Marcel had in mind a village he wanted us to reach before nightfall. I didn’t much fancy sleeping out in the open, so readied myself to set off again quickly. Amelia asked if she could ride with me this time. It felt like a compliment. I had to wear my pack on my front to make room for her, and handling the bike with the two of us on it was doubly hard to start with, but the track was better defined this side of the river and she’d learned to ride pillion well with Marcel. I quickly grew used to the weight of her pressing against my back. We forged on. At dusk Marcel turned on his bike’s headlamp. I did the same. The two beams scissored wildly ahead of us, full of insects. I couldn’t have gone on much longer, but just as the river had saved me earlier in the day, we arrived in the village abruptly. There were no electric lights here. After a quick meal of heavily salted vegetable mush Marcel negotiated us floor space in what seemed little more than a shack. I didn’t care. Curled in my sleeping bag, with Amelia already breathing deeply next to me, I shut my eyes and fell into a weird half-sleep, the muddy track still unspooling ahead of me, the bike’s engine still loud in my ears.

47.

We made it to Langdon’s flagship mine, Canonhead, the following afternoon. The landscape we were biking through had opened up by then. Marcel crested a low hill ahead of me and as I drew up alongside him the operation was laid out beneath us, an open wound cut into the brush, reaching into the distance. It was big, a proper sprawl of prefab huts to one side of a cavernous, tiered open pit, swarming with men and stabbed full of heavy machinery, diggers, trucks. The day was a muggy one. Standing on that ridge, the heat seemed to come from the mine, spread out down there beneath a dirty yellow haze.