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mean that Japan, or the bandits who served her, had taken the island.
    I wondered if there were now any point in my trying to reach Djogjakarta. I knew that the Japanese were not kind to their captives.
    The sound of the surf seemed to grow louder and louder and more and more restful until soon the questions ceased to plague me as I stretched out on the soft sand and let my weary brain and body sink into sleep.

CHAPTER FIVE
The Price of Fishing Boats
    A t noon on the next day I saw the fishing village. It was a somewhat ramshackle collection of log and wattle huts of various sizes. All the huts were thatched with palm leaves and some had been raised on stilts. The dugouts, moored to rickety wooden jetties built out into the shallows, were primitive and hardly looked seaworthy. The huts were shaded by tall palms whose curving trunks and wide leaves appeared to offer greater shelter than the houses themselves.
    I shrank back behind a hillock and deliberated for a few moments. There was a chance that the villagers were in league with either the Japanese or the bandits or both. Yet, for all I was desperate to get to safety, I was tired of hiding, I was dreadfully hungry, and had reached a point where I did not much care who those villagers were, or to whom they felt loyalty—just as long as they fed me something and let me lie down out of the glare of the sun.
    I made my decision and plodded forward. I thought I knew the kind of white man these people would be most prepared to tolerate and feed.
    I had reached the centre of the village before they began to emerge, first the adult men, then the women, then the children. They glowered at me. I smiled back, holding up my pack. “Medicine,” I said, desperately trying to recall my vocabulary.
    They all looked to me as if they could use what I had to offer.
    A few villagers emerged from the general crowd. These all carried old guns, parangs and knives which, in spite of their age, looked pretty serviceable.
    “Medicine,” I said again.
    There was a stirring from the back of the crowd. I heard words in an unfamiliar dialect. I prayed that some of them spoke Malay and that they would give me a chance to talk to them before they killed me. There was no question that my presence was resented.
    An older man pushed his way through the armed villagers. He had bright, cunning eyes, and a calculating frown. He looked at my bag and uttered a couple of words in his dialect. I replied in Malay. This had to be the headman, for he was far better dressed than his fellows in a yellow-and-red silk sarong. There were sandals on his feet.
    “Belanda?” he said. “Dutch?”
    I shook my head. “ Inggeris .” I was not sure if he saw any difference between a Dutchman and an Englishman. But his brow cleared a little. He nodded.
    “I have medicine.” Carefully I enunciated the Malay words, for his dialect was not one with which I was familiar. “I can help your sick.”
    “Why do you come like this, without a boat or a car or a flying machine?”
    “I was on a ship.” I pointed out to sea. “It caught fire. I swam here. I wish to go to—to Bali. If you want me to cure your sick, you must pay me.”
    A slow smile crossed his lips. This made sense to him. I had come to bargain. Now he looked at me almost in relief.
    “We have little money,” he said. “The Dutch do not pay us for our fish now that the Orang Djepang war against them.” He pointed up the coast towards Djogjakarta. “They fight.”
    I disguised my despair. So now there was no point in trying to reach the town. I would have to think of another plan.
    “We have rice,” said the headman. “We have fish. But no money.”
    I decided to continue with my original idea. If it worked I would be a little better off. “I want a boat. I will cure what sickness I can, but you must give me one of the boats with the engines.”
    The headman’s eyes narrowed. The boats were their most valuable possessions. He sniffed and he frowned