Layla stopped talking, shielding her eyes from the sun. She was tall for a Bengali woman, her movements both angry and graceful. She wore a simple white shirt, with the charity’s lanyard round her neck. Thick eyebrows came together in a scowl as she made her way down the narrow path between the tents. Her face was an odd combination of compassion and distaste, as if she couldn’t quite decide on her emotions.

‘These camps are just about OK right now.’ Savannah followed Layla along the path. ‘But in a few weeks, the monsoon will come.’ The aid worker stared around the steep-sided valleys of the camps. ‘They’re all built on dust, these tents. Delta silt. When it dries out, there’s nothing there. It crumbles at a touch now all the trees are gone. When the monsoon comes, the tents at the bottom of the hill will flood, while landslides wipe out the ones at the top.’

Casey tried to imagine living for years in this endless camp. A little girl peered down at them, as they passed by. She was leaning against a bamboo railing, loosely tied to an upright pole, above a 15-foot drop down to a dried-up riverbed.

‘It was the British who encouraged the Rohingya to go to Rakhine in the first place,’ Savannah murmured. ‘When the map of this part of the world was all pink.’

‘Quite,’ Hessa nodded.

‘Some of the Rohingya have been in these camps since the early Nineties.’ Savannah spun in a circle. ‘That was when the first wave of refugees arrived in Bangladesh. In the older parts of the camp, no one under the age of twenty-five remembers living anywhere else, ever. This is all they know.’

‘And probably all they will ever know,’ Hessa sounded harder, tougher.

They had parked up near the Balukhali camp, in the shade of a sweeping acacia that had somehow survived. Ed had stayed behind in Cox’s Bazar.

‘It’ll be easier, just two women reporters,’ Casey had explained. ‘I think Shamshun might be happier talking to us. And it’s useful, you being in Cox’s, just in case Dylan checks up on us.’

The camp stretched for miles all around Balukhali, the tents loosely constructed from chopped-down bamboo and tarpaulin. The colour of the tarpaulins depended on the donor, so one stretch of the camp was patterned in pink, the next aquamarine, then coral. A strange plastic Babel, Casey thought.

‘This way.’ Savannah pointed. ‘Two refugees were killed by elephants down there a few months ago. In the most recent rush of refugees, the tents were built too close to one of the old elephant paths. The elephants have gone now, deeper into the forest. Or maybe they’re just gone.’