They built tunnels protecting them from light their killer, creeping climbing brown shaggy tunnels up the walls. They ate their way to the bathroom and into a box of soapflakes. Their pearly, flaccid bodies, emaciated maggots trailing glabrous extra skin, moved among the flakes, and through the hole in the wall antennae waved and peered. I found them waving and peering at me in my bath and, clothed again, went downstairs to look for their trail coming through the floor from the servants’ quarters below the bathroom.

The servants’ rooms were nearly empty. A Chinese wayang, open air theatre, was performing in town. Cookie had gone with his family to see the actors wheeling and swirling gorgeous robes under the neon lights. In the abandoned servants’ room a naked bulb threw yellow light upon Ah Mei’s face as she sat at the table, writing on a small sheet of paper. Opposite her sat her mother on crossed legs on the plank bed, hunched as an owl, staring at her daughter, as if dictating. I wore rubber slippers and coughed, for I dislike to surprise people’s secrets. Immediately the mother was up and coming straight towards me, her body held squarely, as a shield. Above her shoulder I told Ah Mei, who had risen with her hand upon the paper, about the ants, and she replied that she would search early in the morning, and I left.

I went down to the garden, still refusing the knowledge that was already in me about Ah Mei, sniffed the night air’s mellowness, the soothing virtue of its sweet unmoving, and thought again how right were the Malays to do their marketing at night instead of struggling by day. To night belonged work, and wit, play and dance and eating, all enjoyable actions of life in the coolness away from the killing sun. I paced the quiet night garden, unquiet, still not wanting to know.

The lights of a car bent round upon me and stopped. It was Luke Davis, with Che Ahmad. I waved, and suddenly lonely asked them to come in for a drink.

Che Ahmad, refulgent as a planet in velvet songkok, white satin blouse closed at the neck by an artificial diamond button, sapphire, jasper, and silver sarong with white satin trousers beneath, and black leather shoes, appeared slightly heavier with lithe smooth fat. Many men of his race fatten when over thirty, but his face of lustrous amber was still beautiful and sensual, his body still supple and serene, as he stood with a quietly happy smile, a glowing Asian Apollo. Luke Davis, in open shirt and long crumpled trousers, looked gaunt, tired, and disreputable. He smelt of sweat and sadness, and threw himself in the rattan chair to gulp a stengah. Che Ahmad, deeply religious, only took orange juice and removed his shoes. ‘When I am in town I wear shoes, when I go back to my kampong I walk kaki ayam.’ (Literally ‘chicken legged’, naked footed.) ‘How know the earth that God made, otherwise than with one’s bare skin upon the ground?’ Every gesture of life had meaning beyond meaning, and chaos did not exist, chaos was but a word, for all was rounded in the perfection of Allah’s will.