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I had never experienced a woman like her, so total in the expression of a passionate nature, so absolutely uninhibited. And yet through it all was a tenderness, the sense of our being one. And when it was over and we lay there, drained and exhausted, I caught the whisper of a sigh as she murmured, ‘Thank you. Now I can sleep.’

When I woke in the morning, she was gone, the sun streaming in through the porthole, steep slopes of tropical green sliding past. I washed and shaved, slipped on a pair of shorts and went through into the wheelhouse. The ship was just emerging from the narrow passage between Bakawari Island and Bougainville. Ahead was a great bay with a curving shoreline and old wooden houses half hidden in the shade of palm trees. ‘Kieta,’ Jona said when I joined him on the upper bridge.

A big yacht lay at anchor off the jetty, some local craft closer inshore, and almost abeam of us was a dusty-looking wharf with a small cargo vessel moored alongside. But it wasn’t the port and the great sweep of its natural harbour that held my astonished gaze. It was the slopes beyond. They were emerald green in the sun, a towering vista of endless rainforests reaching up to pinnacles of grey rock etched sharp against the hard blue of the sky.

There was still a trace of dawn freshness in the air, the sea, the land, everything sparkling in the sun, and Jona standing there with a pipe in his mouth, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts and his peaked cap. That’s how I shall always remember Bougainville, the picture in my mind as vivid now as when I first saw it in the lingering freshness of that blazing morning. There was an overpowering sense of magnificence in those endless towering vistas of jungle green. ‘The copper mine is over there, beyond those hills.’ Jona pointed the stem of his pipe towards the forest-clad slopes above Kieta. ‘You’ll get a glimpse of the road they blasted up to it when we move on along the coast to Anewa Bay.’

He ran the ship straight in to the beach, close under the main part of the town, where a little knot of islanders stood waiting. There always seems to be a sense of anticlimax when one finally arrives in port, the contact with the shore and its officials being in marked contrast to the excitement of the landfall, the sense of achievement at the end of a voyage. On this occasion the change of mood was very noticeable. As soon as the bow doors were open and the ramp down a government official came on board accompanied by a police sergeant. Jona did not go down to meet them. He left that to Teopas, waiting with his sister in the wheelhouse. The two drivers sent to take over the trucks remained on the shore.

We watched as Teopas unfastened the back of each truck. The inspection was very thorough, the police sergeant even crawling underneath the vehicles to check the chassis. The Haulpaks, too, were examined. ‘He’ll want to see the manifests now,’ Perenna said.

‘Hans has the manifest.’

‘Then how are you going to explain the trucks?’

To my surprise he seemed almost relaxed. ‘Teopas will tell him we shipped them to help the Co-operative. And Hans has kept his promise; Nasogo is from Buka.’

The official was coming up the ladder now, thickset and very black with a little wisp of a beard and dark glasses. He was dressed in grey-blue trousers and a white short-sleeved shirt that was freshly laundered. Teopas stood waiting close behind him as he shook hands with each of us, murmuring, ‘Joseph Nasogo’, in a soft, gentle voice. Then Jona took them to his cabin, and we waited, the heat and the humidity growing all the time.

At length Perenna asked, ‘What happens if he doesn’t accept Teopas’s explanation?’

I looked at her and gave a little shrug. ‘I’m a stranger in these parts.’ I said it lightly, but there was no answering smile as she stood by the open door to the bridge wing staring down at the trucks. The drivers were getting into them now, and the police sergeant was standing on the ramp, talking to a little group that had collected to gaze at what I imagine they regarded as a pretty odd craft.

Perenna never moved from her position by the open door to the bridge wing. She seemed totally withdrawn inside herself, the tension in her affecting me, so that I wondered whether she was still scared of something or merely locked up in her memories of the place. And then McAvoy appeared briefly, swaying slightly as he stood staring for a moment at the green hills behind the port, his eyes screwed up against the glare. ‘Kapa,’ he muttered. ‘Bloody kapa.’ He turned to Perenna. ‘I suppose you’d gone before this copper thing started?’

She nodded. ‘There was a lot of talk, of course, and they’d started drilling. But I never saw anything of it, nothing had been built.’

‘Well, you’ll see a lot of changes now. Not so much in the rest of Bougainville, and nothing in Buka. But here. Aye, there’s been a great change, an’ all too dam’ quick if you ask me.’ His gaze switched to the little group framed in the open bows. ‘The Black Dogs,’ he growled. ‘Wouldn’t think it to see them now, standing there so peaceable, but this was where they came from. The Rorovana. That was one of the wantoks involved. Nasty fighters, all of them.’

‘This was during the war, was it?’ I asked.

‘Aye. They were the young men of several family groups, all based on Kieta. Claimed they were for the Japs, but what they were after was independence, from the British, from everybody. Caused us a lot of bother, those bastards did, and now they drive great trucks up at the mine or work in the crushing plant. No independence at all, just slaves to machines. And all in less than a decade.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘I don’t understand,’ he murmured. ‘The world changed, and then again nothing changed, man being what he is and his nature just the same.’ He stood for a moment, silent, his body sagging as though bowed down by the weight of his thoughts. And then he was gone, back to his cabin and his drink without another word.

It must have been a good half-hour before Jona came back into the wheelhouse, his manner almost jaunty as he saw Nasogo to the top of the bridge wing ladder. Back in the wheelhouse, he informed the two of us that we should tell the Immigration Official at Anewa that our visas would be issued at the offices of the North Solomons Provincial Government in Arawa that afternoon.

A few minutes later Nasogo drove off with the police sergeant in a small Japanese car. The engines of the trucks had already been started up. We watched them bump their way down the ramp into the water and up the beach to the road. ‘Well, that’s that,’ Jona said, and there was a sigh of relief in his voice. ‘We’ll be round at the copper port by lunchtime, and tonight we can all have a good lie-in.’ The ramp clanged shut, the bow doors closing. He rang for Slow Astern, and the big winch drum aft began winding in the anchor. The crew were so used to this manoeuvre that orders were unnecessary.

As we headed north between the high green slopes of Bakawari Island and the Kieta Peninsula, I wandered round the ship, mingling with the crew. No solemnness now, the Buka men all smiling. But they weren’t singing at their work, and they didn’t talk. I couldn’t figure out what the mood was, except that I was conscious of an undercurrent of excitement, all of them locked up inside themselves and the bared teeth not so much a smile as a grin of expectancy. I thought I must be imagining it, but when I spoke to Luke, he evaded my questions. All he would say was: ‘Buka pipal bilong old days. For them this mine and all the great development here and up in the mountains is a kind of Cargo.’

We cut north-west through the narrow passage inside the small island of Arovo, and then we were heading just south of west direct for Anewa Bay. Already it was too hot to con the ship from the upper bridge. We were all of us in the shade of the wheel-house, and as we came clear of the Kieta Peninsula, the broad curve of Arawa Bay began to open, with the modern township spread out on the flats behind it, a pattern of buildings and palms all hazed in heat. ‘Used to be a big expatriate plantation,’ Jona said. ‘Now it’s got the largest shopping centre and superstore in the South West Pacific’ And behind the town, merged now into the jungle green of the mountains, were the faint scars of blasting where the highway to the mine hair-pinned its way up to a gap on the skyline. ‘The mine is just over the other side. In a car it takes about quarter of an hour, maybe twenty minutes, from Anewa. It’s low-grade copper mixed with gold and some silver.’ And he added, ‘The taxes paid by that mine are what keep the new state of Papua New Guinea going. Without it they’d be broke.’