Even if this had not been so, there was little enough reason to move from one part of the cage to the next, since one section of it was very much like another. True, I could just manage to peer through the bamboo sides at the guerrilla encampment surrounding me. I did this, at one time or another, from every side of the cage. I saw, at one time or another, any number of huts, cooking fires, rifles, machetes, sharpened stakes, and Siamese guerrillas. I saw various articles of my clothing – I was quite naked in my cage, like a bird plucked free of feathers – being worn by various guerrillas. I saw nothing, however, that was sufficiently deserving of a second glance to tempt me to risk leaving the point of balance in the center of the cage.
There was a small hole in the center of the floor, a small square hole cleverly cut into the bamboo flooring, through which a bowl of wormy rice was passed to me twice a day if they remembered and less frequently if they did not. Now and then someone would also pass me a cup of greasy water, and now and then I would void whatever had to be voided through the same aperture. One would have thought that with so little food and water coming into the cage, a correspondingly small quantity of matter would have to leave it. But there must have been something corrupt in either the rice or the water or both, some sociable amoebas bent on causing amoebic dysentery. Around the middle of the third day I began to worry that, eating so little and voiding so much, I was in danger of disappearing entirely or of turning myself inside out. But by the fourth day the dysentery went away; I guess I had starved it to death.