The Thirteen Gun Salute (29 page)

They were on the ridge at last, the crater's lip, and before going over and down she looked at him again with what he thought a happier, even a friendly look. He stayed for some moments, letting the pain ebb away from his legs and taking in this wholly unexpected scene: a vast bowl, miles and miles across, with a lake in the middle, a much gentler slope down the inside, trees almost to the top - a landscape of mixed forest interspersed with bamboo groves and wide stretches of grass, particularly by the lake. And down, far down on his left, the Kumai temple, a wisp of smoke rising from a building at its side. From where he stood there was only a path leading down, and a faint one at that; no steps were needed on this moderate fall. But the ape had left it; she was already among the low trees, swarming along with vast heaves, scarcely touching the ground and soon not touching it at all. He saw her shabby red-brown coat vanish among the leaves, travelling straight and fast towards the monastery, where someone was beating on a gong.

He arrived himself as dusk was falling. Much of the temple was ruined, but the severe broad front was whole as well as a large hall behind it, a hall from which a thin remote chant could be heard: across this front stretched what for want of the proper term Stephen thought of as a portico, a narthex, and in this narthex a monk in a worn old saffron robe was sitting by a brazier.

He stood up as Stephen emerged from the trees, reaching the open grass before the temple, and came forward to welcome him. 'Will you take a cup of tea?' he asked, proper greetings having been exchanged.

Ordinarily Stephen took no great delight in that insipid wash, but the Thousand Steps had reduced his pride and he accepted most thankfully. As they walked back and mounted the narthex steps (oh so painfully) he observed that the mias was sitting on the other side of the brazier, not indeed on a stool like the monk's but in a kind of tilted basket-work nest.

Her feet had obviously been washed in a basin of warm water and there was blood on the cloth. Nevertheless the monk said, 'Muong, where are your manners?' and the ape rose high enough to bow.

Stephen returned the bow and said, 'Muong and I came up the Thousand Steps together.'

'Did she indeed go so far down as the durians?' asked the monk, shaking his head. 'I had supposed she was only walking on the higher slope for tilac berries. No wonder her poor feet are so torn. She too will be the better for a cup of tea.'

The ape had looked anxiously from face to face during this conversation; but at the word tea her visage brightened, and from the recesses of her basket she drew out a bowl.

While the monk, whose name was Ananda, was making the tea, and while they were all three drinking it, Stephen studied Muong's face; its varieties of expression were difficult to make out, but presently he could distinguish several, particularly the took of deep affection that she often directed towards the monk.

The chanting inside the temple stopped. The gong sounded three times. 'They are about to meditate,' observed Ananda.

Now night was coming fast. A final chorus of gibbons went hoo hoo hoo at great length in the forest below, and two of them hurried across the grass in front of the narthex, one with its hands clasped behind its neck, the other with its arms held high. The monk brought a lamp, and at once it lit up a mouse-deer and her tiny fawn. Muong's eyes had closed; she was wheezing comfortably.

'I am sorry that she went so far,' said Ananda. 'It is too much for an ape of her age.'

'Perhaps she is very fond of durians.'

'She is; but there are plenty here, and some are ripe. No. She goes down there to see a male orang-utang; but she is old, and he scorns her. She comes back tired and sad, her feet torn, her coat quite matted.'

'Are there no orang-utangs here?'

'Oh yes, plenty, plenty; but they will not do. The only one for her is that animal below. She is friendly with her cousins here; they visit her quite often; but none can be looked upon as a mate.'

They talked about her for some time, and it appeared that more years ago than he could remember - the count of years was lost up here - when Ananda was a newly-arrived novice he had found her, a suckling, her mother dead, presumably from a snake-bite, and he had brought her up on ewe's milk. She could not actually speak, but he was quite sure that she understood at least two hundred words and could follow the drift of any ordinary conversation. She was very affectionate in a quiet, gentle way; and if she had not been so tired that evening, Stephen would have seen that she had pretty manners - she always wiped her mouth after drinking, for example, and she could eat with a spoon.

