The rajah sat down on an old wooden chair where Taminah spent long hours wondering what her life had signified and how, if she so wished, she might be rid of it. The mist moved in ghostly eddies as a breeze crept through the trees and a pale sun began to rise. At Sir Ralph’s feet, Taminah’s cockerels, huddled together in a bedraggled little group, woke up and shook their blue-black tail feathers in the sunlight, to dry them and restore to them the lustre of which the birds always appeared so proud.

The smallest of their number had been killed, plucked and roasted by Taminah the day before and, in their hunger, she, Leon and the rajah had torn and eaten every morsel of flesh from its bones. But now the rest of them came, one by one, to where the rajah sat and looked up at him, hoping for millet or a husk of maize, and he talked to them softly, telling them that he had nothing for them. And he thought how the entreaty of the birds mirrored all the thousand other requests which those he called his people made of him, and how, though he sincerely wished to give them what their hearts cried out for, he very frequently failed.

When they left Taminah’s house, Leon suggested that they continue their journey to the proposed site of the cannery, but the rajah refused. He wanted to hurry home as quickly as the swampy ground would permit, to see if Edmund was there.

‘He may not be there,’ said Leon.

‘You told me that he had decided to turn back. Where else would he go?’

‘I cannot know rightly, my rajah. Perhaps he is there, perhaps he is not. I have seen foolish butterfly men turning in circles. They do not understand the forest. And Jesus cannot help him.’

They walked slowly, their feet often pulled down into the flooded earth, and when they reached the Savage Road they stopped. The long rains had now borne away almost all the tamped earth of its surface and it appeared to Sir Ralph a lamentable ruin, as though it had been laid down long ago by someone else and forgotten, a road which nobody travelled, a gathering of white stones testifying to the labour of a multitude of souls, but now devoid of any purpose or function.

In contemplation of his blighted road, the rajah felt a great weariness overcome him, a weariness that was not habitual in his life. He thought of himself as a man of unbounded energy, whose brain boiled with schemes and endeavours, whose blood never cooled, and who would soon begin to undertake the great adventure of the cannery, which would bring work and prosperity to his people. Now, he felt that merely overseeing the repair of his road was not only beyond him; it was pointless. Whatever works he put in place, they would always be at the mercy of the rains and the encroachment of the forest. These things were its enemy. Only his great iceberg of a house rose high enough and displayed an audacity sufficient to withstand the climate. He was in a frame of mind to wall himself up inside his outrageous palace and never move again.