When darkness fell, the dancing continued into the night. The moon shone, catching the white feathers sewn into the plumes, exactly as Aaron had said. The peak of Huvaemo was outlined against the sky. Rika changed out of the cloth Janape had dressed her in; the dance had gone beyond her ability to accompany it – whatever was happening out there on the amorire belonged to the mountain, not to a pale visitor.

As the dance continued, its numbers dwindling towards dawn, when only the strongest would remain, she dozed, and woke, and watched, and brooded, her thoughts returning to Aaron, always to Aaron. To those first sweet days, her skin and his, the opening, the closing that took them under, beneath the surface, into the heart of each other. Longing rose in her, and a fretful fear that she may never find her way back to him. She put her mood down to bad nights, the unyielding beat of the kundus, the thinness of the air and the tension of days passing with nothing said to Leonard.

When she watched him film, his cumbersome equipment, his cards and notebooks seemed a barrier. She despised the platforms he’d had built. As she watched him labouring, first in the sun, then in the light of the moon, Boja at his side with the Nagra and a clapper, the camera separated him from the dancers. Even when he came down and moved among them, even when he turned the Arriflex to follow someone out of the edge of the frame, still she registered it as an imposition. An imposition and a limitation. When she took her own camera, the small, neat Leica, into the midst of the dancers, it was in contemplation of all he left out of the frame. Maybe the notion of frame needed to go in this landscape of spirit, if anything was to be known of feet moving over forest tracks, feet dancing, a hand raised with the paint-stick. Foot and earth, plume and brow, cloth and skin – these were the gestures she tried to catch.

At dawn, when the dancing was finished, she sat with Janape, watching the sun rise, gold over the outline of peaks. Janape had danced the full night. Her legs trembling from the work of it, her feet bruised. It was only the second time she’d found the strength to stay with it to the end. She was sucking a piece of sugarcane, preparing for sleep, when Nogi came towards them across the amorire, which had been beaten into mud by the feet of the dancers. She was still wearing the ground-spider cape, which hung from her back like the rays of the sun. She spoke to Janape. Not many could dance from dusk to dawn for the mountain. When Nogi was young, she had done it, and now it was her granddaughter, as it should be. Then she took Rika’s hand, and gestured for her to lift the camera. Lift the camera. Look at my face. At all our faces. Now that you have seen us dance.