At the entrance to the village, a large bark-cloth hangs across the gate, a jagged line of painted mountains moving in the breeze, and in among them the words ROVANE and JERICHO. Somewhere at the back of his eyes, Jericho feels the sting of tears as the bark-cloth is lifted and the dancers welcome him in. A sea of faces, a sea of hands, familiar, strange, he does not know. The inside of his head is dancing, beating to the drums, as he crosses the dance ground, shaking hands, leaning towards the faces that lean towards him, breathing the next breath. And then his feet remember. They pick up the rhythm and dance him into the village.

THE GUESTHOUSE WHERE HE AND LEONARD STAYED HAS GONE. ALL that remains are indentations where the house poles were. Instead, he is to live in a small house next to Obi’s, near his uncles, Napo and Boja. ‘Gutpela,’ Boja says, sniffing at him, grinning with his red stumps of teeth. An amiable man, he tells Jericho the names of the boys and men who gather round. These are Janape’s brothers and cousins and nephews. He finds it hard to speak the name of his long-dead mother, who succumbed to a fever and died in the night when the moon was full and the rivers in flood. What was her story? It is not a question he knows how to ask. Maybe she gave him an answer when she sang to him the night before she left him with Rika and returned to the mountain. He doesn’t know if he remembers her lying beside him singing, or if he’s made a memory from the tales he’s been told. There is nothing coherent about the memory, if memory it is, just rumblings, like an ache. She has no face but the face of a photograph. She has no smell, as Leonard has, and Rika. And Bili. Especially Bili. Even as a child he liked the smell of Bili. Stringent, not sweet, like citrus, a touch of salt. Has he folded Janape into Bili, as Laedi suggests? Has he mistaken one smell for another?

The house for Jericho consists of one room and a covered platform. The room is dark, but in deference to the new ways there’s a flap he can push up with a stick and open like a window. On the floor of the platform are woven mats and on the wall a covering of bark-cloths. They are at once like the mountain peaks that hang in Bili’s apartment, and the curled hook of the vine in Laedi’s living room, but also different. It’s as if something has moved in them: there’s a different delicacy, the markings are finer, more exacting, more modern. Is that a word that makes any sense on top of this mountain? Why not? Many of the younger ones speak some English, and books are prized. Obi keeps his wrapped in bark-cloth against the mists. The Time magazines are passed between the young men who go to Popondetta and have seen the images on the big screen of the towers falling in New York and the soldiers in Iraq. They ask Jericho about America, and want to know everything he saw there. They know about the world beyond the mountain, and beyond Papua New Guinea, and they want to be a part of it, not in a job like Young Albert, or in the post office in Popondetta. It’s not just that they are poor, with no money for tarpaulins, or lamps, or radios; they want to be of account, and they want the mountain to be of account.