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and his eye backwards and forwards under water. He moved his hands gently so that the water swished. They left the water and reached round and gathered smears of green weed.
    He knelt up and held the smears of green against his eye and the right side of his face. He slumped back against rock among the jellies and scalloped pitches and encampments of limpets and let the encrusted barnacles hurt him as they would. He set his left hand gently on his thigh and squinted sideways at it. The fingers were half-bent. The skin was white with blue showing through and wrinkles cut the surface in regular shapes. The needle reached after him in the skull behind the dark arch. If he moved the eyeball the needle moved too. He opened his eye and it filled immediately with water under the green weed.
    He began to snort and make sounds deep in his chest. They were like hard lumps of sound and they jerked him as they came out. More salt water came out of each eye and joined the traces of the sea and the solution on his cheeks. His whole body began to shiver.
    There was a deeper pool on a ledge farther down. He climbed slowly and heavily down, edged himself across and put his right cheek under again. He opened and closed his eye so that the water flushed the needle corner. The memory pictures had gone so far away that they could be disregarded. He felt round and buried his hands in the pool. Now and then a hard sound jerked his body.
    The sea-gull came back with others and he heard them sounding their interlacing cries like a trace of their flight over his head. There were noises from the sea too, wet gurgles below his ear and the running thump of swells, blanketed by the main of the rock but still able to sidle round and send offshoots sideways among the rocks and into the crannies. The idea that he must ignore pain came and sat in the centre of his darkness where he could not avoid it. He opened his eyes for all the movement of the needle and looked down at his bleached hands. He began to mutter.
    “Shelter. Must have shelter. Die if I don’t.”
    He turned his head carefully and looked up the way he had come. The odd patches of rock that had hit him on the way down were visible now as part of each other. His eyes took in yards at a time, surfaces that swam as the needle pricked water out of him. He set himself to crawl back up the rock. The wind was lighter but dropping trails of rain still fell over him. He hauled himself up a cliff that was no higher than a man could span with his arms but it was an obstacle that had to be negotiated with much arrangement and thought for separate limbs. He lay for a while on the top of the little cliff and looked in watery snatches up the height of the rock. The sun lay just above the high part where the white trenches had waited for him. The light was struggling with clouds and rain-mist and there were birds wheeling across the rock. The sun was dull but drew more water from his eyes so that he screwed them up and cried out suddenly against the needle. He crawled by touch, and then with one eye through trenches and gullies where there was no whiteness. He lifted his legs over the broken walls of trenches as though they belonged to another body. All at once, with the diminishing of the pain in his eye, the cold and exhaustion came back. He fell flat in a gully and let his body look after itself. The deep chill fitted close to him, so close it was inside the clothes, inside the skin.
    The chill and the exhaustion spoke to him clearly. Give up, they said, lie still. Give up the thought of return, the thought of living. Break up, leave go. Those white bodies are without attraction or excitement, the faces, the words, happened to another man in another place. An hour on this rock is a lifetime. What have you to lose? There is nothing here but torture. Give up. Leave go.
    His body began to crawl again. It was not that there was muscular or nervous strength there that refused to be beaten but rather that the