By Ho Lian-Yi

MAS Selamat Kastari certainly has no fear of spiders.

He spent days in Singapore's drains while making his way to the coastline - and they are not for arachnophobes.

Walking, or crawling, through the underground drains of Singapore is to be assaulted by webs that cover every opening, that line the ceiling, that break off in your hair and catch in your mouth.

It's not known which drains the terrorist leader took.

But some of the drains he crawled in were probably much like the one that photographer Choo Chwee Hwa and I entered - dark, damp and invisible to anyone above.

Getting down to this particular drain, which runs under Braddell Road, was easy. Feet over fence, edge down a small slope and there it was.

Though roadlamps lit the entrance, which stood at an open drain, the light penetrated just two or three metres before I hit a wall of darkness, which seemed almost like a physical thing.

Squatting, I lit a candle - how did Mas Selamat light his way, anyway? - and the first thing it illuminated was a silvery mass of cobwebs. I yelped.

Ms Choo was startled.

'Spiders,' I said.

'Aiyah, I thought what,' she said.

I poked at the webs with my candle but they were apparently fire-resistant.

And we plunged in.

Mas Selamat and I are nearly the same height. He's 1.58m and I'm 1.6m. The drain couldn't have been higher than 1.3m.

This meant if we didn't want to crawl, we could either walk like hunchbacks or waddle like ducks while keeping our heads down to avoid hitting the horizontal bars that run across the ceiling, or getting a spider in the eyeball.

There was no smell, though the air was stale. The water that ran in a small stream in the centre looked clean.

The bare, sandy concrete was dry but for a muddy puddle in the distance.

We made our way forward, our flickering candles casting monstrous shadows on the walls, and found that it marked where a smaller, feeder drain joined with this one.

Someone, workers maybe, had spray painted the number 4 next to it.

To climb inside, I had to undo the work of several enterprising long-limbed arachnids that covered this hole. It was far narrower than the main tunnel, with a lower ceiling, but breezier here at the junction.

A weird, grey shape was just in front of me. Closer, I found that it was a ladder that led up to a manhole. Decaying leaves pooled at the base of the filthy rungs.

'How far do you think we went?' I asked Ms Choo.

'Around 25m?' she estimated.

I was already drenched with sweat and smelled, well, like I had crawled through a drain.

We were underground for around an hour, taking photos and making observations - and I already had a sore neck and a throbbing skull.

Mas Selamat is made of tougher stuff than I am.

As we dusted ourselves off, and left the drain (good riddance), Ms Choo made a rather chilling observation.

It was so dark, that if there had been someone, even just 20m away from us, watching, we would not have known.

It would have been almost impossible to detect anyone in the darkness that, for a few days, Mas Selamat turned into a terrorist subway.

This article was first published in The New Paper.

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