Leon came to the construction site every day. Taminah watched him and saw that he was putting on weight and that he strutted around in an arrogant way, arms folded across his chest, barking orders. The Chinese, whom he referred to as ‘the rajah’s little mushrooms’, appeared afraid of him. And this new vision of her son as the overseer of the hospital made her aware that although she thought that she knew him, she had never before seen so clearly this side of his nature, which longed to wield power over others, even over his own mother, to whom he had always shown such careful respect. When he came up to the veranda, he now told her she was working too slowly. The frames of the longhouses were being assembled very fast, he announced, with some roof struts already in place. Yards and yards of the palm leaf thatching would soon be needed. She was falling behind in her important task.

Taminah told Leon that she was working as quickly as she could, but he commented that he had often observed her daydreaming instead of cutting, weaving and sewing.

‘I am old,’ she replied. ‘You must allow the old their dreams.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘What are you dreaming of?’

She didn’t wish to admit to Leon that she sometimes dreamed about taking the old man, Lin, in her arms and stroking his head. She told him that she was thinking about the past, when he had been a tiny, beautiful child and his father had made him a little boat out of a turtle shell, in which he paddled about the pond and she had stood by, watching him with awe.

One evening at dusk – when the workers had gone to their huts and the three longhouses were almost complete, with a few cots already installed and privy trenches dug behind them in the bush – Taminah heard unfamiliar voices on the river.

She walked down to the new landing jetty put in below the longhouses and looked westwards and saw a procession of heavy canoes, four or five of them, coming towards her, against the run of the river. In the prow of the first canoe, stood a man with a flaming torch. He was waving it about, trying to cast light on the river bank, and now, when the longhouses came within his sight, he called out excitedly, gesturing to them and calling for the convoy to stop.

The current was strong and threatened to send the boats spinning backwards the way they had come. Taminah watched and listened and realised the voices were shouting in English. After the lighting of more torches, the canoes were manoeuvred in to the jetty and tied up.

Taminah stood very still, invisible in the descending darkness. She saw a group of men assemble on the jetty, perhaps twelve or fifteen of them. They wore wide-brimmed hats and underneath the hats, Taminah guessed that their faces were pale.

These faces were now staring, in the torchlight, at the newly built longhouses. And it was as if, for a moment, they didn’t dare to move towards them, as though the longhouses might have been a forest mirage, or else a shrine to some god whose name and necessary rituals were unknown to them. But then two men set off towards them, holding high the torch, and carrying heavy rifles.