Script quote on the thigh

The cook has begged me to stop sleeping on the cargo hatch, so I write this from the galley, where the stove still holds a little warmth and the rats have the decency to keep to the bread bin. We are four weeks out of Liverpool and the coast of Bahia is a smudge of green on the horizon. Mr Pell, who keeps the ship's books and has never once looked at a plant without sneering, asked me last night whether the orchid was worth a man's life. I told him the words I keep pinned above my desk were written for me alone, and he laughed until he coughed.

You will remember the line I copied out for the Bristol nurseryman: I will almost die for this beauty. I was not joking. The flower I am after grows only on a single ridge above a river the maps call by three different names, and the men who guided the last collector up it did not come down. I have a paid guide now, a boy called Tomé with bare feet and a knife he sharpens on his heel, and he has promised to take me there before the rains.

Tomé came in this morning and set a heel of bread beside my notebook without a word. Then he drew in the condensation on the window a flower with six petals, the lowest one fringed like a skirt. I asked him what it was called. He shrugged and said only that it was the one that lives where you cannot follow it. I have pressed a leaf of it into this letter. Keep it somewhere dry, and if the next post does not reach you, read the margin twice.