The Luminaries

pono, te ora. Hone 14:6
, he wrote, and then, marvelling,
from the epistles of Paora
. The translator had even changed the names.
    The Maori man looked up; seeing Devlin standing on the ridge above him, he stopped, and from a distance of several yards they regarded each other, saying nothing.
    A sudden gust of wind flattened the tussock around where Devlin stood, blowing his hair back from his temples. ‘Good afternoon ,’ he called.
    ‘Good afternoon,’ returned the other, squinting slightly.
    ‘I see that we are neither of us deterred by a spot of foul weather!’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘The view is rather compromised; that’s the only shame,’ Devlin added, throwing out his arm to include the shrouded vista before them. ‘It seems that we might be anywhere on earth, when theclouds come down—do you not think? I fancy that when they clear again, we shall find ourselves in an altogether different place!’
    The terrace of Seaview, aptly named, had a singular prospect of the ocean, which, from this height, was a featureless expanse, a fat band of uniform colour, with the sky a lighter shade of the same. The shoreline was not visible from the terrace, owing to the steepness of the cliff below—the edge gave out abruptly into a scree of loose stones and clay—and the blankness of this vista, trisected into earth, water, air, with no trees to interrupt the level, and no contour to soften the shape of the land, alarmed one’s senses to the point that one was soon compelled to turn one’s back upon the ocean altogether, and to face the eastern mountains instead—which were obscured, today, by a shifting curtain of white cloud. Below the terrace, the clustered roofs of Hokitika gave way to the wide brown plain of the Hokitika River and the grey curve of the spit; beyond the river, the coastline bore away southward, blurring with haze and distance until it was swallowed absolutely by the mist.
    ‘It is a good vantage,’ said the Maori man.
    ‘It most certainly is; though I must say that I have yet to come across a view I did not like, in this country.’ Devlin descended several steps, thrusting out his hand. ‘Here: my name is Cowell Devlin. I’m afraid I don’t remember yours.’
    ‘Te Rau Tauwhare.’
    ‘Te Rau Tauwhare,’ Devlin repeated solemnly. ‘How do you do.’
    Tauwhare was not familiar with this idiom, and paused to puzzle over it; while he was doing so, Devlin went on. ‘You were a very good friend of Crosbie Wells, I remember.’
    ‘His only friend,’ Tauwhare corrected.
    ‘Ah: but even to have one good friend, a man should count himself lucky.’
    Tauwhare did not respond to this at once. After a moment he said, ‘I taught him
korero
Maori.’
    Devlin nodded. ‘You shared your language. You shared the stories of your people. It is a fine friendship that is built from that kind of stone.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘You called Crosbie Wells your brother,’ Devlin went on. ‘I remember it: you spoke the very word, that night at the Police Camp—the night before his body was interred.’
    ‘It is a figure of speech.’
    ‘Yes, it is—but the sentiment behind it is very fine. Why did you say it, if not to say, simply, that you cared for the man, and loved him, as you would love your own? “Brother” is another word for love, I think. The love we choose to give—and gladly.’
    Tauwhare thought about this, and then said, ‘Some brothers you cannot choose.’
    ‘Ah,’ said Devlin. ‘No indeed. We cannot choose our blood, can we? We cannot choose our families. Yes: you draw a nice distinction there. Very nice.’
    ‘And within a family,’ Tauwhare went on, encouraged by this praise, ‘two brothers can be very different men.’
    Devlin laughed. ‘Right again,’ he said. ‘Brothers can be very unalike. I had only sisters, you know. Four sisters—and all of them older. They made quite a pet of me.’ He paused, meaning to give Tauwhare the opportunity to volunteer information about his own family, but Tauwhare only repeated his observation about brothers a second time, seeming well pleased with his own perspicacity.
    ‘I wonder, Te Rau, if I might ask you something about Crosbie Wells,’ said Devlin suddenly.
    For he had not forgotten the story that he had overheard, that morning, in the dining room of the Palace Hotel. The politician Alistair Lauderback had been convinced, for some mysterious reason, that the late Crosbie Wells and the blackmailer Francis Carver had been brothers,