‘Shit!’ exclaimed the youngest, a chubby male monster who was fingering his penis. Pretending she had been shocked by his remark, Peleiupu turned her back on them. ‘Shit!’ the boy repeated. His sisters giggled, then Peleiupu heard them running off the veranda and around the corner of the house. She tried not to laugh.

  When Barker and Mautu came out, Barker was wearing his black hobnailed boots. Around his waist was his cartridge belt. What he called his sun helmet was perched precariously on his huge mound of hair. Under his left arm was his canvas satchel in which, Peleiupu knew, he carried his pens, pencils and paper. His sleek rifle was in his right hand. The great adventurer that Mautu had told them about, Peleiupu thought.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked Mautu. He motioned with his head towards the plantations.

  ‘It might rain,’ Barker remarked in English, gazing briefly up at the dark blue clouds covering the top of the range.

  Shaking his head, Mautu said, in English, ‘No, it not rain. It is fine weather.’

  Peleiupu’s heart skipped with joy: she understood most of what they had said. Not just words any more; now sentences as well.

  ‘Hurry! Hurry!’ Barker called in Samoan to his aiga in the fale behind the house. Two of his wife’s brothers, Moamoa and Tuvanu, came running carrying another pick, bushknives and what Peleiupu thought were metal frying pans without handles. ‘Where the food?’ Barker asked them abruptly in Samoan. Both men were middle-aged and had children. Moamoa scurried back to the fale. ‘Fool!’ Barker called after him. ‘You can’t trust these people!’ Barker said in English to Mautu.

  When Moamoa was back with the basket of food they started off, with Barker and Mautu leading, setting a stiff marching pace. Peleiupu almost had to run to keep up.

  People in the fale they passed greeted them with invitations to stop and eat. Their group stopped briefly every time, and Mautu refused their invitations politely. A dog, fur bristling, rushed at them with ferocious barks and snapping fangs. ‘Alu! Alu!’ Barker barked back at it. The poor creature cringed away, its tail between its legs.

  Alongside the track, which was islanded by puddles, the vegetation was still sparkling with dew, and soon their clothes were wet from it. Peleiupu felt strong, invigorated, alive with anticipation, and smashed her reflection in the puddles merrily with her feet. As they passed through the crops, trees, creepers and shrubs she imagined they were swimming through a soundless sea world of lush green, led by the courageous Captain Barker and his loyal native lieutenant, Mautu.

  Suddenly, into her daydreaming came Barker’s voice. ‘Gold,’ he said and she glanced up at his back, hoping to understand more, but Barker was speaking too fast.

  They veered off the main track and crossed over creeper-covered ground through a plantation of bananas to the Satoa River. On the edge of the bank they stood and surveyed the river valley, which meandered like a gigantic centipede up through foothills to the centre range. The river was faintly brown with silt as it rippled leisurely through narrow strips of boulders, rocks and pebbles sparkling in the sun. The light breeze brought with it, from the mountains, the odour of dank, decaying vegetation.

  While they watched him, Barker found a large tree trunk nearby, brushed the creepers off it, sat down, opened his canvas satchel, took out a board and spread out sheets of blank paper on it. Then, pencil poised in his right hand, he studied the terrain before them for a long, hushed while. Quietly, Peleiupu edged over and stood looking down over his shoulder at the paper. Mautu stabbed his bushknife into the soil at his feet and sat gazing at the water, dangling his legs over the riverbank. Moamoa and Tuvanu retreated into the cool shade of a clump of bananas and watched from there. Already waves of heat were brimming visibly up from the beds of boulders and stones below.

  When the hand clutching the pencil moved, it was like a quick spider drawing with all its legs. Soon black lines, a whole network of them, covered the page. Peleiupu recognised it as a map of the river valley and the area around it. She had seen a sketch map in one of Mautu’s books.

  Barker held it up to Mautu, who came over and, studying it, said in English, ‘Good, good!’ Just like Barker would have said.

  ‘I think we should start here.’ Barker pointed with his pencil at the area of sand and pebbles on his map, then down at the valley. ‘Then here on our next visit.’ The next area was a few hundred yards upriver.

