by Nevil Shute
I didn’t quite know what to do, but I walked up to them and smiled at Hussein, who got up from the ground to meet me. The others looked up and rose too, even the old Sheikh. I said, “This is a great honour, Mr. Hussein. The rope wasn’t meant to keep you out.”
He smiled, and bowed, and then, speaking in Arabic, he introduced me to the Sheikh, who bowed to me. I said in my halting Arabic, “So many people come to hear what Shak Lin says to the engineers that we have had to put this rope, or the men could not work. But if you want to hear more, will you not come inside?”
The old man replied, but he was very old and he mumbled so that with my poor knowledge of Arabic I couldn’t understand him. I said, “Forgive me, I speak Arabic so badly,” which was one phrase that I knew by heart.
Hussein said in English, “The Sheikh wishes very greatly to hear the Teacher, but he is rather deaf. It is very kind of you.” I lifted the rope for them, and the four men moved majestically across the floor of the hangar, their long white skirts swishing with every step.
I could not take any part in their devotions or in their relations with Shak Lin. He was doing something with one of the engineers on the bench—checking the gap of a contact breaker, I think. I crossed to him and said, “Connie, this is the Sheikh of Khulal and his party. I’ve told them they can come into the hangar any time. Is that all right with you?”
He looked up. “I can deal with them.”
“All right, then. I’ll leave them with you.” I took him forward with me and introduced him to the old Sheikh in my halting Arabic, and they bowed to each other, and then I said that I had a great deal of work waiting for me in my office, and went away. I felt at the time that it was cowardice, but it was a situation that I really couldn’t cope with at all. When I looked out after the men had knocked off, there was the Sheikh and his party outside the hangar with the rest of them, going through the Rakats, but a little to one side of the crowd. Later they got into the Hudson and drove off.
They didn’t come to the aerodrome again, that I know of, but Connie used to go to them, usually on Friday, which is the Moslem day of prayer. He made these visits to Baraka at irregular intervals, sometimes once a month and sometimes at less frequent intervals than that. Baraka, although only a hundred miles away, is pretty inaccessible; there is no post or telegraph service, and no regular boat service or land transport. I always knew when he was going there because he came and booked the Fox-Moth and got one of the pilots to fly him over; he never learned to pilot a machine himself. I used to charge him the full rate for these trips, less ten per cent.
We went on steadily for some months after that, building up the business. I got a Proctor, a single-engined four-seat aircraft cheap in Egypt as a replacement for the Fox-Moth, which was really much too slow and too short in range for the work we put it to in the Persian Gulf. We kept the Fox-Moth in commission for short trips about Bahrein, and the two Airtrucks were working steadily, but the bulk of the turnover, of course, was done by the Carrier. I charged sixty pounds an hour for the Carrier which came to about a penny for every pound weight carried a hundred miles, and at that the machine was working practically to capacity all over the Persian Gulf and far beyond. In those months I took on another Sikh pilot, a chap called Kahan Singh.
I still did the longest trips upon the Carrier myself, though Gujar normally now flew it as chief pilot, with one of the others with him as co-pilot. We got a big job for the Carrier one day, to fly to Burma. The Arabia-Sumatran Petroleum Company had interests in the oil fields at Yenanyaung in central Burma and had a load of machinery to send there from Bahrein; the return load was to be a number of the European staff coming home on leave. These men were to ride home as far as Bahrein in the Carrier and would go on to England or to Holland by the normal airlines.
I took the Carrier upon this trip myself, with Arjan Singh; I wanted to see how Arjan carried on before approving him as the chief pilot of the Carrier in Gujar’s absence. I used this as a training flight, in fact, and sat in the co-pilot’s seat all the way, making Arjan act as captain of the aircraft as well as doing all the navigation and the radio. I only helped him when it was physically impossible for him to be doing two jobs at the same time. I made him do all the formalities upon the ground—the manifests, the customs clearances, the immigration formalities, the flight plans—everything. He got on all right, of course; he had, in fact, a good many more hours’ flying experience than I had myself, and on more types. But one likes to be certain, and he didn’t know the route beyond Calcutta.
While cruising across Baluchistan and India upon this journey, in the long hours of sitting relatively idle in the co-pilot’s seat while Arjan Singh did all the work, I had leisure to consider my business as a whole. The various oil companies in the Persian Gulf were growing accustomed to the use of a large freight aircraft in their daily work, and I was offering the service to them at an economic rate. It would not have paid them, individually, to keep such a large machine as a Carrier for their private use, but amongst the lot of them there was more than enough work for one such aeroplane. Much more. It was this aspect of the matter that was worrying me a bit. On this journey to Burma I was taking the Carrier away from the Gulf for a week; in that week the heavy air transport business would be at a standstill. Having accustomed them to the advantages of heavy air transport I could not expect them to tolerate that for long. I might have to get another large aeroplane, or there would be competition cropping up.
