Weather Report

Brilliant walking conditions the last number of weeks here, while in the north Niagara Falls froze over and down on the Great Southern land the interior burned. Newspaper reports have suggested three and four degree lower temperatures this nor’east monsoon season, much less rainfall and double usual wind speeds. One of the recent work-place deaths in the construction industry possibly involved dangerously high winds in the upper storeys. (This morning’s fatality brings the number of deaths in that sector to five in the last week.) At the kitchen sink one morning a fortnight ago the first definite sighting of racing celestial galleons that are a common sight in our skies down in the south. Looking out over the heads of the seven AM tai chi ladies between two of the Haig Road blocks the massed forms making the crossing produced a little start. After more than thirty months of dead stillness in the upper reaches here was a show of movement and drama in the great airy forms. A radical change indeed from the usual pasted cloud either low on the horizon or blanketing the entire dome.
         Following the Gurkha compound investigation that also took in the last true kampung in Singapore, last week the old Chinese cemetery at Bukit Brown, the author and his guide good Gabriel yesterday surveyed another cemetery again, this time the Japanese grounds not far from Serangoon. In the main here plain, simple head-stones carried no more than a handful of characters, war dead interned among a few notables. Mostly it was a quiet, modest resting place, with a small Shinto shrine presiding in the middle. On an earlier walk we had come upon the remains of another Shinto shrine in the midst of what had become a water-way, only irregular lines of wooden foundations remaining to hint at the structure. Here in this cemetery stood a well-maintained example according with the picture-books that had been examined over so many dreamy years of confinement: a light, simple structure of lacquered wood, airiness and minimal iconography as far as could be seen through the fretwork. To one side of the shrine was found an example of the famous Japanese rock-garden laid under over-hanging trees and a stand of dark-stemmed bamboo, five or six boulders set in circular disks of embedded small stone stakes. A Montenegrin could get a trifle light-headed in such a setting. The guide Gabriel had seen these structures on previous visits, as well as numerous shrines and rock-gardens in Japan proper, the lucky angel. Nevertheless, the man was stumped and nonplussed before a giant tree on the other side of the Shrine standing at least seven or eight metres high. After forty years in the region and with a keen eye for colonial tracery, Euphorbiaceae had never previously been witnessed of this proportion.
         — Rubber my dear Gabriel. Grown out and evidently not for harvesting in this case. (Rubber-wood possibly; the Malaysian oak.)
         On Borneo false reports of snow on Mount Kinabalu. Ballyhoo! the chief Indonesian meteorologist countered. Ice, yes; but not snow on the equator. After four hundred years dormancy, Sinabung on Sumatra has been blowing for weeks past, an evacuation of thirty thousand brave souls needed who farmed the rich volcanic soil on the upper ridges. Such had been the ash there even from these minor rumblings that houses had collapsed under the weight.