‘You can drive further yet,’ he says, shaking Meg’s hand up and down. ‘We can cut a road.’ The men have their bush-knives out of their belts, already hacking at the edge of the path.

‘No further,’ Meg says. ‘You’ll have to walk.’

The walk. The climb. Jericho remembers it from when he came back with Leonard. The airstrip was still there then. He hadn’t had to do this first part, but every muscle in his body knows what lies ahead. Two hours, they say, to the village by the old airstrip; not far, but hours are notional when the day is measured in the movement of the sun. The kago, heaved onto backs, takes off along the path, vanishes into the trees. Jericho keeps what he thinks is a good pace with Obi and Napo, the path rising and falling through the foothills, past gardens, small villages. Two hours pass and they are at the river, that’s all, at the border where the mountain begins. The water is deep, chest-high, running fast. Jericho lets Obi steady him against the current, and though Obi smiles, calls him brother, it is a small humiliation, a reminder, if he needs one, that he might be from the mountain but he is not of it.

The path that rises ahead is steep. Valleys fall away to the side. Some are planted as garden; he recognises the wide leaf of banana, the tangle of yam. Another slope is planted with coffee, left untended since the price dropped and the road that was promised, through to the river, was abandoned before it was started. Jericho wouldn’t have known it from regrown forest were it not for Obi’s commentary. On every side he is pointing things out – plants, rocks, ridges, the birds whirring above them, a spider, a trailing vine – giving everything its mountain name, slowly, repeatedly, as if he has taken on himself the task of educating this returning hapkas brother. His words ping in Jericho’s head as they climb.

The sun is in its slide down the sky when they reach the village. Mauve-grey clouds are rumbling overhead as they walk across the airstrip where Jericho and Leonard landed all those years ago. It’s been closed for some time and saplings are poking through long grass. The aid post with its tin roof is still there, but the doctor has gone. A rusted tank turned on its side is being used for a cooking fire. Two men come out of a house. Jericho thinks it’s to greet them, but there is something surly and impoverished about them, and inside, out of sight, he can hear a child crying. More men appear. They shake Jericho by the hand. ‘You bring plenty kago,’ they say, and he doesn’t know if it is disaffection he hears in their voices, or envy. Or a comment, that’s all. The boys take it on up, they say. They gesture up the mountain, which has vanished under the clouds.