Golden Earth (27 page)

By all accounts the ferocity of this king startled even the Burmese, accustomed as they were to ruthlessness in the affairs of state. At his accession, when surplus members of the royal family were eliminated in the usual way, they were burned alive, including the previous king’s four principal queens, who were accorded the privilege, however, of dying with their babies in their arms. This monster was diabolically efficient in most of his undertakings and led a charmed life. He built enormous public works, including reservoirs, destroyed his enemies, forbade drinking alcohol on pain of death, captured a perfect specimen of a white elephant, and was the first Burmese monarch to obtain a Buddha tooth from China. He died full of years and honour, and was survived by one hundred and twenty-two children.

Into the relic chamber of the Mengun Pagoda – the first of its kind to be lead-lined – went, in addition to the Buddha tooth, all the most exquisite things produced in his day, Buddha-images, models of pagodas and monasteries in gold and silver, European clocks, clockwork toys, and the very latest child of European inventive genius – a machine for making soda-water.

This was the last attempt but one of a Burmese king to storm the Kingdom of Heaven by pagoda-building. The final fiasco was left to King Mindon, who, determined to outclass even the Mengun, had a whole hill cut into blocks to furnish stone, and dug canals several miles long for the huge lighters which were to carry the materials to the selected site. After four years of mass labour the pagoda had only risen four feet, and a French engineer who told the king that it would take eighty-four years to complete narrowly escaped crucifixion. Then the king died, and the thing was immediately abandoned.

We tied up on the Mandalay shore in the middle of a sweltering,
dust-laden
afternoon. A line of gharries, as bizarre in their ornament as properties from the Russian ballet, waited at the top of the slimy bank. I got into one of these and went off in it to see my friend U Tok Galé, and within half an hour was back in my old room over the cinema, suddenly realising, as I heard them again through the mechanical blare and racket, that in the country of the Shans and Kachins I had missed the mild, sweet sound of the triangular pagoda-gongs of Burma.

Having reached Mandalay after hearing no more than a few shots fired, as a matter of routine exercise rather than in anger, I was now ambitious to continue the journey to Rangoon otherwise than by air. The Burman rarely raises obstacles to such a project on the score of mere danger. At the police headquarters, the DSP said that naturally no one ever travelled by train, unless it was to reach a town not served by air; but the fact remained that the Mandalay-Rangoon line – the only one operating in the country – was open, more or less. The train service was, in fact, a fairly regular one, only held up from time to time to repair bridges, or remove wreckage from the line. As far as he was concerned there was no objection. He didn’t see that there was any point in running the trains if people were forbidden to travel on them. He suggested that I should apply to the station master for more details.

The station master was most helpful. The Rangoon express would be running next morning at quarter-past six. He had just received news that the previous train, that of March 15th, had been dynamited at a place called Yeni, but as the dynamiting had taken place several hours ago, the wreckage should have been cleared in time to let tomorrow’s train through. It would be a piece of unheard-of bad luck, he added, if they lost two trains in succession. And at what time would it get to Rangoon? … Get to Rangoon? The station master was slightly surprised. Naturally, it wouldn’t. It was called the Rangoon express because it went in the direction of Rangoon, and it might travel five, ten or fifty miles before the line was dynamited, or a bridge blown up, or with good luck it might even reach Tatkón, which was about a hundred and fifty miles away. After that it would turn round and come back, because between Tatkón
and Pyinmana, sixty miles or so, much of the permanent way had been removed. The railway, said the station master – incorrectly as it turned out – furnished transport to get travellers across this gap; it might be lorries or it might even be bullock-carts. These were held up pretty regularly by dacoits, but even if passengers were robbed – and it was very stupid to carry more than a few rupees – they usually got to Pyinmana safely enough in the end. At Pyinmana, with reasonable luck, a train would be found waiting to leave for Rangoon. The DSP, he said, had been misinformed in the matter of the military escort. There was none. In fact, the only hope of the trains getting through was to run them without military escorts.

He promised to keep me a good second class seat – not over the wheels.

