The village was built on the side of an immense Janusheaded volcano looking both ways: to the purple highlands from which he had just come, and also towards the sea. At that hour with the red sun going down between Krakatau and Java Head in the Sunda strait and its light setting on fire one huge summit of cloud after the other, the earth below by contrast looked black and already abandoned to the night. The plain and the redeemed marshes below the village and between the volcano and the sea were no longer visible, but he could tell the whereabouts of the islet-locked ocean by its effect on the northern sky where the sunset fires were abruptly extinguished and the moisture-charged air rose swiftly to hang like a thick mauve curtain between the day and the night. It was its exalted situation above the malarial plain and its nearness to the sea which had made the village a favourite health and pleasure resort of the more privileged persons working in the great port on the coral coast. The village contained several big luxurious hotels and the roomy holiday houses and week-end villas of many prosperous merchants and higher officialdom. But there was no holiday atmosphere about it on this evening of fire in the western sky and darkness on the earth. An air-raid alarm had sounded just before Lawrence arrived and no light shone in the fast deepening twilight to welcome him. The streets were silent and empty. At the entrance to the village square the challenge of the policeman who stopped the convoy rang out with a loudness which sounded almost profane. Luckily the policeman knew about the convoy. He was there, in fact, to conduct the men and officers to their billets.
It had not been easy to find decent room for them, the policeman explained. The hotels and houses were full to overflowing with fugitives, mostly women, children and old men who had been pouring in from the outer islands. It had been terrible to see them coming in because most of them had left their homes, husbands and belongings at a moment’s notice in order to escape the Japanese who had an uncanny knack (he said it with a trace of acid cynicism) of always showing up a hundred miles ahead of where only a few hours before the latest official communiques had placed them. The refugees had arrived packed like cattle in trains with few belongings other than what they stood up in and not knowing what had become of the fathers, sons and husbands who had been left behind. Though he was dutifully polite and scrupulous in his attention to the needs of Lawrence and his men the policeman explained all this with an undertone of accusation, as if he, too, blamed the British and their failure to hold Malaya for everything. When all the men and officers were under cover and at last provided for, he escorted Lawrence to the most modern hotel in the village. Lawrence would have preferred to remain with his men but he had no option since he had been ordered to be night and day at the end of a reliable telephone until the battle with the enemy was truly joined and this hotel had been chosen, the policeman said, precisely because it had the best telephone system in the place.
By then the darkness was almost complete. Only the lightning flashing from some yellow head of curled cloud, filled the black night with profound unrest and made the silence stutter with the distant mutter of thunder. Out of smoking hedges swarm after swarm of fireflies began to break like sparks blown from the great blacksmith working his forge in that volcano towering purple against the sheets of lightning which flared from time to time behind it. Whenever his eyes recovered from the flashes of light, Lawrence was amazed how dense and how near the jungle crept even to so long-established a settlement. In a state of heightened perception brought about in him by that immense world-drama so swiftly sweeping to its climax, the jungle appeared like a tiger crouched patient, watchful and at ease in the night, ready to spring on the village the moment the back of man was turned. From it, as from the fields, streams and paddy waters, rose a noise of ecstatic crickets, singing lizards and booming bullfrogs that was deafening. It sounded as if all the small, secret forces of creation, whose enemies prowled by day, were joined there in the chorus of gratitude to the night which alone gave them their chance of fulfilment. Immediately above Lawrence was a great patch of clear sky. When the lightning flared it was like a deep lagoon ringed with coral strands of cloud, but in the darknesses between it was charged with the same unrest of creation which vibrated in the earth around him. The Milky Way emerged too with a profuse deep-sea phosphorescence as if the mother of light were spawning in those coralled waters.