When Eamon returns he tells her he is going to the cathedral. 'Alone,' he says sharply, stalling the protest she is about to make. Eamon walks across and joins the queues at the bottom of the steps, and waits patiently to shuffle along and enter the cathedral.
        Mary strolls around the hotel; she looks at her watch. Eamon wanted about half an hour alone in the cathedral. When he told her, she had bridled, had wanted to say, I want to see the cathedral as well as you. But she knows by now that Eamon has this need for solitude. She is used to it even though she resents it at times. She reminds herself sharply that this is no holiday. Alone in the gift shop, apart from the assistant who hovers nearby, fear sweeps over her, a dread she can't pin down of the unknown that lies ahead.
        The cathedral is so crowded it is almost too full to move. She shuffles past the queue waiting to press their hands into the roots of the Tree of Jesse below the statue of Saint James. Mary looks for Eamon in the crowd. Down at the end of the cathedral, there is another lengthy queue of pilgrims who have completed the Camino, who snake along the side aisles and around the rear of the High Altar, waiting to climb behind the altar, to embrace the most sacred image of Saint James and kiss his bejewelled cape.
        The crowds swell and push. Video and digital and mobile phone cameras flash, held aloft as though in adoration, to capture the best view of the ceiling, the pulpit, the choir stalls; it does not seem to matter what, they photograph everything. Mary is disconcerted, almost panicky as the ruck of tourists and pilgrims push and shove her. A young woman, in a short skirt and skimpy top, jaws rhythmically chewing gum, wanders in, her video camera running, looks for somewhere to point it and decides the High Altar is the place. Some priests sit in open confession boxes. A young man takes aim with his camera and the priest gestures angrily for him to desist. The man seems astonished, as though the chance to be photographed at all times is to be cherished.
        Overcome by the crowds and the noise – there is a constant low murmur, a hum of conversation, broken now and then by a loud question – Mary sits in a pew in a side aisle. She looks at the huge thurible, the Botafumeiro, which requires eight priests to operate by ropes and pulleys, swinging it across the 30-metre ceiling of the transept. Once it was in use at every service, the clouds of incense sent out in the hope of fumigating the filthy pilgrims. She knows from her guidebook that nowadays they only operate it for a special Mass. Observing the heaving scrum of people, Mary has a wicked desire to fill it with tear gas and clear the tourists out. She is constantly searching for Eamon and is worried she can't see him. Has he sent her inside the cathedral as a decoy, while he is off somewhere else? She still hasn't found out why he had to go to London four days ahead of their flight here and why he insisted on going by himself.

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