Moreover, this journey to Yenanyaung was only to be the first of many. The Arabia-Sumatran people had made that fairly clear to me. They had these interests in Burma, and they had their big establishment at Diento in Sumatra, which I had visited in the Airtruck. In addition, they were starting to develop an oil field on the East Alligator River, about a hundred and fifty miles to the east of Darwin, in North Australia. These four oil centres formed a chain stretching from the Persian Gulf to Australia. Before the days of air transport each of these centres would have been equipped with the necessary scientific staff and laboratory and field scientific equipment for it to function entirely as a separate entity. With air transport, it was now becoming possible for the Arabia-Sumatran Company to transfer scientists and their equipment quickly and readily from one oil field to another, and this they were doing in an increasing degree. There were obvious economic advantages to them in doing so, and they were quite prepared to use my organization for the transport job. It meant, however, that if one large aeroplane was to be cruising most of its time between Australia and the Persian Gulf, I should have to have another for the day to day business at Bahrein.
To buy another Cornell Carrier would be out of the question; I should never get an allocation of the dollars. It would have to be a British aeroplane, and the Plymouth Tramp was the obvious British counterpart. The Tramp was about the same size as the Carrier and had certain advantages in easy loading; I knew that I could use a Tramp very profitably if I could add one to my fleet. The trouble was the purely mechanical business of paying for it, always a bugbear.
A new Tramp cost about fifty-five thousand pounds, and of course I hadn’t got a hope of raising such a sum. It was too much to expect that I should find another gun-runner operator of a Tramp on his way to prison, and though I could try for a second-hand Tramp I very much doubted if there were any on the market. I wasn’t sure what sort of a reception I should get from the Plymouth Aircraft Company if I went along as an individual, Tom Cutter, with very little money to put down upon the table, and asked for an expensive aeroplane upon hire purchase terms without any guarantees or backing whatsoever. The Plymouth Aircraft Company were a very large and powerful concern, full of the most important work, with no need to scratch for orders or to provide finance for small operators wanting to use their products. I had a notion that I should be shown the door pretty quick if I went to their sales department with the only sort of proposition I could offer.
All these matters occupied my mind as I sat idly in the co-pilo
t’s seat from Bahrein to Rangoon. We left about midday one day and made Karachi in one hop, making a night landing there at about seven o’clock. We slept at the airport and flew on early next day across India to Calcutta, and on the morning of the third day we flew to Rangoon down the coast of Arakan and crossing the Arakan Yoma south of the island of Ramree. We landed at Mingladon airport about midday.
That day was a Saturday and there was trouble at Rangoon because all the Government’s civil servants were on strike. This included the customs officers, and Mingladon airport was in confusion. The police were very active and there were two other charter aircraft full of freight parked under a police guard when we got there, delayed until the customs officers resumed work and could clear them. Passenger aircraft were allowed to function normally; it was the freight that they were interested in. The Control officer explained the position to me quite politely; I must park my aircraft under guard alongside the other two. They hoped to make arrangements to clear them all on Monday.
When travelling in the East one has to keep one’s temper and take things as they come. I parked the aircraft where they said and locked it up, and rang up the Arabia-Sumatran office in Rangoon, twelve miles away. They said that one of their staff would come straight out to the aerodrome, and asked if we wanted hotel accommodation in Rangoon. I said I’d rather stay out at the aerodrome; I never like sleeping very far from the aircraft in a foreign country.
The representative of the oil company in Rangoon, a Scotsman called Macrae, turned up three-quarters of an hour later in a Chevrolet and found Arjan Singh and me at lunch in the airport restaurant. He was a pleasant young chap. He apologized to us for the delay and promised to report on the demurrage to the Bahrein office, because this affected the charter fee. He said that he had ascertained from the customs that all aircraft would be cleared on Monday morning. In the meantime he would be delighted to show us Rangoon. He quite understood that we preferred to sleep at the aerodrome near the aircraft, but would we dine at his home that night if he sent a car for us? And then tomorrow, Sunday, he would take us to the Shwe Dagon pagoda and show us that.
It really was very good of him. I told him that we had some work to do on the machine that afternoon, but we would be delighted to dine with him that evening. He went away then, and we fetched our small luggage from the aircraft and took it to the aerodrome rest house. Then we refuelled the Carrier and looked for a small oil leak on the starboard engine and put that right. I used the last of the locking wire in the tool kit on that job. While Arjan was polishing the windscreens, putting away the maps, and making all tidy in the cockpit, I strolled over to the hangar that housed the aircraft of the Burmese National Airways to see if they could let me have a hank of locking wire from their stores.
