In the native prau which took the two men from Singapore to Kuching, Ross’s spirits lifted for a while. The sky above him was a fierce and blameless blue. The delicate open boat, with its single vast sail, travelled so fast over the water that Ross yielded to the illusion that he was flying. He began to call to Edmund in his mind. He told him that he had been ‘long delayed’ but that he was here at last, speeding across the deep ‘like a bird skimming the waves’ and that he, Edmund, was the only person now inhabiting his heart.

He asked himself whether this was true and reasoned that it was almost so. Yet he knew that Jane was also there, a dark shadow which would always fall across whatever he attempted. And the knowledge that he would never quite escape from her, or from what he had done to her brought back to him his feelings of despair.

When the prau made its graceful landing at Kuching and Ross’s trunk was lifted onto the quayside, he and Chesterfield stood looking about them in bewildered curiosity. Where Singapore had been crowded and noisy, this place was made strange and fearful by the silence which seemed to hang over it.

After a moment, they heard a cannon shot fired, then another and Chesterfield said, ‘Lord, Sir, nobody mentioned we were sailing into an insurrection, did they?’

They waited. For the sound of running feet? For the appearance of militiamen? But nothing stirred. Ross looked out along the wooden quayside. He saw a line of what he took to be small shops or booths, but all of these had been boarded up. Ahead of them was a street of low houses, built so that the upper floors, resting on wooden stilts, overhung the lower ones, to keep them in the shade. The dirt road which ran between them appeared empty of people. On one side of the street, spreading trees which Ross could not name stood sentinel in the quiet. The only sound was the chatter of birds, high up in their branches.

‘Perhaps,’ said Ross, ‘this is the place where people come to die?’

‘Well,’ said Chesterfield with one of his slow-burning smiles, ‘it certainly doesn’t look like Derby Day at Epsom.’

Chesterfield then hoisted the trunk onto his scrawny back, crossed the street and set it down in the shade of one of the houses. He instructed Ross to sit on his luggage and wait while he went in search of some conveyance to take them to the rajah’s house. ‘Give me money, Sir,’ he said as he prepared to depart: ‘it will be the only language anyone will understand.’

Ross put silver into his palm and watched him walk away with his awkward seaman’s gait. As the old man rounded the corner of the street, Ross heard a church bell tolling.

It was late by the time a donkey, together with its Chinese owner and a small dray cart were found and they set off south-eastwards towards the rajah’s lands and Ross worried that they might become lost in the declining light. But Chesterfield reassured him that the driver had told him, in his few snatches of English, that he knew the rajah’s house – ‘not “Rajah Leon” Sir, the rajah is Sir Ralph Savage, English person.’ The house was so exceptional and so large that everybody in Sarawak knew it. It was ‘a white mountain’ nobody could miss. You could, he said, see it clearly in the darkness.