"The nature of time is incomprehensible. Days that crept and months that crawled telescope into years that seem to fly past. Burma is a land of soothsayers. Campaigning in the Irrawaddy division in 1989, I met a young doctor who told me anxiously that after careful astrological calculation, local Buddhist monks had come to the conclusion that nine years would pass before the movement for democracy was crowned with victory. "Nine years," he said with furrowed brow, "Can we bear it for so long?" "Why not?" I replied absently, wondering about the scientifically calculable probability rate of astrological predictions with one part of my mind while the other tried to work out the implications of a decade of struggle. At that time, a decade stretched out mistily into the unforseeable future; but now that almost the whole of it has been left behind, it has shrunk to negligible proportions..."