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the back of the docks, stock still among the hundreds of moving bodies and voices, looking up at the high sides of the ship. Anyone standing close enough would have heard him muttering frequently under his breath, damning the Boers for their stubborn persistence in this war, and even occasionally the British too, for theirs.
    Like the other Europeans on the quayside the Bishop wore khaki. Both his drill apron and his clerical coat were of this colour. He was small, only five feet tall in his boots, but stocky with it. His face was clean-shaven, and his skin a sun-burnt brown, taut across his cheekbones despite his age. He was fifty-five. The only discernible lines on his face were about his eyes, deep crow’s feet, developed by years of squinting through the sun’s glare. His cheeks were lean, and beneath his helmet, which was tipped back from his forehead, was the suggestion of closely cropped grey hair, receding above the temples. His eyes were blue, and made all the brighter in contrast to the bloodshot whites about them.
    Bishop Gaul had been stationed in Rhodesia for seven years now as Bishop of Mashonaland, and on meeting people had taken to introducing himself as ‘the smallest bishop with the largest diocese in Christendom’. His listeners often found it hard to distinguish with which of these feats he was most proud, but he liked it as a line. He liked people to know where he stood, of the scale of things here. And he liked to be the first to mention his height, denying anyone else the chance of an early jibe or comment.
    The Bishop had lasted a long time, much longer than most. A total of nineteen years of service, starting off in the south, far south, in the diamond town of Kimberley, then migrating north, into Mashonaland and the sudden violence of the native uprising of 1896. A widower, he’d arrived in Southern Rhodesia seven years ago a hollow man, a husk blown north on little more than the wind of his wife’s death and his own song lines of grief. He’d come to replace Bishop Knight Bruce, looking for more of the pioneering work he’d done in Kimberley, where he had risen to the challenge of that town to become both rector and archdeacon. It was a hard town, hard as the diamonds at its core, where the prospectors spent the days flogging their bodies in the mines and the nights dreaming of the future happiness their riches would bring them. They mined the earth for the elusive diamonds, while he mined their souls for an equally elusive faith. It seemed like an agreement, a contract, and over time he’d gained a respect in the town, and not just when he was needed, to marry, bury, christen. He also won the respect of the miners for who he was—a man doing his job just like them. And diamonds and God, he’d come to decide, had a lot in common. They both held promises for men, and were received either by those who worked hard, who went looking, or more often than not, by those who just stumbled upon them. No logic. Gems, hidden in the dirt. Soul prospecting.
    He’d had some success with this prospecting in Kimberley. Not much, but enough to keep his belief lit, enough for him to feel he was touching the edge of something, here on this wild continent. But that was a long time ago, and more recently he’d begun to feel his energy dwindle, his eye wander more towards what was to come, rather than where he was now. Towards the end, and where that might be. Natural, maybe, for a man of his age, away from home for so long. Not that he was sure where home was any more. When he was married it had been anywhere with her, his wife. Now, however, it was often bush camps, ramshackle churches, one-horse towns. Would he return to England? Perhaps. Or would he end in Africa? He’d often thought about this, ending it in an African way, not an English. Waking one night in his camp to the sound of the old elephants, swinging their huge weight through the bush on their way to their mausoleums of bone. How he’d walk