The chief looked mournful as Boja translated. He didn’t like the idea of independence. He hadn’t liked the Australian kiaps, the few times they’d come, but the prospect of an Orokaivan government was worse, and closer. Nanaji didn’t smile until Obi came in and sat by the door. He gave the boy a soft greeting. The single cowrie shell tied round his neck shone as Boja pumped the lamp.

‘It’s a fine line,’ Leonard was saying, his voice low, ‘between the old ways and the new. In every circumstance it’s hard to know what’s best, when to hurry or slow down the process. It almost always cuts both ways. What does Aaron think?’

‘Aaron?’ Rika’s heart gave a thump. ‘Aaron Nabuka? Why do you ask?’

‘Alex thinks highly of him,’ Leonard said. ‘Says he’s one of the best, and I gather you’ve become friendly.’

Could her heart leap through her skin and land at their feet, there on the ground between them? Leonard squeezed her hand, returned his attention to the duvahe, who were singing the rhythmic words of the welcome song, while another old man beat the kundu. Song filled the space of the roof, billowed out into the dark.

Obi stood to translate. ‘This song, it is a song of welcome to Huvaemo. This place, our mountain, it is the place of our ancestors, the place of our art. You are welcome. Walk. Walk in and see.’

‘One, one, you walk,’ Boja said.

‘All walk,’ Obi said. ‘Walk one by one, walk all together. Walk in and listen. This song of Huvaemo. This song our art. This place our mountain, this place our art.’

‘Thank you,’ Leonard said. ‘Huëmae.’

The old chief rose to his feet and took Leonard’s hand. ‘You have come, you have listened. Leonard’s wife, tauba lady, you are welcome,’ he said.

Leonard went to a box that had come on the plane and took out a blanket for the other old man duvahe. Another for Nogi. She sniffed at it, handed it to a woman behind her. Nanaji gestured to Obi.

‘There aren’t enough for all the young ones,’ Leonard said.

The chief’s face clouded. He said something that wasn’t translated. Outside there was a hushed quiet.

Leonard gave the boy a blanket.

‘I couldn’t go against Nanaji,’ Leonard said when he and Rika were alone in the windowless cave of a room where they were to sleep. ‘We’re guests on their land. That’s what Don could never grasp.’ And he started again, a catalogue of the arrogant ways in which Don behaved. ‘Apart from anything else,’ he said, ‘it’s discourteous.’

Despite her dislike of Don, it seemed absurd to Rika that on this mountain, in the midst of bark-cloth it had taken such endurance to reach, Leonard’s bitterness should be so great. ‘Could it have been something else that you were arguing about?’ she asked. ‘Something personal underneath, maybe, that has more to do with our world than theirs?’

He was undressing, folding his clothes. There was a faint smell of him in the bed that made the room less alien. Rika lay on the plaited sleeping mat, waiting beneath the mosquito net for her husband. Her heart kept its rapid, guilty beat. She turned away as Leonard climbed under the net to join her.