At moon-rise Ananda brought him a bowl of cold brown rice with salted green durian as a relish, and when it was eaten asked him - the first personal question since they met - where he would like to sleep. The room above this had once been called the pilgrim-chamber, but that was very, very long ago and now the bats might be an inconvenience; yet on the other hand sleeping down here exposed one to serpents, who loved to share one's warmth, and to porcupines.

'If Muong does not dislike it,' said Stephen, who had seen her busily and very exactly spreading a square of litter at the far end, 'I am sure I shall not.'

He had always understood that nothing in the vast and effectively sacred Kumal crater was ever killed by men nor had been so killed since the beginning of the Buddhist era, yet although he had had some small experience of this immunity during his time in Hindu India, where vultures would sit on the roof or squabble in the busy street and where monkeys walked in at the window, he was astonished by what he saw. Before he went to sleep half the Ark, half the fauna of Pub Prabang walked by in the moonlight or sat scratching themselves on the broad expanse of grass. One in the night he was woken by a huge, sweet-breathed creature blowing on his face, but by that time the moon had set and he could not identify it; then in the early light, when first he raised his head, there was an orang-utang nonchalantly leaving the narthex, where it had presumably called on Muong. And the dewy grass was crisscrossed with innumerable tracks.

When next he sat up he observed that Muong had already left - her bedding was ranged neatly behind a row of stones - and that his legs were quite extraordinarily stiff. He rubbed them, listening vaguely to the chant within and watching the sun's light travel down the mountainside: the sky was already a full soft blue and the gibbons had been hooting this half hour and more. The light reached a noble tree that he took to be a liquidambar; the chant seemed to be moving to a close; he stood up, still bent, and felt in his roll for the offerings that Liu Liang (himself a Buddhist in the Chinese manner) had told him would be acceptable, a long thick silk-skinned sausage of delicate tea, a long thick leather-skinned sausage of benzoin. He washed his face in the remaining dew, pushed his roll into a shape at least as neat as Muong's, and sat on the narthex steps, eating a ship's biscuit.

The chanting stopped, the gong boomed and the door opened, a shaft of sunlight showing the great stone figure at the far end of the temple, a calm, harmonious figure with its right hand raised, palm outwards. The five choir-monks came out, led by their tall, lean abbot. Stephen bowed to them and they to Stephen. Ananda appeared with tea and several bowls.

Everyone sat on the ground, and Stephen proffered his silk parcel, saying, 'An unworthy offering to an ancient house,' and his leather parcel, 'To an ancient house, an unworthy offering.'

The abbot patted them with detached pleasure, returned thanks, and waited, drinking his tea, sip by sip After a decent interval Stephen gave a short account of himself he was a medical man, a naval surgeon, brought into these parts by the war between England and France; apart from medicine his greatest interest was living things and their way of life He also had a friend who was deeply concerned with the first spread of

Buddhism and the remaining early temples. Stephen therefore hoped he might be permitted to look at Kumai, measure it, draw it as far as his powers allowed, and to walk about the country for a few days to observe its inhabitants.

'Certainly you may look at our temple, and draw it,' said the abbot. 'But as for the animals, there is no killing here. We eat rice, fruit and such things; we take no life.'

'I have no wish to kill anything here; only to observe. I have no weapons at all.'

While the Abbot was considering this, another monk, who had been gazing at Stephen through his spectacles, said, 'So you are an Englishman.'

'No, sir,' said Stephen. 'I am an Irishman. But for the moment Ireland is subject to England, and therefore at war with France.'

'England and Ireland are small islands on the farthest western extremity of the world,' said another monk. 'They are so close together that they can scarcely be distinguished; birds flying at a great height may land on the one rather than on the other. But in fact England is the larger.'

'It is true that they are close together, and that it is not always easy to distinguish them from a great distance; but then, sir, the same applies to right and wrong.'

