Frau von Pussels had been posting a notice on the board in the cool lobby of the Schiller Institute when she heard the C announcing the Hildebrand’s arrival. ‘Donnerstag,’ she said to herself, glancing up at the rest of the cards and announcements tucked symmetrically behind the lattice of ribbon which criss-crossed the baize board, ‘schon gut.’ Elsewhere – very far away – there were clocks and calendars. In Manaos there were boats and seasons, in addition to the daily thunderstorm at ten past noon.

In the five years since her husband had died Frau von Pussels had taken to spending most of her time in the Institute she had helped found thirty years previously and which she had effectively run ever since. She preferred it to her own house, an overlarge modern villa built at the expense of her husband’s parent company in Hamburg in a style thought suitable for the founder-manager of a mercantile concern which nowadays had five other branches in South America. She found the villa soulless and – although she would never have said so – in most awful taste. It was prettily sited on a knoll overlooking the river but she liked none of the views inside the house itself. Additionally, the architect had installed some new system designed to cool the air without overhead fans. This mechanism was concealed under the floors and despite his assurances that it would be completely silent it rumbled faintly, making ornaments buzz on polished tables and giving one the impression of being on board ship. Nor, as far as she could determine, did it make the house a single degree cooler; but since she was embarking on her fourth decade here she had long since grown acclimatised and it made little difference to her whether the system worked or not.

The premises which housed the Schiller Institute were by contrast quite old, having been built by one of the earlier Portuguese settlers. The house was large and dark but to her mind not at all gloomy. Rather, it was sombre and fragrant, being lined with dusky forest woods of immense weight and hardness. The waxed floorboards in the hallway near where she was standing were each a metre across and lay like sheets of a fabulous glowing metal, creakless and so close that a playing card might not be inserted between them. From the half-open door of the salon came the repetitive sounds of the Nepomuceno boy quietly tuning the Institute’s tropicalised Bösendorfer. A shaft of brilliant Brazilian sunlight lay across the hall and from the shrubbery outside the front door came the faint sounds of tussling birds. She gave one of those involuntary little sighs which, once sighed, made her wonder whether perhaps she had forgotten to breathe for the last five minutes. She realised she was quite happy – no, that was absurd at sixty-two with a dead husband and a dead son – unexpectedly contented would be a better way of putting it. Everyone knew human lives petered out, but here in this stout house on foreign soil there was every evidence of a culture which would outlive. Here were busts of Schiller and Goethe, of Beethoven, Leibnitz and Bach; here was a library; here were the tones of a piano being brought up to scratch for tonight’s recital. And here – she glanced once more at the board to make quite sure all the cards were straight – were the talks and slide-shows and lectures by residents with particular skills and by visitors of distinction and accomplishment. It was all a small and proper part of the only thing which finally mattered: the handing-on of a tradition, the transmission of civilisation.

The notice she had just posted was for one of the Reverend Miles Moss’s popular talks which he often gave when passing through Manaos. The Reverend Moss was the Anglican Chaplain on the Amazon with a parish stretching two thousand miles from Pará to Porto Velho. His real distinction, however, lay in his enthusiastic moth-hunting. He was at present in Manaos and had told her he had just discovered three new varieties of hawk-moth, one of them in a garden not a hundred yards from the Institute. He was witty, eccentric, charming in a fashion which made her feel something lopsided in him to which she was attracted. She had insisted on his speaking before he quit town to return to Pará in time for Christmas at the end of a month’s parochial duties upriver. The Reverend Moss was above all one of those gifted professional amateurs the English seemed to produce in such numbers; he was a considerable authority and in international entomological circles was held in the highest regard. His own collection was magnificent, his work – which from time to time was published by Lord Rothschild – systematic and pioneering. He was also an exhibitor at London’s Royal Academy. What could better symbolise the passing-on of European civilisation than taxonomy itself ? Classify, classify, classify; that was the painstaking but ultimately sure way of making sense of the natural universe. Things proceeded, the unknown became known, the darkness retreated.

