The atrocities committed in Kampuchea are simply unfathomable. The staggering statistics of violent death in all shapes and forms reach well beyond our powers of imagination. Even our compassion becomes crippled by the swollen and swelling numbers, already reduced to a trickle, that find our way through the media. The rapid devaluation of human life surfaces and finds expression only indirectly, by means of apparently minor details of the entire bloody and incomprehensible picture. Such an ignoble detail made an enormous impression on me a couple of weeks ago, at a birthday party in Wyoming, Rhode Island, when I learned about it from two courageous young people working for Oxfam, one of whom had spent a few months in Kampuchea during the worst phases of post-revolutionary crisis. Namely, the destruction of the country was so complete, that a large number of varieties of rice indigenous to the region had vanished without trace. Thanks to a rice-bank somewhere in Canada and the coordination of Oxfam, one-hundred and twenty varieties of rice were recently returned to Kampuchea in quantities sufficient for seed-planting. Etc. This innocent account had such a profound effect on me that I could not record it until today, although it has been on my mind all the while. Even I thus finally got the picture. All are punished, indeed. One-hundred and twenty varieties of accursed rice!