‘Nonsense,’ said the General. ‘It’s because we’re here, Mr Quo, that you aren’t at each other’s throats. If we were to leave, there’d be terrible bloodshed. Malay and Chinese would be massacring each other, just as Moslems and Hindoos in India. As for your scheme of education, it’s all very well, but your young people have got their eyes turned to Red China, as many Malays have got theirs fixed on the Arabian desert. But we’re not as frightened of the Arabian desert as we are of China. All this talk about giving a stake in the land, an equal place to Chinese culture … Our only hope is to have one nation, one country, one loyalty. …’

He looked fixedly at Quo Boon: ‘Will you help us?’

‘All I can,’ replied Quo Boon, ‘but not in recruiting. It’s no good.’ He shook his head, a businessman full of practicalities. ‘Look at what happened when you had your Manpower Regulations. Drove hundreds of young men into the jungle; thousands back to China. You said yourself they were far gone in opposition. How can you hope that an old man like myself, suspect because of my age, my wealth, and my friendship with your colonialism, will persuade and convince these suspicious, rebellious young people to become recruits in your regiments? They will become all the more opposed to you, and the communists will exploit their fresh grievances, and more will go away. And as for me,’ said Quo Boon, ‘I will lose what little influence I still have with them, for they will call me a straw man, a dummy, and a running dog of British imperialism. No, General, you’ll have to think up another scheme for me.’

*  *  *

5-7 p.m. Zodiacal Sign: The Bull.
Mystic Significance: Apotheosis.

Kallang airport of Singapore is a sea-plain, metallic with light, harsh with steel wings and neon, glossy as under-moon water.

Once it was pestilential bog, sea-earth margin bound by tenacious mangrove, rampaging cobra-coiled tentacular roots travailing water and soil to indissoluble swamp.

Then came the builders and took a hill and laid it low and brought, basket by basket, red earth to bury the yawning skin of the mire.

Over Kallang turn the rubber wheels, swing the metal wings of the world’s airplanes. Whinnying in the blue maned wind of their begetting they parade to stillness, steeds of space fretting the sleek resistless tropic air with patches of lucid thunder.

The harsh neon delineates the airport’s white tower and veranda, a ship’s deck breasting the sea. At space of evening in flakes gleam the windows; busy men as dummies clad walk their precise shadows; the flat horizon is turbaned in gleaming orange upon which, fine drawn in China ink, sway the languid palms of the land. Unseen the indigo sea sidles a small gracious breeze inland, its fragrance drowned in oil and tarmac smell, its whispers lost in purr of engines fracturing the early night. The beginning stars are dimmed in the raucous green and orange and yellow lights twinkling below the sky.