‘What happens when people get really sick?’ he asks Nelly at the end of another run. ‘Do you go down to the aid post?’

‘Sometimes,’ she says. ‘A long way.’ She smiles, a shy, unguarded smile. ‘We walk to the road, catch the PMV.’

Nelly finished grade six at the school near the old airstrip. She speaks in English as Jericho asks about her time there, and yes, she says, at school she liked reading, and the map of the world. She has seen England there, an island like Papua New Guinea but one that sits up, like a queen. ‘Here,’ she says, ‘on the map we are a bird.’ As if she’s conjured them up, a pair of sicklebills fly past and into the trees. She laughs, her soft, pretty laugh. But when Jericho asks if she’d like to go on, become a nurse maybe, or a teacher, her face clouds and she falters on the awkward words of the new people’s language. She changes to their mother tongue, slow and soft, and says that this is their mountain. She stops and looks around her as if that is answer enough, and smiles a smile that is in every way different from the smiles of girls in cities. They are crossing the amorire, and Jericho looks with her over to the houses, to the pathways that run between them and across the valley to the high peaks of the mountain.

That night he is peaceful, and in the morning he doesn’t check his diary to mark the dawning of the next day and the passing of the next week.

Another afternoon, after two days of sudden rain, when they have visited the old people who are wheezing from the cold, Nelly asks Jericho if he’ll come to see her mother. They are walking slowly, enjoying the sun.

‘Is your mother ill?’ he asks.

‘No. She paints for you, that’s all.’

They take a path past a small garden, onto a spur where a cluster of houses looks out towards a peak that is not Huvaemo. No, Nelly says, this peak is not a volcano. It’s a word she learned at school, she tests it in her mouth, vol-ca-no; yes, he says, very good, she has it right. She smiles, and tells him that this peak is safe inside, it is the ancestor peak, where the first two ancestors came from. They came out from deep inside the mountain. ‘The man gave the woman a baby,’ she says, ‘and the woman gave the man the cloth. You know?’

‘No,’ he says. He’s never heard this story. Did Leonard not know it? ‘Will you tell me?’

She shakes her head. ‘Lilla,’ she says. ‘Lilla must tell.’

At the house, they find several women painting, with children crowded round them, leaning against them, watching. Nelly’s mother is sitting with her legs out, straight in front of her. She has a cloth folded on her knees and is painting an elaborate grid of black lines, cut by intersecting triangles. Beside her, younger women are painting a cloth laid out on the ground, flat between them. The black pathways have already been painted, uneven rows of semicircular shapes. ‘The tusks of pigs,’ Nelly tells him. ‘Money.’