Beyond the village, the path narrowed through gardens cut into the forest. They walked in single file, climbing on up to a hamlet where women called out as they passed, through more gardens until they were in forest. The great trees rose so high that they walked among the buttress roots. Far above was a pale sheen of sky, a distant source of light, while underneath it was dark, brown and olive, barely green at all, and strangely quiet but for the sound of her boots.

For each ridge they climbed, they plunged down the other side to the roar of water, a tumbling stream in a swathe of sunlight. Her guides waited as she cooled herself in the water, wetting her head, her shirt, before climbing on, up and up, the great peak of Huvaemo appearing to be first on this side of her, then on that. With each rise the path became steeper, and when she couldn’t reach a handhold of root or vine, Obi took her hand and pulled her up, his broad, bare feet treading gently while she swayed and slipped. As the sun lifted into the sky, it became hot and moist underneath, with a pungent smell of growth and decay. Images came to her, dark shapes on a flat canvas. And Leonard’s legs, the thin tendons working, his feet splaying out as he walked. She thought of him, uncomplaining, never asking how far, how far, as she did, his Welsh heart beating down exhaustion, making himself feel nothing. She knew he didn’t feel nothing, but, still, the stoic capacity that had drawn her to him unsettled her. He’d made this journey for anthropology and art. She was making it for love. He’d made it as an act of faith for the bark-cloth and his film. She had no desire to take out her camera. The bark-cloth faded from her mind. Instead, an image of a bird of paradise coming into the hand of a small boy perched in a tree. Aaron was a heartbeat inside her, not so much thought as being, present in each step as she climbed on.

When the sun was high above the forest, they came again into gardens, and the world returned to a vivid green, loud with the sound of birds, and full of breath. Banana and pawpaw trees leaned with fruit, long beans hung from their vines, but though the gardens were well tended there was no one working in them. At a circle of houses built on posts around a clearing of swept earth, doors were closed and open platforms bare. An old woman came from a house on the far side and spoke to Obi. Everyone had gone with Leonard to the big village to prepare for the dancing. She gave them a pineapple, but when Rika wanted to lie on her platform and rest, the old woman gestured them on.

‘Keep going,’ she said in language. ‘Take the tauba lady before it rains.’

Rika lifted her head and there, coming over the peak of the mountain, was a billow of cloud. Albert, a mimic with Milton’s capacity to transform himself, became bedraggled in warning of the rain that would fall.