I gave her my hand and she kissed it.  Her thin, pale lips felt soft, and dry as paper. 'Beloved Isis, Blessed Isis!' she said, blinking quickly, and scurried away into the dim hall.  I sat down and picked up the phone handset.

We do not, of course, have a telephone in the Community, and while there is a set in the Woodbeans' house we are allowed to use, we do not make or receive normal calls.  There is a tradition in the Order that telephones must only be used for urgent messages, and then not in a way so trivial and facile as by simply lifting the receiver and talking.

I dialled the Woodbean's number.  Above me, I could hear Lucius clumping around on the first floor.  I let the phone ring twice, then put it down and dialled again, this time letting it ring nine times, then clicked the cradle buttons down once more before dialling a third time and allowing four more sets of trills to sound.

This was my special cipher; it had been agreed on the previous evening during our final council of war that no further coded signal would be required to let the Order know that I had arrived safely at the home of Gertie Fossil.  This was just as well; sending a long message in this manner - using our own form of Morse code - can take several hours, especially if one has to transmit one's own number to the person initially receiving the call and then has to leave gaps in one's transmission during which they may ring back to send signals containing questions, and never forgetting that there is a degree of inaccuracy inevitable to the whole process anyway, given that the rings heard at the source phone do not always tally exactly with those at the receiving machine (this, I am told, is why a caller can think that a phone they are calling into has been lifted before it has started ringing).

Of course, we do not ask the Woodbeans to sit by the phone all night noting down the sequence of rings; either a pre-agreed time is set up for a call during which an Orderite will be sitting with pencil and paper in the Woodbeans' front hall, or a special machine can be switched on, designed and built by Brother Indra, which records each trill the phone makes on a piece of paper wound round a metal drum and which is made from bits of an old tape-recorder, a clock and a barometer.

There was also, of course, a security aspect to all this; while my Grandfather no longer believed there was a special government department dedicated to the observation and harassment of our Order, and there seems to have been little recent interest from those peddlers of prurience, the popular press, it is always wise to keep up one's guard, for - as my Grandfather has pointed out - it is the surprise attack, the assault undertaken once the victim has been lulled into slackened discipline and sloppy vigilance, that is the most devastating.  Some ungracious apostates have suggested that the whole ritual is motivated by a desire to economise on telephone bills, and it is true that the system does have the additional benefit of considerable frugality; however the sheer awkwardness of the whole business surely points to a holier, more pure purpose.

When I finished my call I joined Gertie in the kitchen, to find her preparing the supper.  On the stove, a kettle sat surrounded by several cast-iron pots, all gradually coming to the boil and filling the room with mouth-watering aromas. 'Blessed Isis!' Gertie exclaimed, adding a dab of lard to each of three large white china plates on which tiny piles of tea already sat. 'You said you were hungry.'

'Indeed I am,' I conceded.

We ate in the dining room, round a long table of darkly gleaming polished wood whose centre was lined with tall candles, condiments, preserves, pickles and baskets of leavened and unleavened bread.  The supper was conducted with all due solemnity.  The presence of the lard and the tea on the side of the plate, as well as the incense candles and a dish as grand as venison tikka pasanda, marked this out as a special occasion.  I said the blessing, I served the first piece of food from each dish, I read from the Orthography and marked both Gertie and Lucius's foreheads with the vial of mud from home; I even made polite conversation and brought the Fossils up to date with the news from the Community; they had not visited for a year or so, and though they were hoping to be there for the Festival of Love in four weeks' time, they were grateful for a briefing beforehand.

I accepted the offer of a bath, though I was already almost dead on my feet, and woke to find myself chin-deep in the tepid water, with Gertie banging as loud as deference would allow on the bathroom door.  I assured her I was awake again, rinsed and dried and then made my way to my bedroom.  It was the finest room in the house and it possessed a large Victorian four-poster bed which I remembered from my visit here three years earlier.  This was ideal for my purposes as it meant I was able to sling my hammock between two of the sturdy posts, and even orient my hammock in a direction that ensured my head would be pointing towards the Community.  I slept soundly, and dreamed of nothing I could recall.

It was while I was sorting out my kit-bag the following morning that I found, right at the bottom of it, something extra and very special; something I did not know I had.  It came in the shape of a tiny vial wrapped in a scrap of paper and secured by a rubber band. 'In case.  S.,' said the words printed on the note.  I opened the tiny glass jar with some difficulty and sniffed the dark, almost black ointment inside.

It was zhlonjiz; the priceless, irreplaceable unguent that is more precious and significant to us than gold, frankincense and myrrh to Christians… no; more precious yet; it is as though we possess our Grail, but it is still magically powerful, and consumable.  I had heard of zhlonjiz since toddlerhood but only ever seen or smelled it once before, at my coming-of-age ceremony three years earlier.  I knew that my Grandfather had only the tiniest amount of the treasured, mystical salve left after all these years.  That he should honour me so by entrusting this substantial fragment of our holy of holies to my keeping was both a humbling tribute to the love he had for me and the faith he had in me, and a sobering reminder - had I needed one - of the importance of my mission.

I felt tears prick behind my eyes.  I carefully resealed the vial, pressed its little bakelite cap to my forehead and whispered a blessing, then kissed the tiny glass jar and stowed it carefully, wrapped in my extra clothes, back in the bottom of my kit-bag.

Edinburgh has the merit as a city - by our beliefs - that it is at its centre erratic, convoluted and full of different levels and strange steep passageways (though by all accounts the old cities of the Holy Lands surpass it in this regard, and Tokyo, in Japan, is apparently quite creditably difficult to find one's way around).  Edinburgh is still a city of course, and therefore to be avoided unless one has some pressing need to stay there - in Gertie Fossil's case a nostalgic weakness for the marital memories associated with the house was what had persuaded her to remain - but as cities go it is neither overly regular in pattern (save in the New Town) nor too large to see out of, two criteria which have always seemed to me important.  We have always held it to be a bad sign when navigating one's way round a city becomes a matter simply of knowing one's x-axis from one's y-axis, and we are I think rightly horrified at the prospect of discovering that the only direction to look in the hope of finding something natural to look at is up at the clouds (like as not polluted by the sight of aircraft and their vapour trails or, at night, by the reflected lights of the city itself).