So one morning, quite early, when the sun was just slipping, all pink and gold, out of the sea, a little caravan marched out of the village gate and up the white road. There were three brown bundles with plump bare feet, two donkeys loaded with bedding and cooking pans and food, and in the rear two excited children.

Sadoc’s orchard lay well off the road in a secluded place in a sort of little valley. He had dug a well there and put up a little one-room house of mud and stones, where the women slept. The olive trees were old and gnarled and gray, and their branches sighed softly in the wind. Under them the ground was quite bare and a deep red in color. Nothing would grow in this dry place except the olive trees, which sent their thirsty roots far down into the earth where the water lay hidden under the hard, dry surface.