The Luminaries

exchange a sympathetic glance with one of the others, but he failed to catch anybody’s eye. He coughed, adding, ‘I suppose I’ve dreamed of what comes afterwards—that is, what the gold might lead to, what it might become.’
    The man seemed pleased by this answer. ‘Reverse alchemy, is what I like to call it,’ he said, ‘the whole business, I mean— prospecting . Reverse alchemy. Do you see—the transformation—not
into
gold, but
out
of it—’
    ‘It is a fine conceit, sir,’—reflecting only much later that this notion chimed very nearly with his own recent fancy of a pantheon reversed.
    ‘And your inquiries,’ the man said, nodding vigorously, ‘your inquiries—you’ll be asking around, I suppose—what shovels, what cradles—and maps and things.’
    ‘Yes, precisely. I mean to do it right.’
    The man threw himself back into his armchair, evidently very amused. ‘One week’s board at the Crown Hotel—just to ask your questions!’ He gave a little shout of laughter. ‘And then you’ll spend two weeks in the mud, to earn it back!’
    Moody recrossed his ankles. He was not in the right disposition to return the other man’s energy, but he was too rigidly bred to consider being impolite. He might have simply apologised for his discomfiture, and admitted some kind of general malaise—the man seemed sympathetic enough, with his strumming fingers, andhis rising gurgle of a laugh—but Moody was not in the habit of speaking candidly to strangers, and still less of confessing illness to another man. He shook himself internally and said, in a brighter tone of voice,
    ‘And you, sir? You are well established here, I think?’
    ‘Oh, yes,’ replied the other. ‘Balfour Shipping, you’ll have seen us, right past the stockyards, prime location—Wharf-street, you know. Balfour, that’s me. Thomas is my Christian name. You’ll need one of those on the diggings: no man goes by Mister in the gorge.’
    ‘Then I must practise using mine,’ Moody said. ‘It is Walter. Walter Moody.’
    ‘Yes, and they’ll call you anything but Walter too,’ Balfour said, striking his knee. ‘“Scottish Walt”, maybe. “Two-Hand Walt”, maybe. “Wally Nugget”. Ha!’
    ‘That name I shall have to earn.’
    Balfour laughed. ‘No earning about it,’ he said. ‘Big as a lady’s pistol, some of the ones I’ve seen. Big as a lady’s—but, I’m telling you, not half as hard to put your hands on.’
    Thomas Balfour was around fifty in age, compact and robust in body. His hair was quite grey, combed backward from his forehead, and long about the ears. He wore a spade-beard, and was given to stroking it downward with the cup of his hand when he was amused—he did this now, in pleasure at his own joke. His prosperity sat easily with him, Moody thought, recognising in the man that relaxed sense of entitlement that comes when a lifelong optimism has been ratified by success. He was in shirtsleeves; his cravat, though of silk, and finely wrought, was spotted with gravy and coming loose at the neck. Moody placed him as a libertarian—harmless, renegade in spirit, and cheerful in his effusions.
    ‘I am in your debt, sir,’ he said. ‘This is the first of many customs of which I will be entirely ignorant, I am sure. I would have certainly made the error of using a surname in the gorge.’
    It was true that his mental conception of the New Zealand diggings was extremely imprecise, informed chiefly by sketches of the California goldfields—log cabins, flat-bottomed valleys, wagons inthe dust—and a dim sense (he did not know from where) that the colony was somehow the shadow of the British Isles, the unformed, savage obverse of the Empire’s seat and heart. He had been surprised , upon rounding the heads of the Otago peninsula some two weeks prior, to see mansions on the hill, quays, streets, and plotted gardens—and he was surprised, now, to observe a well-dressed gentleman passing his lucifers to a Chinaman, and then leaning across him to retrieve his glass.
    Moody was a Cambridge fellow, born in Edinburgh to a modest fortune and a household staff of three. The social circles in which he had tended to move, at Trinity, and then at Inner Temple in his more recent years, had not at all the rigid aspect of the peerage, where one’s history and context differed from the next man only in degree; nevertheless, his education had made him insular, for it had taught him that the proper way to understand