He finished the album on the last Thursday, the evening before the final day.
He worked on it at the desk in his room with the window open and the sound of the city coming up from below — the specific Kampala evening, the voices and the traffic and the cooking smells from the street and underneath all of it the distant clarity of the lake.
The album had been a question of selection all along. Eighty-three photographs now — he had added the Uganda ones as he developed them, slotting them into the chronological sequence with the care of someone adding chapters to a book that had already been written and finding they belonged.
The Fwooper's impossible orange. Ssemakula sitting in the doorway of the stone room on the last Saturday. Nalukwago's hands demonstrating the groundnut technique. The view of the lake from the window, taken on the first evening. Wasswa working on the carved Snitch, the old man's hands moving with the specific certainty of someone who had been making things for fifty years. Kato in his gallery beside the large canvas, taken with Kato's permission, the painter in front of the painting that had the city's light in it.
He wrote the captions in the margins: Ssemakula: he taught me what I was already carrying. Nalukwago: the important part is that you listen. Kato: you see the light, he said. I thought that was about me.
The last photograph in the album was one he had not taken himself.
He had asked Baraka, on the last day of the creatures class, to take it — handed over the camera and pointed to the spot and stood with the Mvule staff and the Ugandan afternoon light and looked at the valley.
Baraka took the photograph.
He put it last. A boy — not quite a man, not quite the child the body suggested — standing in African light with a staff and the specific quality of someone who knew what he was doing and where he was going.
He closed the album. Three copies. One for the shelf at the Burrow. One in the Gringotts vault. One in the pouch.
He packed them carefully and put them in the trunk.