THE lights flicker in the heart of the darkness, and memories of fireflies in the boughs of old trees come rushing back like the white crest of waves sailing home to the beach.
But this place where I stand is not Sungai Klias in Sabah, where an ancient brightness enthralls modern travellers. Neither is it, as Joseph Conrad's Marlow critically says, "one of the dark places of the earth".
This is Jenaris at 10pm. When the darkness is still young and our day is very old. An unmeasured night it must seem to little things, but not to humans who know the swiftness of time.
The roads are illuminated here and there, by streetlights which stand in solemn guard and by the last of the cars going home to rest. Insects used to wildly dance high in the spotlight, as they have always done since man lighted the streets. But they are few now. Sigh.
A certain quietness creeps over the land, the otherwise boisterous doings of women and men hidden hard behind walls of brick.
On that dark road where I wander, the flickering lights approach me, growing steady and strong. They do not belong to fell and foul creatures, but to cyclists. Lamp on the handle, lamp on the helmet and lamp on the seat, pointing the way in a sea of blackness that the road is.
Aha! They have come again, women and men making the untiring journey when everyone else has retired to Netflix to watch 'The Squid Game', or to bed to voyage into dreams. Knees rising in rhythm, torsos inclining in unison, wheels whistling in song. Pedalling, persistent, perspiring.
For 20 years have I cycled in solitude in the night of Jenaris. No soul did I see save creatures for whom the darkness is fair and friend. But in this season when the pandemic has quenched much, the human spirit has rebelled harder.
Thus, more than Shadowfax and I are now on the roads of Jenaris. The wide and narrow paths are dressed richly in the colours of cyclists during the day. And even at night.
The Covid-19 cataclysm gave birth to this state of affairs, which I alluded to in a story in 2019 before the virus made landfall.
But do you know why cycling at night is such a joy, and will never cloy?
Firstly, it is the height of silence, made deeper by the glory of darkness. The lack of light quietens much, even the restless heart.
Passing a row of human dwellings, you may hear a mother calling out to her son to go to bed, or to do his homework. Or cats meowing and caterwauling in mischief and mystery.
On a long stretch of road fringed by the scant remains of an old forest on one side, and a line of relatively orderly trees planted by man on the other, some insects ring, some chirp, and frogs croak. A primordial 'silence' still shouting in a modern age.
An indescribable pleasantness settles on you in these moments of light pedalling, and your mind flies into distant space. But the focus on the road remains in place.
Then there are things that can be seen only at night, for Sol's light 'blinds' us during the day. Cycling in Jalan Puncak Saujana towards the last dwellings of people, for instance, you approach a wall of trees.
They are a tangle of hueless and amorphous shapes, not exceedingly tall, not handsome, but cold and some very old. Stopping and looking up at the shadow that their limbs and leaves have become, one sees more than curious forms.
It is as if in their stillness they are teaching you something about life. "Hurry not, lad."
Birds perched at the end of slim twigs for safety, monkeys occasionally stirred by your presence, and the lights of distant structures such as Merdeka 118 are captured by your eyes, too. But the haunting and hypnotic trees, soft and almost dreamy, are beyond compare.
Almost beyond compare, actually. There are other things that surpass the first two reasons for being out at night on a bicycle in Jenaris. That draw Shadowfax and me out of the house even at midnight.
They are more numerous than the grains of sand on the seashore, but few do I really see. Long do I pedal before I dare to look out for them on a hill. They are the reward, the final trophy for the cyclist who dares, in life's good and bad times.
Those which I speak of have great, almost infinite power. Unlike me, whose body is spent.
Looking up at the mighty stars in the amazing cosmos with the loyal bicycle at my side on that hill, I feel humbled and grateful. And strengthened. As Moses was when he beheld Him.
Still, the celestial host does not present itself to cyclists, and everyone else, all the time. The cloud cover mocks us on many days. Or maybe it's just the foul air in this industrial land that closes the curtain.
But it is all right. As long as there is life in the cyclist's legs, when the darkness is still young and the day is very old, he will go out again. No TV shows, and no 'Squid Game' wicked philosophy of life will hold him back. Be sure of that.
