The small things of the night, slight and eternal: the oscillating recitatives of cicadas, the haphazard knocks of the toctoc birds, . Malay and Indian melodies, lizards’ laughter, were soldered to the other things, important, yet evanescent, looming ponderous in the day’s heat, soon to pass into forgetting: the dull thud of bombs on the jungle; the spit and hiss of machine guns, crouching Fijians or Gurkhas waiting for prey at the edge of the rubber; the road blocks; people lining up outside huts being searched, the miles of wire. Keeping time like a metronome apportioning the hours, a drip felt, not heard, the heaving sap in millions of trees dispensed sumptuous latex, the white gold, the rubber, rubber the live gold for which perhaps all this was happening, for which men fought and died, betrayed or kept faith: the harsh tree-wealth, the curse, the boon of Malaya.

Great or small, mean or significant, Malaya-the-last-defence-against-communism and Malaya-the-last-colony slogans, the words and deeds, sickening or superb, trivial and inhuman and brutal or tender and pitiful, the confusion of cruelty, obtuseness, violence, hypocrisy, courage, and devotion, all fell or clicked or slid into place, like amber, like pearls; disparate but harmonious, piecemeal and imperfect, fragments of a land created of fragments, kept together, soldered by its one infallible sap, dripping monotonous as prayer: Give us this day our daily latex.

And this was peace, perfecting the opposed into a circumferential geometry of life, for which chaos is but a word, the name of an order not yet born; where madness, greed, and violence sought to lay their hot waste upon all, where greed, madness, and violence were counted in the drops of the latex; this was peace, in the clemency of night to blend the confusion of the fissured land into harmony, smooth as horizon circle, gathered as latex in a cup, complete and flat as death.

*  *  *

Brown and black and rufous ants I knew, omnivorous elegant pacers on soil and wood; and the small shrill bright red ones surging up one’s leg, plunging ravening jaws into flesh, undeterred by tearing their bodies off. White ants had now invaded our bungalow, and were busy eating it up.

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.