After daybreak, more bread and a mug of black tea. He said nothing and it was delivered without violence. He was given a brush to clean his teeth and managed a small defecation in the bucket. When the plate and bowl were collected, the bucket was replaced. He didn’t dare to speak words of gratitude.

On the third morning, after two more breaking, corroding days and nights, a different man looked in, less roughly dressed.

‘Come.’ Sami nodded, not opening his mouth. ‘It’s all right, brother, you may speak now.’

He felt exhausted, cramped, his legs like jelly. He forced his voice into action despite the dread of allowing the wrong words to escape. ‘Thank you, brother,’ he murmured.

‘It is time for you to meet the Adviser.’

‘It’s everything I imagined,’ said Patrick, turning the corner that brought the unique form of Pendle Hill into view. It was late afternoon – they had a couple of hours to get up and down before darkness would turn the great delineated mass visible in daylight into a brooding nocturnal shadow. ‘You see photographs and don’t think it could be like that. But it is. A blue whale. An enormous blue whale.’

‘A whale?’ Sara exclaimed with exaggerated alarm.

‘Yes, don’t you see the tail rising up from the valley and that smooth long back leading to the broad mouth feeding off the valley below?’

She turned to him. ‘I think I see a man with an unexpected imagination.’

As the village of Barlow receded and they gained altitude, he in boots, jeans and anorak, she in trainers, jeans and hoodie, the north-west wind began to flap their jackets and flick their faces. The stony path on peat bog compressed by thousands of summer tramplings was dry and they skipped easily up it. Sara felt the tensions of the encounter with Sami ebb as her breaths deepened. Nearing the final crest, the wind strengthened and, once they were over it, was transformed into a roar, an invisible compression of sounds and waves ripping into their cheeks and rib cages. The summit plateau, Patrick’s enormous whale-back, stretched into the distance.

‘Let’s get to the very top,’ he yelled. In a few hundred yards they were standing by the cairn and trig point that marked the summit, the wind at its fiercest.

‘I always wanted,’ said Patrick, betraying for the first time a slight breathlessness, ‘to see if it’s possible to lean against wind.’ He spread his arms and legs out. ‘But until now I’ve never been in a wind strong enough to try it.’ He slowly leant forward into its teeth until, finally, he was forced to put forward a leg to steady himself. ‘Fantastic. It works. Try it!’