Taminah looked worriedly at him. She said to Leon, ‘He must not go out. The river will fall on his head.’

Leon asked his mother to fetch what tuak remained to her and they would drink this and eat some rice and sleep a little until the worst of the rain was past. Then he called out to Sir Ralph, ‘My rajah, giver of all gifts, don’t be a nin-poop. Stop your calling and close the door.’

Taminah put a pot of sticky rice to heat above the fire and served Leon and Sir Ralph all that remained of her tuak. The rajah felt cold and worried and the strong drink soothed him a little. He disliked having arguments with Leon. Worse, he hated it when he suspected that Leon was lying to him, and he thought now that Leon had lied about Edmund. Surely, if Edmund had decided to turn back, he would have made this plain? Edmund perfectly understood that Sir Ralph was now both excited and troubled by Leon’s idea of the cannery and he would have been interested to see where this great ‘consolation’ might stand one day.

But the rajah reasoned that there was nothing to be done until the deluge had ceased. He drank the rest of the tuak and ate a little of Taminah’s rice. Leon sat close to his mother, on the far side of the fire and would not look at him.

When they’d eaten all she had, Taminah laid out mats for them and they lay down and slept, while the thunder rolled on and the waters of the Sadong rose still higher.

Sir Ralph had a dream of Edmund’s voice reading softly from St. Luke, Chapter Five:

‘… now when he had left off speaking, he said unto Simon, launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught.

And Simon answering said unto him, Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing: nevertheless at thy word I will let down the net.

And when they had this done, they inclosed a great multitude of fishes: and their net brake.’

The rajah, in his dream, saw the fish thrashing in the heavy net, but the fish that he saw were not in the Lake of Gennesaret, but in the Sadong. There were so many of them that the banks were silvered and alive with their leaping, as though, in their multitude, they were one dancing and shuddering body.

The rajah’s hands reached out, and other hands reached out and the fish were taken up and thrown onto a wide moving belt which conveyed the fish to the portals of the brand new cannery. The cannery workers scooped them onto slabs of stone and knives began to slice away their heads and slit their bodies to get out all that was unclean or sharp – anything in them that might hurt a man.

While the rajah slept, Edmund had walked deeper into the forest. He was still following the red ants, trusting in them as some kind of fortuitous guide, but he had strayed far from the original path to the abandoned gold mine and he had no idea, now that there was no sun in the sky, which direction he was travelling in. He berated himself for not staying with Leon and Sir Ralph. It came to him how many times in his life he had been distracted from the road he was on by the sight of some wonder of nature, a single orchid growing by a brook, a white owl in the dusk, gibbons at play in the high trees. He would lose himself in contemplation of these things and forget where he was meant to be going. Often, he had been saved by his compass, but now that vital piece of equipment had gone missing from his life.