The Purple Plain [antikvár]

Shy flocks of small banana-green parrots had begun to come back to the pipul trees about the bombed pagoda. But across the rice-fields, scorched and barren now from the long dry season, only a few white egrets stepped daintily like ghostly cranes about the yellow dust in the heat-haze. Nothing else moved across the great plain where for three years no rice had grown. Somewhere down the line of tents beyond the pagoda a sergeant kept a tame monkey, and Forrester, sweating and naked on the bed in his own tent, could hear it crying in the heat of the afternoon. It cried piteously as he lay watching the low mountains that rimmed the plain in the haze of heat and dust like long crests of thunder-cloud. Now and then these mountains seemed to dissolve in gigantic explosions of sulphur dust against the heat-discoloured sky and the whole plain melted away under the glitter of dust and sun. And then when it cleared and came to life and the white light burned glassily down again it was always to create for Forrester the same illusion. It gave him the impression that besides the white egrets there moved across it, in the pitiless heat-haze, a spark of purple flame. This flame seemed to burn itself forward on the burning dust, quivering and dying and brightening in the dazzling air until it became at last a group of people: a solitary line of Burmese peasants, tiny and brilliant in waist-cloths of vermilion and violet, travelling south to the villages of the river. When Forrester turned over and lay on his back and stretched his long legs and felt the sun strike down through the brown canvas tent-flap like an acetylene lamp through a piece of gauze, the splintered glare clashed into white stars on his eyeballs and jerked out of his body a new rush of sweat. And when he moved as if to wipe it off with his hand it was only to find