She came down the worn stairs in the way small children sometimes do, in a sitting position, lowering herself cautiously from one to another in the darkness. As the stairs turned, she could see the lighted outline of the half-open door; the noise was much louder now, and the roast-pork odour stronger. The door, she was glad to see, stood in the position in which she had left it, far enough open to give her a clear view and yet offer some protection. If anyone had entered the little room, he had left no sign. She crept to the door and looked into the church.

It was then that her first amazement struck her. That she should be so surprised, so shocked. After all, in Africa she had seen plenty of naked bodies. . . .

You could think some very long thoughts in almost no time at all, and in the half-second it took her to raise the camera, she had time to think that black skin was in itself, in some strange way, a kind of raiment; no black-skinned people could look as naked as these Walwykians did. And she thought, too, that there was some profound truth in the Bible story – now generally considered to be allegorical – about the nakedness and the fig leaves. Man’s great step forward out of the animal world was not made at the moment when he heaved himself up on to his back legs – apes could do that. No, man’s Rubicon had been crossed when he first covered his nakedness, probably with leaves, as the Bible said. And she thought, too, that there was a difference between a naked stranger and a naked person whom one knew. . . .

And why think about it at all? she asked herself, setting the camera to work. The very heat of the church might have informed her.

The pictures wouldn’t be good. The church was lighted by candles; there were a lot of them, but they gave off almost as much smoke as light. And in the centre of the trestle table upon which the meat and drinks were spread, there was a bowl which smoked like a volcano.

It was a drug. Whoever breathed it long enough could no longer rely upon his senses.

But this – her fingers tightened on the camera – this is a machine which cannot think or feel or be affected by any drug. It can only record. It is recording now! And that was, oddly enough, a very horrid thought when you looked at the fat round haunches of the Postmistress, ordinarily corseted into the decent solid roundness of a tree trunk, or when you looked – at the pendulous breasts, like empty paper bags, of Phoebe Rigby. When you looked . . .