From the first day, the question of bisnis hovers in the air. How are we to make money? How are we to be known? How can you, our hapkas brother, help us? They have seen tourists walking the Kokoda Track. If they walk there, why not here? Jericho tells them that Australians walk the Kokoda Track because of the soldiers, their own people, dying there in the war. There’s no reason for them to climb up here, no myth to cast light on the forest floor. They’re not interested in the mountain, that’s the truth of it.

‘Let me think. Give me time,’ Jericho says. ‘First I must learn the mountain ways.’

Every day of that first week, Jericho has to force himself not to run back down the mountain to Milton. The thought of Bili is enough to stop him – the scorn on her face – though in truth it’s an impulse that is more in his mind than a real possibility. His head is a jumble of impulses that run against each other. He takes out the photo he has of Rika standing beside the ground-spider cloth with its sun-ray legs. He had it blown up in a shop-front lab in London – Rika would never approve, but that’s what he did – multiple copies, which he gives to the duvahe.

Nanaji has died, and in his place is another old man, whose mind is sharp though his eyes are rheumy and his knees pain him when he walks. When he goes, Napo tells Jericho, Obi will be chief. The clan will choose Obi, he says, confident of a consensus before its time has come. The old men look at Rika in the photograph, and at the cloth, the talk going back and forth; Jericho doesn’t understand what they say. When he gives a copy to Lilla, something about the way she smiles makes Jericho smile. As the chief of his clan’s women, she was first in the line of women to welcome him to the village. He recognised her at once, though twenty-two years have passed since he’d seen her; something about her high cheekbones and dark eyes have merged into the image of Janape from Leonard’s photos.

The painting is in New York, the young men ask, for all to see? All who visit Rika, Jericho replies. And all who see this photo. It was in a magazine, he says, the same as Time. The old men tut and shake their heads. The young men clap their hands together. They pull him into the future, while Lilla talks of the past, and Rika’s visit, all that she learned from old Nogi chief, who is dead now, and gave Rika the cloth, a gift from the mountain to take into the world.

The next day, Boja takes him round the dance ground. The amorire. Jericho loves that word, so close to love, soft, easy on the tongue. This is where Leonard stood to film, Boja says. Jericho doesn’t want to hear about the film, he’s spent hours in Leonard’s study, back and forth through every foot of film. He needs to escape the film. He had thought he wanted the past, he thought that was why he came, but as Boja continues his tour, and the sun rises into the sky, and the young men go to the gardens, he finds he’d rather be with them in the hard work of now. But each morning of that first week, Obi has a plan for him. He takes him to the boundaries where village land ends and hunting ground begins; he shows him where the river can be crossed, where the sago trees grow that are used for thatching, and where the trees they cut for cloth can be found. He walks him fast, teaches him the names of bush plants and caterpillars, nuts and spider webs. And again Jericho hears the story of the war, of the initiation interrupted, and the eruption of the volcano in 1951. He learns the names of the chiefs who climbed to the rim of the volcano, where the heat turned their skin white.