Island - Aldous Huxley [9]
“Ready,” Vijaya called.
Will turned his head and saw the stretcher lying on the ground beside him.
“Good!” said Dr. MacPhail. “Let’s lift him onto it. Carefully. Carefully…”
A minute later the little procession was winding its way up the narrow path between the trees. Mary Sarojini was in the van, her grandfather brought up the rear and, between them, came Murugan and Vijaya at either end of the stretcher.
From his moving bed Will Farnaby looked up through the green darkness as though from the floor of a living sea. Far overhead, near the surface, there was a rustling among the leaves, a noise of monkeys. And now it was a dozen hornbills hopping, like the figments of a disordered imagination, through a cloud of orchids.
“Are you comfortable?” Vijaya asked, bending solicitously to look into his face.
Will smiled back at him.
“Luxuriously comfortable,” he said.
“It isn’t far,” the other went on reassuringly. “We’ll be there in a few minutes.”
“Where’s ‘there’?”
“The Experimental Station. It’s like Rothamsted. Did you ever go to Rothamsted when you were in England?”
Will had heard of it, of course, but never seen the place.
“It’s been going for more than a hundred years,” Vijaya went on.
“A hundred and eighteen, to be precise,” said Dr. MacPhail. “Lawes and Gilbert started their work on fertilizers in 1843. One of their pupils came out here in the early fifties to help my grandfather get our station going. Rothamsted in the tropics—that was the idea. In the tropics and for the tropics.”
There was a lightening of the green gloom and a moment later the litter emerged from the forest into the full glare of tropical sunshine. Will raised his head and looked about him. They were not far from the floor of an immense amphitheater. Five hundred feet below stretched a wide plain, checkered with fields, dotted with clumps of trees and clustered houses. In the other direction the slopes climbed up and up, thousands of feet towards a semicircle of mountains. Terrace above green or golden terrace, from the plain to the crenelated wall of peaks, the rice paddies followed the contour lines, emphasizing every swell and recession of the slope with what seemed a deliberate and artful intention. Nature here was no longer merely natural; the landscape had been composed, had been reduced to its geometrical essences, and rendered, by what in a painter would have been a miracle of virtuosity, in terms of these sinuous lines, these streaks of pure bright color.
“What were you doing in Rendang?” Dr. Robert asked, breaking a long silence.
“Collecting materials for a piece on the new regime.”
“I wouldn’t have thought the Colonel was newsworthy.”
“You’re mistaken. He’s a military dictator. That means there’s death in the offing. And death is always news. Even the remote smell of death is news.” He laughed. “That’s why I was told to drop in on my way back from China.”
And there had been other reasons which he preferred not to mention. Newspapers were only one of Lord Aldehyde’s interests. In another manifestation he was the Southeast Asia Petroleum Company, he was Imperial and Foreign Copper Limited. Officially, Will had come to Rendang to sniff the death in its militarized air; but he had also been commissioned to find out what the dictator felt about foreign capital, what tax rebates he was prepared to offer, what guarantees against nationalization. And how much of the profits would be exportable? How many native technicians and administrators would have to be employed? A whole battery of questions. But Colonel Dipa had been most affable and co-operative. Hence that hair-raising drive, with Murugan at the wheel, to the copper mines. “Primitive, my dear Farnaby, primitive. Urgently in need, as you can see for yourself, of modern equipment.” Another meeting had been arranged—arranged, Will now remembered, for this very morning. He visualized the Colonel