An Empire of the East by Norman Lewis

Author:Norman Lewis [Norman Lewis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780600505
Publisher: Eland Publishing
Published: 2014-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Lospalos, close to the eastern tip of the island, had not only been at the centre of desperate fighting between the Indonesian forces and the Fretilin, but remained a stronghold of the Church. There were four priests in the area; the senior who held the ministry in the town itself, although an Italian, being remarkably known as Father Ernie. It was for this father that Sister Paola had an urgent message. Since the post did not function in East Timor, this would have to be delivered by the driver of the orphanage truck, and when she suggested that we might like to go along with him we readily assented.

The road impressed with a sensation of desertion even more than the one from Díli to Venilale had done. For a number of miles, long barren stretches of it ran close to the sea, after which, the way barred by plateaux bearing some similarity to the mesas of Mexico, it twisted south through the wide plain of Fuiloro to Lospalos. Much of the emptiness through which it ran had become familiarly known as ‘dead earth’ because all those who had filled it were dead and gone, and human activity had come to an end; although nature had already begun a rearrangement of the scene in its own way.

Down by the sea there had been villages, and faint rectangles drawn in charcoal marked where the houses had stood. The water’s edge was encarnadined with coral and the sea had flung the black remnants of feluccas up onto the beach, where salt had eaten through their vitals. Fish traps embedded in coral detritus had grown fur like that of a reindeer’s antlers, with the sea-lice fidgeting over it in search of prey. Among this ancient wreckage a single seagoing craft had been streamlined and reshaped over the stagnant years by gentle, marine decay. The land was dead but there was submarine life in plenty. The fishermen, our driver told us, had harvested a great variety of molluscs in these waters, and the available crop had steadily increased throughout a decade in which they had been left unmolested. And there they were to be seen, inky graffiti of clustered shells scrawled through the shallows, and among the coral heads, and the drifting shadows of the fish.

Life inland, responding to a check in one direction, was on the move in another. Regular cultivation of the soil had come to an end with benefit to spontaneous and unaided growth. Seen from a hill’s summit, the dead earth was marked out with what might have been taken for the inscriptions or traceries of prehistoric man, or even space invaders. Rice paddies had been cut here, tended, irrigated and fertilised for generations, and now what remained of them were meticulous geometrical shapes growing wildflowers to rejoice the heart of someone indifferent to husbandry. Flowers had sprung up everywhere in the vacated land: bright doodlings where ploughs had meandered through the rocks, and windborne seeds had since fallen on fresh earth.

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