  Just before they made their way down into the shallow valley Barker shook Mautu’s hand and, smiling, said, ‘Good luck!’ Peleiupu was even more puzzled.

  The river was shallow where they were; beds of stones protruded out of the water at midstream. Mautu took one of the shallow pans and squatted down in the water. Stabbing the shovel into the pulpy sand, Barker pushed down on it with his boot until the shovel head was buried. Wrenching up a shovelful of sand, he tipped it into Mautu’s pan. Peleiupu, Moamoa and Tuvanu watched fascinated.

  ‘I not know how,’ Mautu said in English to Barker.

  ‘Let me.’ Barker took the panful of pebbly sand, lowered it into the water and moved it back and forth, washing out the sand until only the bits of rock and pebble were left. He then picked out some bits with his fingers and examined them. ‘Nothing yet,’ he said to Mautu. ‘Take the other pan.’ Mautu did so. Barker, in his broken Samoan, instructed Moamoa and Tuvanu to fill the pans with the sandy material whenever he told them to do so.

  Peleiupu crouched in the water in her father’s shadow and observed his every move. Mautu’s eyes were alive with a brightness she hadn’t seen there before. The water was cool around her feet and ankles; periodically she scooped up handfuls of it and washed her face.

  Relentlessly the sun pressed down. Neither man noticed it and, whenever Moamoa and Tuvanu were slow, Barker hurled orders at them. Even in her father’s shadow Peleiupu found the heat becoming painful so she lay down in the water, with only her face and head above it. The cool water tingled on her body.

  Periodically they shifted upriver whenever Barker gave the order.

  At noon Peleiupu whispered to Mautu that she was hungry. Her father told her and the other two men to go into the shade and eat. From the healing shade of the trees, Peleiupu munched her food and watched Barker and Mautu digging and sifting, oblivious to the heat shimmering around them in visible waves like hungry swarms of mosquitoes. They seemed locked in a time they never wanted to leave.

  Mautu was the first to break the spell and hurry into the shade. He ate quickly, all the time watching Barker. When he’d finished he scrambled out again.

  ‘Lazy! Lazy!’ Barker shouted over to Moamoa and Tuvanu, who got up reluctantly, cursing under their breath, and went out.

  Gold, Peleiupu remembered Barker saying earlier that morning, as she watched. She fell asleep and dreamt of Mautu looming above her, his chest puffed out, his face beaming with a golden light. Then, digging his hands into the centre of his chest, he prized open his ribcage and out of the cavern of his chest gushed a river of liquid gold, in which she splashed and laughed and laughed.

  They got home that evening as Lalaga was lighting the lamp. Without speaking to their inquisitive aiga they took some soap and a towel and bathed in the communal pool beside the church.

  Their whole aiga were in the main fale ready for the lotu when they returned. Mautu put on a shirt. Peleiupu brought him the Bible.

  Straight after their meal, during which Mautu ate as if he were caught utterly in his own thoughts, he went to where he usually slept, drew the curtain behind him, and they soon heard him snoring heavily.

  Anticipating her mother’s question, Peleiupu offered a vivid, matter-of-fact description of what she called ‘their expedition’, but omitted her speculation that Barker and Mautu were prospecting for gold.

  ‘What can they be looking for?’ Lalaga asked, more to herself than Peleiupu, who shrugged her shoulders. Lalaga left.

  When her brother and sisters and the other young people in their aiga gathered eagerly around her Peleiupu retold her story, this time with extravagant embellishments, dramatic flourishes, hilariously accurate imitations of Barker’s Samoan and deliberately misleading clues as to what the two men were up to. One: perhaps they were mapping the course of the Satoa River. Two: perhaps because both men were scientific — they were working out the types of sand, rocks, mud, and pebbles found in the valley. Three: perhaps they were excavating for the sites of ancient villages, hoping to find priceless artefacts. Four, perhaps — and this was the remotest possibility of all — they were acting out an adventure they had read in one of Barker’s books.

  Tired from the expedition, Peleiupu tumbled into a deep sleep soon after telling her tale. The other children lay awake late into the night, envying her and speculating among themselves, in whispers, about what Barker and Mautu were up to.

