In this state of intense mindfulness, he passed the Sultan’s flower gardens and the Zoo with the peacocks flying across the road to perch on the walls of the Judge’s house, the small flame-coloured pony eating the morning grass; left the mosque on his right with the smooth lawns sloping away from its white walls and domed and cupolaed towers; and had the Straits of Johore in front of him, the water silver-sapphire and rose-opal, smooth-shining softly under the sky, fringed by the hoary rain trees and the filmy casuarinae along the road. Here and there in the water rose the kelongs, fishing stakes looking like long-tailed crabs perched on high legs strutting the water. They were made of wooden piles driven into the sea, hundreds of yards away from shore. A small house was erected at one end of a platform, nets spread from the piles. Two to six men lived on them for a week or more, catching fish, salting and curing it. Luke, slowing, gazed at them, thinking of the communist courier routes – convenient for smuggling, these kelongs. At night the sampans and motor boats could anchor there, goods could be unloaded, hidden under piles of nets, fish heaped to hide them … There were hundreds of such stakes along the long and complicated coast, standing out to sea like moored ships. Three were definitely known to him as stopping points in a communist route, smuggling ammunition from Singapore to Johore.

Past the Johore State Customs, with polite smiling inspectors waving him on; on to the Causeway, three-quarters of a mile long, bridging the Straits. The Causeway, an umbilical cord of stone linking Singapore to Malaya. On his right lay the large round pipe carrying water to the city of Singapore from the mountains of Johore. The railway ran alongside the pipe, and the road next to it. How vulnerable it all looked. Perhaps it was the knowledge of this tenuous link crossing the unsolid sea which kept Malaya and Singapore far apart instead of uniting them … as if the Straits were a new English Channel, unspanned by road or rail or needed water. In the war, the Causeway had been blown up to prevent the Japanese crossing; they had crossed anyway, undaunted.