By advising the rajah to build his road, he had supposedly been showing the Englishman how to establish mastery over his lands, yet that mastery was fragile; nature kept on and on reclaiming the road – as Leon had surely known that it would. Perhaps he laughed a bitter laugh whenever the rains began? He had probably come to understand that no foreigner, whether Dutch or English, could hold sway for long in Borneo, because there was too much about the island that they didn’t understand – and never would understand. They relied on clever Malays, like Leon, to tell them what to do. So why should he, Leon, remain in a position of servitude, when he was the one who possessed the knowledge needed by the ruler? All that kept him there was his lack of money.

Here, then, lay the reason for his enthusiasm for the cannery. He knew that Sir Ralph would wish to have little to do with such a complicated, messy enterprise, but that there might be hard currency to be made from it. And he, Leon, would put himself in charge of the accounting. If all went to plan and cans of filleted subaru and well-prepared soft shell turtle could be exported to China and beyond, then Leon’s dreams of riches might be realised. And then he would leave. He would go in search of his own small empire to rule.

Dismay at the logic of these thoughts gripped the rajah’s heart once again as he stood watching the engineer fumbling with his fuses. He saw how easy it would be for Scaife to be blown apart, and sudden compassion for the man overcame him. He thought, we all risk being defeated by some small weakness in us that we can’t control. And then that is the end of us.

He didn’t want to remain at the river. He had the notion that to lose himself in the forest for a while, to remind himself that nature could be sublime as well as unkind, would bring him some respite from sadness and worry. To return to his house, he would have walked due north, but leaving the Sadong behind until he could no longer hear its running over the rapids, he turned east and proceeded at a slow and careful pace.

He soon came upon a family of gibbons and stopped to wonder at their furtive little faces looking down upon the white man. They scattered as he moved forwards and this disappointed him, as if he’d hoped to have some kind of conversation with the animals and was hurt by their fear of him. And this foolish wish revealed to him how alone he felt himself to be.

Not far from where he was walking he knew there was a small Dyak settlement and he wondered if he might come across it and stop to rest there and drink a cup of arak and admire the pumpkins the Dyaks grew in strange abundance. The chief delight of this tribe had been to play a complicated form of Cat’s Cradle – or what they termed ‘Scratch Cradle’ – with the rajah. And it always made him marvel at the different patterns they could make with the string, far superior to any he had ever learned in his fifty years of life.