‘Bloody will,’ he said, blinking his eyes at me and showing us that even his lids were red. There was something of a tyro-musketeer about him, the youngest of the magnificent however many, the one you wouldn’t originally take along but would come wholly to rely on in the end. He responded to my implicit challenge to his sobriety by suddenly holding himself very erect and running through an entirely lucid list of the other people who would be accompanying us on the five a.m. fishing expedition, the number of vehicles that would be going, and the precise names of the various creeks and billabongs in which we would be fishing. If I wasn’t mistaken in my geography, the last of these necessitated a journey over that same mountain range on which George Grey had paused, while removing Aboriginal spears from his side, in order to wonder at the spectacle of a foaming cataract below him, and to imagine a time when ‘civilization would have followed my tracks, and . . . rude nature and the savage would no longer reign supreme’. In which case we really owed it to ourselves to be up and ready in the morning. On the other hand, who on earth was Orlando De Biasi?

‘How long have we got to decide whether or not we can make it?’ I asked him.

He instantly went flexible again – I mean in body and in attitude. ‘Tell me at the end of the evening,’ he said. ‘If you tell me before then I’ll forget.’

At which he went off to dance in the small space between the tables with a very fat but breastless girl wearing a cowboy hat fitted with flashing lights – the electric cowgirl.

While we’d been talking to Orlando I’d noticed that Hector had arrived, looking no less authoritative than before, when at the wheel of his taxi, but distinctly spruced up and looking for a good time.

‘We’ve just been offered the chance to go out fishing,’ we told him. ‘What do you think?’

‘Take it! With him? Take it! Snap at it!’

(Snap at it was precisely the expression the man from the bureau had used when urging us to accept the lift to Broome. They went in for voicing pretty definite opinions, hereabouts.)

But later on, when Orlando wandered over and explained to Hector that it wasn’t fishing on a boat he was planning, but overland travel, Hector changed his mind. ‘Give it away,’ he said. ‘Too uncomfortable. Too hot. Too many mosquitoes. You won’t enjoy it.’