The rajah began listening out for the sounds of human habitation, but all he could hear was the great orchestra of the forest and he held up his arms in a gesture of surrender to its music, which, when his own death came, would continue without pause.

Then he walked on, managing to find pathways through the trees into small glades, where the bush had been cut and where burning sunlight fell. In one of these glades, he noticed that the air was tainted by a foul scent and he expected to find a carnivorous pitcher plant growing there. Though these insect-eating plants always spoke to his curiosity, he also knew that they could emit a horrible stench, their bulbous stems being full of half-digested flies.

The rajah looked around and around. What his eye eventually lighted upon was not a pitcher plant but a shallow mound, covered with a few stones and branches of foliage. Sir Ralph knew that dead animals were seldom buried in the forest; they were eaten – by men or wild hogs, or vultures. Approaching the mound, he fought off the sickness that rose in his throat from the vitiated air and gave all his attention to measuring the grave in his mind. It didn’t take him long to conclude that this was the fragile tomb of a man.

By the time the rajah reached the Dyak settlement, he felt weak from heat and thirst and from a new and terrible thought which had entered his mind: that he had stumbled, quite by chance, upon the last resting place of Edmund Ross.

He was relieved to have found the Dyaks. Though he had once fought them, as enemies of the Sultan of Brunei, this was not widely known along the Sadong. Indeed, some on the lands he now owned chose to regard him as a Deity-come-among-them, and this both moved and amused him. They did not merely bow to him, but liked to touch him, trying to ascertain if his skin, his hair, his fingernails and his eyes were made of flesh and blood or rather of some other immortal substance they would never be able to name. This touching of him sometimes felt like childish tickling and would make the rajah giggle and this pleased the Dyaks greatly and they would set up an answering clamour of laughter all around the white man, loud enough to silence the tree frogs and the bad-tempered toucans.

Once, he had been told by a Dyak woman that when he died, he would certainly be reborn ‘just as before’ wearing his white garb, with his grey hair tied in a black ribbon and his feet shod in old army boots. And this superstition seemed to take flight and travel round the settlements, so that now, when the Dyaks encountered the rajah, they tried to overcome their awe by gestures of ordinariness, offering him mangoes to eat or shaking his hand, pumping it up-and-down, up-and-down, in the way of a white man’s greeting.