In spite of his extravagant desires, Sir Ralph Savage had little of meanness in him and as soon as he had installed himself under his colossal roof, with his favourite Malay servant, Leon, as his primary bed companion, he set himself upon his path of philanthropy. In Leon, Sir Ralph had chosen a remarkable man, someone who knew far more about Borneo’s yearnings and dreams than the English rajah would ever understand. In the hot nights, holding Leon in his arms, he kept asking him, ‘What is to be done here, Leon? How am I to improve upon what the Creator has given us?’ He told his lover that he wished to go down in history as one who had ‘enabled happiness’.

Leon advised him to begin by building a road.

‘A road to where?’ Sir Ralph had asked.

‘Sir Raff,’ said Leon. ‘There is no “where” in Sarawak. There is only Nature. Men begin; Nature finishes.’

‘Then what is the point of the road?’

‘The point for the road is to try to be’

Sir Ralph stroked Leon’s thick, oily hair. Because he liked this answer and didn’t want to argue with his lover, and because he was infatuated with Leon and wished to deny him nothing within reason, he began to design plans for his road straight away.

He announced that it would be called the Savage Road. A cruel quantity of stones had to be found, broken and crushed to form its base core. This stone, hewn from the hilly ground by Chinese labourers, gave it impressive stability, and when Sir Ralph showed this proudly to Leon, Leon said, ‘White and strong, Rajah Sir – just like you and the British Empire!’ and exploded with irrepressible laughter.

Sir Ralph didn’t mind being teased by Leon, but when the Chinese road crew informed him that nothing else could be found for its surface but tamped earth and ground sandstone, he understood straight away that when the heavy rains fell, the Savage Road would appear to send tributaries of itself slithering away into the forest. And this dismayed him. He wished to feel proud of his road. His appetite for the Great Tasks in life was boundless, but he suffered when what he had seen in his mind was blighted by some unexpected flaw. After each drenching rain, he would walk out along the road, past the new settlements that he was building on either side of it: past Malay children playing in the mud, past the little stockade where cock-fighting took place by firelight and moonlight, and note how much earth had been washed away.

He cut a strange figure, dressed in a crumpled linen robe, with his greying hair tied back in a silk ribbon and wearing leather boots purloined from East India Company Army Stores, standing in the middle of the Savage Road and cursing the sky. The little Malay children laughed at him. The Malay women hid their laughter behind soft shawls. But Sir Ralph didn’t care if people found him funny or ridiculous; he only hoped they didn’t find him cruel. He himself had endured enough of cruelty from his peers in the Army of the East India Company to wish for a world in which it didn’t exist. Sometimes he’d kneel in the mud and pray, to his beloved Jesus, to send rain in more modest quantities, to help him return the lost earth to its rightful place on what he sometimes called his ‘providential highway’. But the rain in Sarawak was relentless.