Standing in the morning sun with these bark-cloth women, Jericho is startled into a thought, and he can’t imagine why he hasn’t had it sooner. Here is the mountain’s wealth. Here is how he can help. Their cloth is art in any terms. It’s contemporary, it’s bold, and it’s beautiful. And it’s unknown.

‘That cloth,’ he says to Hector. His training has not equipped him for this. He raises his hands in a question, and something in Hector’s demeanour changes. His face sharpens, without the teasing edge, as he tells Jericho that the cloth that is cut to make the village designs isn’t painted. Its colour comes from being soaked in mud. It’s the old way, before the ancestors found the dyes. Once, it was done in every village – their grandmother, Nogi, made cloth that way. But now there is less knowledge, and when the old duvahe women die, who knows if there will be more. The young women say it is too much work, the bush-string is stiff and the bone needle hurts their fingers. That afternoon Hector does not joke. He has thought a lot about the future of the cloth. When he was in Moresby he saw the bark-cloth from other tribes that was sold to tourists. Young Albert wanted to bring mountain cloth, make hats, cut it small, then sell it to the tourist shops. The chiefs said no. They were right, Hector says. It may make a small bisnis, but the cloth here will die, no longer for the mountain. Down below, on the flat, the Orokaivans sold their cloth, and now the trees are gone. No cloth, no trees, no art. That’s why the chiefs like ecotourism. The tourists will come and look. They will learn about the mountain and take their talk of it back to the place they come from. That way, the mountain is known, and it stays safe.

How would you feel, Jericho asks him, if we made a different business with the cloth and sold it in London, or Australia? Not to tourists for a little money, but for people who understand art from all over the world. In his gallery in London, sometimes they have exhibitions from India, or Japan. Not just white-man art, the bright-colour art Hector has seen in Time magazine, or the empty designs he saw in the lobbies of hotels in Port Moresby. There’s a seriousness about Hector when it comes to the art, a thoughtfulness that Jericho hasn’t seen before. ‘Nogi was my grandmother,’ he says. In Port Moresby he went to the museum, saw the cloth from other places in Papua New Guinea, cloth from their neighbours in the ranges, from the coast down below. Old cloth from long ago. He talked to the guard, who didn’t know how the art was chosen, or how it came to be there. It was a dark place, no one looking, and the electricity off. Even so, their art should be in the museum. Hector felt the insult of its absence, and so did the duvahe when he told them. It is a sorrow that the mountain is not known and respected. He asks Jericho about museums in other places, and who would buy their art, what they would do with it, and who would see it. He thinks about the trees, and all that the young women must learn, and the work of keeping the cloth dry and safe, and the pride that could return to them.