He had been subsumed into an oval of light, white, brilliant. It was like an internal sun glowing in his head, very clear and bright, without proportion or edge. He felt an effortless stillness, as if he were at the centre of the cosmos, inseparable from it, a child back in the proverbial womb, in a peaceful bliss of nothingness that extended out into the actual sun and stars.

‘If someone shines a torch in your eye, you look into the dazzle and see light and colours, and then, if you go on staring, you can start to penetrate into a cascade of thoughts and feelings, like superfast broadband.’

In that brief intense flash, the future didn’t exist, nor the past. He was fully sober to the moment. He felt as if he had located his heart, mind, character in the source of all nature. He was composed of the energy which is the essence of life, his brain made up of the atoms and neutrons that generated the sun, part of the same infinite process.

Superfast broadband, an absolute whiteness – Rougetel had tumbled in language, but this was the best he could do. Dyer had to stamp on the same strong urge to laugh in an embarrassed way that he had felt with Marvar.

Rougetel looked at him with his startling pupils. He said that before the whiteness dissolved there appeared at its centre a dark disc like an eye. The sole occasion that he had seen something comparable was in the Byzantine chapel on Kythera when, observed by Dyer, he had held a candle to a blistered wall and touched a white mark painted on it.

In common with Dyer, Rougetel had been raised in the Church of England. His dramatic experience now made him take seriously the existence of another world view. All religions, it appeared to Rougetel, whether Protestant, Catholic, Byzantine, Eastern, Andean or Amazonian, were a quest for matches with different-coloured heads, when the flame was the thing. They were imperfect constructions of the human intellect in its search for what transcended it. They formed different paths up the same mountain, towards a summit which towered beyond any man-made religion.

That inner sun was the entrance to his path. He never achieved a further vision of it, but he had felt the intimacy of its embrace, and it was very powerful, nothing could displace it. He missed it with an intensity that astonished him and had never abandoned him. He believed that he had glimpsed the best of himself, of what he could be. From this moment on, he wanted to be that person as often as it was possible, a receptive void disengaged from the intricacies of living.