'Good and evil are so close at times,' observed the Abbot, 'that there is scarcely the breadth of a hair between them. But as for the animals, young man, since you undertake not to do any harm, you may certainly walk about among them; Muong will show you her friends among the mias, and there are quantities of swine, as well as all the gibbons and their kind, and medicinal plants in great variety. Yet like all pilgrims you are stiff and bent after the Thousand Steps. Ananda will take you to our hot baths, and then today you will draw the temple and measure it: tomorrow you will be supple and reposed.'

There were few carnivores in Pub Prabang - no tigers at all- and fewer still at Kumai. Some pythons were to be found, and they had to make a living; but three months between meals were not unusual for them, and neither they nor the odd small cats, still less the honey-bears, created that perpetual half-conscious wariness and apprehension among the peaceful animals that made them so nervous and difficult to watch in most other parts. But above all they had not been persecuted by men for a thousand years and they took no more notice of human beings than of cattle; and Stephen found to his stupefaction that he could walk through a herd of rusa, pushing his way where they stood thick, as though he were one of themselves. He could offer the mouse-deer's fawn a green frond growing too high and it would not hesitate for a moment. Although the comparatively few birds were a little more diffident, no doubt because being airborne they were more experienced (very few other creatures could manage the bare, steep, shaley outer crater-wall, and it had only the single gap, by the Thousand Steps), but even so they sometimes perched on him; and the whole effect was very like being in a waking dream, of losing human identity, or even of being invisible as well as wonderfully supple and reposed after hours in the three basins hollowed in the rock and fed by three faintly sulphurous springs, each hotter than the last.

The grazing animals it was that took least notice of him; the swine - there were two kinds - were curious, sometimes embarrassingly so, and playful; but it was the primates, the golden and the proboscis monkeys and above all the orangutangs that showed most interest. The orang-utangs were gentle, placid, rather lethargic creatures upon the whole, not particularly sociable and not at all gregarious - Muong never showed him more than five at once, two sisters and their young- but they often came down from the flattish nests in which they spent so much of their time and sat with him and Muong, looking earnestly into his face, their lips pursed and thrust forward, as though they were going to whistle, and sometimes gently touching him, his clothes, his meagre hair, his pallid, almost naked arm (their hands, though scaley, were quite warm) Once it was a perfectly enormous old male that came down by a liana as thick as a cable and sat at the foot of has tree with them he was old, he had the expanded cheek-pads and the throat-pouch of the aged mias, but none of the peevishness and ill-nature so usual in the elderly. He positively caressed Stephen's shoulder before going up his liana again, with a swing as light and easy as a topman for all his prodigious weight. What communication there was between Muong and her friends he could not make out, though he tried hard: sound audible to him had little to do with it - a small vocabulary of grunts - and he could only suppose that it was a matter of the language of eye and minute change in expression. Whatever it was, she knew where they were and how, from a distance, to invite them to come down from their trees or through a bamboo-grove.

Those he most attentively watched were the two sisters, both rather a fine red, and their half-grown, playful, very active young. They spent much more time on the ground and he stayed with them for hours together, hoping he would remember all he observed. But Muong did not really approve of this frequentation, and gradually it was borne in upon him that she thought the children tiresome and the young mothers rather discreditable, even common.

Indeed it was his insistence upon going to see the group on his last day that led to their only disagreement. Muong knew perfectly well what he wanted and by now he knew perfectly well from her expression that she was not pleased; still, when both Ananda and he asked her to do so she did lead him to the far side of the lake, sometimes going along with her knuckles to the ground when they reached the open grassy slope, sometimes leaning on his arm.

The family band was there, where a tongue of trees ran almost to the water; and that was where Muong left him, obviously intending to go home alone.

The twins, lighter and more spidery than their one-at-a-birth cousin, were guarding the top of a boulder from him, a great rounded grey boulder at the edge of the water. With boundless energy the little apes attacked, repelled, fell on to the muddy shore or into the water, splashed and began again. Apart from some muted gibbering they were remarkably quiet for perhaps half an hour, but then in an excess of zeal one bit another's ear: they all fell into the lake, screeching; the mothers came rushing down - oaths, reproaches, blows, reddish hair torn out, and the game ended with the whole group shambling off over the grass and into the trees.