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interrogate him—which could be another expression of the same dignified, calm, selfless and
perhaps even non-violent self-control, even if the compassion is lacking. Most interestingly is
how in Highways to a War Koch pushes this ambivalence of the colour yellow, from
Langford’s hair to Madame Delphine’s opium, until it takes on a metaphoric value of an escape
from reality to the dream world.
Madame Delphine’s opium den is replete with dual images of collegiality, mirth,
decadence and evil. It stinks of open drains, an image it shares with the entry to the office of
the ex-CIA men Donald Mills and Aubrey Hardwick, who are best described as duplicitous;
but this unappealing sensorial quality is tempered with an atmosphere of the wayang. A single
electric bulb disrupts the outside darkness, a big, dim mosquito net hangs above the patrons
like a cloud, fans slowly turn, and straw mats on the walls are worked in gold and chocolate. It
is no wonder that Harvey Drummond calls it ‘a confusing place’. The opium he inhales brings
‘with it love of the world and my friends; love of the world inside me. I lay bathed in yellow
delight’. It is significant that he is bathed in yellow ‘delight’ and not yellow ‘light’ in this
scene where yellow signifies not ‘enlightenment’ but the maya of delusion.
At Madame Delphine’s, the correspondents are all enjoying a trip into a dream world,
but it is an ominous one where the blissful sighs come from ‘motionless shapes of my
colleagues’ and ‘from out of the dark on all sides’. Drummond reports how ‘They all spoke on
a calm purring note I’d not heard before: the voice of opium’. Time itself becomes a yellow
substance there, slowed ‘to the ooze of honey’. Madame Delphine is the dalang there, ‘her
lamp creating big shadows’, and her clients lay their heads on wayang puppet-like leather
pillows, leading Harvey Drummond to find that he ‘was in two places at once’. He feels,
contrary to the normal tendency of perceiving the world one is in as the ‘real’ one, that the
world he perceives is unreal, with white grass and a green sky, and recognises that it exists
inside of himself (HW, 282-83).
Two other men who live uneasily between worlds are Colonel Chandara, the anti-Khmer
Rouge rebel leader, and Donald Mills, the alcoholic ex-spy. Chandara places yellow roses in
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