Mr. Toms announced that she would now heal people by her touch and the art of shampooing.
"Plenty little cannibalism in the islands," he reassured them cheerfully. "When discovered in the past, on Camorta Island, for secret rites, it very punishable. The Nicobarese a simple people and a musical."
"One had guessed as much," said Cyprian, putting his hands to his ears as the chorus grew deafening.
Captain Tin Belly presented them each with a plaited palm-leaf box from a shrine bristling with votive bananas. The boxes were not the same size and the discovery seemed to worry him; he measured them several times in the faint expectation that one would grow in the process.
On the way home, with Slippery Sam consistently practising the double-shuffle, Ferlie asked: "Padre, do you never grow tired of smiling at them and appreciating their customs, and settling their infantile disputes? Don't you often give up hope?"
His pathetic pink-rimmed brown eyes were glorious with vision as he answered: "I never grow tired of praying for them; and then one hopes again."
As Cyprian said afterwards to Ferlie, "One can hypnotise oneself into any state of semi-imbecility through prayer."
He remained restlessly convinced that whether or no the islands were going to bring him any closer to Ferlie's visions they were not going to bring him any closer to her God.
Nor to the God of the Reverend Gabriel Jellybrand.
* * * * * *