Rapid Dawn

Half seven this morning the wide fish-lens of the S-E of the island from Doreen's tenth floor kitchen showed low dark cloud on the horizon and beneath luminescent orange following the same line. Cool through the open window and still like a painting that had drawn one in. The brilliant visual that is given each morning here outside the window before breakfast bears no relationship whatever to the bulldozer heat imminent, less than an hour away. (During the time of the forest and jungle it must have been an entirely different matter.) Dusks are brief on the equator and innocent sleeping city dawns the same. Yesterday at the adjacent Komala table a young Tamil engineer based the last few years at the Caterpillar factory in Arizona remarked upon the heat—neither Arizonan desert nor the South of the Indian sub-continent came close to the challenge here.