In the heat of the afternoon the clear air of the island over this high plateau not only trembled from the impact of the long lances of bronze equatorial sun, but also vibrated with a strange, quick kind of rhythm which seemed to come to it from tomtoms beating deep down under the thin-skinned earth, mobilizing its tribal hordes of fire, lava and earthquake, for those colossal files of the volcanoes which bestrode the 690-mile-long island from west to east in twenty-league strides. I call it thin-skinned, because as earth goes the earth of Java is extremely young in geological time, and everything on the island still had upon it a kind of sheen like that of a new-born calf. It was still so sensitive to earthquake and eruption that I felt even as I lay with my ear on the stones of my prison floor at night that I could always hear the tribal forces of this primeval earth drumming barbaric below me.
To add to this tremble of air and light there were millions of dragonflies, with bodies as if made from some aluminium of stars, wings of slivers of sapphire so fine as to be transparent, and heads of turquoise, darting ceaselessly over the burning paddy waters, until the brilliant atmosphere became so sequined and crackling with such a quick electric sparkle and shivering with such a refined inter-vibration of precious wings that from time to time I would have to shut my eyes, conditioned to our motionless prison-shade, from it.
Finally, to frame this stirring canvas of our vision, in the far blue-satin west, as the perfect counterpoint to Tangkoeboehan-praauw, stood the other great mountain of the plain: Malabar – always a Hindu citadel, purple and imperial in the shadows cast from behind it by the long level light of the sinking sun.
What made this moment of beauty most poignant of all, perhaps, was that for people who had been so long in prison as ourselves it was an unchanging kind of beauty. It had been like that every day since we had been incarcerated. It had been like that because there were no seasons in Java: the jewelled land, from end to end, was like a long emerald strung on a shining cord of the equator itself and the climate seemed forever the same. There was no movement of winter into spring, spring into summer, summer into autum and so on into winter again, to suggest that time ever changed and moved out of given moments of itself into other phases of change and renewal. One had never realized before how much one needed the seasons and how much one’s own sense of renewal depended on their annual witness that not only life on earth but the universe itself was deeply and irrevocably committed to a process of greater becoming. This was the cruelty of the beauty of the scene, because it presented itself to tired and imperilled senses as evidence that time itself on this island might be on the side of the Japanese, and that the years of imprisonment would never change. There was for us, as it were, always only one day: there could only be another when we were free. It would take the nightly fall of rain, the purple lightning and the thunder to rescue me from this feeling of life in a trance from which perhaps now not freedom but death would release one. Fortunately there were the stones to gather and the irony of having to endure the bitter complaints of worn-out, half-starved men, and officers not in the know, that one had done nothing to prevent the Japanese forcing them to this hard labour of collecting useless stones and carrying them back into our camp.
The ordeal, as these men regarded it, was over only too soon for me, because with so many thousands to collect stones the task was quickly accomplished and this precious world of infinite beauty was shut out from our eyes perhaps for ever.
Once this was done, I arranged for each of the six platoons in their strategic distribution in the camp to maintain from then on always a system of guards at night. Henceforth one man in each section was to be perpetually awake, listening for anything unusual in the sounds that reached us in prison. Most of us, already some three and a half years behind prison walls, had developed an acute ability for interpreting the noises made by the guards on their rounds of duty, or those that drifted in from their quarters hard by the gates. For instance, on many occasions intimations of surprise searches for secret radios, hidden weapons or evidence of the plots that their imaginations, with all the fertility of the fanaticism which is a product of unacknowledged self-doubt, constantly imputed to us, had reached us through an indefinable awareness of a change in the tempo and timbre of the sounds of Japanese activity from outside. This had happened in the middle of the night, in the early morning and even in the course of the prison day, and gave us just enough warning for the appropriate precautions to be taken. We now knew our captors so well, I felt, that we had only to be perpetually on guard to make it impossible for them to mount an action, on so great a scale as a massacre of some thousands of men would entail, without betraying it through sound or the abnormal absence of sound.
Even if our interpretation of the sound or its absence failed us, I had a conviction that we would know if something of overwhelming import reached the last stage of active preparation, through an intangible change of atmosphere that would forewarn and forearm us. I had often in the past seen dumb domestic animals in Africa so aware of the secret intent of the people who had bred and reared them and earned their trust that they could hardly walk, knowing they were being led to a distant place of slaughter. How much more, therefore, would not this same kind of subliminal mechanism, built into all living spirits, be accurately at work in us, who were in the power of men we mistrusted, provided we kept our minds open and awake to receive its warnings in the urgent code of our blood. From this time on until the end there was not a moment when there were not always seven of us perpetually at the ready to receive and perceive warnings of this or any other kind.
I say seven because I counted myself as an addition to the six. I have always since I can remember slept rather like an animal. I rarely sleep for more than a short period at a time and all through the night at brief intervals will find myself waking and sitting up to listen for anything unusual in the sounds of the night. I know that such a manner of sleeping is normally utterly unnecessary, at times most exhausting, and in the long run perhaps even harmful. Whether it is an inheritance from a family who lived for some centuries always on the dangerous frontiers of European expansion in Africa, or just a consequence of years of conditioning to some kind of continuing participation, even when asleep, in the changing manifestations of the nature of the aboriginal Africa I love, I do not know. All I can say is that I have never been able to change it and that, particularly all through my years in prison, however deeply involved I might be in a dream of sleep, I would be wide awake and listening at the slightest change in the rhythm or pull of the night.
All this done, there remained only the task of selecting the men who would have the greatest chance of escaping in the final hours, and carrying out the news of what had happened to us. It was obvious that none of us British could qualify for the role. Not only would our physical appearance give us away, however well we disguised ourselves, in an island so thickly populated with Javanese that it carried the densest proportion of persons per square mile of any area on earth; but our ignorance of the language, the people and the terrain would make it impossible for us to survive long enough to carry out so difficult a mission successfully.
It would need men who could pass themselves off as Indonesians of some kind, and so merge and blend safely in the world outside for long enough to meet the forces of liberation when they came. The only persons in these categories were obviously only to be found among the men under the command of the Dutch. The Dutch themselves, for all their knowledge of the country and the languages which most of them possessed, had the same physical disqualifications as we had. The most desirable candidates for the mission would have to be selected either from the few indigenous persons, or from Eurasians among their ranks.