We sat down in the meagre shade of a banana tree. The air was sweet with orange and jasmine, and the moon swam palely in the pale blue daylight sky. It looked as worn and thin as an old coin, and the craters were the same colour as the sky, so that one seemed to be looking through holes at the universe behind. There was no sound of traffic. The clip-clop of a horse belonged to the same ancient world of silence. ‘Yes, it’s very peaceful,’ my aunt said, ‘only an occasional gunshot after dark. The police are sometimes trigger-happy. I forget whether it’s one lump or two.’
