He looked quite crestfallen. He had a pleasant, naturally amused face, and the tousled hair of a comedian; but I thought for a moment that he was going to cry. ‘And if that’s not enough you can always take a bit of ours,’ I said.

But we’d both misunderstood him. It wasn’t the niggardliness he couldn’t bear. ‘All this? For me?’ he said. ‘But I only have little tent.’ It was the waste.

In Japan they could have built a small city on this. So he was uncomfortable – morally uncomfortable – with the luxury. ‘Spread out,’ Ros laughed. But his English wasn’t up to the phrase. Just as his Japanese was almost certainly not up to the concept. He pitched his tent finally on an extreme corner of the plot and never ventured thereafter more than eighteen inches beyond it.

I grew to marvel at the compact nature of his existence. Every afternoon, to the astonishment of the entire population of the caravan park who would crawl out of their own bivouacs to watch him, he would remove a number of delicate objects from a box on the back of his motorbike, screw together a tiny copper cooker, shake out a collapsible copper pan, and prepare tea. This he would take formally, sitting cross-legged at the entrance to his tent in a clean shirt. Had his English been better, or had he looked as though he would positively have welcomed it, we might have spent more time talking to him. As it was we smiled at him a lot, and then, as the days went by and he seemed to slip into intertia, we began to fret about him. The other Japanese stayed two days and left. Other travellers far less self-contained left also. But still our neighbour sat hugging the corner of his sandy domain, still taking tea, still studying his atlases, but showing no sign either of enjoying being here or intending to move on. What if he’d lost his nerve in the middle of Australia and couldn’t motivate himself to continue?