BooksBarbecue
Back Railroad of Death
Chapters (40)
  1. FOREWORD
  2. RAILROAD OF DEATH
  3. REFERENCE LIST:
  4. Railroad of Death
  5. PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION (1948)
  6. INTRODUCTION
  7. PART ONE: SINGAPORE
  8. CHAPTER 1
  9. CHAPTER 2
  10. CHAPTER 3
  11. CHAPTER 4
  12. CHAPTER 5
  13. PART TWO: RAILROAD OF DEATH
  14. CHAPTER 6
  15. CHAPTER 7
  16. CHAPTER 8
  17. CHAPTER 9
  18. CHAPTER 10
  19. CHAPTER 11
  20. CHAPTER 12
  21. CHAPTER 13
  22. PART THREE: BASE CAMPS AND LIBERATION
  23. CHAPTER 14
  24. CHAPTER 15
  25. CHAPTER 16
  26. CHAPTER 17
  27. CHAPTER 18
  28. CHAPTER 19
  29. CHAPTER 20
  30. APPENDIX ONE:
  31. APPENDIX TWO:
  32. APPENDIX THREE:
  33. APPENDIX FOUR:
  34. APPENDIX FIVE:
  35. APPENDIX SIX:
  36. APPENDIX SEVEN:
  37. APPENDIX EIGHT:
  38. APPENDIX NINE:
  39. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
  40. And The Dawn Came Up Like Thunder

Back in Medan was his factory, and here the pearls were cleaned and polished by the very latest electrical methods. The pearl revolved under the action of a certain gas at a very high speed, but only for a fraction of a second. Lorenzo asked us to bring over a scientist because he thought he’d got the name of the gas wrong, but when we brought over a Dutch and an English chemist, we found that the old boy had remembered it perfectly. Since his family had begun in the business, some four generations ago, they had collected five enormous, almost pure black pearls, which had become sort of heirlooms in that they couldn’t be sold and which were nearly unique. He was now head of the firm, for his brothers were lazy and existed comfortably enough on the moderate allowances he made them. He had a yearly contract with Simon Artz for 2,000,000 rupees a year!

No wonder we liked to chatter with the old man, who in turn relished the Wednesday evenings we used to meet. When the officers left Chungkai there was a procession of us going to wish him farewell. A friend of mine, rather notoriously absent-minded, went round to bid him goodbye just as we were parading to leave. As he left Lorenzo’s hut he stumbled into one of his neighbours, who smiled as my friend apologised to him and asked him if he knew Lorenzo.

‘We know him very well,’ said Ted, ‘he’s a dear old fellow and quite extraordinarily interesting.’

‘I thought it might interest you to know,’ said Lorenzo’s neighbour, smiling quite nicely, ‘that in reality he is a clerk who works in a Printing Press in Medan!’

image

The last part of this interlude is more political in theme. When all the dancers and kronchong players had gone up country again, Noel found an excellent new Guru who taught him Javanese and who really broke the back of Malay for me. He was an Indische Jongen named Freiman; his mother was a Sundanese of the highest rank, a Raden Mas, and his father a European. He had a gift for languages and spoke Sundanese, Malay and Javanese, knew some Arabic and Sanskrit, quite apart from four Western languages.