I suppose we must have been in the Yellow Quarter for about ten days when we scaled a stony ridge and then came to a halt, a wide shallow valley sprawling before us. A single road ran across the land from north to south. I couldn’t imagine who it might be for. The military, perhaps. To the west of the road lay a stretch of ground that seemed to have been dug up or turned over, and a crowd of White People had gathered there. While it looked as though we might have reached our destination at last, I couldn’t see anything in this desolate place to justify the long and perilous journey we had just undertaken.
We began our descent, and before too long we were on the valley floor ourselves. The White People were not in the habit of exchanging greetings. There was no embracing, for instance, no physical contact. They stood in front of each other or beside each other in a muted show of acknowledgement, or else they circled one another with their eyes lowered and their hands fidgeting among the folds of their cloaks, as if overwhelmed by a sudden attack of nerves. I could never tell whether they were renewing their acquaintance or meeting for the first time.
I walked over to the muddy area I had seen from the ridge. It was the rough size and shape of a swimming-pool. Tyre tracks led from the road to one of the longer sides. At the far end, I saw a man on his knees. I moved towards him, curious, but not wanting to intrude. Every now and then he would lean forwards and lay his cheek tenderly against the earth. When I reached him, I nodded and murmured, an all-purpose mode of conduct that I had picked up from my three companions. The man ignored me. Staring out over the land, I thought I understood. Something had happened here.
I returned to the main group. Lum and Neg had built a small fire by the roadside. Potatoes nestled among the embers. I squatted down and hunted through my pockets, bringing out apples and red peppers that I had found at the back of a village supermarket several days before. I also produced a few muddy beetroot, stolen from someone’s kitchen garden. Lum placed the peppers round the fringes of the fire so they would sear. Neg bit gingerly into one of the apples. As for Ob, he was gazing into the distance with his usual mystical intensity.
Most of the White People had set up camp by now. Some even owned billy cans in which they were heating water or broth. The curved shape of the valley amplified our murmurs. Once we had eaten, though, a hush settled over us, a silence that had the patient, reverential quality of a vigil. The air itself appeared to have tightened as if, like a crisp new sheet, it had been snapped out over the mattress of the earth. I wrapped my cloak around me and lay down.
When I woke it was dusk, and our fire had burned low, the mound of grey ash delicately embroidered with scarlet threads. As I tried to rub some feeling back into my legs, I looked up and saw a full moon balanced on the ridge above me, a moon so huge that I imagined for a moment that both the land and all the life in it had shrunk. The colour, too, astounded me. A lavish, creamy pale-gold, it had the gleam of antique satin or newly minted coin. Glancing round me, I saw that people were rising to their feet as if they had just received a signal.
I watched them move towards the rectangle of earth. Arranging themselves around the edge, they started taking off their clothes. I had no choice but to join them and do the same. Once undressed, we stepped out on to mud that had a particular coldness of its own — far colder, somehow, than the grass, far colder even than the air. Our flesh gave off the pale, almost transparent glimmer of a puddle when it freezes. The people nearest me were scooping up the mud and plastering their bodies with it, their faces too. As I bent down, a light seemed to flare inside my head, and I saw a lorry reversing towards a wide, deep trench. Its tail-lights glowed, then faded. Glowed again. Then the back end lifted on hydraulic rods, and the load began to spill … All this I received in a split-second, then it went dark again, and there was only my bare arm reaching out and the mud below, and the hairs rose on my skin, but not with cold.
I started covering myself, then stopped, aware of a sound coming from the people gathered round me. They were calling out, not to each other, but to some larger thing, or even to the void, perhaps, their voices tentative, enquiring. Slowly the volume grew, the voices becoming less distinctly individual, less obviously human. I thought of a swarm of bees, a reverberation that was partly music, partly noise, and I found that I had been caught up in it and that my voice had merged with theirs. I was ridding myself of burdens I had been carrying for years — the collusion, the deceit, the lies I had told to others, and to myself as well; everything was being dumped on this rectangle of ground, and I could leave it here, I could leave the whole lot here. The sound made earth and air vibrate, and that was all we were just then, a single voice raised against the elements, a resonance, a kind of harmony.
When I woke the next morning, I didn’t know what to believe. Were the images I had seen the product of my own fevered imagination? Or could it be that I was beginning to receive the pictures that the others were receiving? Was I gradually gaining access to their peculiar, unspoken language? If my vision of the night before could be relied upon, it looked as if White People had been slaughtered in their hundreds and then buried here. I hadn’t actually seen the bodies tumbling out of the truck, but somehow I knew that that was what had taken place. We were camped on the edge of a mass grave. In covering themselves with mud, the White People had been remembering their dead, and the chilling, unearthly music had been both requiem and homage. If that was true, they were more conscious of the past than people said.
Another possibility occurred to me. Though I had been living among the White People, I hadn’t actually become one, and that had given me the license to create my own mythical version of their lot, which wasn’t something they were necessarily capable of doing themselves. After all, if my own feeling of release was anything to go by, then the removal of their white clothes and the smearing of themselves with mud might simply have been their way of ridding themselves of the abuses to which they had been exposed, a ritual that enabled them to go on living as they did — from hand to mouth, from pillar to post. When the singing came to an end, we had walked down to a brook that ran between two banks of heather. Stepping into the ice-cold water, we had washed off the mud, then put our cloaks and boots back on, and I remembered how clean I had felt, how light, how free.
As I packed up our few remaining provisions and scattered the last embers of the fire, I decided that it didn’t much matter where the truth lay. They could have been reliving the agony of those who’d gone before or shedding pain they had themselves endured. The ritual lent itself to a number of interpretations. In the end it seemed likely that it was part of a process of purification and renewal. It was also part of their own unique culture, which was relentless in what it required of them. To suffer. To continue.
Just as they didn’t greet one another, so the White People didn’t say goodbye. There was no leave-taking, not even so much as a backwards glance, only a gradual dispersal, a miniature diaspora. Along with Ob, Neg, and Lum, I joined a group of about twenty others, setting off in a north-westerly direction that would bring us, sooner or later, to the sea. Lying a few miles offshore were several holy islands, most of which belonged to the phlegmatics. Some distance further north, the border with the Green Quarter came curving round to meet the coast. I wondered which of these destinations the group had in mind.
The land quickly became harder to negotiate, the fells much higher and topped with splintered crags, the woods thornier, more dense. Though deserted, the moors had had their dangers, but the country we entered that day felt all the more hazardous for being populated. As we passed through a village during the afternoon we were pelted with manure and bits of coal by a horde of vicious, foul-mouthed children, and then a bucket of slops was tipped from an upstairs window. We suffered cuts and bruises, nothing more serious than that, but I still thought we should be circling places like these, especially since the terrain now offered so many opportunities for concealment — or else we should hurry through on light feet, while everybody slept. I had no say in the matter, though. There didn’t seem to be any decision-making as such. There was only a momentum, which was neither questioned nor explained.