Afterwards, they sat side by side on a pile of mats and smoked and as Leon watched the blue smoke curl and billow about the small room, he knew that the time had come to put his plan into action.

He began asking Chang about the rumours of fever in the city and Chang told him that here, by the Sarawak River, you could hardly smell the Mal de peste, but that if you went into the centre of Kuching, you began to breathe it and taste it, the deadly miasma that brought sickness and death from Dengue Fever. Some people, he said, had already fallen ill and many were trying to get passage on a boat to Singapore.

‘Where will I find those who are suffering?’ asked Leon. ‘I need to find two or three who are stricken down.’

‘Why do you need two or three who are stricken down?’ asked Chang.

‘Because,’ said Leon, ‘I am going to save them. This is my mission, to take them away from Kuching. Perhaps I cannot save them. Perhaps they are too far gone into the fever, in which case they will die. But I am going to try to make them well, and what I must do for this is to take them to another place.’

‘Where is this other place?’ asked Chang.

Leon kept drawing smoke into his lungs and savouring its release as he described to Chang how he had built a hospital in the forest, but the hospital had been invaded by men from a faraway country, who were not stricken in any way except by a lust for gold and who were about to rape the land and destroy acres of forest with their foul and greedy diggings.

‘At first,’ said Leon, ‘I could not see how I was going to persuade them to leave. I thought that I would have to try to kill them, but it is beyond me to kill so many.

‘And then I saw how, if I brought in the sick and dying to my hospital, if I brought there the people for whom my hospital was designed, then these foreign men would be filled with terror. And what would they do? They are poor men whose hopes have been disappointed too many times to count and they may be reluctant to abandon what they think will be the source of their fortunes. But soon enough, they will go. They would rather live with their disappointment than die. For who would not? So eventually, they will get back into their boats, with all their cargo and they will sail away down the Sadong River and we will never see them again.’

Chang was silent. He looked into Leon’s face, still half concealed by the silk bandage. Then he said: ‘who will care for the stricken and the dying?’

‘My mother will care for them,’ replied Leon. ‘I will pay her with silver and with objects that I have been given by the rajah. She will care for them for a little while and then they may die. Indeed, they will almost certainly die in due time. We will send their bodies down the river and imagine them arriving at the sea. And then we will be at peace once more.’