Work had begun on the new portion of the Savage Road that would lead to the river and the site of the cannery and the rajah was interested to see the jungle being cleared, foundations laid and stones broken to form the hardcore of the new highway. The Chinese labour brought in by Leon for these arduous tasks toiled in the great heat. With their small, slim bodies and their wide, conical straw hats, they appeared to Sir Ralph to resemble little mushrooms, bobbing about, scrabbling for a place in the earth. He knew that this was an amusing way to think about them, which, normally, would have made him smile, but he discovered that it saddened him. The life of a mushroom, so brief, he now compared to his own existence in Borneo; he had popped up here, as though overnight, in his white clothes, with his burning red-brown skin beneath, and people had gathered round to stare at him. He had gained a footing in Nature’s realm. Now, he was decaying. His heart was pulp. He would soon be gone.

He dated his decline into depression from two events: the disappearance of Edmund, and Leon’s obsession with the cannery. He blamed his own inattention in both cases. Why had he not noticed straight away when Edmund had gone missing from their trek to the river? Now, Edmund was dead and he would, in due time, be obliged to search for the address of his brother in England and write to him, relating the sad news. But he put off doing this. He dreaded to be held to account for his failure to take care of Edmund.

And as for the cannery, why had he not refused to sanction the wretched fish factory? It was his money that was going to pay for it, not Leon’s. And already great damage had been done. In the shaking hands of Septimus Scaife, so much gunpowder had been packed into his paper tubes and lodged at the feet of the mangroves that the resulting mighty explosion he had boasted about had not only blasted the trees out of the water, it had killed all the fish in a mile-long stretch of the Sadong. Their bodies floated to the surface, nudged along the current by the broken tree trunks. Hundreds of turtles also died and their severed limbs littered the river banks, vitiating the air and bringing vultures down from Mount Ophir.

When Leon was shown this sight, he stuck out his tongue and screamed at Scaife, threatening to scatter his limbs along the Sadong and accusing him of sabotaging the project deliberately. The rajah witnessed the engineer turn white and in his attempts to move backwards, away from Leon, fall over his own feet and land ignominiously on his bottom in the mud. He began to protest that the fish would return, that eggs laid upriver by the turtles would hatch, but Leon could only see a white man’s ignorance, stupidity and malign intent. Without consulting Sir Ralph, he dismissed Septimus Scaife on the spot, telling him to leave Borneo ‘within one day’ and never return. He told the terrified man that if he had had a dagger in his belt, he would have plunged it into his heart.