by Nevil Shute
“I had to put a rope up,” I said. I told him what had been going on in Bahrein and we compared notes for a few minutes. Then U Myin came back with the locking wire. His chief took it and gave it to me, and I asked how much I should pay for it, and he smiled and said that he was glad to be able to help. I thanked him. During this U Myin was standing by the door although Bah Too had indicated that he could go, but now he said laboriously.
“Mr. Cutter, he stay two, three days?”
“Till Monday, anyway,” I said. “I can’t get customs clearance until then, because of this strike.”
He said, “English pongyi …” but then his English broke down, and he turned to Bah Too, and began speaking in Burmese. His chief listened to him, nodding now and then, occasionally putting in a question. Presently he turned to me.
“He says that one of our monks living just outside Rangoon is an Englishman,” he told me. “He is a very holy man. He has been a Buddhist monk, a pongyi we call them, for over thirty years. He is a very old man now, and he will not live for very much longer. His name is U Set Tahn. He has heard about Shak Lin. This boy wants to take you to see this monk, in order that you may tell him more about Shak Lin. Would you like to do that?”
“I don’t mind a bit,” I said. “I’ve got nothing much to do tomorrow, so far as I know.”
U Myin understood English much better than he could speak it, because I saw his face light up when I said that, and I wondered what I was letting myself in for. Bah Too said, “It would probably be a great kindness if you can spare the time.”
I got out a pencil and an old envelope and wrote the name down on the back of it, with Bah Too’s help, U Set Tahn. “That is a Burmese name, of course,” he said. “It means, Mr. Rainbow.” He spoke to the boy, but neither of them knew what the old man’s English name had been.
I fixed up to meet U Myin at the office of the airline in Rangoon at three o’clock on the following afternoon and they gave me the address, in Montgomery Street, near the Sulei Pagoda Road.
I drove into Rangoon that evening dressed in a clean suit of whites to dine with the Macraes, with Arjan Singh with me in a neat grey suit and a red and gold embroidered turban, looking like a robber baron in full dress. They had an English couple to meet us, and we had a very Surbiton sort of a dinner party; but for Arjan and the two boys who served us we might have been thousands of miles away from the East. They were very kind and hospitable people, keeping up the English way of life meticulously, far from home. I asked them if they knew this English pongyi, U Set Tahn. Macrae had vaguely heard at some time that there was such a person, but it was news to the rest of the party that any Englishman in Rangoon was living as a Buddhist monk, and there was a marked indication that he was letting down the side by doing so. I didn’t pursue the subject, beyond saying that I had promised to go and visit him the next afternoon. Nobody offered to come with me.
Arjan Singh had made a date for Sunday with a countryman of his own, a Sikh pilot of Indian National Airways that he had met during the war in the Royal Indian Air Force. I drove into Rangoon on Sunday morning, a long, interesting drive past lakes bordered by flame trees, very beautiful. The Macraes took me round the Shwe Dagon pagoda in our stockinged feet, and I marvelled. Then we went back to their house and changed our socks and had a drink, and went down to the Strand Hotel for them to have lunch with me. Then they left me, very kindly putting their car and driver at my disposal for the afternoon, and I went out to meet U Myin.
I picked him up at the airline office, and we drove out together northwards from Rangoon. He knew where the old man lived, and gave the driver the instructions in Burmese. We went out about six or seven miles, past the lakes, and came to a country district where the good class suburban bungalows standing in their gardens were merging into farmland and the palm thatch houses on posts of the poorer Burmese peasants. Here we drove down a side road and stopped the car and got out. A little-used footpath led through the scrub up on to a small hill with a few palms rising above the lower trees on top. “This way to ashram,” U Myin said. “English pongyi live here.”
He led the way, and I followed him up the path past a farm house; in this place that was wholly in the East I was queerly reminded of Cornwall, for there little farms lie close beneath small hills in just the same way. We went up the hill between the bushes and came to a small palm thatch house on top, shaded by the palm trees, all rather tumbledown and decaying. We stood by this and called up to it, because like all these houses it stood on posts and the floor was five or six feet from the ground, reached by a rough ladder. A very old man came to the door and looked down on us.
His head and face were shaven clean, and he wore only the coarse yellow robe of a monk. He listened to U Myin for a minute and then said, “Good afternoon. It is very kind of you to come to visit me. Will you come up?”
We climbed up into the house. It had an inner and an outer room, all very poor. In the inner room there was a bed with a mosquito net, in the outer room a broken deck chair, a wooden stool, a table with a few tattered books upon it, and little else. The old man made me take the deck chair and he sat upon the stool; U Myin squatted on the floor beside us.
I knew enough about the East, of course, not to approach the subject of my visit directly. I had all afternoon and evening to spare, and it was for him to raise the subject of Shak Lin when he wanted to. I said that I was passing through Rangoon and had heard that he was living there, and had come to visit him to see if there was anything that I could do for him, or bring to him from other countries. I explained that my aircraft were likely to be passing through Rangoon fairly frequently.
