The punishing thought of pneumonia descended on Rika.

Boja went down to inspect the river. He said it would be three days yet before Rika could cross, maybe more. He and Leonard played a hand of cards.

‘I won’t leave till you’re better,’ she said to Leonard.

‘You go,’ he said. ‘I’ve had malaria before. The worst is over, and Janape is here.’

‘Should you come out for a break? To Popondetta.’

‘I’ll stay here. Maybe in a month. That’ll give you some time, and perhaps you’ll feel differently then.’

‘Aren’t you angry?’

‘Rika, Rika. Would it make it easier if I were?’

Her last days in the village were strangely calm. Leonard was quiet, as if all emotion had been drained from him with the fever, as if his weariness was too great for expression. He sat in the sun and ate the yams Janape cooked for him. She boiled up a root she’d found by the river. The prospect of pneumonia receded. Women came with vegetables, and Obi and the boys went into the forest to catch lizard for him, a delicacy to make him strong.

The angry spirit that had inhabited Rika vanished as entirely as the rain. Affection rose in her again, for Leonard, for this good man weakened with sickness, who remained kind even in the face of betrayal. As the time approached for her to leave, she felt she could have stayed. Not to be with Leonard, but to experience more of this place where time changed its nature and spirit lived in the air.

‘Maybe,’ she suggested to Leonard, ‘their idea of spirit is more like photosynthesis.’

He smiled and did not correct her. She looked at him through the Rolleiflex and saw a kind of veil around him, an aura perhaps, a trick of the light, the spirit of the mountain working on him. She knew that both of them had been moved in ways that would stay with them for the rest of their lives.

RIKA SAT ON THE STEPS TO THE PLATFORM, SOMBRE, PULLING ON HER boots, ready for the long walk down to the airstrip. Her eye was idly following four small pigs, poor pigs without spirit. The first blundered into a fence, the ones behind colliding and squealing, disoriented. It took several attempts for them to find the path. And then it dawned on her.

‘Leonard,’ she shouted. ‘They’re blind!’

Leonard, who was checking the film he’d packed for her to take back to Moresby, didn’t look up.

‘The pigs! Leonard!’

Still he didn’t look up.

‘They’re blind, aren’t they?’

She could see from his expression when he turned to her that it was true. ‘When do they do it?’

‘At birth.’

‘How?’

‘With lime. They rub it into their eyes.’

‘Why?’

‘To keep them out of the gardens.’

‘It doesn’t work.’

‘I know. It’s custom. They blind their pigs. Other tribes fence their gardens. It’s tradition.’

‘It’s horrible.’