On our way back, Tok Galé asked me if I believed in ghosts. ‘I ask you,’ he said, ‘because they say that this is the worst thing about travelling by train.’ He kept an open mind on the matter himself, mentioning that although he had been passing a well-known haunted banyan tree every day for a number of years, he had never seen anything unusual.
However
, the fact was that travellers by train complained that they suffered from supernatural molestation. The ghosts came crowding up at night, headless and handless, and all the grislier and more menacing for this deprivation. Tatkón was the worst place for them; and Tok Galé thought that a possible reason for this might be the large number of unburied corpses left lying in the jungle near by, after the insurgent troubles. It was on this warning note that we said goodbye. 

T
HE LONG TRAIN
was made up of converted cattle-trucks, marked second or third class. In the second class there were two benches running the length of the ex-truck, but in the third class the space was divided up into sections, so that twice the number of people could be squeezed in. Until quarter-past six the phlegmatic crowd on the
departure
platform was split up into nearly motionless social groups, as if before the performance of a première which nobody particularly wanted to attend. Then a man called the platform superintendent took a
hand-bell
from under his arm and shook it, and the train gave a lurch. The passengers who were already in their seats fell on top of each other, and picked themselves up, smiling with dazed pleasure. Those on the
platform
dashed for the doors. The platform superintendent pushed me into a second class compartment which he had insisted on keeping empty for me, and which was not over the wheels. ‘Remember,’ he said, ‘in Burma there are no Communists, only people who want a change of
government
.’ The train then moved away from him, and he turned and sank back from sight among the drifting groups of those who had come to see friends off, and in a moment the melancholy ringing of his bell was swallowed up in the clashing steel concussion of the wheels.

I found myself confined in a compartment measuring about nine feet by seven. There were glassless windows which could be covered by pulling down wooden shutters. The door, which had no handle, was fastened by an inside bolt. Passengers were asked to pull the chain in case of emergency, and in the lavatory, which smelt very badly, a notice invited them to depress the handle. But there was no chain and no handle. The electric light came on when two wires were twisted together.
Mosquitoes lived in the dark places under the benches and streamed out in such numbers that they seemed to move in rough formation. A few large cockroaches crawled aimlessly about the floor.

Outside, the suburbs of Mandalay, caught in the sallow light of the rising sun filtered through strips of indigo mist, went lurching past. And then, almost immediately, the bungalows and the African huts merged with the mouldering pagodas of Amarapura, with mighty, broken walls, brick-choked moats, headless Buddhas, and a zooful of fabulous monsters, all strangled with cactus and scrub and flowering weeds. Here, with the city’s abandonment at a monarch’s whim, had been squandered the labours of ten thousand lives. Among the nearest pagodas lay the twisted and charred wreckage of rolling-stock where it had been thrown clear of the line, and left.

I was about to change carriages at the first station at which we stopped, when a smart, bespectacled young Burmese put his hand through the open top of the door, even before the train had come to a standstill, and unbolted it. He then jumped in, looked round the compartment, smiled quickly in my direction, took out a clean handkerchief, unfolded it, and wiped the opposite bench. After that, he jumped out again, and held the door open for another man to enter. The second-comer was an elderly man, tall and dignified, with a stubble of grey hair, and an extremely dark complexion. He came in, walking with some difficulty as if at the head of a procession, and sat down facing me. He wore a longyi, and a white sports shirt, neatly repaired in several places at the neck; two fountain-pens protruded from the breast pocket. Having seated himself he made a slight gesture to the young man who had come in first, and he, in response, trotted over to a group of women and children gathered in the background. From them he obtained a garland of flowers, which he came in and placed round the old man’s neck. He was backing respectfully away when an uplifted hand halted him. ‘Have you got your notebook?’ the elderly man asked. The young Burman said he had. ‘Good,’ said the other. ‘Make a note of these requirements.’ And in an old, precise and rather harsh voice, he dictated a memorandum. The Burman, whom I now supposed to be his secretary, shut the notebook, put it away, and was dismissed.

Now two children entered the carriage, a boy of, I supposed, twelve, followed by a girl of about ten. They were handsome and grave, and dressed in Indian style. Falling to their knees, one after the other, they placed their hands together as if in prayer, and touched the floor of the compartment three times with their foreheads. While this ceremony was going on, the old man looked out of the window. As soon as the boy and girl had gone, he opened a suitcase, producing a small pile of
Reader
’s
Digests
and a biscuit tin commemorating the Coronation of Edward VII, upon which had been screwed a plaque, with the inscription, in English, ‘God is Light, Life and Infinite Magnet.’ Turning his attention now to me, he suddenly smiled with a charm for which I had been unprepared, displaying in his dark face fine white teeth and the tip of an extremely pink tongue. ‘I am Mr Pereira,’ he said. ‘I am usually known as Uncle.’

