By now we were outside in the busy colonnade which, like all such passageways in K.L., is exactly five feet wide, a specification stipulated by the great Stamford Raffles, who never seems to have anticipated the claustrophobia it might induce in members of the white races.

I believed him then, not because I remembered the poem but because I recognised the fuzzy outlines of the event, as one might recall a childhood nightmare that contains no more than the dregs of terror. It was a horrid feeling, a kind of nausea.