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headquarters and instruct them to send out airships and patrol boats to look for me.
    The gunfire stopped for a moment. I looked back and saw the tiny figures of the villagers. They seemed to be kneeling before the Japanese.
    Then the machine-gun started up again, but this time it did not fire out to sea.
    * * *
    A few hours later I began to think that the chances of pursuit had disappeared. I had sighted only one airship in the distance and soon it would be night. I had been lucky.
    As I chugged out over the smooth and blazing mirror of the ocean, congratulating myself and with my thoughts increasingly turning to abstractions, I did not realize that the Japanese patrols must have been searching waters where I might logically be. It seems that I had already lost my bearings, in more senses than one.
    As the burning days and the cold nights passed, I began to realize that I had no chance at all of reaching Australia, and I started to indulge in debates with my starving, thirsty self on the nature of life, the nature of death and the nature of what seemed to me a continuing struggle between Chaos and Order, with the former tending to come off rather better in the long run.
    And it was this babbling and foolish wretch—once a practical and pragmatic soldier in a more orderly world—who eventually sighted Rowe Island and decided, reasonably, that it was nothing more than a splendidly detailed illusion.

CHAPTER SIX
The Mysterious Dempsey
    R ove Island was discovered in 1615 by the British explorer Richard Rowe.
    In 1887 it was found to contain formations of almost pure calcium and in 1888 was annexed by Great Britain. That year the first settlers arrived and by 1897 they had obtained a concession from the mother country to work the phosphate deposits. From being uninhabited before 1888, it had by the first third of this century achieved a population of more than two thousand, mainly Malay and Chinese miners who had come there to work for the Welland Rock Phosphate Mining Company, which was the island’s sole industrial concern.
    Rowe Island lies—or lay—in the Indian Ocean, 224 miles south, 8° east of Java Head and 259 miles north, 79° east of the Keeling Islands. It is 815 miles from the ruins of Singapore and 1,630 miles from what is left of Freemantle, Western Australia. Its European population used to number a hundred or so: the Official Representative and his staff; the manager and administrative staff of the Welland Rock Phosphate Mining Company; various private residents there for their health (Rowe Island was a very healthy place); a young lieutenant commanding the small garrison of Ghoorkas; some restaurant-, shop- and hotel-keepers; various missionaries and the airpark and dock officials. When I arrived most of these, of course, had already gone and neither airships nor steamers came to collect the island’s only export.
    The settlement had a mosque, a Buddhist temple, a Catholic church, a Methodist chapel and a mission hospital run by the Church of England. The hospital was staffed by a group of young Pakistani nursing nuns under the direction of a layman, Dr. Hira, a Sinhalese. The hospital’s missionary and his wife had departed for Australia soon after the Destruction of Singapore.
    It was in this hospital that I woke up and slowly realized Rowe Island was not, after all, an hallucination.
    I was sore and my body stung all over, but I no longer felt thirsty, merely hungry. I lay between the rather rough linen sheets of what was evidently a white hospital bed. The walls were white and there was an ivory crucifix on the wall, a few tropical flowers stuck in a pot on the ledge by the partially opened window. I felt the urge to scratch, but discovered both hands were bandaged. I moved and my joints throbbed. I tried to sit upright, but fell back wearily. It was still hard to believe I was safe, after all. I had survived.
    A little while later the door opened and in came a shy, beautiful Pakistani girl in a