‘You be careful, girl,’ Milton says, and Bili pats his arm. She’s had worse than that, she tells him.

Undeterred, he presses on with cautionary tales about accidents that befall those working to document the loggers and record the illegal movements of bulldozers and sawmills. One goes over a ravine, another into a river torrent, another disappears without trace.

Bili shrugs, she knows these stories. She drinks another bottle of Coke and says she’s safe because she’s visible. ‘It’s harder to kill a lawyer from the capital.’

‘No, it’s not,’ Milton says. ‘Car accident. Raskol hold-up. A robbery turned violent. A snake through a vent in the wall.’

‘A snake?’ Bili says, looking up sharply.

When Martha and Milton get up to go to their rooms, it’s almost midnight. They leave Jericho rolling a joint and Bili leaning against him with her eyes closed. Archie is playing his guitar.

‘She should take more care,’ Milton says.

‘Is it true about the snake and the vents?’ Martha asks.

‘Could be. I read about it somewhere. Africa, I think.’ He pauses, with a mischievous nudge. ‘Bili doesn’t like snakes. Never has. Don’t you remember?’

Martha doesn’t, and laughs. ‘Good try,’ she says. Over at the bar, Archie is singing ‘The House of the Rising Sun’. ‘They must be stoned,’ she says, and takes the path towards her hut and the solace of a mosquito net.

THE NEXT MORNING, THE SKY IS A CLEAR DOME OVER THE MOUNTAINS and Martha is on the terrace in time to see the first tendrils of sun reach the other side of the fjord. The large girths of the trees turn a theatrical orange, the rocks shine beneath tumbling vegetation. Below, on the water, all is calm. There is a whole day before the plane arrives with Laedi and Leonard, and she is up, determined to spend some part of it with Jericho.

Archie arrives on the terrace with his coffee. Milton, he says, is inside eating sausages and eggs. He looks across the fjord at the great old trees, lit gold, clinging to the edges of the fjord. Past the cyclone zone that leaves the peninsula ridge tops a grassy green, it’s forest all the way to the perfect cone of a small volcano, which Archie tells Martha is called Komoya. He’s come to find Jericho for an early swim, and when Jericho ambles onto the terrace with a blurry smile, Martha feels a kick of dismay. She doesn’t smile when he stretches and says good morning, but she does when he tells her that in Tahiti, Matisse said the light was like ‘plunging your eye into a gold globlet’. He ran out of sketch paper in a matter of days, and the island had to be scoured for more.