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a card player laying down a trump. Like most islanders, he practised Christianity in tandem with the old ways of magic, switching with ease from one to the other as the mood and needs of the moment took him. Kella could empathize with the old man. All the same, at the moment, all his tribal instincts told him that Timothy Anilafa had chosen the wrong spot for his shipbuilding project. It was out of balance with the feeling of the area.
    As if to confirm this thought, the crowd of men on the other side of the garden started growling. Kella took care to remain where he was, as a token shield between Timothy and the wrath of his putative attackers. It was plain that the villagers were on the verge of destroying the vessel and sweeping the old man away with his project in the process. The problemwas that Timothy genuinely believed that he had experienced a vision and would not step aside when his younger kinfolk surged forward. Desperately Kella cast about in his mind for a way of resolving the problem to the satisfaction of both sides, before the elderly villager got hurt. Somehow he had to facilitate the movement of the ark without offending its architect’s jumbled religious beliefs. The persistent drumming of the adjacent waterfall seemed to grow even louder in his ears as he racked his brain for a solution.
    Vague memories of his Bible lessons at Ruvabi mission school twenty years earlier, before he had abandoned the white man’s religion, began to stir in Kella’s mind. He remembered Father Pierre prowling up and down the rows of desks in the overcrowded bamboo classroom in his bare feet and ragged cassock. The old man had hoped that Kella would one day enter the priesthood. He must have been severely disappointed when the youth had been summoned away by the custom chiefs, the
hata aabu
, those whose name must not be spoken, to undergo the calling and cleansing ceremony among the artificial islands of the lagoon. After that, as the
aofi
, he had been lost to the white man’s church forever.
    However, unbidden, one phrase from his dusty mission lessons leapt into Kella’s mind.
    ‘The springs of the great deep!’ he said loudly. ‘That’s what the Book of Genesis says about the ark.’
    Timothy looked at him suspiciously. ‘When the Lord spoke to me—’ he began.
    ‘I am telling you what the Bible tells us,’ Kella interrupted, gently but firmly. ‘
All the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.
’
    ‘That will assuredly happen again,’ nodded Timothy, regarding the policeman intently.
    ‘But where?’ asked Kella. The villagers were edging forward, all except the one in charge of the cache of stones, who wasnow engaged thoughtfully in selecting the sharpest ones. The policeman spoke quickly. ‘The waters of the earth rose first, before the rains came.’
    ‘And they will once more,’ said Timothy, as if speaking to a child. ‘That is why I must finish my ark soon, to be ready for the overflowing of those waters.’
    Actually it looked as if it would take a fair number of years for the old man to complete that particular quixotic project, thought Kella, looking at the ramshackle collection of detritus that made up the vessel’s insecure and uncompleted base. ‘Where will the water rise around here?’ he asked rhetorically, indicating the gardens. ‘There are no springs. The women have to carry water all the way from the pool at the base of the waterfall to feed these plants.’ He paused for effect. ‘You must locate your ark close to the waterfall. Then you will be ready to float away in glory down to the river, and from there to the sea with ease when the rains come.’
    Timothy frowned. The villagers stopped advancing. Kella drove home his point. ‘It was an understandable mistake,’ he said. ‘You have chosen the wrong place.’ He pointed in the direction of the unseen thundering waterfall. ‘That is where you should have built your ark, next