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laces together and slung them around my neck, as I usually do when I’m out with Denis. We’re walking in a trickle of cold water that runs over the sharp rocks. Denis stops in the bends, scans the water in search of camarons, of crayfish.
    The sun is high in the sky when we reach the source of the Boucan high in the mountains. The January heat is oppressive, I find it hard to breathe under the trees. Striped mosquitoes come out of their nesting places and dance in front of my eyes, I can see them dancing around Denis’s woolly hair too. On the banks of the torrent, Denis takes off his shirt and begins to gather leaves. I draw nearer to look at the dark-green leaves covered with fine grey down that he’s harvesting in the shirt, now converted into a sack. ‘Dasheen,’ Denis says. He splashes a little water into one of the curved leafs and holds it out to me. Caught in the fine down, the drop remains suspended, like a liquid diamond. Further on, he gathers other leaves: ‘Dasheen wrap’. On the trunk of a tree he points to a vine: ‘Mile-a-minute vine’. Palmate leaves open out in a heart shape: ‘Faham tea’. I knew that Old Sara, Capt’n Cook’s sister was a ‘ yangue ’ – that she made potions and cast spells – but this is the first time Denis has taken me to look for plants for her. Sara is Malagasy, she came from Grand Terre with Cook, Denis’s grandfather, back in the slave days. One day Cook told Laure and me that he’d been so frightened when he arrived in Port Louis with the other slaves that he’d gone and sat up in a tree at the Intendance and refused to come down again, because he believed they were going to eat him, right there on the wharves. Sara lives in Black River. She used to come and visit her brother and she liked Laure and me a lot. Now she’s too old.
    Denis continues to walk along the torrent towards its source. The thin trickle of water runs black, smooth over the basalt rocks. The heat is so muggy Denis splashes his face and chest with water from the stream and tells me to do the same to freshen myself up. I drink some cool, light water right from the stream. Denis is still walking out ahead, along the narrow ravine. He’s carrying the bundle of leaves on his head. He stops at times, motions to a tree in the thick of the forest, a plant, a vine, ‘Benzoin’, ‘hart’s-tongue fern’, ‘Indian laurel’ , ‘tall balm’, ‘mamsell tree’, ‘prine’, ‘glorybower’, ‘tambourissa’ .
    He picks a creeping plant with long, fine leaves and crushes it between his thumb and forefinger in order to smell it: ‘verbena’. Still further along, he walks through the underbrush until he reaches a tall tree with a brown trunk. He removes a bit of bark, makes a cut with a flint: golden sap runs out. Denis says ‘balltree’. I walk behind him through the brush, bent forward, avoiding the thorny branches. Denis moves agilely through the forest, in silence, senses on the alert. Under my bare feet the ground is wet and warm. I’m afraid, yet I want to go further, penetrate deep into the forest. Denis stops in front of a very straight tree trunk. He tears off a piece of bark and has me smell it. It’s a smell that makes me dizzy: ‘rosin’.
    We walk on, Denis is moving faster now, as if recognizing an invisible path. I’m suffocating in the heat and humidity of the forest, I’m having trouble catching my breath. I see Denis stopped in front of a bush: ‘coromandel’. In his hand a long, half-opened pod from which black seeds like insects spill. I taste a seed, it’s bitter, oily, but it gives me strength. Denis says, ‘This food for maroons with the great Sacalavou.’ It’s the first time he’s talked to me about Sacalavou. My father told us once that he died here, at the foot of the mountains, when