To the Islands by Randolph Stow

people left on earth, each hastening to impress on his memory, before it should be too late, the face of the other. Still in his anaesthetized peace of spirit: ‘You’ve brought food,’ Heriot said.
    ‘Yes, brother. Tin food here.’
    Restlessly the two horses craned their necks towards one another. ‘Good,’ said Heriot softly.
    ‘Brother—’
    They stared hungrily at one another. ‘Yes?’
    ‘If you go along with me, I go with you, always.’
    Behind the uneasy trees rose the hills, and beyond them again the country of the lost, huge wilderness between this last haunt of civilization and the unpeopled sea.
    ‘Welcome, my Good Deeds,’ whispered Heriot. ‘Now I hear thy voice, I weep for very sweetness of love.’
    Late in the afternoon, under a torn sky, the village woke suddenly into wild mourning. The wailing of women broke out on the wind, mixed with the frightened cries of children. The whites came to their doors and looked out. Gunn and Dixon, emerging from their houses, met in the windy road with a simultaneously shouted question.
    They saw by the hospital a little bunch of keening women, their heads bent and covered, and from the gate Helen appeared and came running up the road, her skirt flapping and her smooth hair ruffled by the wind.
    As she came up: ‘What’s wrong?’ they demanded, and she stopped, panting a little, and stiff with apprehension around the lips.
    ‘They say Rex is killed,’ she said, breathless.
    That shocked them, they looked at one another. ‘How? Where?’ they wanted to know.
    ‘I can’t stop. Come with me. They may be wrong, they were about Dicky, remember?’ She broke away again, and they ran with her. ‘It’s at the new building.’
    ‘How’d it happen?’ Dixon asked.
    ‘They say a sheet of iron—blew down and—hit him. Oh—terrible if I were late...’
    ‘He shouldn’t have been out,’ Gunn said.
    ‘No,’ she said. ‘No.’ In front of them was the building, and under a tree a group of squatting men with their heads bowed. They had not known how to take this death, whether to mourn as white men or as black. Though two older men had wounded themselves on the forehead with stones and were quietly moaning, the blood running down, the others were still and silent.
    ‘Over there,’ Dixon said. He hung back from her as she approached the body and knelt beside it. Dust lay over the clothes and had crusted thickly on the bloody forehead.
    She unbuttoned the scarlet shirt and put her hand to the brown breast. As she held it there she was not looking at the man, Gunn saw, but at something far away or perhaps invisible, and with such passion that he was startled and found her unfamiliar. It was as though she were willing life to push down and pierce through her fingers into the heart beneath them, or as if by concentration she could absorb death into herself and there overcome it. He heard Dixon breathing lightly beside him, and glancing up saw his eyes were fixed on her with puzzled awe.
    She said in a toneless voice and without moving: ‘He’s alive.’
    Dixon moved back and cleared his throat. After a pause: ‘Thank God for that,’ he said sincerely.
    She had lifted, very tenderly, the head. ‘He’ll have to be moved gently. It’s dangerous. Would you get some men and go for the stretcher, Terry?’
    ‘Like a shot,’ he promised. He went quickly away towards the mourners, shouting: ‘He’s okay, boys. He’s alive. We just want the stretcher.’
    They got to their feet and looked at him. There was a silence. Then they began to make comments to one another, then jokes. In a minute bursts of laughter were drifting over from the trees.
    Gunn said quietly: ‘After a decent interval they’ll begin to celebrate.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘There’s the sheet of iron, over there, by the trees. It must have dropped pretty sharply and been blown along the ground.’
    She was watching the quiet dark face. ‘I suppose so.’
    ‘You looked—different, just then.