World Within: A Borneo Story (Reprint)

The atomic bombs which fell, late in August 1945, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki seemed, for a day or so, to have fallen upon us also, inside Borneo. The, to us, sudden end of the war blasted plans, indeed hopes, nursed and nurtured in our particular internal abstraction. The complexity of our proliferating ant-heap had kept some sort of shape, common purpose and self-control: the intention of, and absorbed belief in, ridding the inland of every living Japanese. Beyond that, however obscurely, a feeling had been growing throughout the interior that after the war the interior might ask for something more than ever before. This feeling took the form, among an appreciable number of thoughtful inland people, of in some way associating all the different peoples realistically, as many within one ‘feel’.