Eventually Halbert got to the bottom of her list to the most devastating disease of citrus plants in the world—huanglongbing, Chinese for “yellow dragon disease.” Huanglongbing, which is also called HLB or citrus greening, had been spreading slowly through India, China, Indonesia and South Africa.… Researchers began injecting antibiotics into tree trunks and looking for resistant genes to splice into orange trees. But huanglongbing continues to spread.

Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlights I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical regions, and assembled them together in China or Indostan.

In the morning he got up pallid and he shaved badly, but he was a generation ahead of his own Euphemia series, and the school of charm and quiet humour and of letting things slide with a kind of elegant donnishness, had lost him for ever…

Absently, he picked a dew-wet leaf from the hibiscus shrub, crushed it in his palm, put it in his mouth and came towards her, chewing.