As it turned out, it wasn’t. On the first morning she went to the hotel where Leonard was staying, and even before the coffee came she knew that he had survived and she was forgiven. When Alex Penrose arrived to pick him up for the screening in the anthropology department, they were both relaxed, leaning back in their chairs. Leonard was telling a story about his parents’ dogs catching a rabbit, which they brought into the house. ‘An English sort of a story,’ Alex told Pete, ‘but at least they were smiling.’

In the car, driving to the university, Leonard looked out at the new suburbs and the crisscrossing roads that made the dry valley of his memory almost unrecognisable. Alex Penrose pointed to where the new centre of government would be, out there, off to the right, where cars and trucks were overtaking on a dual carriageway. He pointed to the buildings going up, and told Leonard of the others that were planned and who was paying for them: a national museum, a library, a new parliament house.

When they reached the university, Leonard looked at Rika and smiled. ‘Why don’t you come to the screening this morning?’ he said. ‘You might find it easier than watching it tonight.’

There was a pause and then, in a small voice, Rika said, ‘You think? Okay. Yes.’

‘Good I didn’t wait till this evening,’ she said when she went over to the library to see Martha. Although Leonard had warned her, another wave of nausea had coursed through her during the sequence – barely a minute long – of her arrival in the village, a rush of adrenalin hitting her knees and the back of her neck. On the screen she saw in her face all that Leonard had not seen. She contemplated how often he would have had to return to that short sequence in the solitary quiet of the editing room. She imagined him in the dark, rolling film back and forth, the flicker of light, and the consequences of her cowardice. Her cruelty. Five years. And there it was, a moment of her past replayed in a full seminar room. When Leonard asked if she would still come to the public screening, and to the party afterwards, she knew that she must. She also knew that when she walked into that theatre she might as well be branded with a scarlet letter.

‘I capitulate,’ the director of the arts centre said when he stood up to introduce The Mountain. ‘Ethnographic film has been difficult for us. Remember Margaret Mead, wanting to “catch and preserve” us on film “for centuries”? A more effective way of putting the native on display!’ He paused for the response. ‘The imperial camera,’ he said. ‘Ethnographic film hasn’t been a form we’ve looked to as we create our own arts of piksa film. But this one. Well, this one might change our minds. This one makes us proud.’

The famous image, regarded as a turning point in the history of ethnographic film, is of an adolescent boy with muscular calves – Albert – at the edge of the drama and the edge of the shot, mimicking not the dancers but Leonard, the filmmaker. Sometimes it is only the shadow play of the mimic that’s seen. Sometimes Albert is dancing at the edge of the shot, the camera of his imagination heavy in his hands until the old chief walks across and takes the boy out of the frame. Young women slip across the edge of the dance ground, one holding a bottle of shampoo in her hand, and there is Albert again, his camera swivelled to take them in, and Boja waving his arm at all of them to get out of the way, and a troupe of smaller boys mimicking them both, another dance circulating at the edge of the dance.