They rose and started emptying the cups into the pails, keeping their eyes fixed on the latex which ran, smooth as milk, into the pails. Soon the pails were full with the first load, and, staggering a little, panting as they carried, their hearts beating against their chest walls with fear and weariness, they clenched their jaws, and set off at a quick, swinging trot towards the weighing shed.

On his second collecting trip Big Dog Tsou was waiting for Neo, squatting at ease beneath a rubber tree, and with him was a girl whom Neo had seen once before collecting subscriptions for the People Inside. And then Neo remembered, pay day this afternoon, subscriptions tonight and tomorrow. Neo remembered the girl. She was dressed as a rubber tapper and had a black handkerchief round her head and tied under her chin, as his wife had, framing her smile.

‘Meeting, comrades,’ said Big Dog Tsou, smiling.

And now out of the vaporous heat between the rubber trees they came, the tappers from the four corners of the estate, greeting Big Dog Tsou carefully.

‘Tell your mother to carry the pails without me,’ Neo told his son and, speaking of himself as of another person,’ tell her he will be back in half an hour.’ And he followed Fong Kiap, waddling in front of him, again, as in a repetitious dream.

As he walked he found himself noticing, through the floating membranes of exhaustion, everything else alive, small things, like small silver fish going through an ever-spread net … the bark of trees, scurfed with ridges, and the millimetre amplitudes of their cuts through which the pitiless white drip fell into the cups. In this part of the estate the lallang grass grew thick up to a man’s thigh. This was the part of Division 1 abandoned to the People Inside by the mata-matas and the weeders, and the Estate Manager had not come round since the last shooting. The mark of the People Inside was over all, with slashed and dying trees.

‘Truly,’ thought Neo, words going through his mind as if spoken in his ear, ‘truly the People Inside are strong and it is dangerous to go against them.’ He passed a tree with a great dark gash, pith congealed. ‘Fire and water,’ he thought, ‘we stand between fire and water, between the Police, and the People Inside.’ And then they were at the old smoke house, with the derelict rubber press like a misshapen instrument of torture gone dead in the middle, for the wooden parts had burnt down and the rusty iron alone was left. About thirty tappers were there. Among them, dressed as tappers, the People of the Movement, eager and talking, going from one to the other, happy and excited.