Perhaps it is Malaya, as Betchine says. Everything seems to me out of gear, awry, disproportioned, tedious, and grotesque, and therefore unreal. I must not try to make a meaning and a shape out of this. Like my footsteps in this corridor, at the moment there is no resonance to any event, no significance to any gesture, no illumination to any explanation. There is only repetitious exuberance, the raw undiluted essence of growth, a violence in all that I apprehend, in which I must not instil significance, for at the moment it dispenses none. This is Malaya. And there is no pattern as yet. Only confusion.

At the end of the corridors are the wards. Here unrelenting darkness clusters, sombrely untouched by a few electric bulbs spaced along the two arms of the T-shaped ward. Each arm is eighty yards long and ten yards wide. Along both sides, the sheeted grey beds need the sting of flashlight to reveal their huddled contents or their disarrayed emptiness. Where the ward arms intersect is the massive platform on which the night nurse sits, and the single bright stab of a reading lamp bent over the table at which she writes, interminably writes, the endless night’s report.

Night nurse in charge of the ward is overworked, as all the nurses are; she watches one hundred and twenty beds, goes up and down, ministering. When busy in one of the arms, she can have no inkling of what goes on in the other arm. It is out of sight, out of hearing. It would take a strong man’s shout, a healthy man’s din, to bring her running on the slippery tiles in the half gloom. When an injection is due, she rushes twenty yards to the room where the trolleys are kept, hurries back with the rattling trolley to the patient’s bed, returns to the platform. I see her lift light-dazzled eyes to interrogate the dark-filled three tunnels which radiate from where she sits; she cannot distinguish me, nor has heard my steps, till I stand two yards away from her. Suddenly I see her, uniform and all, elongated by some monstrous, invisible power, pulled abominably in the shape of the cross she rules over, her feet stretched to reach one end, her finger tips touching the doors at the other two ends. Her head remains under the bright bent bulb. She peers and smiles, for at last she has seen me. ‘Good evening, doctor,’ she says, with the pleasant Malayan English insistence on the second syllable of bi-syllabic words. ‘What can I do for you?’ Her sweetness brushes away the nightmare woven round her, like a spider web, but not its repetition every time I walk the wards.