One of the first men that I saw in the hangar was U Myin, the Burmese boy who had been with Dwight Schafter and Connie at Damrey Phong. He was working on the port engine of a Dove. He recognized me at once, and he was very pleased to see me. He seemed more upstanding and competent to look at than I had remembered him, but he had very little more English at his command than he had had then. He understood technical words, of course, and when he understood I wanted locking wire he left his job and took me up to the office of the chief engineer, Moung Bah Too.
Moung Bah Too was a friendly and smiling young Burmese who spoke perfect English. He listened to what U Myin had to say to him in Burmese, and then said to him in English, “Of course.” He turned to me. “I think we have eighteen gauge and twenty-two gauge wire. Eighteen gauge? All right.” To U Myin he said, “Go to the storekeeper and ask him for about a pound of eighteen gauge galvanized iron wire, and bring it back here.”
The boy went off, and Bah Too offered me a cigarette. “It’s really very kind of you,” I said. “It’s not fair to come in and want supplies like this. I hope that I’ll be able to do something for you in the Persian Gulf one day.”
He smiled, and we talked about our operations and compared notes for a few minutes. Presently I said, “How’s U Myin getting on?”
“Oh, he is very good,” his chief said. “A very good engineer. He is reliable; you can trust that work is well done if he says it is all right.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” I said. “I’d have taken him on myself when Dwight Schafter packed up but for the fact that he couldn’t speak much English. At that time I was running the ground engineers myself, so all the people I took on had to know English fairly well.”
He nodded. “I think he was very well trained when he was with Schafter,” he said. “You have a chief engineer, have you not—a Chinese called Shak Lin?”
“Yes,” I said. “He was with Schafter, too. He’s not exactly a Chinese, though. He’s a British subject born in Penang, of a Chinese father and a Russian mother. He went to school in England.”
“Is that so!” There was keen interest now upon the wide, intelligent brown face before me. “I had often wondered who he was.”
“You’ve heard of him, then?”
“Oh, yes, I have heard of him many times. U Myin talks to me and to the other engineers about him constantly, in the workshop, about his methods of teaching and inspection. In Bangkok, too, they talk of him a great deal, with Siamese Airways. I have two or three engineers from Bangkok working for me now.”
I had not thought that Connie would be so well known, yet it was reasonable enough, because he was a man to be remembered and the aviation world was small.
“He is religious, is he not?” There was no mistaking the interest that Moung Bah Too was showing.
“Yes,” I said. “He’s very religious.”
“Tell me, what religion does he teach? Is he a Buddhist, do you know?”
It was the same question that I had asked myself several times before. “I don’t know what he is,” I said. “I don’t think he’s a Buddhist because he talks about God. You don’t do that, do you?” He shook his head. “He’s certainly not a Moslem, although he talks a lot about God to the Moslems in the hangar at Bahrein. I shouldn’t say he’s much of a Christian. I’m afraid I can’t tell you what he is.”
“I have heard it said,” Bah Too observed, “that he has the power to make men of any religion bring that religion to their daily work upon the aircraft, and the results are very good.”
“I think that’s fair enough,” I said slowly. “I should think that’s the best definition that you’d get of what he does.”
“It is very, very interesting,” he said earnestly. “I am not religious myself. When U Myin and two other men came one day to this office and asked if they might set up that Buddha that you see in the hangar”—I had not noticed it—“I did not know what to say. In England, in the de Havilland Technical School where I served for five years, you do not put a Cross up in the hangar, and I run this hangar in the way that I was taught.” My heart warmed to this little brown man, whose problems had been so very similar to my own. He laughed. “I did not know what to do,” he said. “In the end I told them that they might put it up, but no time was to be spent in prayer in working hours.”
It might have been myself, telling somebody about my own difficulties in Bahrein. “What have the results been like?” I asked. “Does it help the work?”
“It is very good,” he said seriously. “It is a very good thing. They pray before and after each shift, for five minutes or less than that. They say a few verses from the Payeht-gyee, our litany of praise, and then they say a prayer that Shak Lin taught U Myin in Damrey Phong about the aircraft, that Right Thinking is indicated in Right Work, and Right Work in Right Thinking, because both are one. By his teaching, Right Meditation which leads to Nirvana, is only attained by the exercise of Right Work. No man cumbered with error in the Work can reach the state of Right Meditation, which is the approach to what you would call Heaven. I do not know if you are used to these ideas, but I can tell you this. Since U Myin introduced them to my hangar, the standard of maintenance of the aircraft has improved enormously.”
He nodded. “It is the same here. I think this new teaching is a very good thing.” He smiled. “The only complaint I have is that it is spreading. Most of our engineers now join in the prayers before the Buddha in the hangar. The transport drivers have been coming along, too. That is all right for our own transport drivers, but lately all sorts of other people have been coming to the hangar to pray with the engineers—transport drivers from the other companies, and from the petrol companies, and even taxi drivers—they have been coming in. I cannot have all these people coming into the hangar. I do not quite know what to do about it.”