  By the morning meal everyone in Satoa was talking about the expedition. At this point, with everyone hungrily awaiting the unravelling of the mystery, no one advanced the possibility that perhaps both men had gone mad or were chasing mirages as described in the Holy Book, the very thing that Peleiupu was protecting her father against by not mentioning gold.

  For Peleiupu two impatient days had to be tolerated before their next ‘expedition upriver’ (a phrase she had read in a book). During that time Mautu spent the afternoons with Barker going over their sketch map and marking in large red Xs their next diggings. Then, out of the blue, Mautu told Peleiupu she was to stay home next time and help Lalaga. Hurt by this, she was a sullen, easily angered, resentful helper, and she had frequent quarrels with the other children, especially Arona who, as the only son, resented her being their father’s favoured companion. Arduous upriver expeditions were for boys not girls, he complained to Lalaga who, when alone in bed with a silent Mautu that night, explained that it was time he took his only son with him and not Peleiupu. ‘We shall see,’ he said, and was immediately lost in his thoughts again.

  ‘Your children, apart from Peleiupu, do not exist for you!’ she complained.

  ‘What did you say?’

  She slapped the mats she was lying on and, trying to keep her voice down, said, ‘Never mind!’

  ‘You are angry with me?’ he asked gently.

  ‘No!’ she snapped. Then quietly, she asked, ‘What is happening to you? What are you searching for? You speculate, you dream, you pursue figments of Barker’s imagination and what you read in those books!’

  ‘I pursue God’s mystery. His depths. His secrets. I want to understand Him.’ It was stated simply, with total belief.

  ‘It can lead you to heresy. Have you thought of that?’

  ‘How can it be when I know that God is everything, including the wonders and dreams and fantasies and visions of the imagination and mind?’ With that she was lost, she couldn’t grasp his meaning.

  ‘And this — this unreal search for gold?’

  ‘Did Peleiupu tell you that?’

  ‘No, your clever loyal daughter tried to put me off your track.’

  ‘But what is so unreal about it? No one has tried to see if there is gold here, have they?’

  Caught again by his logic, she felt like shouting. ‘But everyone says there is no gold here!’

  ‘But where is the actual proof?’ When she didn’t reply, he caressed her shoulder and said, ‘I love you and our children more than my own life.’

  ‘Soon you will be lost from my understanding,’ she said. ‘Please stop this search for gold before our people think you’ve gone …’ She couldn’t say it.

  ‘Yes?’ he asked. She said nothing.

  While it was still dark on Friday morning, with a chilly wind weaving in from the sea, Mautu woke Peleiupu and Arona. They dressed without waking the others and, carrying a basket of food and their implements, went to Barker’s house. The dew-covered grass prickled under their feet.

  Barker and a yawning Moamoa and a half-asleep Tuvanu were waiting on the veranda. Without talking they were soon into the solemn shadows and breathing silence of the plantations.

  That day the sun pursued them again. They covered about half a mile of riverbank, stopping, digging, sifting panfuls of sandy material, then shifting further inland. Barker and Mautu, oblivious to everything else, confined their talking to intermittent instructions to Moamoa and Tuvanu; the two children were like their shadows, always beside them, saying nothing, watching.

  At mid-morning Peleiupu noticed that the still air immediately around them was tainted with Barker’s flying-fox smell, which worsened as he sweated and as they moved into the humid dampness of the bush which, at the start of the foothills, groped right down to the water’s edge.

  They found nothing that day.

  At the to’ona’i at his home on Sunday some of the elders questioned Mautu politely, obliquely, about his search. Light-heartedly, he told him they had found nothing yet. No one asked him what they were looking for; they had heard rumours, started by Moamoa and Tuvanu, that precious metals were being prospected for.

  Lalaga refused to ask him about it, while Peleiupu, now the veteran explorer, let Arona explain to the other children what had happened so far. The slow Arona stuck, in his story, to the bare facts and details.

  The following week they went out three times. Moamoa and Tuvanu, tired from the work and Barker’s abuse, didn’t appear the last time, a Friday, so the still-eager Peleiupu and Arona carried the implements and food.

