When Neo and his companions, hunger and thirst, toiled in the rubber forests, where liquid white gold to be neither eaten nor drunk fell into his pails, rain had been an enemy, stoppage from work, gap in his daily wage. It had meant more hunger, more cramps in the belly, more dancing shadows in front of his eyes, more stifled sighing from Neo Saw, and weeping from the children. Sometimes if the rain came briefly while tapping they would not stop but wait for it to go, look heavenwards from under the leaves, and opening their mouths, drink the water that came trickling between the rubber trees.

The sallow young man with a tiger tattooed upon his left shoulder, the secret spring of messages that went through the ‘black’ sections held the men together in brotherhood; this sallow young man had suddenly gone, between six armed policemen, last week. It was his tattooed tiger which had both betrayed and saved him; and when he had gone, the drums of silence, hammering softly on plywood wall and stone, told how he had been bought out by the brotherhood, and now deported, sent to the ancestors’ country.

Among those caged within the triple barbed-wire fence, and a forbidding wordlessness, a new leader would be selected from the inner ring of the ‘black’ section. There would be no meeting of men coming together as is done outside the wire fences, and yet each man would cast his vote. The predestined leader Neo had not seen but knew. He was so feared by the white-skins that he had not been allowed outside in the fresh air, for two months, in that other camp called the Camp of the Specials, one hundred miles from this one. Neo would vote for him like the others after the rain had stopped, for the drum song of the rain, loud and imperative, allowed no other talk.

‘A sullen dog, a real bad one.’ Thus the Commandant with the inspection tour trailing behind him like a pi-dog’s tail, pointed at Neo breaking stones that morning before the rain, and playfully lifted his swagger stick, pretending to bring it down smartly on Neo’s shoulders. But of course it was well known that the Camp Commandant had never beaten a prisoner, and the committee of inspection tittered as one man. Neo did not look up, his face was shut as usual. He would not smile. ‘It is unfair,’ he thought, ‘it is unfair.’ And the knowledge of this unfairness kept him from making the gestures, from giving the smile and the glance that would make this unfairness lighter. Neo might learn the secret passes that would make him communicate with others of the ‘black’ section, but he could never learn the language, the language that everybody outside the wire fence spoke to smoothen life, as stealthy murderers rub oil on their bodies to make the grasp of would-be pursuers futile: the language of smiles and servility.