It was a tableau that would remain with Laedi and Martha like the cover of a book, a bit tattered and worn, but nevertheless a moment when nothing ceased to be nothing.

THE MOUNTAIN

WALKING ONTO THE MOUNTAIN, IT SEEMED TO RIKA that she could have been on a sea voyage, rowing a small boat through a large ocean of waves. Yet an ocean would have left her exposed, open to the sky, while this journey took her deep under the green surface. From above, nothing of her progress would be visible, only the turbulence of the forest canopy rising and falling like unsteady currents. She’d watched the vast movement of forest from the small plane that took her over the high spine of the island. It had landed twice at narrow grass mission strips perched on precarious spurs, viridian green in the dark ocean of forest. At each a crowd had met the plane, old men gathering to shake the pilot’s hand as crates were unloaded and the mailbag handed to the clerk from the mission. Women crowded together, their string bags heavy with sleeping babies. It surprised Rika that so many people emerged from the forest emptiness.

On the northern side of the mountains, the land flattened onto a plain cut by rivers and crossed by roads, pocked with houses and villages, tin roofs of plantations and government stores, the square grid of Popondetta. The plane circled the old military airfield and landed on the one strip that was maintained. While the plane was reloaded for the run that would put her down on the mountain, Rika walked along the edge of the strip. Tall grass grew through rusted, burned-out tank remains. There was no sign of the town, ten miles away. A man with a scrawny dog gave her a stick of sugarcane and walked on across the airstrip. A group of women with string bags for sale sat in the shade of the shed, where boxes of cargo were being weighed for the plane, which rocked as they were pushed into its tail. She looked across to the mountain, jutting forward from the range, a crown of cloud concealing its peaks.

Leonard was up there somewhere, waiting, not knowing that she was coming. She hadn’t sent a letter ahead. ‘Don’t write,’ she’d said to Alex Penrose. ‘I want to tell him myself. Face to face.’ He’d nodded, and all he’d said was to take shoes that were strong and accustomed to her feet.

‘You sure you’re okay?’ the pilot asked when he let her off at the strip and saw there was no one to meet her.

When she’d written the envelopes that took her letters to Leonard, delivered by this same plane, the name of the village had conjured up a settled place, with the sort of things settled places have, and now she could see that even a post office was a fanciful notion. There was a bush school from which children came running, and an aid post, a small building with the only tin roof she’d seen as they landed. The medical orderly from the coast was on the strip to greet the pilot and take the mail bag.