Edmund stood where he was, watching the butterflies’ graceful flight and listening to the forest alive once more with bird and animal cries. Looking down at his feet, he saw a column of red ants flowing across his boots and smiled at their insouciance. He didn’t move, but let the column surge on. It was then that he noticed that he was standing in a small clearing and that nailed to a palm was a cracked and faded wooden sign which read: Claims Office 500 yards. An arrow pointed in the direction the ants were travelling and it amused Edmund to wonder if, where once a gold mine had been worked, these courageous tiny creatures had found ideal terrain in which to nurture the queen and establish the epicentre of their vast and complex society.

He shook the ants from his boots, but began to follow alongside the column. Although saplings and trailing lianas stood in his way, he saw that he was walking on what had once been a well-trodden path and while knowing that he should have turned back and rejoined Leon and Sir Ralph, he felt insatiably curious to discover whatever traces remained of what had once been a gold mine. Inherent in this curiosity, he knew with some shame, was the notion that man’s search for precious metals, over the whole circumference of the earth, is a quest without end, yet also subject to his impatience, fatigue and disappointment, thus leading to the idea that wherever treasure has once existed, small vestiges of it can often remain, long after it has been abandoned.

After a few moments of walking, the ant column veered leftwards into the dense forest. But so certain was Edmund that the ants had selected the old mine terrain as their home that he decided to follow them. Feeling at once the absence of his kris, with which to hack away the vegetation impeding his progress, he nevertheless stumbled on, bending everything aside with his hands.

A cloud of moths shook itself from a fallen tree and rose into the air, passing directly over Edmund’s head, some of them touching his hair with their wings, and snagging on it. Edmund brushed the moths away. He stopped for a moment, wondering whether, after all, he shouldn’t rejoin Leon and Sir Ralph, but realised he had come quite far now. The ants still travelled at his side, in a smooth flow over roots and mossy stones. A large Monitor lizard darted suddenly from a camouflage of leaves, snapped up a mouthful of the insects and disappeared. A few of the ants began to run round in circles of distress, but the main column surged on, closing the gap on itself left by its dead comrades. And Edmund found that he now felt a sentimental affinity with the red ants. He wanted to follow where they led. He also told himself that if they were indeed leading him to the abandoned mine, he would enjoy apologising to the rajah for his sudden disappearance from the walk to the cannery site if he could put into his hands a tiny powdering of gold.