‘It’s the season,’ Meg says. ‘Rain up there. Pneumonia.’

‘Do they come down?’

‘Not when they’re ill. If they’re old, they think it’s because their spirit is tired and their time is up. Every rain season, some of the old ones go.’

‘And the young ones?’

‘They might come down. But habits are strong – it’s a big problem for us at the hospital. It’s the same everywhere here, they don’t believe you can die during strong life unless there’s been sorcery, or they’ve upset the ancestors. It takes some other kind of power to kill you after you’re no longer a small child whose spirit’s not yet taken hold, or very old when it becomes tired.’

When they arrive at the hospital, Jericho asks about Tobias and what it was like back when he was brought down from the mountain as a child. Meg wasn’t there then. She came later, when Tobias was director; 1980, she started, so she was there when he died. She says it was jealousy that killed him, still a young man. ‘His relatives were angry because he didn’t give them big money, and his colleagues because he stopped them taking hospital money. It killed him, all that bad thought. One day he died, here in the hospital. I was a new nurse.’

‘What, he just dropped dead?’

‘One afternoon. He was tired, said he’d sit down, went to the small room the doctors used. An orderly found him dead in his chair.’

‘Sounds like a heart attack.’

‘Maybe. He was young yet.’

The hospital is run-down, the wards are cramped, outside on the walkways there are families preparing food for their sick ones. Jericho walks around, trying to picture himself as a child. He’s been told the story of being brought down by Janape, of sitting under a tree with her, waiting to see Tobias, waiting all day until at last Tobias noticed them, took them into the hospital, to his house, where Jericho saw his books and took one from the shelf. It was another of the stories Rika told, a set piece rehearsed over the years. As a child he corrected her if she got a word wrong. Now he wants the version that hasn’t been rehearsed. He looks at the tree where they sat and waited. He supposes it’s the tree: it’s dusty, it doesn’t shed much shade, but there are women and children under there. He turns away from their patience, their subservience, from so much waiting. They can’t tell him anything that will answer the questions for which he can’t form the words.

He goes back into the hospital. Meg is in the outpatients’ room, which is full of women and crying babies. An old man sleeps on the concrete floor. Jericho thinks maybe he’s dead, then sees him move. He should be on a mattress, but there are not enough. Some of the beds are a metal frame with pandanus mats. Even mattresses are stolen. The storeroom has steel bars around it like a vault, and still the keys fall into the wrong hands and the morning comes when Meg opens the doors and there is no antivenom for the snakebites that come in week by week. It makes big money on the Asian market.