Chan Ah Pak, whose frame of mind, being Chinese, was to look down upon the Malays as unreliable and inefficient, believed in this invulnerability of Mustapha Kling. The Malays did have potent charms, and they sold invulnerability spells in tiny amulets containing a cut from the root of a male virgin bamboo with cabbalistic signs and the name of Allah engraved upon it. In the ancestors’ country, too, there had been bands in the forests, men like himself, Chan Ah Pak, fleeing to the green shade from a corrupt and tyrannous government and thence dealing true justice, who had been invulnerable. And the Righteous Fists, who had killed the imperialists up and down China fifty years ago, had claimed that silver bullets alone could hit them. Such was Mustapha Kling’s boast today.

Ah Pak hitched himself a little farther forward, on his concealed platform, noticed that the special constables had relapsed into immobility, and let his mind wander softly, half dreaming.

Unlike Luke Davis, Chan Ah Pak did not know doubt. Bulwarked, felted from hesitation by violence since he was twelve, his only unease was dreams. He had dreams of the most vivid variety, and ascribed it to hunger, which of course he accepted as he did violence, common as breathing, nearly as ubiquitous and casual as death. The most usual dream he had was a bank of gorgeous butterflies skimming the thick green water of a pool, their self-illumined wings gathering all the strained twilight in a blaze of swift splendid colour; then unfelt, soft walking as violence itself and as noiseless, came a gust of wind and the butterflies would suddenly be gone.

‘In the floating dream of life, we are but leaves blown from a tree, butterflies playing for a day in the sun …’ Despite the slogany creed which made his diary (where he never wrote down his dreams) such dreary reading, Ah Pak was of a race whose poetry was an explanation of existence, of living. Whenever any comrade brought into the jungle a Chinese newspaper, Ah Pak would turn to page eight, which carried from top to bottom the blank verse, the sonnets, the short stories written by the Chinese school children of Malaya, the best of the lot every day.

Ah Pak’s memory retained no dates, months or years, but was sensitive as a photographic plate to the time of the day and the people, their gestures, their words, and the words unuttered behind the masks of their faces. In the enduring twilight of the jungle he would think back easily, solacing himself with the stories of himself and the comrades and the world that he knew. This past, always fresh and clear, unexhausted and nourishing, reeled off before his eyes, unrolling like an endless panoramic photograph.