‘What was she like?’

‘She walked so quietly we never heard her coming, but we always knew when she was there. There was a force about her.’

‘That’s what everyone says, but it doesn’t give me a fix on her, it’s too cloudy. Isn’t there something specific? Something she did?’

Laedi thinks for a while. ‘That last night, before she left, she lay with you. Rika could hear her talking to you, singing as you slept. She didn’t sleep. Nor did Rika. In the morning you went to school and Rika put Janape on the plane, back to the mountain. After that you slept in Bili’s bed. It all goes back to then. Don’t you see?’

He doesn’t. ‘Sort of,’ he says, but a hard, stuck place in him tells another answer. ‘Not really.’

‘She gave you the cowrie shell she wore,’ Laedi says. ‘You must remember that. We rethreaded it onto leather for you, you wore it every day.’ That hard, stuck place. Yes, he remembers the cowrie shell, and he knows it came from Janape, and he knows the story of his refusal to believe Aaron when he said it came from the sea and had gone to the mountain before coming back to him. It was a mountain cowrie with its own mountain name that he can’t remember. But he can remember the feel of it around his neck, the comfort of it, and the boy in the playground at the Dragon School in Oxford who laughed at it. A boy’s laugh that has grown over the years to become a terrifying roar. It wasn’t the boy who threw the shell away, pushing it down in the rubbish bin. It was Jericho. He buried it, out of sight. Gone for ever. Like Janape, who died of a fever after Leonard took him to England.

In Laedi’s house above the harbour in Port Moresby, he lies under the fan and weeps for the mother he doesn’t remember.

Laedi tries another tack. ‘Why don’t you spend this time reading,’ she says, and he can hear the effort it takes her to keep impatience from her voice. ‘Be constructive. Prepare for the mountain.’ He has stopped going into Bili’s office each day. Twice a week is enough. More than enough.

Laedi puts a pile of books on the table. They are bristling with yellow stickers. Compulsory reading. More endurance.

And so, from the safe distance of the page, Jericho crosses the ranges to the plain at the base of the mountain, Huvaemo, a word that remains deep in him after the rest have flown. He starts with the early anthropologists, as instructed, and finds their language arcane and their kinship charts frankly boring. In any case, until Don and Leonard went to the mountain, none had ventured up to the small tribe perched at the top of its inaccessible flank. Don’s book is too full of him to be of use, and Leonard’s film has merged into the memory place that has become what Jericho sees when he thinks back. Other anthropologists stayed on the easier terrain of the flat land inhabited by the populous Orokaivans. His people’s traditional enemy. Jericho thought he had forgotten, but the memory rises off the page, enough for his shadow to shrink and pull in tight around him. There are those who say you can learn the nature of a man from his enemy, but nothing Jericho reads brings him any closer to the mountain.