The island across the water reaches up to the sky, releasing billows of heat from the vapourisation of crude hydrocarbon particles that rise to caress the air into a cloud of twisted warps. At dusk, the installation ignites into a fey vision of chimneys, silos, towers and heat exchangers, a world of twinkling columns and reinforced curves in which fossil fuel is reduced to functional fractions to be in turn set alight in chambers of internal combustion and flights of casual fancy. The refinery sparkles with cold beauty, a sprawling, shining city that envelopes the surface of small islands with a coenenchyme of steel and concrete, a maze of distilled warmth by a shallow sea gnawed by corals whose slow advance is just a spill away from instant calamity.
A different plant grows when one turns southward on a swimming lagoon that has become unfit for simple leisures and a silty flat where stars with spiny arms race between thickets of sponges and seagrass. Three large mangrove trees occupy a thickish hook of Pulau Hantu Besar that threatens to separate two artificial coves built to turn reefs of old growth into weekend retreats for the young.
The largest of the trio, a perepat with the girth and gnarls of a juvenile ent, has outlived the trauma of land reclamation and so revelled in its freedom from neighbours that the secondary branches have outgrown their own strength and now flounder on the mud. Skinny cones sprout from the sediment in meandering formations that surround the main trunk and provide footholds for hermit crabs and snails who scorn the fiercer depths. In darker times, the boughs with their opposite leaves and outrageous blooms might have harboured a battery of fireflies and welcomed the clumsy beats of fruit bats from nearby isles. But in this era of false economy and uncommon sense, the night and its natural excesses have given way to scenes of stray light that pay no heed to warnings from the brink and the plight of coastlines long past their peak.
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