Golden Earth (12 page)

Two enormous leogryphs guarded the approach to Taungbyon. They were as large as the monsters that stand before the Shwedagon Pagoda at Rangoon, but painted stark white, and eerie and forbidding in these cheerless surroundings. Beyond, reared up Anawrahta's pagoda.

We roared into the village and pulled up by a structure like a
roofed-over
marketplace in an English country town. The soldiers came tumbling out of the lorry, cocked their Sten guns and formed a widely
spaced circle round us and the sacred places. Beyond them we could see the villagers, temporary dependants of the PVO, gathered at the doors of their huts and watching us without either hostility or enthusiasm. It was correct first to visit the pagoda. With our shoes respectfully removed, we were led by a guardian to the entrance and shown the two spaces still left vacant for the bricks of the Shwepyi brothers.

Apart from building pagodas, the ancient Burmese seem to have set extraordinary store by the act of completing them. Just as in biblical times battles were sometimes decided by individual combat between champions, there are many examples in Burmese history of conflicts being settled without fighting in favour of the side which could first complete a pagoda. The chroniclers relate with relish the obvious and childish stratagems practised by the victors, who usually had a canvas imitation finished while the incredibly gullible adversary was still busy with the foundations of a traditional building of brick. Perhaps, after all, there was something in the nature of high treason about the Shwepyis' defection.

One of the soldiers now brought up the guardian of the nat shrine, which was in a building under the market-like structure. Padlocks were unfastened and heavy double trellis gates slid back. It was like being let into a bank after hours. In an interior lit by strings of electric fairy-lights and behind a bank of flowers sat two gaudy dolls, with high spiked helmets, and drawn swords carried upon their shoulders. They were quite unmartial in appearance, and yet, in some way, sinister. Unlike the Buddha images with their placid, even smug expressions, these golden faces were shrewd and scheming. What a decline attends the mighty after death! These great captains who had fought their way to China and back, and had plagued Anawrahta after their killing by catching at the rudder of the royal raft so that it could not move (a classical Burmese form of haunting), were now a couple of slightly disreputable Don Juans of the inferior heavens. Legend remembered that they had died by castration, and appeared to attach some tortuous and topsy-turvy significance to this. By a kind of logic in reverse the king who is supposed to have died as a result of an attack of dysentery is worshipped by dysentery sufferers, and the castrated heroes become the patrons of sly amours. At their
annual ceremony the chief mediums, who are females, dress themselves in the special costumes attributed to the brothers; in waist-cloths with an ornamental border, wide-sleeved jackets, white scarves thrown over the shoulder, and light red helmets on their heads. They are attended by junior mediums dressed as Burmese princesses. The ceremony begins with the chanting of the traditional song in which the brothers' lives and deaths are briefly described. This ends with the words: ‘Now all ye pretty maidens, love ye us, as ye were wont to do while yet we were alive.' In this lies a hint of the mild element of the saturnalia that appears to enter into this feast. As the lieutenant put it, on our way back, ‘to accomplish this celebration we proceed not with our wives, as there are many pretty ladies assembled there, also not in company with their spouses'.

A
T EIGHT
next morning I climbed into the gharry called Ford, setting in brisk motion its resident gnats, and ordered the driver to take me to the airport. In accordance with my declared itinerary I was to fly to Myitkyina, leaving Mandalay on approximately the third of March and returning, by river, on the eighth. On the ninth I was to set out for Lashio by road. One day was allowed for this considerable journey; but the War Office had generously allotted five days to get to Taunggyi, which was hardly farther. There was some vague talk of occasional caravans of lorries plying by stages between these two towns, but no suggestion had ever been made that there was any way of getting from Taunggyi to Mandalay, a section for which three days had been prescribed. Having reached Mandalay again, I was to board a boat, which the General Staff Department seemed to imagine would be waiting for me with steam up – since no delay was assumed in the city – reaching Rangoon seven days later, the minimum, taken by the trip, in favourable circumstances. It had seemed to me at the time ambitious, when allowing for Burma’s
condition
, to try to draw up an exact timetable, in the way one might have done in preparation for a Cook’s tour in the Dolomites. And now at the airport it soon became evident that an immediate breakdown in the original planning was likely.

Nothing had been heard of the plane that was due to arrive at nine o’clock. Nor did the airport staff seem in any way surprised. The plane that had been due four days before, on the Monday, had not arrived either. At that season, thick ground mists often prevented the planes taking off at Rangoon in the early hours, and unless they could make an early start there was no time to go to Myitkyina and back during the day.
But there was still hope, and I was invited to make myself at home in the picturesque huts which served as waiting-rooms. One of these had a notice across it which said it was a restaurant. Here in surroundings to which a Hindu ascetic would not have objected I seated myself and ordered breakfast. I was soon joined by a police official, who began to probe me in the most urbane fashion, between mouthfuls of eggs and chips, as to my intentions. Refusing, perhaps through irritation caused by the delay and the heat, to enter into the conventions of the game, I silently produced and spread across the table the whole of my many documents. The officer was hurt at such bluntness, and said that he was only trying to do his job in the most reasonable way. There was no gainsaying this; I apologised, put the permits away uninspected, allowed myself to be drawn forth in a civilised manner, and our interview terminated cordially.

