Empire of the East by Norman Lewis Page A

so, would remain in their pristine condition until the logger invasion reached them.
    The rumour that the park itself had already become a principal victim of the all-out attack on the forests of Sumatra seemed feasible when you considered the UN study which had revealed that, out of eighty-eight nations, rainforest clearance in Indonesia is exceeded in annual acreage only by that of Brazil.
    During the next few miles our fears that a massive invasion had already occurred were strengthened by the appearance of side-roads too new to be on the map, all leading inland in the direction of the park. They plunged straight into the low hills and the laterite soil laid bare on the road surfaces and the steep embankments cut through the hillsides had been sun-seared to that shade of vermilion which warned that nothing would grow on it again.
    Barriers kept private vehicles out, and there were threatening notices in Indonesian warning off unapproved visitors. Nevertheless we passed through and continued on foot to a point where a road crested a hill, and offered a wide view of the surroundings. The forest had once covered these hills, but it had been clear-felled and then burned over. What was left here was a painted wilderness of sand, a billowing Sahara doodled over with patterns of ash.
    Conquistadors of the kind who once went overseas in the hunt for gold ran the country, and as deeply in commerce as politics pursued their conquests at home. A single log of a rare dypterocarp fetches up to £2,000 in Japan. In Indonesia, timber is the gold of our day.

Chapter Five
    D ESPITE WHAT MUST HAVE been in normal times the almost constant thunder of log transporters through their villages, the fishing communities of this zone exuded an immemorial tranquillity. Their names — Kutabuloh, Teungoh and Keu Deu Tantanoh — ended, as Andy pronounced them, on a soft aspirate, as if the last intake of breath before sleep. Nevertheless, committed to a calling in which time and tide waits for no man, an imperceptible but meticulous order of the day’s activities was not to be avoided. There is a time to bait the fixed lines, a time to repair the nets, a time to salt and dry the catch, a time for post-dawn sleep. Special urgencies rule in the seasons of the shoals of fish, and those are timed, too. Fishermen the world over, apart from those drawn into an industry based upon big ports, lead self-sufficient, immutable lives, bound to the wheel of custom, and it was clear that this applied in Teungoh.
    We arrived at the moment when some of the younger men were beaching a number of heavy canoes. This, everywhere, is a communal effort in which all spare man-power in the village is called into action. The primitive communism of fishermen is an unescapable fact of life. Nobody can own the sea, from which it follows that the property-owning qualifications of the fishermen are scant. In this case they would have amounted to little more than a house, a boat and tackle. Once again the world over, fishermen behave in roughly the same way. What little money they have, they squander. They are addicted to gambling; inclined to throw their money away. The gods they worship in secret are not those of the peasants settled upon their hard-won and closely guarded plots, located in this case only a few hundred yards away. After a big catch the fishermen buy new clothes for all their womenfolk. No fisherman ever became rich. They leave nothing to their descendants when they go.
    The stilted houses on the shore at Teungoh spoke of these propensities. They were neat, orderly and uncluttered compared with the cheerful squalor of the peasant hutments built along the edge of a black ditch at the furthest point of the village from the sea. There a shop sold bicycle tyres, biscuits, powdered milk and paper kites, and besides such necessities plastic and china ornaments, including smirking Disney animals, put on display in peasant houses as symbols of wealth. The fisherfolk would