I didn’t understand it then, and when I told my mother how I felt she said I was half crazed. “Keep it to yourself, Elsha,” she said, smiling but earnest. “You father is troubled enough by your mad ideas.” Only one other did I tell: my one true friend, Lesharo.

I thought of him often on that strange, slow day, while I lay enfolded in darkness and enigmatic joy. Perhaps that was the day I first knew I loved him, and the wonder of it took my breath away, left me dazed, dreaming in the velvet dark. Perhaps destiny was watching me, and made my limbs lazy and my mind dream. I did not know it then, but our history changed because I was slow that day.

At last I heard the gong that signalled evening and the time for the return home. I groped blindly in the water for the last few firestones I had chipped out, and placed them in my basket. I crawled backwards down my narrow tunnel, dragging the basket after me. I came to the end of my seam, stood upright, and felt for my heavy outer clothes near the foot of the ladder. I stripped off my soaking skirt, dragged on my thick grey goat-hair overdress, tied my belt, pulled on my sheepskin boots, and hauled the basket onto my back. Staggering under the weight, I felt for the ladder and put my foot on the lowest rung.

The air grew colder as I neared the surface. The pitch-blackness glimmered sooty black, then frosty grey as I came up into the evening light. A freezing wind slashed across my face, and my wet hands and feet turned blue. My heart sank when I saw the long line of us waiting for our last baskets to be weighed.

I struggled down the stony track to where the overseer checked our loads, and stood at the end of the line. We did not all have our loads weighed. Most of us the Chosen trusted, and left to work without supervision or inspection. But there were some of us whose every load was weighed, every day’s work recorded, assessed, and answered for. We were the troublesome ones, the offenders. It was ever a grief to my father that I was one of them.

About fifty of us waited: fifty silent, grimy souls, our burdens at our feet, our backs and heads bent from cold and fatigue. We were all grey, our icy garments tossing stiffly in the bleak wind, our faces and hands wrapped in rags for warmth. Our flesh was black with firestone dust; our eyes were haunted. Remembering now how we looked, I realise the horror and hopelessness of our poverty. And I marvel that I was the only one who questioned it.

We did not talk while we waited; we had no strength to talk. A few others came up and took their places behind me. Hundreds more, the trusted workers, stumbled past us, dumped their final loads into the carts that waited to haul the fuel to the homes of the Chosen and to our tents, and went on home. Looking back towards our camp, I noticed that already some of the fires were lit, and the smoke hung in a gritty haze over the black tops of the tents. By morning the smog would be so thick the tents would be totally obscured.