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They looked to the Ceylon side and saw nothing but a hugereflecting collar of sand around a dim, green layer of trees. But something vertical stood out, wavering in the sun, a stick moving along the sand. It was a man running in a solitary manner along the beach. He had a most determined, yet peaceful expression, as if he were in a trance. Bearing in mind that they were passing through Adam’s Bridge, James asked his father if it was the first man himself.
    ‘Papa, is it Adam?’
    ‘Where?’ he said, absently. He was often that way.
    ‘There, Papa. Running.’ His image arrested James.
    ‘Adam?’ His father laughed. ‘Well, son, perhaps it is,’ he said.
    And if it were, where was Eve? The boy wanted to know.
    Now his father laughed long. ‘I suppose Eve will be along soon. Isn’t it for her sake he’s running?’
    James supposed Eve had got behind. He looked long and hard on that shore, but he never saw her.
    Papa eventually took pity on James. He squeezed his hand and then he said, ‘No, that man is called a peon. He is running from Colombo, Ceylon, to Madras, India, with the post,’ his father said. ‘It is five hundred miles and he will do it in ten days.’
    James never forgot the sight of him.
    How ridiculous he must have been, in the schoolboy grey flannels and blazer that his father had made him wear. His straw boater tried to lift off his head at every minute, so he was kept busy jamming it back down. His skin – so pink in contrast to the skin of every other human they met – prickled, stung with sweat, burned, and peeled until it bled. It took him many more years to supply himself with the bark he had as an old man, seasoned and lined and impervious to insult.
    At last they drew in to the large, half-moon-shaped bay. There were hundreds of boats pulled up on the shore. Thewind was blowing away from them: sand flew, and in amongst the gusts of it he could see figures swirling in purple and black and burned orange, green and indigo.
    He was so short he had to stand on the thwart to jump down out of the boat. He landed, squinting despite the shade of his straw hat, in hard wet sand. This grew lighter in colour, and dried, as they walked inland. But it was still sand, hot, and slippery underfoot. So this was Paradise.
    There was nothing built on it, only a few fragile opensided sheds, straw roofed with skinny crooked poles at the sides to hold them up. And hundreds of tents, which flapped in the wind and hissed with the onslaught of sand that came on the gusts. Papa explained that the fleet had gone out with the land breeze at the firing of the guns at ten o’clock the evening before. It would have reached the banks at daybreak and the divers would set to work. At noon they would stop as the air began to stir to warn them to come back. They were due back, on the sea breeze, in a few hours.
    James could see, emerging out of the sand clouds, people. People of every kind he could imagine, hundreds and hundreds of them. He and his Papa had arrived at a giant, seething fair which was all the more astonishing for having appeared on a sand spit, out of nowhere. There were black men, yellow and brown men too, men in long robes, men with pigtails and satin hats, nearly naked and squatting in loincloths, long-haired, turbaned, wrapped in shawls and crowned with fez. There were Malay soldiers with their curved blades called kreese; his father said to watch out. Once drawn, a kreese was bound to draw blood.
    It was all impermanent, an encampment, and better than a circus. They passed men with rings through their lips, and women so freighted with jewellery and hardware they had to be supported as they walked. Others were shrouded so that they appeared as only a pair of large wary eyes, in a black triangle. The sun-burned laughing girlswho flipped their tambourines at him were sea-gypsies. And there were dancing boys with hips as narrow as a dog’s, who insinuated themselves between the soldiers as they walked.
    It