‘No need for sad,’ Simbaikan said, though the lines of her face were grim. ‘This is her ground. She’ll come back.’

‘And Don?’ Rika asked. ‘Will he come too?’

Simbaikan raised her arms as if to say it was of no account whether he did or he didn’t. She’d never liked his smell, but he’d made two strong babies, had he not?

Rika laughed and was comforted. Yes, Laedi would return, Laedi and the girls, and somehow at that moment she knew it would not be long.

It wasn’t. A year and a half and they were back. They moved in with Martha and Pete until the house next door came free, and by the time their boxes arrived from Melbourne, Rifle had built a shed for the chickens he gave Bili as a gift to welcome her home, to Hohola.

BETWEEN MARTHA’S KITCHEN AND LAEDI’S WAS A PATCH OF BARE ground. After a few months of tramping back and forth, eating in one house or the other, carrying plates and dishes, and never enough chairs, Laedi had the idea of a platform. Highlanders who’d set up camp on the hill behind them built it, the design emerging from many hands and many beers. When it was finished people came from streets away to look. It was a raised platform, just that, built between the houses, with a roof of iron sheets and sago palm, and large enough to accommodate a long table, also knocked up by Highland carpenters, from offcuts Pete bought at the sawmill. Two sides of the platform had low plaited walls, but otherwise it was open to the air. Breezes came down the hill, and from it they could see who was walking up the road. During the day, washing hung along the open walls, and Simbaikan was there often enough to guard against intruders and theft. At night the Coleman lamp hung from the rafters and they talked in its shadows, all of them gathered in, neighbours and visitors, everyone together, breathing the pyrethrum of mosquito coils.

Laedi’s return, Rika said, had them back on their rightful pathways.

In the European summer of 1971, Rika’s Mountain exhibition opened in Amsterdam. The treacherous thought that had come to her when Nogi made her own relationship with the camera and met the lens without posing, without vanity, proved prescient. Here was a new face, a new set of eyes looking.

The exhibition was noticed, and so was Rika. There was an interview with her in the cultural pages of de Volkskrant and a photo of her at the opening wearing a white crocheted dress. Her hair was loose, grown long again, cut straight at the shoulder. In the interview she said that during her one year of art school in Amsterdam, she’d learned that the task of art was to make the familiar strange. On the mountain, she’d understood that her task was to reverse that maxim. She wanted to let something that is familiar, common to us all, show through the strangeness. She gave each woman her name, and that is how their images were titled, though to her chagrin not a name made it into the reviews. ‘The Strange Made Intimate’ was the header over one, ‘Savage Beauty’ over another.