He goes back to the house, which is quiet during the day. The last of Milton’s boys are at the school, and Meg, his wife, is at the hospital, where she’s a nursing sister. A woman comes in and sweeps, a relative of Meg’s; she washes clothes and goes again before Meg arrives back late in the afternoon, long after Milton has returned from school. When Milton hears her old Toyota station wagon come grinding down the school road, he goes inside, turns on the gas, fills the kettle. He smiles. Well, for Milton it’s a smile. Smiling’s not something he does much, as if the past has stamped him so thoroughly he can’t let a glimpse of smile show, it’d shake the edifice. But he’s happy, as far as Jericho can tell. Or if not happy, then content. Or if not fully content – Milton will never be that – then with Meg he is content.

She is a large, comfortable woman. She’s from this area – Orokaivan like Milton – but while he’s skinny with no meat on him, she’s large enough to envelop him in her rolling breasts. It’s not a thought Jericho pursues. They’re so different, Meg and Milton, that he finds it weird to think of them married. But they dote on each other in an offhand kind of way. He follows her with his eyes, and looks away if he catches Jericho watching. She treats him like another of her children. Jericho finds her easy to know, comforting, it’s all there on the surface, or seems to be. With Milton, whatever is going on underneath is out of sight. You feel it, but you don’t see it. Jericho rereads his poetry from years past, slim volumes at one end of the shelf, clamped together by the damp, not opened for years. There’s one that gets snagged in his dreams that night, about being at the bottom of an abandoned water-well, crawling downwards for eternity to some great waiting underworld, and white girls looking down at him, all inviting voices and silky legs, and the image of a man, whom Jericho takes to be Milton, alone and writing when the wind has blown down the walls and torn off the roof.

Jericho wakes at first light. He’s in a room with Milton’s boys. They are snugged down under the sheets. The room smells of farts. He goes outside, washes his head under the cold tap. Inside, Meg has the kettle on and she gives him a cup of sweet, powdered coffee. He never thought he’d come to like it, or milk from a tube, but he does, sitting there with Meg. Outside, through the open door, the sun is turning everything gold: trees, river, even the roof of the school.

If Jericho is careful where he walks, he can avoid seeing the mountain from the school, it’s hidden by the rise of the hill and the forest. But when he drives into Popondetta with Meg, he can’t avoid it, out there to the east, its peaks swathed in cloud as if deliberately keeping itself from view.