At Kinsayok there were barges on the river where you could buy eggs – five cents at Chungkai, twelve and a half cents here – and a little fruit; and there was the best bathing of any camp in a clear stream that flowed into the river, its bed being terraced at various levels so that you could just sit in the cold fresh water below a series of separated, small waterfalls. But the thing we remembered most about Kinsayok was the stinking old huts we were expected to sleep in. To sit half a minute in shorts on the edge of the slats meant a dozen fat bed bug bites on the thighs; every stick of bamboo in the huts crawled with the stinking things and sleep inside there was out of the question; so we laid our bedding on the ground outside, between the huts, and the blasted things came down out of the huts, crossed the intervening few yards to our blankets and once again devoured us. We moved further afield and, while we rested our aching bodies and wondered glumly what other foulnesses the Nips could have in store for us, we gazed up at a perfect tropical night, with its myriad stars and sun of a moon that lit the whole countryside so brightly that I could read the minute pencil notes in my diary.

We were off again next morning and hadn’t yet been caught up by the Sick truck. The leader of the party was left behind, and also my young batman with all my books, shaving, washing and eating kit with him. As we covered listlessly the sixteen kilometres that separated us from Rin Tin, the last camp in 4 Group, we discussed, before we became too tired to chatter, the stories that had filtered through about Rin Tin. Were they true? We’d heard in Kinsayok and below that it was a plague spot and had been closed down. What had been wrong with it? Was there anyone still there? We reached it eventually about four in the afternoon, for our pace was dragging more and more each day.

This camp’s entrance lay past a Nip Transit Camp that looked clean and trim. Perhaps, then, all the stories were nonsense! Three hundred yards further on we dipped into a gully, climbed the other side, and found ourselves near a high riverbank and in Rin Tin Camp. It was the eeriest and foulest place we had seen in Thailand, and two things struck us immediately about it: first the acrid stink of dirt and decay, and something worse; and secondly, an uncanny stillness. Built and cleared on the top of the riverbank, it was entirely enclosed by a ring of high trees; not a bird sang, not a twig rustled, even the cicadas seemed in a conspiracy of silence. There was something evil, something ominous about the place; we wanted to clear out of it as quickly as we could.