Cengkih

Cengkih is clove: the dried flower bud of a tree that grew, until the sixteenth century, on only a handful of small islands in the north of Maluku. On Ternate there is a clove tree called Afo that is thought to be three or four hundred years old.

The Portuguese and then the Dutch fought to own the trade. Today nearly all of Indonesia's cloves are smoked instead, crackling in kretek cigarettes, and part of the smell of a Javanese street at night is clove.

This perfume is that smell without the cigarette: clove over tobacco leaf and labdanum, nutmeg and ginger to open it, and a thread of smoke under everything.