The next day, one of the miners fell ill.

He wasn’t much older than a boy, a young fella Jim McKenzie knew as Billy, whose father had found gold in Otago and squandered it all on a failed manufactory of leather goods in Yorktown. Seeing this enterprise go down and faced then with his father’s suicide, Billy lived with the conviction that, in a heartless world, joining a gold rush was as likely a way to make money as any other. But he told McKenzie that when he found ‘his’ gold he wouldn’t risk it on ‘some futile endeavour’ but rather exchange it at the Bank of Australia for enough silver dollars to last his lifetime.

But Billy had got no gold, and now the fever had laid him low. McKenzie heard some of his compatriots explain to the boy that he would have to be moved to the large longhouse, where the sick belonged, or else risk infecting them all. But only McKenzie had seen inside this place and he balked at the idea of putting Billy in there. He told all the men to move to the last and smallest of the longhouses, the furthest away from the hospital. He helped them carry away their possessions, aware as he did so of how few chattels a gold miner can call his own. Then he sent the diggers off for their day’s labours, made Billy as comfortable as he could on his thin sleeping mat and told him he would leave his side only to beg some medicine from the nurses in the hospital and return straight away. As he left, Billy cried out to him, ‘Don’t let me die, Jim!’

McKenzie scratched his red beard. ‘Do I look like a man who would?’ he said.

As soon as he left Billy’s side, McKenzie changed his mind. He began walking up the Savage Road to the rajah’s house. He’d seen it at a distance before, but never trespassed inside its gates and now the whiteness and magnificence of it made him pause on the road. The day was fine and he saw the sun shining upon great banks of lilies in the garden and heard the cassowaries chattering in the aviary.

McKenzie stared in wonderment. This was how great wealth always showed itself: it killed the poor with its beauty. And no men, McKenzie reflected, are more susceptible to being wounded in this way than gold miners. Their day-to-day world is filthy and brutal, but their dreams are all of the luxurious life. They can imagine it without difficulty. They can envisage the fine clothes they would put on their backs, the polished silverware they would set out on their tables, the pictures they would hang on their walls. This other life is present inside them all the time.

McKenzie made his way to the rajah’s door. A Malay servant, dressed in impeccable white, opened it a crack. From the crack, he observed the miner’s dirty moleskin trousers, his frayed shirt, his face that was hollow with hunger under the red beard, and informed him coldly that the rajah would not deign to see him.