‘Bird of paradise,’ he says, unimpressed. He rolls over and goes back to sleep.

For Jericho this village is a paradox - so rich and so poor. There are no lamps up here, few plates. Abundant meals from abundant gardens are eaten off banana leaves. Water that runs fresh from the mountain is heated in bamboo. Nails are few, but houses are well built and their platforms generous. The children wear rags for cloths but there are few sores on their legs. That morning, the air is cool, the sun slants onto houses. The first fires are being lit, smoke drifting from the roofs. He breathes in, tastes the mountain air. This would be the village for ecotourism, if you could parachute the tourists from a plane passing overhead. Even the flowers on the trees are different. So is the bark-cloth hanging on walls and worn by the women as skirts. The cloth is paler than in Obi’s village and there are fewer of the intricate workings of designs from the forest he’s become used to: vine and fern, bush snail and the backbone of river fish. There’s a boldness of intersecting lines, as if the underlying sinews are made present. For the first time Jericho wishes he had Leonard’s film with him.

‘Did Leonard see this cloth?’ he asks.

‘The same,’ Obi says. ‘He came to this village. Ask Boja. Plenty of filming in this village. Then he went back. He did not go on top.’ His head gestures to a peak that is clear above the morning cloud.

‘There’s a higher village?

‘Small village.’

‘Is the bark-cloth like the bark-cloth here?’

‘More different,’ Obi says.

‘Can I see? Will we go there?’

Obi jerks his head in another direction. ‘We go to a village that way. Big village.’ He shouts over to the women in the cookhouse, and the reply comes back. Yes, the women from the top, they will come.

And sure enough, some days later, there on the grass are three women with long dreadlocked hair. When Jericho goes over to greet them, he sees that it’s not hair that’s plaited. It’s bark-cloth. Rika can’t have seen these women or she’d have photographed their strange and beautiful locks. Texture. It’s what she’s become famous for. Edges, shadows, erosions.

‘Do all the women wear their hair like this?’ Jericho asks.

‘Some,’ Obi says.

‘Can we go there?’

‘It is not a village for visitors,’ Obi says. ‘The first ancestors lived there.’

So he is a visitor? Oh well, Jericho thinks, I suppose I am. A visitor, a brother returning, not yet returned. He looks at the dreadlocked women. Their language has the sound he’s become accustomed to, the same music, but its meaning slips his grasp. On the cloth they wear are large squares, long wide pathways, pyramid-shaped mountains. He looks carefully. The designs are cut from another cloth, sewn on, a form of collage, like Rika’s ground-spider; the first he’s seen. Same technique, different design, a very different effect. There’s something about these bold shapes and the way they’re placed on the cloth that reminds him of the constructivists. Malevich’s squares, or Popova perhaps. A ridiculous thought, the sensibility is quite wrong. Stupidly wrong. They are something else entirely, unlike anything he’s seen, but for all that there is something about them that is modern.