ing and evolution of the body and spirit could only take place above a honeycomb of hollows. The skies and the sea would be heard in those places. Their vastness and motions would be echoed down beneath the taut earth, swilling and booming the darkness into quiet against their unseen mineral walls. She spoke of their unity of voice, from the humblest well to the vastest cathedral cave, how they are like pipes of different sizes in a mighty organ. An organ constructed to shudder in fugues and fanfares of listening, not playing; where a cacophony of silence was only counterpoised by insistent drips of water. She knew it was their action that influenced the minute physical and the immense mental and spiritual spaces inside human beings. I thought of this now as I walked across the lid of their meaning, of her unfolding these wonders to my baffled ears. I thought of her voice, very close, very clear and I stared in shock at the truth of holding her bones and flesh in my sweating hand. During the night, lightning could be seen far out at sea. Above the horizon, soundless dendrites of storm flickered, marbling the curve of the earth on its way towards here and the waiting dawn. I took shelter in a dug-out shepherds’ cave at the edge of one of the poorest villages. The terraced fields here were worn down, losing their boundaries in limping disrepair, survival and oblivion quarrelling among the falling stones and parched plants. In this domain of lizards, flies and cacti, the human signatures were being erased. My shelter felt like it had not been used for years, the stitched-together sacking that made its rudimentary door falling apart in my hand as I tried to unhook it. This crouching space had been