‘You fish?’ she asked.

‘I’m a land man.’ He shook his head. ‘This reef is dangerous.’

‘Yes?’ Rika said. ‘Men go out on canoes every day. Small boys dive. Girls. Everyone. They seem okay.’

‘They can die,’ Dawson said. ‘They come into the aid post. They tread on a stonefish. They catch a snake in the net.’ He looked gloomy.

Martha had been out that morning with Jacob at first light, when the water was still and the wide sky opening like a steadying hand. He’d come down at dusk to sleep in Noah’s house, ready for the plane that was due by mid-morning. With Pete staying up above with the vasái elders for another week of research, Martha had slept alone and woke to the first call of birds. She pushed open the window as Jacob emerged from Noah’s house.

‘Do you want to come?’ he called as she came down the steps. He was walking across the grass towards the water. ‘I’m taking a canoe out. A swim before I leave.’

‘Sure,’ she said.

The tide was high and the canoe slid out over the rocks.

Everything was still, no breeze to disturb the surface of the ocean. Shafts of golden sun lit rock that shone through the trees. For the rest, the land loomed dark and impenetrable, still in the shadow of sleep. Out on the horizon, a large island rose like another mythic land, freed from the clouds and mists that concealed it during the day. Swoosh went the paddle as Jacob dipped it first this side, then that, swoosh as they cut through the still water, along the edge of the peninsula to its tip, where three rocks jutted into the sea like giant stepping stones. ‘That’s Port Moresby,’ he said, pointing to the first. The next was Sydney, and the furthest Australia. ‘When Aaron and I were back from school, we swam out here and climbed up onto Australia and looked out.’ He pointed straight ahead, north, towards the equator. ‘Wrong direction, but that’s where Australia was for us, and the world, stretching from one place of plenty to another. We were headed there.’ He laughed. ‘The little kids used to worry whether the ancestors would keep the canoe in a straight line and stop it from vanishing into some underneath place.’

‘And you? Did you worry? Or Aaron?’

Again he laughed. ‘We said we’d be on a boat, a ship like the ones that passed way out on the horizon. It never occurred to us that they could go down.’

This time it was Martha who laughed and, lulled by the soft morning air, she asked what his plans were for the vanilla they were planting up in his village. ‘Are you going to have plantations up there?’ She even told him, so lulled was she, so bewitched by the light, that there were rumblings of anxiety down here in Aaron’s village. She said she’d picked it up from the women, they talked a lot of the trouble it caused with the men, this fear that on top they’d grow rich while down here on the edge of the fjord, they’d be left behind, subservient and shamed.