Mr Pereira, despite the patriarchal aloofness of his manner towards his staff and his children, proved to be a genial travelling companion. I judged him to be an Indian, with possible Burmese, and even – as his name suggested – Portuguese blood. Within a few minutes of the train’s starting off again, he told me that he was a Buddhist monk, on a kind of sick-leave from his monastery. I gathered that his intense interest in religion had been a recent development and, owing to certain qualms and doubts he had experienced over the Buddhist non-recognition of the eternal soul, he had voluntarily accepted a year’s penitential discipline, called tapas, which involved meditation and strict fasting. He had just been released from hospital, where he had spent six weeks recovering from the effects, and was now on his way to Rangoon for further
treatment
. Fortunately his intellectual capacity had been strengthened along with the depletion of his physical reserves, and now he found no difficulty in the calm acceptance of the personality’s extinction in Nirvana. So much, indeed, had he come to crave this release that he had ordered the building of a pagoda on the Sagaing hills. It was to cost 50,000 rupees, of which sum he had been able to raise a half, thus exhausting the family’s capital. But the sacrifice was well worth it, he was convinced; he added suddenly, with the kind of smile that usually goes with a wink, ‘I have assuredly purchased a ticket to a higher plane of existence.’

He opened the biscuit tin and took out a photograph of his
unfinished
work of merit, in the relic chamber of which, he mentioned, had been placed a quantity of earth from the spot where Buddha preached his first sermon. There were other photographs – some of religious objects, such as the Buddha-tooth of Kandy – but mostly of railway disasters. Mr Pereira was an old railwayman, and his affection for his former career had not been obliterated by his subsequent religious preoccupations. At the next station several railway officials joined us, and he entered with vivacity into the technicalities of their shoptalk, while the snapshots of derailed engines and smashed carriages passed, with cries of admiration, from hand to hand. English was the chosen language of these men, who were Burmans and Anglo-Burmans, and they spoke it with pleasure and exuberance. Sometimes they lapsed for a few sentences into Burmese, but even then it was a Burmese studded with English words like ‘emergency’, ‘reconstruction’, ‘insurgents’, ‘those sods’. And then the Burmese sentences would fill up with English technical jargon, the Burmese words become rarer and rarer, and once again they would be speaking English.

The indifference displayed by the generality of the passengers towards the hazards of the journey was replaced here by a positive zest for danger. The railwaymen were eager to display inside information about such alarming topics as the sorry state of the bridges we were passing over, most of which had been blown up several times. It was clear that from their familiarity with the structural weaknesses, of which no layman could have a knowledge, had been bred a kind of possessive affection. Some bridges had been patched up in makeshift ways which flouted engineering theory, and they were proud and happy about it, waiting impatiently for the bridge to come, trying to make me understand why a repaired main-girder could not be expected to withstand the strain we were about to impose, claiming heatedly to feel the bridge – when we had reached it – sway under the train’s weight. ‘But don’t worry,’ said a merry little Burmese Deputy-Inspector of Wagons, ‘trains don’t fall into the river. They blow into the air.’ He threw up his hands, made an explosive noise with his lips, and laughed gaily.

In the insurgent areas, as they were called, he also explained, it was usual to economise on materials whenever possible. For instance, as they were always having to replace rails, they used only two bolts to secure them to the sleepers, instead of the regulation four. A colleague now chimed in with the information that the telegraph wires had been cut on the previous night, which always meant an attack; so the engine driver had been given a red ticket – ‘to proceed with caution’. But what was the use? The guard, a Mr Brunnings, was bound to bring bad luck. He was a regular Jonah, and some drivers refused to have him on the train, although the drivers themselves were no better. They fancied themselves as speed-kings and went so fast that they didn’t notice a small gap in the rail. The speaker mentioned that he had jumped a twenty-inch gap in his ‘petrol-special’ the other day. They were like infantrymen who derive a perverse comfort from exaggerating their sorrows, and it was almost with satisfaction that they acclaimed, just after we had passed Myittha, the violent application of the brakes.

