Without consciously knowing why, I’d been digging around in my pockets. My hand emerged clutching one of Francis’s chocolate biscuits. I knelt down next to the boy and offered it to him. He took it very quickly, as if worried I might think twice about the offer if he hung around.

‘Merci,’ he added, once the biscuit was safely snatched.

Merci. Mercy. I gulped, fighting the comparison, but it came anyway. This kid had lost both his parents. For now, I’d also lost mine. Beno’s situation was beyond desperate, but I was desperate too, desperate to get Mum and Dad back.

‘I’m not sure a snack is going to solve much,’ said Amelia. She wasn’t being hostile, just stating the truth.

‘I know, but what else can I do?’

‘Your parents came out here to gather evidence, right? Of illegal mining. Seeing as you’re the one with the big camera, they should probably have brought you with them in the first place. I’d take as many pictures as you can, if I were you.’

The fact we still didn’t know who had hold of Mum and Dad must have played in my face. Amelia went on. ‘They’d want you to document this and put it the evidence in the right hands. Theirs, preferably. But if your parents don’t make it to the summit, they’d want you show people the photos there yourself, yes?’

The summit was still a way off and Mum and Dad would surely make it there in person. I couldn’t let myself think anything else, but said, ‘I suppose so,’ to Amelia all the same.

‘Get on with it then – take as many as you can before one of these guards realises Caleb’s not as important as he’s pretending to be.’

She was right of course. ‘I’ll take the kids’ photographs, you get their names and ages,’ I said, and we set to, working our way around the piles of rocks and puddles and holes and sacks and heaps of dirt, everything filthy and alive with apparently pointless physical work of some sort, a termite mound that only made sense when you thought of how all the backbreaking tasks – hacking and digging and shovelling and lifting and pouring and picking and sluicing and sifting – came together in the form of something valuable to sell.