Vertiginous is the word Jericho uses to describe the state he’s in, spinning from the strange new perspective that arrives with the boys from the mountain. Boys, they call themselves, and that’s how they seem to Jericho in their ragged clothes, pulsing with unpredictable energy. He is wary of them, and of the bearded man who arrives with them, whom he takes to be an emissary from the chiefs with messages of welcome. His uncertainty before this next array of kin he does not know has him precarious and afraid of falling. He cannot answer their questions, or understand the language that was once his, so he can’t gauge what they want, and as a result he buys too much beer. The boys are drunk on three bottles, and so is Jericho. Young Albert watches with frank disapproval. He takes Napo, the bearded one, back to his family in Gerehu, the suburb out past the university where he lives, leaving Jericho in the settlement with the boys. He is too drunk to mind. Besides, he is making a friend of Presley, who wears his baseball cap backwards and who knows how to rap. He works at the post office in Popondetta and speaks English after a fashion. Unlike the others, his clothes are sharp. Cheap, but sharp. He draws Jericho a map in the dust, a family tree – except his grows up from the ancestor roots – and there they are, his mother’s brothers, five of them, sturdy branches growing up, and tucked behind them, not yet strong enough to make branches of their own, are his cousins. At least, he thinks that’s what they are, and their children: a great array of names. Napo has his own branch as the eldest son of Janape’s eldest brother, and his sons and nephews are among the boys crouched around Presley as he draws the tree in the dust. They grin when he calls out their names. Jericho, the child of the mountain, the singular child with his singular skin, is surrounded by kin. Test his DNA and he’d be in a great pool of sameness.

Life in the settlement has taken him by surprise. He’d expected to find the open-mouthed scream of German expressionism. Instead, he finds women sweeping the ground outside rough houses, worn shirts washed and hanging on a line strung between trees. The settlement they’re in is on the edge of town, near the airport, a shanty on marginal land, one enclave among many for the thousands who come looking for work and adventure and end up in these tacked-together places. It’s not as bad as Jericho imagined, not as bad as the stories he’s heard. There’s corn growing, rusted-out cars, chickens scratching at a pile of rubbish. Even that is picturesque. There’s nothing African about the settlement, by which he means nothing as swollen-bellied and grinding as the TV screens make out. That’s starvation. This is poverty, and though he wouldn’t want it for himself, in the midst of song and string band, and with too many beers in him, he enjoys the sense of being part of it and becomes sentimental about a life he doesn’t need to endure. He takes the guitar, there’s a round of cheers, and he dances until at last he falls asleep next to Presley on a hard mat – too tired to dream, flat-out among the boys, his kin. In the morning he finds that nothing has been pilfered from his pockets. He’s yet to see a fight that’s anything like the fights Simeon has described. Stay out of the settlements, he warned, and when Jericho tells him of the songs and the girls and the taro roasted in the fire where the women cook, Simeon is not convinced.