Had it been there at all? Or had something else – some configuration of shadow and light – confused the watcher? Edmund took off his spectacles and paused in his reading. His gaze interrogated the forest. Nothing moved there. He saw Sir Ralph turn in his hammock and stare at him. ‘Why have you stopped?’ he asked. ‘My mind was just beginning to fill with wonder. You must understand, Mr Ross, that I have been yearning to hear a voice like yours reciting St. Luke’s Gospel to me for more time than you could imagine. Please go on and don’t stop until I tell you.’

Edmund replaced his spectacles and resumed:

‘And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God.

‘And behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus.

‘He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father, David.

‘And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end …’

Edmund kept reading until his throat began to be sore and the sun, rising higher in the empty sky, cleared the shade of the palms and began to burn down upon him and he felt the first symptoms of his fever returning. ‘Malaria,’ his brother Valentine had warned him, ‘once begun on its first vile visitation, has a habit of returning, without discernible reasons. Watch for this and when you feel the first signs of fever, lay yourself down to rest.’

Edmund closed his eyes, shielding them with the bible. He wanted to get out of the hammock but he felt too weak to move. Then, he was aware of Sir Ralph at his side, lifting his shoulders gently and placing a kiss on his head.

‘We shall go on tomorrow,’ said Sir Ralph. ‘Now you must sleep.’

He slept for many hours and woke in the darkness. His head ached, but the fever he’d thought was about to come back had subsided.

He knew that he’d dreamed about the Birds of Paradise, about their singular magnificence. The dream had been lit by a multicoloured radiance, quite as though sunlight itself was streaming out from the bodies of the birds, to fall upon everything around them. What now returned to Edmund Ross was the promise that he’d made to himself when he’d set out on his great adventure – that he would not go back to England without at least one living pair of these birds. He’d been told that the Queen herself yearned to see them and would build ‘some suitable edifice to house them, that they may be seen as marvellous additions to our kingdom’.

He knew that he was not certain to find them in Borneo. He needed to persuade the owner of a ship to take him further eastwards, to the Aru Islands. But what was he now? A man in a strange captivity. A naturalist who had lost everything he needed to continue his quest. How could his plans ever be realised?