He found the painting on Monday afternoon, in the gap between his first integrated spell work class and the second stage of the transformation.
The artist had a small gallery on a side street off the magical district — a single room with perhaps thirty canvases, the work of someone who had been painting Kampala for twenty years and had found, sometime in the middle of those years, a way of seeing the city's light that was specific to him and impossible to mistake for anyone else.
His name was Kato. He was perhaps fifty, with hands that carried the permanent evidence of paint in the creases and the calm of someone for whom the work was simply what he did rather than what he performed.
Ron stood in front of the large canvas for a long time.
It was a view of Kampala from the hill above the magical district, looking south-west toward Lake Victoria. The evening light — the specific Kampala evening that Ron had been watching from his window since the first night — was rendered in a palette that was not quite realistic and was entirely accurate: ochre and burnt orange deepening toward the lake, the city's seven hills in graduated layers of green and terracotta and shadow, and at the far edge the lake itself, not blue but its own colour, a brightness at the edge of everything.
It was approximately sixty by ninety centimetres. It would need careful packaging for transport. It was, he thought, the best thing he had encountered on the trip, and the trip had contained many excellent things.
He bought it.
Kato rolled and packaged it himself, with the care of someone who understood what he was sending into the world. Ron paid the price asked without negotiating, which was not how Diagon Alley worked and appeared to be how Kato's gallery worked, given the expression it produced.
'You see it,' Kato said, looking at Ron with the assessment of a painter for someone who has stood in front of his work for a long time.
'Yes,' Ron said.
'Most people see a landscape,' Kato said. 'You see the light.'
'The light is what makes it the painting rather than the place,' Ron said.
Kato looked at him for a moment. 'Come back tomorrow,' he said. 'I have something smaller. For travelling.'
Ron came back the next day and found a study — a small canvas, twenty by twenty-five, the same view in early morning rather than evening, the light completely different and entirely the same painter. He bought that too. He put the study in his trunk for travelling reference and the large canvas in the expanded pouch for safe transport.