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to play any part in the checking of the graves, and took instead the opportunity to meditate.
    He thought of a dream that he had had recently and which still remained vivid. The Abbot had appeared before him silently, while he was alone in his cell. The visit was unexpected and unannounced, and really he knew that the Abbot was long dead. He was not frightened by this, but accepted the mystery calmly as though the appearance was long-awaited and the Abbot had something important to tell him, some final piece of instruction to impart before his night of examination. There was great joy in the Abbot’s damaged features. Some ordeal of his own had been overcome. He had been too timid to touch the Abbot’s shoulder, though tenderly reaching for the crusts and pelt, the skin lifting in hardening slices of sores and gristle. His words were gentle: ‘What is it?’ The Abbot’s almost unspoken answer was forceful, broad, deep, carrying the emotion of the encounter before it like a river in flood: ‘Earth.’ It was like the bestowing of a prize, a complete confrontation of the mystery, of origins, fortune, matter and destiny.
    The novice remembered the answer as he watched Vane stooping above the last of the pilgrims, tucked up comfortably into the mountain, but it was his own question that lingered. ‘What is it?’ What was the ‘it’? He knew that it was the question that lent the dream its significance.
    And it was the embodiment of questioning in the ordered yet irritable motions of the sweating Vane that prompted the novice’s ensuing meditation: ‘It is quite elsewhere,’ he thought, ‘that the quantity of our devotion is measured, and we have no say in the matter. Meanwhile the censor continues to interrogate a dormitory of corpses.’
    On their way to the well, Vane’s mood changed. He became grim, confident, mildly exuberant.
    ‘Three out of twenty-six,’ he said, rocking steadily with the motion of the donkey as they walked along the gulf between the mountains.
    Geoffrey was leading the animal. He looked back at Vane, as if to indicate a response. It would have been presumptuous of him to speak, but he knew well how to act as a conversational sounding-board.
    ‘Only three graves of those I came to find,’ said Vane. ‘Twenty-three pilgrims are still unaccounted for.’
    Geoffrey stroked the donkey’s ears, which twitched together like a pair of warm shears.
    ‘And the newest of the graves is a year old,’ said Vane. ‘Your sexton is out of work, eh, brother?’
    The novice did not look back, and Vane gave a short laugh which turned into a belch. A shadow of nausea passed across his face, and he kept silent again till they came to the well.
    The well filled a stone trough the size of three four-poster beds, and was roofed over. At one of the narrower ends, where light fell on it from the doorway, the water ran out over a small spout into a channel at the base of the trough where it flowed back into the darkness of the well-house.
    The thread of water was almost motionless in its falling, except for a slight twist that blurred its smoothness, moving down the thin flow at a gentle pace like a hand idly stroking a lock of hair. It glittered in the shaft of the sun, and made a small sucking watery sound where it touched the stone and trickled away.
    Vane slid off the donkey and ran up to the water, drinking noisily from his cupped hands. The novice merely dipped his finger to the wet stone and touched his forehead with it, and Geoffrey did the same. He was thirsty enough to follow Vane’s example, but a sense of deference to their guide held him back. This ceremonious approach to the holy well didn’t preclude later drinking, he felt.
    Vane took little notice of what the others were doing, but entered the well-house. He had taken a small phial from his pocket, and now he filled this from the trough and sealed it with wax paper. He had been instructed to do this by the Bishop, but whether it was as a