From six in the morning when the family went tapping until two in the afternoon when they returned, there was no food and drink but one small bottle of water between them, and often the mata-mata would taste the water to be sure that no sugar had been added, for that was forbidden. But still some tappers occasionally put a little sugar in, for the children, and were caught.

Neo had never done anything wrong about his hunger and his thirst and that of his wife and children. Never had he taken sugar out, nor rice. And yet he was in a detention camp. ‘It is not fair,’ he thought, ‘it is not fair.’ But further his thought, benumbed, would not go. He had even stopped worrying about Neo Saw and the children, knowing that they too were behind wire, together.

Outside the attap huts of the ‘black’ section fell the rain, swirling sinuous rivulets of yellow-red mud round the stilts of the huts. Here among the ‘blacks’ the prisoners did not speak one to the other, as among the ‘greys’ or the ‘whites’. In unrainy weather they broke stones and carried sand. When it rained, they were confined, each to his cell, and the mata-matas walked along the sheltered wood verandas, peeping in through the small barred windows in the doors; and yet the’ black’ section was full of news and silent talk.

Even Neo had picked up some of the secret passes and gestures, the drumming of fingers on wood, the talk of the secret societies. There was a way of lifting a stone which meant one thing, and there was a way of hammering it and how many blows of the hammer which meant another. All the time they talked thus to each other. And many of the things which happened outside were also known to the brotherhood within.

Neo did not know that he knew these things, incapable of describing his knowledge in words. With him the knowledge was like hunger and thirst, which bound all men to each other. And now imprisonment had become one of those wordless states through which one existed and felt and knew others’ thoughts, not spoken of in words of man.

Outside the rain swept back and forth like the palms of a drummer on a skin drum; its relentless, high music changed pitch and tone whether it drummed upon the roofs or the pathways. Endless, wordless world of tones and sounds and messages conveyed by fingers drumming, rain beating down, slapping as dark-smooth fingers of hands upon the tight drum-skin of the earth. Even the rain carried messages.