Rika followed behind the green of his shirt, along the narrow path back to the tall, aromatic grass, past large boulders, the strange papery trees. More birds were chattering, more sudden swoops of colour. The hill grew steeper as they approached, and the path, which had been rising towards it, turned at its base, skirting its steepness. Jacob walked ahead, off the path, and began to climb. It wasn’t as if the earth had tilted, which is what Leonard said of the hills in Wales when they went to visit his parents. This was more like a child’s drawing of a hill, as if an upside-down U had been given substance and dropped there by some mighty hand. Up close, it was a green wall, a kind of embankment. The ground was dry, stony. Her shoes slipped. She used rocks and branches to help her up. When she went down on her knees, Jacob put out a hand, grasped her by the wrist and hauled her up.

With every step the sun became larger, hotter as it swelled in the sky, and the stiff leaves of the trees gave no protection.

‘Zon,’ she said when they reached the top and had regained their breath. ‘Our word for sun.’

‘Iji,’ he said, and she repeated it as he coached her inflection.

‘Iji,’ she said. ‘Your sun. I like that. It has light in it.’

He nodded, looking ahead into the mountains. Rika wanted to ask what it was he saw when he looked across to those steep ridges folding away into the distance, pink and purple in the morning sun. The mountain where she and Leonard were going was way beyond, on the other side, unimaginably distant. All she saw was a barrier, impenetrable, featureless. She wanted Jacob to tell her how life was lived there, how houses were built, rivers crossed. How things grew. Instead she asked him where his home was.

‘Home?’ he said. ‘My village?’

‘Yes. Your village.’

‘Over.’ He pointed to the east.

‘Near the mountain?’

‘Your mountain? No. Not near there.’ A slight emphasis on your, and she felt a blush add to the heat in her face. ‘Further east, in the fjords,’ he said.

‘Fjords. Like Norway?’

‘So they say.’ He turned from the mountains to face the way they’d come, back towards the valley and the harbour. His shirt was a beacon against an unruffled sky, his face closed, impassive again. She looked with him across the sweep of valley. After the mountains it seemed strangely familiar: the distant speck of the university building site with its cranes and the neat rows of its housing. Through a saddle between the hills she could see the harbour and the outline of a tanker anchored off the port. Small dark shapes of canoes were skimming across the sheen of water like water beetles. She took the Leica from her string bag and leaned back to take a panoramic shot that’d capture the pattern of hills continuing beyond the frame, an impression of unbounded space, and, nestled somewhere in the middle distance, the toy town of the university.