Scene 7

It was still dark when Maille left Siem Reap. The taxi rattled, without headlights, through a landscape that looked like a dark formless mass in slumber – only the sugar palms seemed to be awake, stretching themselves like giant toilet-brushes into the dark grey sky.

At some point the automobile climbed over a long incline and then, all of a sudden, it was daybreak – no sunrise, no morning dew, just a banal and colourless dawn. In such dull conditions Maille would much rather have been in London, the only city suited to grey weather – quite like some women are to melancholy.

Quietly, the arrow-shaped speedboat skimmed past floating villages and finally over a lake that was so vast that it looked like an ocean.

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