Indistinct at first, these sounds took on form and color. They came from somewhere away to the right. They appeared to come from ground level.
“Airplanes,” she thought.
What were these? American planes, or enemy fighters and bombers searching out their hiding place?
“Let them search,” she thought. “They’ll never find us here!”
Then a feeling took possession of her. “I shan’t be at work searching them out!” She half rose from her cot, then settled back. “What nonsense! I have neither equipment nor a gunner. And in this dense forest it would be impossible to distinguish them from the treetops.” At that she fell asleep.
Even in her dreams those distant roaring motors haunted her, for in those dreams flying in the smallest kind of a plane, she darted between great trees like pillars of a Greek temple with the greatest of ease. Spying a spot of sunlight, like a great silver butterfly, she slipped out into the glorious sunshine above the sea of green that was the forest from above. Pursued by a huge enemy plane that spouted fire, she slipped back through the hole to re-enter the shadows, only in the end to crash a wing against a giant tree and to go spinning down.
In the agony of fright she tried to cry out, and so wakened herself to the reality of cot, tent, and forest shadows.
That the planes were real enough she was to learn later. Still more surprising was the fact that her friend Jimmie Nightingale flew one of the planes. In discovering this she was to let herself in on one of the great secrets of this dark forest. But for the time she drifted off into dreamless sleep.
They slept until midday. After that they slicked up, soldier style, and marched out with their mess kits. When four American and three Chinese nurses came from tents adjoining their own to join them at mess, they realized that they were not alone.
“You will be working with us,” a gray haired nurse said to Than Shwe.