I hadn’t posed the ruins and I didn’t touch them. Long before I arrived, they had been dropped off at the foot of a tree in Honolulu’s Kawaikui Beach Park. They lay on their backs: the Queen of Heaven and the Archangel Michael, with the Lord Buddha on his lotus between them. The plaster they were made of was damaged.

Behind and above them rose a tree from the earth. Its hollowed trunk made a little cave where a little oracle might have dwelt, muttering, “Know thyself.”

But it was probably just wood.