In the glade where the women beat the bark, and no man could enter, Rika’s thought moved, changing shape as she contemplated the possibility that spirit wasn’t something that existed in this thing, this person, this tree, this cloth. Maybe it was more like negative space in photography, the connective tissue that joins the things that are seen, bringing them together through angle and light. Emboldened, she stood up and walked to the water. It was fresh from the mountain, a shallow pool lined with smooth pebbles, but when she took off her boots, tucked up her skirt to step into the water, Kimame’s hand went up in warning. More language, more words she did not understand.

‘Not this river. Not this water,’ Janape said. The spirit of this water was to go into the cloth.

Walking back to the village, Nogi stopped at the top of a ridge and fixed Rika with a shrewd look. They were on a rocky outcrop looking across to the peak of Huvaemo.

‘In the big war, many soldiers died and no one to bury them. Their spirits walked about, lost and angry. It upset the mountain,’ Janape said, translating Nogi’s tale of the last eruption of the volcano in 1951, when the mountain breathed scalding, angry air that burned everything that lived, incinerated villages, buried gardens under ash. Before the eruption, there had been signs that the mountain was angry. Cassowaries and bandicoots came into the village, wild boars came close to the houses. There were great storms with lightning in the sky, and though the rain fell, the rivers ran dry, the water pulled back up into the mountain. When the water returned it was hot.

‘She wants you to know,’ Janape said, ‘some things happen are no good. No good for the mountain. It’s a very big job being chief. Plenty work to do.’

‘Is there something wrong now?’ Rika asked. There was nothing rising from the peak, not a wisp of smoke, or even of cloud.

‘The snakes, maybe a little,’ Janape said. ‘They move around.’

‘Is it us being here?’ Rika asked.

‘You are welcome,’ Janape translated. ‘You white lady, you are welcome. You and Leonard are good spirits, both. When no good tauba come to the mountain it makes trouble. The mountain does not like.’

‘The kiaps?’ Rika asked.

‘They okay,’ Janape said.

‘Is Nogi afraid for independence? Maybe bad strangers come then? Into Papua New Guinea.’ Rika imagined the threat of plantations coming across the plain right to the base of the mountain, driving the Orokaivans up to these villages for water and gardens, and the rivers overflowing, silted up below, the sky rumbling with thunder.

‘Maybe,’ Janape said. ‘Maybe no.’

‘What can I do?’ Rika asked.

‘Understand,’ Janape said. ‘Nogi, she want you to understand. Leonard is a good man, but other tauba caused much trouble. Nogi say you must know. Keep trouble away.’

‘Don.’ It was Don. ‘What did he do? Was it the music? The camera?’