We all got out and walked up to the front. About twenty-five yards from the engine, a small charge had exploded under a rail. The rail had been torn by the explosion, and one of the jagged ends thrust up into the air. Round this the passengers gathered reverently, under their bright display of sunshades. The dull journey had been leavened with incident, and although unexcited they were appreciative. Left to themselves they would have settled down here, as at a pagoda outing, to a picnic. But the engine’s imperious whistle called them away, and the train began to back slowly towards the station we had just left, jolting to a halt after covering about a hundred yards, as another mine exploded in its rear.

We were stranded in a dead-flat sun-wasted landscape. The paddies held a few yellow pools, and buffaloes emerged, as if seen at the moment of creation, from their hidden wallows. About a mile from the line an untidy village broke into the pattern of the fields. You could just make out the point of red where a flag hung from the Mogul turret of a house which had once belonged to an Indian landlord. A senior official, going
on leave somewhere, had his contribution of pessimism to make. He knew this village from past experience. It was the headquarters of about three hundred Communists. The Government was going to have to burn it, he said. And what might the Communists be expected to do now? Nothing much, the official said, with perhaps a trace of regret – at least, judging by previous experiences. At the most they might send a squad of men to look over the passengers, in case there were any political hostages worth taking. With the diffidence which I felt was expected in such unemotional company, I asked what was their attitude to Europeans. The official said he didn’t know, because Europeans didn’t travel by train. In any case, he would have taken me for a merchant from some vaguely Middle-Eastern country, an Iranian perhaps.

The suggestion gave me an idea. My suntan had reached a depth which made me darker than some of the Asiatic passengers, and I had got into the habit on journeys like this of wearing a longyi and sandals. Sandals were really essential, because you were always having to kick off your footwear when entering a habitation of any kind – and this included a second class railway carriage made out of a cattle truck. The longyi would have looked like a ridiculous affectation and have been out of the question had there been any Europeans about, but there were none, and in this heat and dirt it had great hygienic advantages. I had two, keeping a clean one in reserve. They could be washed out and dried very quickly, and in this way I managed a change almost every day. It was now agreed among my travelling companions that should insurgents search the train, it would be safer – in view of the Red-Flag Communists’ attitude towards imperialist exploiters – for me to be an Iranian. But, said the senior official, nothing whatever would happen – we should see.

His conviction seemed to lack solidity after the account of a similar incident I had just been reading in a copy of
The Burman,
bought at the last station. ‘It was ten o’clock in the morning,’ stated the account in the consciously literary style favoured by Burmese reporting, ‘that the
Special
left Shwebo. Twenty-five minutes later it reached milestone 439¾ and struck the mine. With the detonation the ill-fated train was subjected to heavy rifle fire. Insurgents then came forwards towards the train to
loot … The exchange of fire quickly drew Township Officer Wetlet, and a squad of UMP (Union of Burma Military Police) on the scene. After a brief engagement the insurgents were routed.’ Mr Pereira was quite convinced of his ability to defeat any such assault by the sheer weight of moral authority. At all events, if the insurgents attempted to approach our compartment, he would throw them into utter confusion by the preaching of the Law. For himself, he was quite imperturbable, for besides the other advantages of being a pagoda-builder, he was assured of release from the earthly effects of the Three Calamities: Starvation, Plague and Warfare.

But there were no signs of life from the village. Time passed slowly, and the old man entertained the company with the resumé of a paper he had read to the Rotary Club of Rangoon. The subject was Charity, and it was illustrated by many instances, some of which were difficult to appreciate in the grotesqueness of the guise the virtue had assumed. There was the story of King Mindon, which I heard for the first time. In a previous existence the king had been a female demon, inhabiting Mandalay Hill, who had sheltered the Buddha, and, cutting off her breasts, had presented them – ‘in a devotional ardour’, as Mr Pereira put it. This act of merit was rewarded in the next incarnation by a change of sex, as well as the dignity of the Dragon Throne. He also recounted two familiar instances of the Buddha’s all-embracing compassion, in his previous existences. On one occasion, when as a human being he had come across a starving tigress with two cubs, he had surrendered himself to be eaten. In the other instance happening to be incarnated as a jungle-fowl at a time of famine, he had sought out a pilgrim and saved the holy man from death from starvation by the supreme sacrifice. There was nothing in these stories which his hearers would have found difficult to believe. They were not even particularly amazed when the Deputy Inspector of Wagons described a camera he had seen. Persons when photographed with this in their normal attire, came out in the nude.