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she think no one had tried? Did she think Tourmaline hadn’t enough cranks of its own, without picking them up off the road?
    She said nothing, to great effect.
    Rock was stolidly hopeful. For many years, even before it was his, the meagre garden had been kept alive with the waste water and kitchen slops of the whole town, and this had to be collected. The rest thought first of the gold. In the bar of the hotel, with Kestrel dourly watching, visions arose of a Tourmaline greater and richer even than in its heyday, a town paved with gold and murmuring with sluices, inhabited solely by millionaires. So wild was the optimism that there seemed to be a hazy feeling that the drought might break with the diviner’s coming, and the millionaires go yachting on Lake Tourmaline.
    This was the state of hope and curiosity he induced in us. And on the fifth day of his citizenship, having been informed by Mary of our mounting impatience, he sent word that he was ready to be visited.
    Mary’s sitting room, furnished with cane and seagrass chairs, and dominated by a panoramic photograph of Tourmaline in its prosperity, now brown and nearly featureless, was a bleak place, but cool; cooler, certainly, than the more comfortable parts of the hotel, with their monstrosities of brown velvet and imitation leather. No fly ever intruded there, and very little light, for the aged green curtains were always drawn. An upright piano (the property, need I say, of Tom’s grandmother) glimmered in one corner, surmounted by a silver lamp. The carpet, originally green, but worn bare in many places, resembled a drought-stricken lawn. In another corner stood a bookcase, containing the pick of the Miners’ Institute’s one thousand volumes, and as much wisdom, I dare say, as there was to be found in Tourmaline, in those days or in ours.
    It was into this room that Mary led me, and after me Byrne, to be received by the diviner.
    He had been lounging in an ancient basket-chair, but rose to meet us as Mary pushed back the door, looking self-conscious, I noticed. Tom had dressed him in blue dungarees, with a blue shirt, such as most of us wear, and as he faced into the light that fell through the open door I was struck again by the deep cloudy colour of his eyes, like the Timor Sea, as I remember it, long ago. Something about him always recalled to me the sea, the coast, many things I have not known since I was young. There was so much hope in the look of him.
    He was moderately tall, I discovered, about an inch under six feet, a good manageable size. In height and build, indeed, he was almost the double of Byrne, and in his first days at Tourmaline they were often confused. Both were thin, sinewy, almost hipless, with that apparently spindly but actually unbreakable wiriness that the plants of these arid regions also have. Even in his prostration we had seen that he was tough; and that in spite of the fact that the ribs showed under his skin like the laths of a crumbling wall.
    All this time I had been studying him, in the way he must by then have been getting used to, and beginning to hate. But he came forward pleasantly enough, and shook hands with me. Curious hands he had; rather fine, strong hands, but seeming somehow to consist of not much more than his fine, strong bones, elusive and ungraspable.
    This was emphasized by his still being coated with unguents, although no longer with the whitish preparation with which Mary had first plastered him. He gleamed wherever his skin was exposed. His straight nose shone like a plum. Threads of skin clung to his lips, and he did in general, as Mary had said, resemble the flaking ceilings of Kestrel’s pub.
    Even so, it was evident that he possessed certain advantages. He had fine bones, and the yellow hair flopped over his forehead in an amiable way. If he had good looks, they were of a kind that could irritate nobody. In a word, he was prepossessing.
    I said that I was pleased to see him so well.
    ‘I’ve been