Free Seven-Tenths by James Hamilton-Paterson Page B

tattered scrub which the lower reaches of the forest have now become. Even within the forest itself there are signs that trails have been hacked to the top. I can see no pagoda but my companions tell me that a chalet is planned for ‘those who want to be alone’. What, then, of the pair of eagles, my familiars? I had tried not very hard to identify them, flicking through bird books for South-East Asia, but each time I visualised them the print slipped from their wings as they soared away, unnamed. Assuredly they were gone. In one corner of their former home a level patch has been gouged and on this now stand three immense concrete legs.
    ‘Those are for the electricity,’ my companion explains. ‘The cables will come across from the mainland.’
    And so, without need for bridges and causeways (‘the whole point is that it is an island ,’ a Japanese will tell me stiffly some hours later), the Fantasy Elephant Club is to be firmly tethered to the mainland by umbilical cords. The great weight of unsupported lengths of high-tension lines explains the size of the pylons, which will have to withstand the stress of typhoon winds. It is possible to make out three similar pylons tucked away among the shrubs on the distant promontory. Until the project was hatched, this particular corner of the province must have been well down on all priority lists for a surfaced road and electrification. Now, thanks to foreign developers, new poles have sprouted along the dirt track on the mainland and ‘Betamax’ film shows are daily and nightly entertainment where before the villagers played cards and gossiped cruelly by candlelight. ‘Progress,’ as the mayoress of the municipality is fond of saying. Yet there is little risk that someone who knows the area will melt unresistingly into admiration for the foreigners’ altruism. It is theprovince’s impoverished power company which is meeting the bills for bringing electricity to the island. And over in ‘Sabay’, where it is reasonable to suppose the developers might in self-interest have improved the villagers’ inadequate water supply, I noticed the new handpump had been installed by local Rotarians, just as the recent hard surfacing of the sandy lot used for basketball had been paid for by the Lions Club.
    Something had gone sour at ‘Sabay’, I discovered, though I never found out precisely what. The villagers disdainfully said the Japanese were arrogant and too mean to work for at 40 pesos a day (66 pence). They claimed they could earn far more from their usual fishing activities. It was only the other villagers up the coast who were too lazy and ignorant to fish who would consider 40 pesos a possible wage. … There had been friction right from the early stages of construction, I gathered. At any rate, the relations of ‘Sabay’ to this new world on its doorstep were decidedly malabo : cloudy, murky, ill-visaged. It seemed the neighbouring village was to do better in terms of the newcomers’ patronage since the developers were indeed sinking a borehole there for the island’s drinking water. Later, I found out something else which might explain this state of affairs, since I never seriously believed my friends’ protestations (no doubt cued to my own responses and facial expressions) that the island had been despoiled, their traditional lives of picturesque poverty ruined for ever by video recorders and concrete pylons.
    It turned out that what was taking shape on the island was only ‘Phase One’ of a far larger project. ‘Phase Two’ was destined for the mainland: 252 hectares which, if all the requisite planning permissions were hustled through, would comprise an eighteen-hole golf course, a clubhouse, cottages for guests, a two-storeyed home for the (Japanese) aged, a private airstrip/helipad, a skating rink (presumably roller rather than ice), a shooting range and a coffee shop. There was also talk of a casino, said the mayoress, although that might eventually