She saw them go into the first longhouse and for a moment the torchlight vanished. Then they came out again and began calling to their companions on the jetty, from whom a shout of joy went up and these men began unloading rolls of matting, bulging sacks, spades, guns and cooking pots from the boats.

Bent a little by the weight of these things, the group now began to explore all three houses, and, finding them empty, as though providence had set them down before them as a miraculous gift, one group of them broke into a strange, tuneless bout of singing.

Leon had told her about this: that, under certain circumstances, white men had a habit of throwing all decorum aside and, upon some hidden signal, burdening the air with ribald song, the meaning of which was known only to them. It was this to which Taminah was subjected now. The unfamiliar sound echoed all around the forest at her back, driving everything else towards silence – even the river itself. And she knew that what she was witnessing was some complex turn of events, which no one had foreseen and which should not be happening.

The longhouses were being built as a refuge for the sick and dying when the Mal de peste made its terrible way from Kuching to the rajah’s lands. But these men were not ill: they were loud and hearty and full of a kind of reckless cheer. She had no idea where they had come from or what they intended to do. She knew only that they had taken possession of the buildings her son had designed as a hospital and upon which so many people had worked for so long.

And she thought again of Lin, struggling up to her veranda with his back-breaking bundles of palm leaves, trudging to and fro like a donkey, never complaining and only accepting a cup of water if it was offered. She wished that he – and not these loud strangers – could have taken possession of a comfortable cot in a newly built house and laid himself down at last to rest.

The strangers made fires at the river’s edge and cooked rice and drank and sang their songs far into the night.

In the early morning, when Taminah crept near to the jetty, where the canoes bumped against each other on the fast-running tide of the river, she could see strange objects, slightly resembling the bamboo cradles that white women made for their babies, set out on the mud. And Taminah decided that these things – which were and were not cradles – came forth from a white man’s mind, just as the singing came forth from white men’s souls, and that only the rajah would be able to determine what all of this might signify.

Taminah thus set off along the new arm of the Savage Road, heading for Sir Ralph’s great mausoleum of a house. The sun was not yet up and, in the grey light, the road appeared to her as a ghostly, unpeopled highway which her own footsteps unfolded before her. The jungle all around her was almost silent, a tiny breeze just visiting the tops of the trees and sending its shiver through the air. And Taminah thought about the way sickness and fever were said to travel on the wind and in the damp mists of morning and how this terror might soon reach the very place where she was walking.