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his rebel headquarters to soften the impact of the spartan surroundings and his own intense
eyes. Ray Barton finds this to be ‘carefully contrived formality’, but does not grasp the point
that Chandara is seeking to reconcile his antagonistic worlds when he rightly calls Chandara’s
flower adorned office ‘a child’s imitation of the adult world’ (HW, 439). Donald Mills wears a
‘jarringly vivid’ yellow shirt and white trousers, ostensibly an attempt to submerge the events
of his life, which are anything but compassionate, impartial or innocent, behind masks of
dispassionate and unselfish souls. These are very different men, and yet Mills and Chandara
share the recognition that they are standing on the edge of a volcano, and both are trying
desperately not to fall in.
12.6. Descent into the Underworld
Mike Langford, however, is from the very beginning preparing his own descent into the
volcano called Dis, a journey which resembles Dante’s descent into the spiralling circles of
hell. Langford perceives Asia from the very start as something of an underground world.
When he arrives in Singapore and is driven down the old city he encounters images which
resemble those experienced by Guy Hamilton on his arrival in Jakarta:
Dim and shadowy, the old road from Paya Lebar was very different from the
freeway that brings the air traveller of today into Singapore from Changi: it
was a glowing and teeming tunnel of life, walled and roofed over by the dim
fronds of palms, and by giant, snake-limbed banyans and rain trees. Dusk
became blue-tinged darkness there: malam, the big Malay night, flaring and
glimmering with the little mysteries of kerosene and oil lamps. (HW, 68)
Further descending, Langford, Jim Feng and Dmitri Volkov arrive in Vietnam, laughing
as if it were breathing. Unlike Dante, however, they cannot exit this circle, for this is the land
of time and meaning,
the place where their youth casually vanished. It vanished while they shot the
action; vanished while they joked. Jokes were their food: more necessary than
whisky, or the many other stimulants the region and the period had to offer.
They were high on everything, in those years, but their greatest high was risk:
that sprint along the near edge of death they never tired of repeating (HW, 98).
The image of going underground fits Koch’s allusions to Alice in Wonderland, though its
successive points of entry are more numerous and each one brings them deeper into Dis, a
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