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parts of the lake under the domination of local spirits. It was after reading this leaflet that Andy told us he preferred not to sleep in a hotel bedroom that night but would lock himself in the car.
    We took a walk along the lakeside to visit the nearest of the villages. These were the busiest, liveliest of places, reflecting once again a local appetite for road signs in Indonesian, SUBSIDENCE, HAIRPIN BEND, FALLING ROCK, DANGER, PROCEED WITH CAUTION , which they had purloined for use as a form of decoration together with advertisements of all kinds: for car batteries, soft drinks, detergents, and above all those for Rinso. The village streets were full of small, strutting Lowry figures, coming and going in all directions, with men holding cockerels clipped and ready for the combat under their arms, women hanging up washing, herds of goats directed by their owners purely by arm signals and ginger dogs. Inevitably these people grew rice, and here the paddies’ sparkling attraction was intensified by the use of hundreds of brilliantly coloured flags planted in the mud or suspended from lines to keep the birds away. Small mosques were built in each village by the villagers themselves. The domes were what really counted in these buildings and they were made from scales of metal hammered out in local forges.
    Despite the Acehnese reputation for social exclusiveness and taciturnity the whole population of a village turned out when we passed through to wave and shout something that we hoped was applause.
    Surprisingly another guest arrived the next day to break the spell of the hotel’s emptiness. ‘Don’t even attempt to pronounce my name,’ he said. ‘To my friends I am Anatole. Where are you from? England? Well, of course, one glance was sufficient. I hope you will be staying over the weekend. It is a relief to have someone to talk to. Here it is hard not to feel cut off. I am in the logging business. This is a nice place to relax and the security is good, but let us face it, it is a little dull.’
    Anatole’s father had been a diplomat and he had spent several of his formative years in Paris and London. He had black, gleeful eyes, his youthful appearance betrayed only by the tufts of grey over the ears. He stood as erect as a soldier on parade, but his hands were constantly in motion. I noticed about him, as I had done before in the case of upper-class Indonesians who ate frequently and well, a faint odour of the spices employed in their food. My impression of him was that he suffered from a lifelong struggle to use up energy. There was no time when all parts of his body were at rest. He had placed himself at this moment close to a table scattered with antique bric-a-brac, and constantly shifted the position of various objects. Thoughts breaking into the stream of consciousness provoked shallow bursts of action. He broke off in mid-sentence to dash to the window, from which he returned with a frown and a shake of the head. ‘Boat still not fixed,’ he muttered. ‘As I was saying,’ he went on, ‘this is a great place to go to earth for a few days. By the way, I just saw your man down there. He was running round in a circle. Anything wrong with him?’
    ‘He finds that it helps with the nerves,’ I told him. ‘He picked up some talk about hostage-taking and I think it worried him.’
    ‘Tell him he has no value as a hostage,’ Anatole said, with a sudden explosion of laughter. ‘Anyway he’s quite safe while he stays here. You must have heard of the GAM, the so-called Aceh Liberation Front. They’re the people who are causing the trouble, but it’s quiet in this season. Could be something going on round Meuseugit. That’s past Banda, where the road gets squeezed in between the mountains and the sea. They just killed a few loggers working on one of our concessions. Here we’re well placed. Trouble is it’s coming to an end. We don’t clear-cut in this area, and unless there’s an upturn in the price of