He was a pleasant and a matter of fact old man, whose manner contrasted oddly with his way of life. He told me that he had few needs, but under a little pressure he confessed that he wanted one thing, a British Admiralty Nautical Almanac. Astrology enters largely into Buddhist religious life, and he was hampered in his studies of the World to Come by the fact that his Nautical Almanac was out of date and he could not forecast the positions of the stars and planets upon any given day. I promised to get him that, and we talked of unimportant things for over an hour before he raised the subject of Shak Lin.
The old man had been a Colonel Maurice Spencer in the Royal Army Service Corps in the First World War, and had come to India after that for the prosaic job of organizing a service of lorries in Bengal. Within two years he had become a Buddhist and had achieved a small circle of Indian Buddhist friends in Calcutta, where he must have been a great grief to the English official and business community. Presently his friends told him that they were going out as monks to walk through Bengal villages for a month, and they proposed that as some leave was due to him he should put on the red robe, red for Buddhist priests in India, and get a begging bowl, and come with them. It had been as simple as that.
He had come back from that walk, settled up his Western affairs, and had put on the Buddhist robe again for good. He had walked on foot across India and down into Ceylon, eating only what the pious put into his bowl as he walked through the village, silent, every morning. I asked what happened if they didn’t put anything in, and he said that that had never happened. There was always more than he could eat. Each day he would walk on to the next village and sit talking with the elders under the village tree, giving what advice to them in local problems that he could, helping spiritually where he was able. One by one they would slip away to bed till he was left alone beneath the tree in the night; he was too holy a man to share their houses. When all were gone, he said, he would hunt about for somewhere to sleep himself. If there was a temple he would wrap his robe around him, and curl up and go to sleep in a corner of that, but you had to be careful of the snakes, which sought the warmth of a body on the cold stone floor. If there was no temple, he would go out into the country and find a haystack, or else go to sleep in the lee of a hedge. He had never come to any harm in many years of this life, though he had had fever often enough. He had walked across I
ndia and down into Ceylon, and all over Ceylon, and back up India and into Burma, in the course of ten or twelve years. He had come to rest there on the outskirts of Rangoon and had found this place, where the people had built the ashram, or small monastery, for him. When it needed repair or rebuilding, the villagers would make a day of it in a gang, and rebuild it for him. He had three or four small boys that he called his disciples; they came to him each morning and together they all walked out through the district for an hour or so with begging bowls held before them, eyes cast down, never looking to the left or the right, never speaking. The people brought out food and filled their bowls. They would return and eat, and for the rest of the day he would instruct the boys in reading and writing the Buddhist scriptures in the Pali script. At evening the boys went back to their homes.
I asked if he had ever been back to England, and he said, once, in 1936, but he found the world set upon the wrong course and was glad to return to his quiet ashram on the outskirts of Rangoon. I asked him what he wore in England, and he said, “Well, that’s a damn fool question. Do you think I walk down Piccadilly looking like this?” One could ask him anything.
A monk, he told me in explanation of his poverty, may possess only a few articles—the robe, the bowl, the drinking cup, the spectacles if he needs them, the sunshade, the needle, the fan with which he shields his eyes from the sight of women. As he was a friendly and a candid old man I asked about his mosquito net and his deck chair, to which he replied that they were weaknesses of the flesh that he could not do without, which meant that he was not a very good man. There seemed to be no answer to that one.
Presently, as we sat talking easily about these things, he turned the conversation to Shak Lin. “U Myin has told me that you have a man working for you, a remarkable man,” he said.
“He told me that you wanted to know about him,” I replied. “He’s my chief engineer. His name is Shak Lin.”
“And is he remarkable?”
I hesitated. “Probably not, to you. In England, people would say that he was mad. I say that he’s a fine engineer, who makes men reliable by bringing religion to their daily work. You can take it any way you like.”
He nodded and sat in thought for a minute, stooping to scratch a brown and rather dirty leg with a lean, skinny hand. His legs and feet were covered in old scars. “I had heard of that,” he said. “U Myin has given me some information, but several people have been talking to me about him.”
“Have they?”
“Indeed they have. He made a great impression on the monks in Bangkok. An Arab merchant from Aden came here to Rangoon a month or two ago and told one of my religious friends about the teaching that was going on in Bahrein. A Parsee from Karachi told us the same story. And then came U Myin who had actually been taught by this man, and who was teaching others at the airport out at Mingladon, as one of his disciples. And now you come, who know more than anyone, perhaps.”
“Well,” I said. “What can I tell you, Father? I’m not a very religious man myself, but I’ll tell you anything I can.”
He said, “Do you know where he was born?”
It was a question that I was not prepared for. “No, I don’t,” I said. “I think it was in Penang, but I can’t say for certain. His father was Chinese and a British subject, I think. Shak Lin himself is certainly British. His mother was a Russian.”
He looked up quickly. “A Russian? From what part of Russia?”
A vague memory of the idle chatter of boys in Cobham’s air circus stirred my mind. “I seem to remember that she came from Irkutsk.”
He got up from the stool and went to the table with the books on it. He had a tattered school atlas there, a little cheap thing such as children use in a council school. He stood there fingering it with fingers that trembled a little, a bowed old man with bare legs and feet, in this coarse, blanket-like yellow robe thrown over one shoulder, leaving the other skinny shoulder bare. He stood staring at the map of Asia for a time, and then closed the book and put it down.
