Grandfather and the sisters returned to the farm at Luskentyre, Salvador to work alongside Mr McIlone with the animals on the farm and continue reading, studying and writing the Orthography, and the sisters to continue driving round the isles in their converted library van, making bad deals and not much of a living.  Come the first summer my Grandfather spent on the islands, that of 1949, the two sisters found themselves doing something else together, as their bellies started to swell.  Salvador - while suffused with virile pride, of course - was already wondering how they were going to cope with two extra mouths to feed when the Fossils arrived.

Cecil (pronounced See-sill, apparently) and Gertie Possil were an eccentric couple of independent means who wiled away their otherwise relatively pointless lives by joining different sects, cults and churches as though they were trying to collect the set.  Cecil was a tall, awkward man who had been unable to take part in the War because he only possessed one eye, the other one having been hooked out when he was a child when his father - a keen angler - was teaching him to cast; a traumatic incident one might have thought would put the young Cecil off fishing, and possibly fish, for life, but which in fact had had exactly the opposite effect.  When Cecil disappeared on one of his frequent fishing trips in the Highlands or to the chalk streams of southern England, Gertie would spend the time attending seances and talking to mystics.

They had read something about Grandfather and his strange new faith - including his emphasis on the importance of the 29th of February - in their daily newspaper on the first of March that year, and realised that that was the day that would have been the 29th of February had 1949 been a leap year.  Convinced that this meant something entirely profound, they had determined to make a pilgrimage to Luskentyre later that year. (Though it has to be said that Cecil later confessed he had also been thinking of the opportunities for sporting fishing to be had in the Hebrides, had he and his wife proved unwelcome at or been disillusioned with Grandfather's proto-church.)

Salvador was wary of the Fossils at first, though Mr McIlone seemed happy to have them stay, and the sisters appeared politely indifferent.  Cecil and Gertie arrived on Harris in a large pre-war shooting break (a kind of estate car or station wagon which Sister Jess assures me a lady called Everidge once memorably termed a half-timbered car) packed with Mesopotamian scatter cushions, Afghan rugs, Ceylonese onyx incense holders and all the other essentials required for prolonged survival on a modest island farm.

They also brought with them at least twenty different types of tea, which they kept in airtight Javanese cinerary urns.  This greatly endeared them to my Grandfather, and was probably the difference between them being trusted and accepted when they first appeared or being treated with such suspicion they felt obliged to leave.  Blithely bestowing the Luskentyre farm with batiks, lacquer screens and silver candelabra, the Fossils were able to bring an air of luxury to the place that at first appealed to all concerned, including my Grandfather.  Until then the farm had been a place of creaking iron beds, smoky paraffin lamps and bare floorboards relieved by off-cuts of linoleum.  By the time the Fossils were finished all of those were still there but by all accounts they didn't seem to define the place any more.

The Fossils stayed initially for two months, providing the farm with its veneer of opulence, Grandfather with all the speciality teas, pens and paper he desired, and the locals with both a rich new vein of gossip and a lurid new example to brandish in front of children and weak-minded adults whenever a paradigm of hedonistic immorality and heathen decadence was required.

I think they also gave our Founder something else: an outside perspective, a calibratory check, a chance to measure his revelations, thoughts, insights and future teachings against the experience of people who'd pretty well played the field as far as odd new sects were concerned, and quite assuredly knew their way round a decent cult when they saw one.

Cecil and Gertie became converts.  Something about Salvador's new religion seemed to chime with them; it was, if you like, both backward and forward looking, and they found elements in each direction that agreed with them.  They had, years earlier, decided against having their house in Edinburgh's Morningside connected to the electricity mains and were already curiously hermetic in their private lives.  Trying to keep up with all the services and meetings of so many splintered faiths left them little or no time to socialise with the real faithful afterwards, and each had few acquaintances outside respectively game fishing and seance attending, and no real friends at all.  I think even Salvador's patently scandalous relationship with the two sisters seemed a breath of fresh air to them after the small-minded and hysterical attitude to sexuality the other sects and faiths they had paid court to tended to display, and in both that and a desire to live frugally and unfussily out-with conventional society, with a respect for the wisdom of the past, for nature and for all mystic faiths, it might be true that my Grandfather was one of the first hippies.

Cecil and Gertie left at the end of that first summer, as Aasni and Zhobelia bloomed bigger, and shortly after Gertie discovered, to her alloyed joy, that she too had fallen pregnant (this was the lump that would turn out to be Lucius).  They swore that they would return, and that they would spread the good tidings of the new Faith's birth, both by word of mouth and by financing the publication of the Orthography once Salvador had completed it.  They took all their exotic trappings with them, stowing them in the back of the shooting break without a thought for the finer sensibilities of the pregnant sisters, who to their dismay suddenly found themselves dumped back into the world of creaking iron beds and curling lino after a heady existence amongst the luxuries of perfume-saturated cloth-of-gold cushions and silk rugs of fabulous design.

I think that was when Salvador, who bore the brunt of the sisters' complaints in this matter, finally turned his back on extravagance and luxury and made simplicity an article of faith.

The Fossils kept up an almost daily correspondence with the farm at Luskentyre, telling of their mission amongst the heathen folk of Edinburgh and their efforts at spreading the good word amongst those who sought game fish in still pools and those who angled after the words, warnings and entreaties of the dear-departed.

Meanwhile Aasni and Zhobelia each grew big with child, and jointly developed a passion at a certain point in their confinement for the pungent pickles and condiments they remembered from their childhood.  Forbidden from contacting their parents, having no wish to do so anyway and knowing of no other nearby source of spiciness, they started to make their own, ordering supplies of the rarer raw ingredients - chillis, coriander, cardamom, etc. - by mail from an Indian grocer in Edinburgh whom Gertie had put them in touch with.

Their experiments with the likes of chilli and garlic sauce, lime and brinjal pickle, apple and ginger chutney and so on did not always meet with complete success, but they persisted, and Salvador - discovering along with Mr McIlone a liking for the sisters' fiery concoctions which might not have been totally unconnected with the commonality of effect produced in the mouth by both cheap whisky and any chilli-laced comestible - happily encouraged these fragrant forays into the Epicurean realm.

Aasni and Zhobelia's original cravings proved to be the pump-priming inspiration for an avocation that lasted decades, and after a long period of initial reluctance which persisted well beyond the time when Aasni had been delivered of Brigit and Zhobelia of Calli and the sisters again fitted comfortably behind the counter of their converted library van, their chutneys and pickles eventually became their most successful line in the travelling shop, giving the more broad-minded citizens of Lewis and Harris a taste for palate-scalding sub-continental condiments that has persisted to this day.