Instead of fishing, Leon gathered wild figs and bamboo shoots on a platter of banana leaves and took these back to Taminah, who roasted them over her fire and the rajah remarked that this ‘gibbon diet’ was much to his liking and that he would plant more bamboos in his garden.

Every time Sir Ralph mentioned the disappearance of Edmund Ross, Leon reassured him that he would now be safely in the rajah’s house. But the rajah also remembered him saying, when Edmund had arrived in his sickly state, that ‘butterfly catchers’, whose gaze was distracted by every bird or insect they saw, got lost in the forest very frequently. He’d suggested mockingly that this, in fact, was the state they deserved – being lost. For only in a condition of lostness did they see clearly what actually surrounded them. They became alert and vigilant. They were compelled to put aside the ‘wrong Englung maps’ of the country they carried in their heads and start to assemble new ones which did not lie to them.

Sir Ralph now pondered this bit of undoubted wisdom, but he also prayed that Edmund had not strayed too far from the path on the way to the cannery site and that when they eventually returned to the house, he would find him there. But he doubted it. He feared for Edmund’s safety. Without a compass and with the huge rains falling, he might succumb quickly to cold and hunger, or he might trespass – a white man alone and in distress – into Dyak territory and risk being killed. He judged that all these possibilities had now entered Leon’s mind and perhaps enthralled it. Leon had decided to feel jealous of the ‘Jesus Boy’. He not only wanted him gone; he might be made cheerful by the prospect that Edmund Ross had suffered and died.

In the dim dawn light of Taminah’s dwelling, Sir Ralph watched his lover sleeping. There was no part of his body which the rajah did not worship. He would have liked to sculpt him in marble, make some marvellous ‘David’ out of him. Yet he also knew that the workings of Leon’s mind were almost entirely hidden from him, that a hatred of white men lurked somewhere deep inside him and that the Malay stayed with him, not out of any deep love or devotion, but because the sexual power he exerted over him could buy him a rich and fabulous life.

To distract himself from the desire he suddenly felt for Leon, whom he couldn’t touch in front of Taminah, Sir Ralph rose up from his mat and crept to the door of the longhouse. He opened it quietly and went out onto the veranda and smelled the pungent perfume exhaled by the forest, rinsed and irrigated by the rain. A dawn mist shrouded the vegetation and he found the scene before him a thing of great beauty. The deluge had ceased. Little by little, the cries of birds began to be heard again.