‘I will tell you what we will do,’ Wyjan replied calmly. ‘We will start to build a hotel – the kind of hotel of which you have dreamed. It will be right here on this beach, and built like a rajah’s palace. It will be famous and everyone will help you. And when it is finished the foreign guests will surely come to you and you will make a fortune. We will call it Suara Segara – The Sound of the Sea. We will pound our own rice on the grounds. We will have Balinese maidens who will weave. We will have our own gamelan – Maday here will know about that – and Njoman will dance and bring in other dancers. Everyone who works at the hotel will be in some way an artist. We will have painters and sculptors. It will be an enchanted garden by the time we get it finished. We will build a coral temple and the village priests will prepare a feast and bless the ground. Beneath the temple we will bury offerings of gold and silver. If we follow all these customs all will be well and we shall prosper.’

Wyjan was interrupted by the others with many exclamations of ‘beh adoh’, which means approval and applause. Then Njoman and Maday added to the fairy tale: ‘We will have our own pigs, ducks and chickens – we will not cut down any of the coconut or palm trees, but build in between and around them. It brings bad luck to cut down trees without making offerings to the tree-gods. Besides, we can always sell the coconuts. Oh – we can be self-supporting!’

I almost cried as I looked at the three earnest faces. ‘Lads,’ I told them, ‘it’s a beautiful dream . . .’

‘A beautiful dream’, these words circled in Grace’s head. She could see the vision K’tut and the people around her had for the hotel.

At last the hotel was completed – completed, that is to say, as much as it would ever be, because we kept having to add new pavilions in order to accommodate the swarms of guests. From the outset the place was a tremendous success, and no wonder. It might have come straight from the Arabian Nights, with its lush gardens, wall of white coral, and its ancient stone statues. It was a replica of a rajah’s palace. There were very few concessions to Western comfort – bathrooms, deep mattresses, and later a large powerhouse to generate electricity. Foreign magazines reported it as the unique hotel of the entire Far East.