Such were not, of course, Frau von Pussels’ actual thoughts as she approved the neatness of the notice board. They were the basis of a rationale which underpinned her dedication to the Institute and its principles and indeed her public person here in this remote enclave. She had long been the wife of Otto von Pussels and a pillar of Manaos’s cultural life. She was now the widow von Pussels who, once she had emerged from mourning, could beat no retreat. In any case she had nowhere to go unless it were back to an unfamiliar Germany defeated by war and humiliated by treaty in one of whose anonymous military graveyards lay the remains of their son Eusebius. No, there was no retreating. But the sheer barbarousness of the war had undercut everything, including her own confidence in the civilisation she loved. The machineries of mass destruction had been unprecedented yet there had been scarcely any hesitation in using them. The ethical humanism of centuries, the flower of European culture, had stood wiltingly by while on all sides men climbed into cockpits and tanks and submarines, threw poison chemicals at each other, shredded nature and human beings with impartiality. If Frau von Pussels was not alone in having lost some of her faith she was equally in the company of all those who re-asserted the values of their battered civilisation. She was gently, indomitably marked by that human tendency which, seeing how nearly a building was toppled, praises it for having been so soundly constructed; but she had come perilously close to blaming it for the inherent weakness which almost overthrew it.

Young Nepomuceno had practically finished. He was now vamping in various keys the tunes which only piano-tuners play: pieces seemingly passed on by rote through a guild, since no tuner she had ever met was any sort of pianist. As she passed the doorway, which exhaled a scent of pot-pourri and the mildewed felting inside the opened Bösendorfer, she again experienced a tingle of pleasure at the calm and purposefulness of it. Here in the middle of however many million square kilometres of jungle, dotted with naked savages still occupied with blowpipes and shrinking each others’ heads, a cultivated young man had just tuned a very beautiful musical instrument on which later that evening an Italian girl was to play Scarlatti, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Busoni. It was going on. It was proceeding. The darkness would have to take a further step backwards.

In at the front door, catching her in a white blast of light at the foot of the grand staircase, came Raymundo the messenger boy. Raymundo, a handsome mestiço lad in his teens with glittery black eyes, had various duties about the Institute in reward for which he was fed and clothed and given a converted pigeon-loft to live in. This was an airy den of which he was greatly proud and for two years he had been showing the kitchen girls the rooftop panorama it afforded of the town. One of his duties was to go down to the dockside and obtain a passenger list of every sizeable ship which visited Manaos. He offered one now, the pages very white in his brown hand.

‘Our latest visitors?’ Frau von Pussels asked him in lingua geral. ‘You’re a good boy, Raymundo.’

‘It’s the Hildebrand, senhora.’

‘I know it is. I ought to recognise its hooter by now.’ She took the list with that pleasurable anticipation such things give in out-of-the-way places. Now and then people one knew turned up unexpectedly, but more often there were visitors whose names were familiar and who could be persuaded to give a talk, a lantern-slide show, a recital. She had a considerable knowledge of who was who in the arts and sciences of the Western world and in turn had herself become a minor celebrity whose name was widely known as that of a person one could not leave Manaos without visiting. Now she smoothed out the sheets of the Hildebrand’s passenger list and froze, one shoe caught in a puddle of light on the tread of the first stair. There was a long silence.

‘Es musste passieren,’ she said half aloud.

‘Senhora?’

Realising she had been staring through the boy she smiled and shook her head, dismissing him. She scanned the rest of the list but there were no other names she knew. Her foot in its light-puddle turned slowly and as slowly rose to the tread above as if leaving glue. In the empty space where it had been the mineral flecks in the white marble sparkled like exploding particles of dust. She went up to her office and opened the shutters enough to permit the energetic half-light of an excluded tropic day to bring the room and its furnishings to life. Sitting at her desk she wrote a careful letter in English on the Institute’s headed writing-paper.