Through the
jets porthole, neck craned, my vision galloped across the land now not so far
below. Both lunar and tropical, barren and sunsprayed, the sounds of spectral
shovels and wheels battered against the earth, clattering in distant echoes.
Tuber skinned ground was painted sparsely, wearing scrub bushes, debris and
cracked branches. A thousand scrawny streams trailed into big stagnant puddles
of metallic looking water that lay thinly on the surface. The total absence of
wind hushed everything to photographic stillness while my mind went ‘click,
click, click’ again and again over this scene. At intervals, colonial mansionsappeared, windows boarded up, plywood planks peeling and roofs smashed.
Withered but once glorious, like consumptive empresses, they sat forlorn in
barren plots. Pastel colours of blue, green and pink, faded by the sun, hummed
a funereal lament for past glories, the
demise of French Indochina and the sinking of their Pearl of the Orient.
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