Little boys, hands linked like flowers in chains, laughing, go towards the mosque, sinuous cohorts of pink and yellow and pale green satin shirts advancing up the road. In the hollow by the bridge which spans a rank, weed-overgrown canal, pullulant with miniature silver minnows flashing coral dots along their flanks, lays the sonorous prison, whose glistening wall tops are embedded with glass chips. It gives out jazz music all day: ‘Oh how I love you, Rose Rose I love you.’ A tune started in a Shanghai cabaret, sung by a sweet-throated actress of eighteen, and now heard in Spanish in Manila, in Japanese in Tokyo, and in six languages in Malaya.

The road again, the blue-grey, heat-hazy tarmac, and on either side the jungle kept at arm’s length by a battalion of Tamil women. They have faces of polished rosewood, encrusted with mother-of-pearl and ebony eyes. They stand and behead the rough long grass, precursor of that other kingdom of the living, the vegetable universe. Over their heads and down, at the end of dark arms bared by movement, they whirl their angled scythes and softly the stalked grass flies upwards and falls scattering like cut hair.

Hieratic as sunset-straddling cattle I see them, the women, swathed in scarlet, azure, ochre, and emerald, cheap cloth so soon faded in the Malayan sun. Their ear lobes are yawning holes circled by a string of flesh hanging to the shoulder and supporting knobs and cubes of gold, their savings through the years, weighing the elastic flesh into a loop of skin which sways and swings as the women wheel their scythes.

Watchful, enormous trees, too high and too wide, bearing foliage too thick, leaves too many, too large – thick, succulent, grey-green – stand to massive attention right and left of the road. Lanky coconut palms poise their bomb-loads of fruit. Years later I shall not have lost my first discomfort towards the dreary oppression of unchanged, round-the-year green, the manifestly eternal voracity which sprouts, fungates, ferments, germinates, blurs, and befogs every sharpness of the red sandstone land, smothers hill and rock with leguminous bulk. The heart of a Malayan city, with bare streets and pink-roofed bungalows, white walls and tamed trees strung to fit the road, is always a small clearing wrested from the jungle and, too easily, turns jungle again.