Several hours dwindled away. With their passing the excited
anticipation
drained from the passengers who now squatted, resignation drawn over them like a shabby cloak, in corners of the airport huts. A group of pongyis, released in these days, it seemed, from the prohibition on such mundane forms of travel, had ceased to examine their tickets and relapsed into holy meditation. Only a few crows turned in the grey, empty sky, in the rim of which the far hills flickered and stirred as if about to dissolve. Occasionally a member of the airport staff came cringing past under the sun. At about midday an official went round whispering to the various groups, as if a great man had died, that the flight had been cancelled.

Back at the airport office, they refunded money on tickets,
re-booked
those who insisted on a hypothetical Monday-plane, drove the despondent crowd into the street and barred the door. A huge
barrel-chested
Sikh came up and clutched at me moaning, ‘I can’t stand this heat’. He wanted to go to Bhamó, and knew a man who might be persuaded to hire him a jeep, with a driver, for five hundred rupees. What would I say to splitting the cost? I hadn’t intended to go to Bhamó, but it was in the right direction; so I agreed, and in a moment the Sikh had leaped into the nearest gharry, which bore him swiftly
away, his head thrust out of the window, beard quivering with excitement and despair, shouting alternately instructions to the driver and counsel to me. An hour later he was back, heartbroken. The man was a villain who wanted to profit from the misfortunes of others by charging twice the price offered. Now he was off again to comb the city for an honest
jeep-owner
, and with a furious wave to the driver he went rattling away.

It now seemed to me that I might as well, to use an army phrase, ‘find my own way’, going perhaps to Lashio and Taunggyi first, and working in the Northern Shan States part of the trip at a later stage. I therefore made enquiries in the neighbouring teahouses and found that a lorry was expected to leave for Lashio next morning. With the aid of an English-speaking gharry driver, this was located. The driver was either working or sleeping underneath it, since only his legs protruded, but after the gharry-wallah had jerked them furiously, he crawled out and admitted that he would be leaving for Lashio early next morning. Still not completely weaned from Western conceptions of travel, I tried to fasten him down to something less vague. Through the ever-present language difficulties there was nothing to be done. Around us swirled a flood of bullock-carts and pedicabs. There seemed no way of fixing this definite point in the chaos of the traffic, but that would have to suffice. He would leave from there, early in the morning – when you could see the veins on your hands.

Back to Tok Galé I went to announce the prolongation of my stay. There was another visit to our Chinese friend who with limitless
hospitality
immediately offered me his room again. Another night was to be endured in the reverberating no-man’s-land between the cinema
loudspeakers
, the pagoda gongs, and the penetrating Chinese sopranos of the teahouse gramophones. Once again I took my washbowl to the edge of the parapet, silhouetted there against the neon-pink of the sky, and, trying to convince myself that any previous reaction had been imaginary, poured out the water on the roof below. Once again came back the muffled cry. On my way to the Excelsior a pariah dog turned back and followed me. Remembering the Englishman who was nearly lynched for killing one of these creatures I increased my pace, and the dog did the
same. When close at my heels it reached forward and without any particular animosity, in a rather detached and experimental manner, it took my calf between its teeth, and bit. Having done so, it turned back and strolled away, while I was still wondering what the onlookers would do if I kicked it high into the air. In the Excelsior I washed the wound in Fire-Tank Brand Mandalay Whisky, and offer as a testimonial the fact that I suffered no ill effects.

But that night there was a good news. Tok Galé arrived to tell me that a Mr Dalgouttie of the British Information Service would be arriving next day by plane from Mandalay and then continuing immediately to the British Consulate at Maymyo in the car which would be sent down to meet him. Although Maymyo was only thirty miles along the road to Lashio, it was situated at an altitude of three thousand five hundred feet, and would therefore be a very agreeable place for me to stay for a day or two while making arrangements to go further. I telephoned the Consulate and was told that there would be no difficulty about putting me up.

About ten miles out of Mandalay, the road begins to climb and to wind. There are trees, at first isolated in tangled bush, and then slowly closing in until linked with thinly flowering creepers. According to reliable information, the area through which we were passing was solidly held by White-Flag Communists. Burmese army lorries passed up and down the road and, in doing so, were frequently shot-up; but no attempt was made by the army to penetrate into the jungle where the Communists administered the villages. It was probably not worth while. Even if a major operation could be undertaken to clear every village, the Communists would come back as soon as the troops had gone away. It seemed likely that an unofficial
modus vivendi
had been reached, and for civilians the road was moderately safe, as long as they didn’t travel with the police, or with the army. The White-Flag Communists were said not to indulge in acts of terrorism, which sometimes occurred in Red-Flag areas. The trouble was to know who was in control. The traveller’s chief security problem was the lack of effective control by one side or the
other; because the Communists, no doubt, had the same trouble with dacoits as did the government.

