Fulcrum for a Lever

Quemoy A man-made cave is a curious locale for a luncheon party, but it would be unseemly for guests to be discommoded by haphazard shells from the enemy guns four thousand yards away. Besides, it is a big cave now, thrust far back and down into Quemoy’s rock, to the command post’s communications and control centers. There are hundreds, indeed thousands, of sheltering caves on this island, which is a little larger than Manhattan. Every family, school, farm household of the 45,000 civil population has access to a shelter. The troops, for the most part, live in their caves. The powerful guns, so placed as to cover every approach and a long radius into the mainland, are coiled in their dark cave-tunnels like the dragon of the Nibelungs, with their shell-eggs piled back of their flanks, and the bunks of the crews stretched still further into the rock mass.

Our meal was made entirely from Quemoy’s own products — chicken, pork (Quemoy raises enough hogs to have an export surplus for the Hong Kong market), the myriad Chinese vegetables, peanuts, and kao liang, which many rate as the most explosive of all Quemoy’s equipment. Kao liang is a close cousin of corn likker or White Mule, but runs to a minimum of 115 proof. Now, a Chinese meal is filled with toasts—from host to each guest in turn, and back again, and from guest to guest—drunk either shvei pien (“according to capacity”) or sometimes kan pei (which is considered more flattering, and which concludes with the two drinkers turning their glasses upside down, to prove that the rite has been fulfilled). Ordinarily the liquid is a relatively mild rice wine. But Liu An-chih, Quemoy’s commanding general and civil governor (the conjunction is inevitable, because all of Quemoy is an integral fortress)—who looks hard enough to be made out of his island’s rock—likes all of its products. So the glasses at his table are filled, and re-filled, with kao liang, not wine, and he scorns the timidity implicit in shuei pien. To each guest in turn, his kan pei is offered, and of necessity accepted (“he is famous for his diplomacy,” one of his aides whispered admiringly, as the shuttling kan pei’s soared past the twenties).

JB

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James Burnham

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Quemoy A man-made cave is a curious locale for a luncheon party, but it would be unseemly for guests to be discommoded by haphazard shells from the enemy guns four thousand yards away. Besides, it is a big cave now, thrust far back and down into Quemoy’s rock, to the command post’s communications and control centers. There are hundreds, indeed thousands, of sheltering caves on this island, which is a little larger than Manhattan. Every family, school, farm household of the 45,000 civil population has access to a shelter. The troops, for the most part, live in their caves. The powerful guns, so placed as to cover every approach and a long radius into the mainland, are coiled in their dark cave-tunnels like the dragon of the Nibelungs, with their shell-eggs piled back of their flanks, and the bunks of the crews stretched still further into the rock mass.

Our meal was made entirely from Quemoy’s own products — chicken, pork (Quemoy raises enough hogs to have an export surplus for the Hong Kong market), the myriad Chinese vegetables, peanuts, and kao liang, which many rate as the most explosive of all Quemoy’s equipment. Kao liang is a close cousin of corn likker or White Mule, but runs to a minimum of 115 proof. Now, a Chinese meal is filled with toasts—from host to each guest in turn, and back again, and from guest to guest—drunk either shvei pien (“according to capacity”) or sometimes kan pei (which is considered more flattering, and which concludes with the two drinkers turning their glasses upside down, to prove that the rite has been fulfilled). Ordinarily the liquid is a relatively mild rice wine. But Liu An-chih, Quemoy’s commanding general and civil governor (the conjunction is inevitable, because all of Quemoy is an integral fortress)—who looks hard enough to be made out of his island’s rock—likes all of its products. So the glasses at his table are filled, and re-filled, with kao liang, not wine, and he scorns the timidity implicit in shuei pien. To each guest in turn, his kan pei is offered, and of necessity accepted (“he is famous for his diplomacy,” one of his aides whispered admiringly, as the shuttling kan pei’s soared past the twenties).