  After a heavy night’s rain the ground under the bush at the river’s edge was soft and stank of decay; their feet sank into it to the ankles. The undergrowth was denser, more tangled, and they had to cut a track through it. Around them the sad air was a blue sea of steam through which swam rapacious swarms of mosquitoes that Peleiupu and Arona fought off with small leafy branches. The riverbanks shot up sharply into rugged escarpments, hills, and ridges all smothered with virgin bush, which made them feel they were being watched.

  As they worked, there was little conversation, only the rushing sound of the now swiftly flowing water and occasionally the lost cries of birds. Around them Peleiupu sensed the bush world growing, growing.

  Late in the afternoon, wet and tired, the skins of their hands and faces wrinkled with the cold, they retreated from the bush and headed for home, locked in themselves, and Peleiupu wondered if her father and Barker were going to give up.

  That weekend the Satoans, encouraged by Moamoa’s and Tuvanu’s enigmatic comments about the expedition, started joking about it behind Mautu’s back. All the young people in Satoa, however, maintained their faith in the search.

  On Monday morning, with the barely visible drizzle whirling around them as they tramped up the valley, Peleiupu sensed a more dogged determination in the two men. The bush still steamed with an inescapable dankness and, as they entered it, it closed around them. They worked in little light.

  They went twice more that week. Still nothing. The drizzle continued. The terrain became more rugged, wilder, more difficult to penetrate. The mosquitoes fought for their blood.

  Another week, then Arona’s shovel stabbed, a few inches into the water-logged ground, and struck a solid but hollow object. He pressed down on the shovel with his large foot. The shovel refused to sink down any further. He scraped the mud off the object. Through the weeping scar in the mud, an opaque whiteness shone. He scraped off more mud.

  ‘What is it?’ Peleiupu asked.

  ‘Don’t know,’ he replied.

  Their father looked down. He took Arona’s shovel and dug around the object. Suddenly he stopped.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Peleiupu. Mautu started covering the object with soil again but Barker reached over, grasped the shovel handle and stopped him.

  With his boot Barker pushed the mud aside, reached down into the shallow hole with both hands, grasped the object and pulled it up. The children cringed. It was a human skull. In the blue light, it looked so nakedly white, veined with black mud.

  With his hands Barker brushed all the dirt off it. ‘Wonder how it got here?’ he asked, poking his fingers into the skull’s eye sockets.

  ‘We go now!’ Mautu said to him in English. The children gathered the implements quickly.

  Barker, saying nothing, started digging up the ground around where the skull had lain. Peleiupu could feel her father’s mounting anger as he stood watching. Bit by bit, as Barker dug, a broken human skeleton was revealed.

  Panting heavily from the exertion, Barker asked, ‘It’s so far inland — how did it get here?’

  Mautu had no answer. ‘Let’s go home,’ he instructed his children.

  ‘But it’s early!’ insisted Barker. ‘And there’s nothing to be afraid of.’

  ‘The message, it is clear,’ Mautu said in English. ‘There is nothing here. Not now.’

  ‘But the mystery, don’t you sense the mystery? How come he is here? There may be others.’

  ‘We leave it alone!’ Mautu said. It was an order.

  For a moment Barker hesitated, then, dismissing Mautu with a curt nod, started exploring the nearby ground with decisive stabs of the shovel.

  Mautu wheeled and started for home. His children followed him.

  Behind them, caught in the blue tangle of bush, they could hear Barker foraging like a hungry boar. Even when, miles later, they were free of the bush, they could see Barker in their minds, black with wet and sweat, his muscular body pulsating with inquisitive blood, his eyes focused hypnotically on the ground, his arms pounding the shovel into the softness, searching for the bones, the skeletons.

  At home, they didn’t tell anyone about their terrible find.

  After their evening meal, during which he ate little, Mautu disappeared into the wet darkness.

  ‘Barker won’t find any more, will he?’ Arona whispered to Peleiupu when they were trying to sleep.

  ‘No,’ she reassured him. Around them the dark was filled with aitu and other fearful phantoms.

  ‘I’m — I’m scared!’ he murmured.