their hands as the red fire of sin and courage and lust and mystery flicked round them to Pipi’s swift words. When the brain is overwrought, the body is more fitted to touch that universe of meaning which lies behind speech and movement. A man bears this learning alone and unshowing, as Murray bore it now in his corner, with one booted leg crossed on his knee, and a numb dread sliding down on the thickening shadows and the tightening silence of the men.
Above the accordeon Lou’s face alone was bright in the flame-light. It was beautiful and wicked as the stories that Pipi told. Stories of centuries on centuries of uncleansed lives with their desire and their strength and their elusive horror which slips between words as sand between the fingers. Pipi’s white hair twitched on his scalp. He leaned where the light on the shrunken skin struck the tattoo-spirals to the likeness of fibres from whence the leaf-greenness has rotted. His eyes were as the yolk of a stale egg—blotched, blood-flecked, and smurred, and his speech plaited coarse white-man talk with the delicate imagery of the Maori.
They were things new to Murray that he told. Things that no Englishman has yet learnt—nor will learn while English soil gives him birth. For they are the breath of New Zealand. They come in the glad winds, and