The Consulate station-wagon sped smoothly over the first section of the ‘Burma Road’ which, still the country’s main strategic highway, was in far better condition than the terrible tracks on which I had hitherto travelled. In about an hour we were in Maymyo, the former hill-station of the English, and suddenly it seemed as though we were entering Forest Gate at the end of a dry August. With a hissing of tyres we drove up a
well-kept
thoroughfare called ‘The Mall’, across which, before us, passed a long, thin snake with whiplike movements. There was also a Downing Street and several well-spaced villas, with names like Ridge-View. We stopped for a moment at the golf course to chat with members of the Consular staff, and then drove on to the Consulate, which was set upon an eminence, above evidences of landscape-gardening; a sweep of lawns, with coarse, whitened grass; flower-beds in which larkspur and
nasturtiums
fought against desperate odds.

Here at Maymyo I was offered a splendid chance to compare the English and French methods of adaptation to South-East Asia. In the previous year I had stayed at Dalat, the French equivalent of Maymyo in Indo-China. In Dalat, one knew that one was in the Far East. Although it was neither France nor Indo-China, the French had tinkered with bamboo and carved wood and produced an acceptable pastiche, a compromise that was sometimes gay and well suited to its surroundings. There were hotels and restaurants where you could eat the local food, Frenchified of course, but still of recognisably oriental origin. In
Maymyo
there seemed to be no compromise. The atmosphere, by contrast, was austere, sporting and contemplative. Maymyo was very clean,
hardworking
, hard-playing, exaggeratedly national and slightly dull. Here you began to understand the allegation that the English are an insular people.  

But if unadventurous and simple by French colonial standards, life in Maymyo was full of solid comfort. It was quite extraordinary to experience the sensations so often associated with the fatigues and discomforts of remote places in these well-ordered surroundings, to lie
at dawn between well-laundered sheets, watching the flocks of green parakeets in the treetops, and listening to the early jabbering of exotic birds. Fifty yards from my window, beyond the show of sweet peas, the jungle was kept in check behind an iron railing. The jungle was not particularly exuberant, and had been made to look rather like a
gentleman
’s sporting estate in the Home Counties, by the cutting through it of numerous walks and avenues. In the early hours there was a great scratching of fowls down by the fence, and as it seemed unlikely that the Consul, a dashing figure, should keep chickens, I went down to inspect them. I was amazed to find that they actually were jungle fowl, a cock, with mane and rump of copper and glinting blue thighs, with his numerous harem. As no one had ever bothered them you could get within a few yards and watch their bright, busy foraging among the leaves. Duffy, the Consul, said that they were there every day as he had resisted the servants’ implorings to shoot them; he knew that as soon as the first shot had been fired, this decorative adjunct to his demesne would vanish for ever.

That evening the Consul gave a party. Besides the shrunken Consular staff, there were a few Indians and Anglo-Burmese, a Burmese princess with her English husband and her daughter, and a British engineer who was at work on the repair of the viaduct which carried the
Mandalay-railway
line over the gorge at Gokteik, about forty-five miles further up the road. Officers of the Burmese Army who had been invited did not appear; a reflection, it seemed, of an officially-inspired coolness.

The work on the viaduct sounded like a Herculean labour. It had been in progress for three years and every so often the territory would pass temporarily into the control of some new insurgent movement, and high-ranking officers would come and inspect the work benignly, in the conviction that they would benefit from it in due course. Recently the Communists had made one or two official appearances, once requisitioning the typewriter, for which an official receipt had been left. The local Communists, not having had to fight Europeans as they have
done in Indo-China and Malaya, show no particular anti-white animus. When they were about to remove some of his personal gear, the engineer made the private ownership clear by pointing to his chest and saying, ‘me, me’. These articles were left.

The guest of the evening was clearly the Princess Ma Lat, who, apart from the possession of a vivid personality in its own right, had acquired some additional celebrity by a reference to her in Mr Maurice Collis’s book
Trials in Burma.
The passage, which is practically known by heart by the literary-minded section of the local population, deals with the occasion when, some thirty years ago, Mr Collis, who was then a district magistrate, solemnised the Princess’s marriage with a local bookmaker. After commenting with great enthusiasm on the Princess’s beauty and dignity of demeanour, the author permits himself an expression of surprise that he should have been called upon to perform this particular ceremony.

Ma Lat’s party had settled down at the other end of the room, and I found myself engaged with an Anglo-Burman. He was the opposite of the Police Inspector of Mandalay, dark and Burmese-looking where the other had been Anglo-Saxon; unable to throw his lot in with the Burmese from whom he felt separated by blood, he was permanently wretched as a result. This man clung desperately, pitifully, to the English in him, of which so little could be externally recognised. In some way or other, he and his fellow Anglo-Burmese had been ‘abandoned’, left to some kind of nameless fate under the pure Burmese whom they so clearly despised. Such unfortunate people are, of course, always followers of some
nonconformist
Christian sect, which further impedes their comfortable and happy absorption into the human mainstream of the country where they live.