Now, remembering this, as though it might have happened only a year ago, instead of two decades, Edmund asked himself how long he was going to stand where he was, with the rain now sliding off the banana leaves and splashing onto his shoulders. And something in him told him he would probably stand there, unmoving, until the rain ceased. But he also knew that it might not cease, that the day was slowly passing and the night would soon come, and he asked himself what he would do then.

He made some decisions about this, and yet he knew that these were fragile – the kind of decisions other men would have made and acted upon, but which he, Edmund Ross, would probably be unable to carry out. Some other man – his great hero, Alfred Russel Wallace, for instance – would perhaps have gone back to the fallen log and, by the wild illumination of the lightning flashes, been able to work out the right direction towards the path, from which he’d strayed to look at the Papilionidae. If he’d found this, then possibly the distant sound of the river, towards which he’d been walking with the rajah and Leon, might be heard above the storm and following this might guide him to wherever they were sheltering.

Alternatively, if he found the correct path, this other courageous person, this true explorer, might have been able to follow it all the way back to the Savage Road and thence to Sir Ralph’s house, and then his life would quickly resume its purpose.

But Edmund, understanding that this person was not him, knew why he didn’t move from under the banana tree: the pain of being lashed by the storm was no more terrible to him than that which he now endured perpetually, in mind and body. He could remember a time, not so far distant, when this agony had not been there, but since his illness, it had been almost constant in him – the knowledge of the slow collapse of his whole enterprise. He could not go on. He felt more dead than alive. And he saw, trailing behind him, the great mistake that had been his belief in himself as a true explorer, as a man who could endure loneliness and deprivation, who could understand how to exist in other people’s worlds, how to suffer willingly for the sake of the discoveries he would make.

But he was not this man. He was too frail, too cowardly ever to become this man. What he longed for was to be on the Wiltshire Downs, searching for fritillaries and orchids among the springy grass. He wanted to lie down on a bed of chalky earth. When he tried to utter the word ‘England’ it invariably choked him with weeping.

He moved just a little – from a standing position to sitting down on the damp ground under the tree. He reached out with his hands and touched moss and sodden leaves and the tatters of dead banana fronds and small pellets of matter which might have been the droppings of flying squirrels or rats. He dreaded to light upon the body of a snake. He knew that snakes would slither out as soon as the rains ceased.