He came back to me, and sat down on the stool again. “Do you know the date of his birth, and the hour?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I’m afraid not, Father. I don’t even know how old he is. I’ve always supposed he was about the same age as myself. I think he is, within a year or so.”
“How old are you?” he asked.
“I’m thirty-three.”
“So you were born in the year 1915?”
“That’s right,” I said.
He sat in silence for a long time after that. I shot a glance or two at him after a time. His head was shaking in the way that very old people do; it seemed to me that he was getting very tired. I had been with him for something like an hour and a half. I glanced at U Myin, and in his return look it seemed that he agreed with me; it was time we went away.
I broke the silence presently, after at least ten minutes. “Father,” I said, “I think it’s time we went home now, and left you to rest. I’ll come again one day, if I may. And I’ll send the Nautical Almanac as soon as I can get one out from England.”
“Stay for a minute,” he said. “I have things to tell you.”
He sat in silence again, and I waited.
At last he said, “I know that you are not a religious man. I will put what I have to tell you in words as simple as I can make them. Men are weak, and sinful, and foolish creatures. When they are given something that is beautiful and good they can recognize it and they venerate it, but gradually they spoil it. Infinite wisdom, infinite purity, and infinite holiness cannot be passed from hand to hand by mortal men down through the ages without being spoiled. Errors and absurdities creep in and mar the perfect vision. All the religions of the world have become debased. According to the present code of this religion I may not take life, yet I may eat meat if somebody else kills it and puts the cooked meat in my bowl. You Christians have similar absurdities; you have a curious ceremony in which you eat your God. The Moslems fast, which is a stupid thing to do, and they give far too much thought to the outward forms of prayer and pilgrimage.”
He paused. “Every religion in the world requires to be refreshed from time to time by a new Teacher. Guatama, Mahomet, Jesus—these are some of the great Teachers of the past, who have refreshed men’s minds and by their lives and their example brought men back to Truth. We are very far from the Truth now, far enough here, even farther in the West. Belsen and Buchenwald exceeded any horrors of the war here in the East. But we are all in this together, wandering, far, far from the Truth.”
He raised his head. “This thing is beyond the power of ordinary men to put right,” he said. “We must look for the new Teacher. One day the Power that rules the Universe will send us a new Teacher, who will lead us back to Truth and help us to regain the Way. There have been four Buddhas in the history of this world, of whom Guatama was the last. One day a fifth will come to aid us, if we will attend to Him. Here in Burma we earnestly await His coming, for He is the Hope of the World.”
I sat silent while he rambled on. He was putting into words things that I had resolutely kept in the background of my mind, in little cups that I hoped might pass from me.
“We know a little of the Teacher from our sacred learning, based upon the movements of the Celestial Universe,” he said. “We know that He is very near to us in time. We think He is already born. We think that His birthplace is somewhere in that corner of the continent of Asia where Tibet and Russia and China meet. We think that He will be of a mixed Eastern and Western stock. We think that this man is the Saviour of the World.”
I moistened my lips. “Do you know where He is going to teach, Father?”
“That has not been revealed,” he said. “The only certain fact we know is that His ministry will last for four years and twenty-three days.”
He was silent again, and when I looked at him he was sitting with his eyes closed, perhaps in some kind of a trance, perhaps asleep. I glanced at U Myin and got his agreement; we got up to go. T
he old man never stirred. I waited for a minute, but there seemed to be no point in staying any longer or disturbing him, and after a time we climbed down the ladder and went back to the car.
CHAPTER FIVE
Oh, Threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise!
One thing alone is certain, that Life flies:
One thing is certain, and the rest is lies:
The flower that once has blown for ever dies.
EDWARD FITZGERALD:
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
I GOT back to Bahrein about four days after that, after taking my load up to Yenanyaung. I landed back at our base with eighteen passengers from the Burma oil field late one evening. I went into the office before going to the chummery and found, as I had suspected, that we had had to turn away or to postpone a number of important transport jobs for the various oil companies, due to the fact that the Carrier had been absent from the district for nine days. Clearly, I couldn’t go on doing business in that way.
I had a talk about it to Connie and Gujar Singh in my office next day. Ours was a personal business and all the decisions and responsibilities were mine, but I had got into the way of talking things over informally with my chief pilot and my chief engineer whenever difficult decisions had to be made. I had them in now, and told them how we were placed.
“We can’t go on like this,” I said. “We’ve brought this business into being by offering air transport to the oil companies, and now they’re offering more business than we can cope with. I’m going to try and get another big aeroplane, and I think it’ll have to be a Plymouth Tramp. We’d never get the dollars for another Carrier, even if we’d got the sterling, which we haven’t.”
We talked about the Tramp for a time. They both liked the idea; indeed, Gujar Singh said roundly that he’d rather have a Tramp for our business than another Carrier. Connie was in favour of a Tramp, but concerned at the diversity of spares that we would have to carry for another aircraft of another type. There was a great deal in what he said; already we were operating five aircraft of four different types, and if we got a Tramp we should have six aircraft of five types.