Empire of the East Read Online Free PDF Page A

world. We had driven two hundred miles through paddy-fields along the shore, through many pleasant villages with kite-flying boys, Muslim girls on bicycles, old men with their long religious beards, rice-farmers with children’s butterfly-nets splashing after tiny fish, and overbearing policemen on Japanese motorcycles — people in fact busying themselves in every corner of the landscape. Now we had passed the last little girl dragging her buffalo, and easily avoiding the occasional horn-thrusts in her direction, and the people had gone. The green and silent world of the jungle was closing in.
    Suddenly, and strangely, it was cooler, and the odours of grass and sap, of acrid blossom, of earth and weedy decay were in the nostrils. Back on the coast road the only trees had lined up in plantation rows, identical in shape, height and colour, and as repetitious as a wallpaper pattern. Here they were spread in graceful disorder over the low hills at the back of the plain. Someone had built a mosque and then abandoned it. Its tin dome was streaked with rust, and tipped to one side like a drunkard’s hat. To the delight of the boys the narrowing road had developed sharp bends, a corrugated surface and perilous potholes that offered an excuse for the display of driving skills. The roadside markets of the small coastal towns had been glutted with fish and innumerable varieties of fruit. The only village in the first ten miles on the road to Lake Tawar could offer no more than fruit bats, their wings tied with auspicious red twine, hanging upside down by the claws, their eyes subjecting the prospective buyer to a sad but penetrating gaze. They were offered very cheaply — the largest of them costing less than the equivalent of 5p — and would be turned into stews believed in Indonesia to be the most effective treatment for asthma. Even Andy believed in the value of this remedy, although he rejected as pagan superstition the popular consumption of their flesh as a remedy for defective eyesight.
    It was immediately after leaving Blangrakal that we were exposed for the first time to the vivacity and exuberance of the Indonesian rainforest. We were passing under the flanks of the ten-thousand-foot peak of Mount Geureudong, of which we caught an occasional glimpse through the trees, where the entrances to the jungle were guarded by a phalanx of leaves like great interlocking shields. Placed behind them were enormous ferns which provided a defence for trees soaring possibly to one hundred and fifty feet. Tucked into niches of this rampaging vegetation were tiny villages constructed almost entirely of corrugated iron, and here and there their occupants had quietly done away with a tree or two and crammed a minute paddy-field into the space, in which men with thin, sallow tropical bodies groped incessantly in the mud. Bundles of birds with white faces and long yellow bills had been trapped in these mini-swamps and were offered at the roadside, although the villagers showed no interest in them and there was no passing traffic. The area had somehow managed to avoid official scrutiny, for clandestine logging quite clearly went on in a small way. When we stopped to examine an orchid we discovered a pile of tree trunks, their peach-coloured wood laid bare by the axe, inefficiently concealed among the ferns. This bootlegging of wood was a dangerous business for the small people who practised it, for they risked long terms of imprisonment if caught. Great multi-national timber firms were clearing Indonesian forests at the rate of tens of thousands of acres a day. A hill tribesman living by the traditional slash-and-burn system, by which a fresh patch of an acre or two was cleared annually and cultivated for ten years or so before being returned to the jungle, might be sent to prison for ten years.
    There were twenty or thirty miles of this impeccable forest, after which the road passed out of the steep hillside and down into an open valley where