‘Now you see,’ said Sir Ralph, ‘in this very spot, right here, one of the commodities that money can buy. It can buy peace. For this to achieve perfection, all I need is the poetry of the King James Bible.’

Edmund was told to lie in one of the hammocks and put the spectacles on. ‘You may think you don’t need them,’ said Sir Ralph, ‘but the Word of God must be amplified before our eyes. You see? Or else we fail. We are so blind to what is true. Only when we see clearly, can we begin to understand.’

Sir Ralph had opened the bible at the Gospel According to St. Luke and told Edmund to start reading at Chapter One, Verse 26.

‘I have chosen the Annunciation,’ he said. ‘For what gladdens our hearts more than a new beginning?’

Edmund was tempted to say that he’d experienced a troubling ‘new beginning’ to his life the day he’d arrived in Borneo. Once he’d entered the forest, tangled in its own impenetrable lore, his perceptions of who and what he was had begun to alter in a way that – in his great hunger for his adventure – he had never predicted. Indeed, there were aspects of himself which he now failed to recognise. He no longer saw a person who walked with a fearless stride, who was master – moment by moment – of his own intent, but felt that he’d become a child again, or else some species of a dream-self, who could only wander in this green immensity in a state of deep unknowing.

A hundred times, Edmund had reminded himself that his quest to find and capture rare species of birds and insects had lodged in his heart since he was a boy and that all he could do was to go forward, overcoming terror, and never think of giving up his mission, but yet he knew that something had changed in him: he was somehow lesser than he had been before. And when at last he had fallen ill, his sufferings appeared logical to him – inevitable. His illness was the place towards which he’d been travelling all the time.

But he told the rajah none of this. He opened the bible and turned the filigree pages very slowly until he found St. Luke’s Gospel. Wearing the spectacles, Edmund discovered that the words seemed to jump about on the page – now large, now suddenly small – and the sun, falling in ever-changing striations through the palm leaves, decked the verses with a silvery, flickering light, so that the reader had the impression that he was trying to recite, not from a linen-bound book, but from something obstinately alive.

As he began to read, Edmund thought he saw a figure standing very still at the edge of the glade. The figure wasn’t hiding. It had just seemed to understand how, among the darkness of the trees, it could be master of its own ambiguity. When Edmund next looked up, the figure was gone.