He awakes hours later and feels a cold moist towel on his head. Khin Myo is sitting by his bed. One hand holds the towel to his forehead. He takes the other in his. She doesn’t move away. “Khin Myo…” he says.

“Quiet, Mr. Drake, sleep.”

16

The fever broke alongside the dawn. It was the morning of the third day since he became ill. He awoke and he was alone. An empty water basin sat on the floor next to the bed, two towels hung over its side.

His head ached. The night before was a feverish blur, and he lay back and tried to remember what happened. Images came but they were strange and disturbing. He turned over onto his side. The sheets were moist and cool. He slept.

He awoke to the sound of his name, a man’s voice. He turned over. Doctor Carroll sat at the bedside. “Mr. Drake, you look better this morning.”

“Yes, I think so. I feel much better.”

“I am glad. It was terrible last night. Even I was concerned…and I have seen so many cases.”

“I don’t remember it. I only remember seeing you and Khin Myo and Miss Ma.”

“Khin Myo wasn’t here. It must have been the delirium.”

Edgar looked up from the bed. The Doctor peered at him, his face stern and unexpressive. “Yes, perhaps only the delirium,” said Edgar, and he turned over and slept again.

Over the course of the next few days, the fevers came again, but they were not as strong, and the terrible dreams didn’t return. Miss Ma left his bedside to take care of the patients in the hospital, but returned to visit him throughout the day. She brought him fruit and rice and a soup that tasted like ginger and made him sweat and his body shiver when she fanned him. One day she came with scissors to cut his hair. The Doctor explained that the Shan believed this helped fight illness.

He began to walk. He had lost weight, and his clothes hung even more loosely on his thin frame. But mostly he rested on the balcony and watched the river. The Doctor invited a man to play a Shan flute for him, and he sat in his bed beneath the mosquito netting and listened.

One night, alone, he thought he could hear the sound of the piano being played. The notes drifted down through the camp. He thought it was Chopin at first, but the song changed, elusive, elegiac, a melody he had never heard.

Color returned to his face, and he began to share his meals with the Doctor once again. The Doctor asked him about Katherine, and he told him how they had met. But mostly he listened. To stories of the war, of Shan customs, of men who rowed boats with their legs, of monks with mystical powers. The Doctor told him that he had sent a description of a new flower to the Linnean Society, and that he had begun to translate Homer’s Odyssey into Shan, “My favorite tale, Mr. Drake, and one in which I find a most personal significance.” He was translating it, he said, for a Shan storyteller who had asked for a legend of “the kind that is told at night, around campfires.” “I am now at the song of Demodokos. I don’t know if you remember it. He sings of the sack of Troy, and Odysseus, the great warrior, cries, ‘as a woman weeps.’”

They went at night to listen to musicians play, drums and cymbals and harps and flutes mixing in a jungle of sounds. They stayed until it was late. When they returned to their rooms, Edgar went out onto his balcony to listen again.

After several days, the Doctor asked, “How are you feeling?”

“I am well. Why do you ask now?”

“I have to go away again. It should only be a couple of days. Khin Myo will stay. You won’t have to be alone.”

The Doctor didn’t tell Edgar where he was going, and Edgar didn’t see him leave.

The following morning, he rose and walked to the river to watch the fishermen. He stood in the brush of blooming flowers and watched bees flit between the patches of colors. He played football with some of the children, but tired quickly and returned to his room. He sat on the balcony and looked out on the river. He watched the sun move. The cook brought him lunch, a broth with sweet noodles and fried crisp pieces of garlic. Kin waan, he said when he tasted it, and the cook smiled.

Night came, and he slept a sweet sleep in which he dreamed he was dancing at a festival. The villagers played strange instruments, and he moved as if in a waltz, but alone.

The next day, he decided to write to Katherine, at last. A new thought had begun to bother him—that the army had notified her that he had left Mandalay. He had to convince himself that the military’s obvious lack of interest in her before he left—which had angered him so then—meant that they were even less likely to be in contact with her now.

He took out paper and a pen and wrote her name. He began to describe Mae Lwin but stopped after several lines. He wanted to describe to her the village above the mountain, but realized he had seen it only from a distance. It was still cool outside. A fine time for a walk, he thought, The exercise will do me good. He put on his hat and—despite the heat—a waistcoat he usually wore on summer strolls in England. He walked down to the center of camp.

In the clearing, two women were wandering up from the river carrying baskets of clothes, one against her hip, the other balancing the load on top of her turban. Edgar followed them along the small trail that ducked into the forest and climbed the ridge. In the quiet of the woods, the women heard his footsteps behind them, and turned and giggled, whispering something to each other in Shan. He tipped his hat. The trees thinned, and the women climbed a steep rise, up the mountain, toward the village spread over its back. Edgar followed, and as they entered the village, the women again turned and giggled, and once again he tipped his hat.

At the first set of houses, perched on stilts, an older woman crouched in the doorway, the patterned fabric of her dress taut against her knees. A pair of scrawny pigs lay sleeping in the shade, snorting and twitching their tails through their dreams.

She was smoking a cheroot the width of her wrist. Edgar greeted her. “Good day,” he said. She slowly took the cheroot from her mouth, gripping it between her gnarled and ring-laden third and fourth fingers. He half expected her to growl, goblinlike, but her face broke into a big toothless smile, her gums stained with betel and tobacco. Her face was heavily tattooed, not with solid lines like the men, but with hundreds of small points, in a pattern that reminded Edgar of a cribbage board. Later he would learn that she was not Shan but Chin, a tribe from the west, that this was written in the details of her decoration. “Good-bye, madam,” said Edgar, and she returned the cheroot to her lips, inhaling deeply, sucking her wrinkled cheeks into the cavern of her mouth. Edgar thought again of the ubiquitous advertisements in London: Cigars de Joy, One of these Cigarettes gives immediate relief in the worst attack of Asthma, Cough, Bronchitis, and Shortness of Breath.

He continued to walk. He passed small, dry fields, patterned in rising terraces. With the drought, the planting season had yet to begin, and the soil was turned up in hard, dry clods. The houses were raised at varying heights, their walls like those of the camp buildings, interlaced strips of bamboo woven to create geometrical patterns. The road was empty except for scattered bands of dusty children, and he saw many people gathered in the houses. It was hot, so hot that even the best soothsayers had failed to forecast that today would be the day the rains would come again to the Shan Plateau. The men and women sat and talked in the shade and couldn’t understand the Englishman who took walks under such a sun.

At one house he heard a ringing, and stopped to look. Two men crouched shirtless in loose blue Shan trousers, hammering metal. He had heard of the Shans’ reputation as skilled blacksmiths; Nash-Burnham had pointed out knives in the Mandalay market that were forged by Shans. I wonder where they obtain the metal, he thought, and looked closer. One of the men held a railway spike between his toes, which he hammered against an anvil. Don’t build a railway through a country of hungry blacksmiths, he thought, and it sounded eerily like an aphorism.