There is no point in going into the minute details of all the plans, A, B, C, D, etc., which the two of us developed, or the various manners in which we intended to launch and adapt the battle within the camp according to circumstances, because my only reason for mentioning the matter here is to use it as an illustration of our desperate condition in our last prison, and the sense of pre-determined doom which was coming down like the fall of a moonless night on the spirit of our captors and those of their few forewarned captives.
But what is worth mentioning, perhaps for the same reason, is how we obtained the stones. Unhappily there were hardly any stones in the quadrangles of our prison. I knew there were plenty outside, because I had seen them for myself on our march into camp. The problem was how to get them inside the camp, and fortunately here the weather came to my rescue. I think it was perhaps the rainiest of all the four Julys we experienced in prison. We seemed to have tremendous downpours almost every night, the rain so heavy that it transformed the great flashes of forked lightning – some looked a foot wide – darting through it from the vast towers of monsoon clouds raising their heads far above us in the night, I imagined, like a colossal complex of Hindu temples. Because of some mysterious process of refraction by the heavy rain-drops, the lightning appeared to us a curious purple colour, and would fill with a wonderful imperial light my own dark little world, contained within a single mosquito net suspended from the bunk above me and falling down to the stone floor on which I was trying to sleep. The thunder that followed always made for me the most wonderful music I have ever heard, because it became almost a divine voice resounding in my imagination with the most authoritative exhortation not to forget that, powerful as the Japanese were, there was a far greater power at work in the universe outside, which sooner or later would end their brief and brittle assumption of empire. I would awake at dawn refreshed, and go out to the roll-call which began each day, to find the uneven surfaces of the prison quadrangle turned into pools of water.
The sight of these pools of water, one morning, suggested the answer to the problem of the stones which had become one of my major pre-occupations. The Japanese throughout their occupation had shown themselves hyper-sensitive, if not profoundly afraid, for themselves, in matters of sickness and disease. It occurred to me that if the senior Dutch doctor – the Japanese had for centuries thought Dutch medicine the best in the world – could persuade the prison command that water in the camp not only would breed malarial mosquitoes but, through stagnation and pollution, cause other far more dread diseases like typhoid, the Japanese would respond to any preventive measures they might suggest. The measure I had in mind was that we should be allowed outside daily, and within the vicinity of our prison collect stones to level out the unevenness of the surfaces inside, and to camber them in such a way that any fall of water would be drained instantly into the main irrigation ditch which ran through our camp. The ruse worked. Every afternoon for several days we were energetically hustled out of the camp as if the Japanese had thought of the plan themselves, to collect stones around the prison and so liberally level out the surfaces within.
These afternoons were for me among the most unforgettable moments I spent in captivity. This feeling of growing peril which I cannot emphasize enough, combined with the stress of having to contain vital secrets and responsibilities almost alone, heightened my perceptions to what in hindsight appears to have been close to an extra sensory degree. I would walk out of the prison walls and feel that I had never even in my childhood seen the physical world with such intensity and known it to be so beautiful and so full of wonder. I would emerge from the purple shades of prison and pause by the gates to gaze at it for as long as I felt it wise – in order not to provoke the undesirable attention of the guards. I would pause, indeed, not only to take in the beauty of the scene beyond the walls but because so much and so profoundly had prison walls become a part of one’s life that, on these extremely rare occasions when one was allowed to walk through them, one’s senses reeled from the impact of a world without walls. It was almost as if walls had come to mean not just instruments of confinement but a physical support against the vast, free, comparatively empty and uncontained world outside. One seemed afraid that without walls for one’s vision to lean on, one’s spirit would not only totter but one would lose one’s balance and, giddy, fall bodily to the ground. I was to learn, when talking to friends who had been in prison with me, later on when the subject was no longer too painful for public discussion, that they had for days after their release precisely the same sensation of being in danger of falling over without prison walls to support them. We were in this regard like men who had been forced to walk on crutches because of broken limbs for so long that they were afraid to abandon them weeks after they themselves were mended again, and for months would hanker to have their crutches back.
In addition to the heightening of perception of which I have spoken, there was the stimulation of one’s senses provided by the extraordinary beauty of the scene itself. For me there is no scene of greater beauty on earth than this high plateau on which our prison stood. Immediately behind us there was the great volcano of Tangkoeboehan-praauw, which is a Malay name meaning literally ‘the ship turned upside down’, because the shape of the mountain could with the help of a little poetic imagination be visualized as a legendary Malay ship turned upside down and petrified by time; so much so that I often thought of it at night as a symbol of our own state – for whose world could have been turned more upside down than ours? All around Tangkoeboehan-praauw, as far as one could see, stretched great terraces of rice descending to a plain full of the geometric shapes of more and more paddy fields.
On these terraces and in these paddy fields one would see the peasants of the island at work under their wide brimmed hats of golden rice-straw, in the slow, patient, timeless manner of souls dedicated to cultivating the earth, which always suggests that the greatest and longest and most terrible of wars and the most powerful of dynasties could come and go but only the cultivator would be there to go on for ever. One would see, in one and the same moment, rice in the full round of its processes of growth on earth. One saw it being planted by hand in paddy fields filled with water; one saw it standing lush, and of a green charged with a kind of electricity which made it sparkle and crackle in front of one’s eyes; one saw it a rich, golden colour standing tall, each head of rice bowed reverent with the weight of grain, and a line of women patiently harvesting it. Wherever a patch of water in the paddies showed itself to the sky, it revealed not only its own quicksilver surface but, as in a cool mirror, the profound reflection of the solemn topless towers of clouds that were building up in the blue sky for another downpour of rain at night.