Iain Banks - Whit

That day, before the storm had darkened the horizon, they had washed their bedding on some stones in a river which decanted into Loch Laxdale and left it to dry while they went about their business in Lewis.(Lewis and Harris are referred to as separate islands though in fact they are both thoroughly linked and decisively separated by a range of - by Himalayan standards - small but impressively craggy mountains. The Harris folk are generally smaller and darker than the people of Lewis, a phenomenon popular myth ascribes to the romantic efforts of hordes of swarthy Spaniards washed ashore after Armada ships were wrecked off the rock-ragged Harris coast but which is probably no more than the difference between Celtic and Norse ancestry.)

By the time the sisters had rushed back through the quickly steepening gloom of mid-afternoon the rain had already started, and when they got to where they had left their bedding the wind had flung most of it against a barbed-wire fence and thrown the rest of it into the swollen river. The rain was heavy and almost horizontal by then and the sheets and blankets on the fence could hardly have been wetter had they too been dumped in the river. The sisters salvaged their sodden bedding and retreated to their van, driving it to a hollow in the dunes nearby where they could shelter from the storm.

And so they sat in their coats, clutching each other while their little scented candle flickered in the draught, surrounded by tea chests and boxes full of lard - both symptoms of Aasni's inability either to resist a good deal or to remember how little storage space they had; meanwhile water from their sheets pooled about their feet and threatened to spoil the bags of sugar, flour and custard powder piled under the shelves.

Then there was a thump as something heavy hit the seaward side of the van. They both jumped. Outside, a male voice moaned, barely audible over the noise of the wind and the waves.

They had a lantern; they put the little scented candle inside and ventured out into the bellowing blackness of the drenching gale. Lying on the sandy grass by the side of the van was a young white man in a cheap two-piece suit; he had black hair and a terrible head wound in his upper forehead which oozed blood the beating rain washed away.

They dragged him towards the open rear door of the van; the man came to and moaned again and managed to stand up for a moment; he fell onto the vehicle's floor and they pulled him far enough inside - on a floor lubricated with water and now with blood - to close the banging, wind-blown door.

He looked deathly white, and shivered uncontrollably, still moaning all the while; blood dribbled from the wound in his forehead. They wrapped their coats around him but he wouldn't stop shivering; Aasni remembered that people who swam the English channel would cover themselves with grease, and so they broke out the lard (of which they had rather more than they needed, due to an irresistible grey-market deal with a man in Carloway who'd found several cases washed ashore) and - setting modesty aside - stripped the man to his sodden underpants and started to cover him in lard. He still shivered. Blood still trickled from his forehead; they cleaned the wound and dabbed some antiseptic on it. Aasni found a bandage.

Zhobelia opened the special chest her grandmother had sent her from Khalmakistan on her twentieth birthday and took out the bottle of cherished healing ointment called zhlonjiz , which she had been told to keep for extra special emergencies; she made a poultice and put it on the wound, binding his head with the bandage. The man still shivered. They didn't want to get their coats covered with lard, so they opened one of the chests of tea (the tea wasn't in the best of condition anyway, having been stored too long in a barn near Tarbert by a farmer who'd hoped to turn a profit on the wartime black market) and tipped the dark tea leaves over the man's quivering, white-larded form; it took two tea chests to cover him entirely; he seemed half unconscious, still moaning from within his covering of tea and lard, but at least and at last he appeared to have stopped shivering, and for a moment his eyes opened and he looked briefly around and into the eyes of the two sisters before falling back into unconsciousness.

They started the van with the intention of taking the man to the nearest doctor, but the grass in the little hollow they had parked in was so slippery from the rain they couldn't move the vehicle more than a few feet. Aasni put on her coat and went out into the storm to summon help from the nearest farm with a phone. Zhobelia was left in charge of their deathly white storm-waif.

She checked that he still breathed, that his poultice was in place and the bleeding had stopped, then she did her best to wring the water out of his clothes. He babbled, talking in a language that Zhobelia could not understand and suspected nobody else would be able to understand either. A couple of times, however, he mumbled the word, 'Salvador…'

The man, of course, was my Grandfather.

God spoke to Salvador. They were waiting, enthroned in and surrounded by glorious light, at the end of a dark tunnel which my Grandfather seemed to ascend to from the banal world. He assumed he was dying and this was the way to Heaven. God told him it was the way to Heaven but he was not going to die; instead he had to return to the earthly world with a message from Them to humanity.

Cynics might suggest that it had something to do with the poultice, the potent, exotic, unknown Khalmakistani herbs seeping from it to enter Salvador's bloodstream and poisoning his mind, producing something akin to a hallucinatory 'trip', but the small-(and fearful-) minded will always try to reduce everything to the triviality and mundanity which their stunted, de-spiritualised minds feel safe dealing with. The fact remains that our Founder woke a different man, and - for all that he had almost died from hypothermia aggravated by loss of blood - a better, more whole one; one with a mission, one with a message; a message God had been attempting to transmit complete to Man for a long time through the aggregating clutter of modern life and technology; a message that only somebody whose ambient mental activity had been reduced to something close to quietitude by the proximity of death would be capable of hearing. Possibly other men had heard God's message, but been too close to that edge of death, and slipped over it, unable to transmit the signal on to their fellow men; certainly there had been no shortage of death over the previous decade.

However that may have been, my Grandfather knew when he finally awoke - on a calm, milky-skyed day, with warm tea being poured down his throat by the two dark-skinned women he had assumed were figments of his imagination - that he was The One; the Enlightened, the OverSeer, to whom God had given the task of establishing an Order which would disseminate the Truth of Their message on earth.

Thereafter, then, whoever our Founder had been before, whatever had driven him to that place on that night, however he had made his way through the storm - out of the sea, off the land, or even falling from the sky - became unimportant. All that mattered was that Salvador awoke, remembering his vision and the task he had been charged with, and decided he had a purpose in life. He had work to do.

First, however, there was the matter of a canvas bag…

The last leg of my water-borne journey, in the early evening, seemed to take forever. I had passed beneath the bowed deck of the grey road bridge and the straight bed of the rail bridge fighting an incoming tide with only the wind at my back to aid me; once through the narrows between the Queensferries I could slacken my efforts a little, but every muscle in my upper body felt as if it were on fire.