She showed her camera to Kimame, turned to Janape, gestured to the forest. ‘Can I take it?’ she asked.

‘It’s okay,’ Janape said.

Her thought was not to photograph the women but to capture the dark and pungent place where they climbed, the ground that was their ground. Instead of standing back, she came in close until her images were almost abstract. She took a patch of moss, a section of buttress root, the sharp hook of a curled vine, a snail, the mark left on the path by the slide of feet on wet earth. Sometimes she swung the camera up towards a flash of white, a bird rising like a wish, a blade of sunlight reflected from a broad leaf, but she did not take the shot, returning instead to wet rock, dark earth, leaf mould, the patterned tangle of undergrowth.

She was shy of raising the Leica to the faces of the duvahe. She had no interest in documenting them, in making a record. She had no impulse to catalogue or categorise. She made no notes, kept no journal, wrote nothing down. Only her camera was put to use: knees and feet, a backbone, an elbow, the back of a head, a band of fabric, a woven armband tucked with musky herbs. Texture and resistance. The paint stick meeting the cloth. Mallet on bark.

In a glade where a small river tumbled from the mountain to form a perfect pool, Kimame took several heavy wooden mallets from a small hut so that the young women could beat the strip of inner bark she’d laid over a hardened log. Rika took a place beside Janape as the thwock of the mallets echoed through the trees. It was hard work, transforming bark into cloth, and as Janape sang beside her, Rika thought of Aaron and the men who’d ambushed him. She’d asked him if she should go back to Europe, so that he would be safe. He’d turned his head towards her, taken her hand. ‘If you are afraid for yourself, then you must go. If it’s for me, better you stay.’ He’d lifted her hand to his lips. ‘White men think they can beat things out of people. We believe we beat things in.’

Spirit. The women had taught her the word for spirit when they’d shown her how a tree was cut for cloth, and she’d felt their exasperation when she couldn’t grasp how spirit moved from tree to cloth, from cloth to painting. When she’d asked Leonard, alone in their room that night, his answer was filled with distinctions and discriminations that had nothing to do with the experience of beating the cloth, or walking the mountain, feeling its pulse through the soles of her feet. He turned to his notebook. Some trees have spirit, he reported, but others do not. He read the list he’d made. The mountain has spirit. Rivers have spirit. Bush spirits can make gardens grow, or can send in the pigs. Pigs don’t have spirit.