Carstairs  had been waiting for the boat for three days and there it was, suddenly appeared. He had dozed and it had appeared. He trained his binoculars on it, but it was too far away to be clearly recognisable. It seemed motionless, becalmed in a sheet of unruffled water.
 
He had dug himself into a bank in the sandhills. He still had a little water, some raisins; there was a final cube of chocolate carefully wrapped in the whole of its paper. It was the thought of this hidden pleasure that had sustained him during the hours of darkness when the slight rain and the chill of inactivity had forced him to exercise, to move about, though always afraid he would lose his burrow.
 
From the earliest light of dawn the day had been clear and still. The sea birds had muted calls, the sea itself more a presence than a sound. The tide had steadily retreated beyond his expectations. He knew he had to wait for the arranged signal.
 
Turning on his back he looked at the sky. A few clouds floated hesitantly in the glazed blue. He remembered suddenly a moment from his childhood,       above the beach at Red Point. He had escaped his parents, his adored sisters, and hidden himself in the marran grass. He had lain on his back and felt himself levitate into the clouds. He had looked down on the whole scene, a waking dream. Those moments floating above the long Highland beach had never left him. Sitting in the examination hall for his Tripos that memory had come upon him; he had been paralyzed by it, unable to write or think. He had closed his eyes and strange geometrical shapes had ensnared him. He had felt extremely sick . . .and then very calm. He had returned to the task in hand, a translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, that opening passage describing Eurus, Zephyr, Auster and Boreas: the four winds.
 
. . . he felt something wet nuzzle his hand. A dog, a black shape no more. As he struggled to move himself a larger shape obliterated the sun and shot him.