Mount Ramelau is the highest ground in Timor-Leste, 2,963 metres in the middle of the island, and it is walked at night. Headlamps leave Hato Builico at two or three in the morning, following a stone-stepped pilgrim path, the last village lights dropping away behind you. The lower slopes are stone-walled maize plots and streams running clear off the mountain, which is where the old montane forest went; what is left of it survives in patches. Higher up, round Mambai houses with steep thatch and timber posts sit on the grassy shoulders, appearing and vanishing as cloud drifts through. Above the chapel the ridge goes bare, grass and rock and air close to freezing. Arriving in the dark is the whole point. Through the dry months the valleys underneath fill overnight with cloud that lies dead level, so the sun comes up over a surface rather than a landscape, and on the clearest of those mornings both of Timor's coasts stand above the mist. You are looking at the entire width of a country at once. Within an hour or two the cloud breaks up and the ground comes back.
The Mambai who farm these slopes know the mountain as Tatamailau. A Virgin made in Italy has stood on the summit since 1997, raised in the middle of the Indonesian occupation, and thousands come up overnight for the Feast of the Annunciation in late March and again in October. Down in Hato Builico the main street fills once a week with growers in from the high gardens, sacks of potatoes and cabbages set straight on the ground, the mountain standing directly over the roofs. The climb starts at a painted arch marked Santuáriu Inan Santa Ramelau, and one of its tiled panels carries the verses of Foho Ramelau, the song that told Timorese to take their own land back and that the occupation outlawed. Going up you pass it in the dark. Coming down, in daylight, you can read it.