Golden Earth

by Norman Lewis

  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.

  As the man was becoming lachrymose I was much relieved by the approach of Mr Bellamy, Ma Lat’s husband, a man of genial and confidential manner, who still occasionally makes a book. Mr Bellamy said, ‘If you want to talk to my memsahib, you’d better come over now, because we’re going in a moment.’

  The Princess Ma Lat was at this time fifty-seven, although in the way of many Asiatics who do no manual labour, she looked much less than her age. She was dressed in conservative Burmese style, and her still handsome features were continually enlivened by an expression which made one feel she was amused by something of which she did not entirely approve. Since it had been brought up several times in the evening, I had an intuition that a tactful allusion to the famous passage would not be badly received. The Princess’s characteristic expression deepened. ‘I object to the book,’ she said, ‘only because of its inaccuracy. Mr Collis said that although a member of the royal family, I could not be admitted to any of the European clubs of Rangoon … My father was an honorary member of every club.’ When she had said this, the amused disapproval brightened into quiet triumph.

  The Princess’s grandfather was brother of King Mindon and Crown Prince – a perilous situation for any Burman to be in. In due course, in the preliminary manoeuvring for the succession, he was murdered by one of his many nephews, and as Burmese liquidations were usually extended to include any members of the family who happened to be about, his son – the Princess’s father – escaped, to take refuge with the British. Later he went off to the Shan States where he was recognised as ‘King of Burma’, and raised an army to attack Thibaw, but was forestalled in this by British action.

  In these days Ma Lat had become the moving spirit behind various charities, particularly the local maternity hospital. She is the recognised expert in all matters pertaining to the cinema, and is able quite effortlessly to name the stars playing in any American film shown in the last twenty years. I mentioned my recent visit to her cousins in Mandalay, describing in passing the servants’ habit of crawling into their presence. Ma Lat nodded with approval, and said that she could remember the time when hers did the same, but, there – you knew what servants were nowadays. Discovering that we both expected to be in Rangoon in about a month’s time, we arranged to meet, and I promised to escort her to see the film of Cinderella.

  The daughter of the union, June Rose, who was about twenty years of age, allied to the graceful beauty of the Burmese a quite European vivacity. She had recently been co-winner of some sort of competition, and as a result had been invited with the other successful competitor, a Burmese boy called Richard, for a three months’ tour in the USA. There they had learned to jitterbug. When the family were about to leave, in an elderly and ailing British car, June Rose showed much skill in locating a short in the wiring, and much tomboyish energy in winding the starting-handle until the engine fired. On reconsideration of the whole episode I cannot really think that the Princess was any worse off as she was, enthusiastically immersed in the interests of any English or American woman of her age, than she might have been in the old days, living the stifling life of the Burmese royal seraglio, with the shadow of the red sack looming with each change of kingship.

  * * *

  It was now time to think of the journey to Lashio, and the Consul sent his chauffeur with me down to Maymyo bazaar, to make enquiries. We were told that the trucks leaving Maymyo that day were going no further than the towns of Naungkhio or Hsipaw. There might be some kind of transport coming through next day, from Mandalay, but no one was sure.

  Maymyo bazaar itself was wonderfully lively. We were already on the edge of the Northern Shan States, and there were swaggering, sword-bearing hill men about the street in turbans and the short pyjama-trousers worn by the Shans. Some of them were tattooed so closely wherever their flesh showed, that they might have been wearing skin-tights of knitted blue wool. In the big, walled market they sold a fine selection of the bags the Shans carry over their shoulders, wonderfully woven in colours and sometimes decorated with small cowrie shells. There were piles of enormous coolie hats, some of them finished in a central cone of silver, any number of patent medicines, and towels with ‘good morning’ on them. Maymyo had many barbers’ shops, which had found a use for the waste products of the local ‘tyre surgery’. Lengths of outer covers were mounted complete in sections of rims on the bottoms of the barbers’ chairs, in which the customers rocked themselves in perilous abstraction while the razors hovered over their chins. There were ranks of gharries that appeared to do no serious business, although occasionally a group of Shans would wake up a driver, bundle into one and go for a quick spin round the bazaar, much as in the old days one took a five shilling flip round the aerodrome in a plane. In Maymyo the exuberant fantasy of the Mandalay gharries was diminished, but I saw a pedicab with three pairs of handlebars, twenty-seven lamps and fourteen horns, one in the shape of a serpent.

  * * *


  At the Consulate, Duffy thought it a good thing to wait at least another day, to see if I could pick up a truck going all the way to Lashio, rather than run the risk of being stranded for a time in one of the smaller towns between. I felt ashamed of the eagerness with which I seized on this short respite.

  In the afternoon we visited the local gardens. There was a small, trim lake, a few well-spaced trees and shrubberies in the English style, and here, said the gardener, in the early mornings passed a gaudy, transient population of hornbills, orioles and parakeets. But always with the mounting of the sun these exotics vanished and were replaced by the drab, skulking bird-life of the European woodlands. Where peacock and silver pheasant had strutted now only hardy, unabashed thrushes and sparrows hopped. But always the background was dominated by the mysterious calls of birds, aloof and invisible in the jungle; the sad hooting of the Burmese cuckoo, which is the call of the cuckoo we know with the notes reversed; the midnight rendezvous-whistle of the brain-fever bird, which repeated without respite, to the victim raving with malaria, becomes an hallucinatory addition to his torments. In the end these sounds become associated with the Indo-Chinese peninsula, and after being away from them for a time, I found myself longing to hear them again.

  * * *

  Dressing next morning I hid a small reserve of money in a bandage round a damaged ankle. The barometer of Burmese travel had fallen back somewhat, since the news had just come through of the slaughter of two tin-miners near Tavoy – a rare and extraordinary occurrence, as foreigners have not been singled out for attack in Burma. They had been taken off a truck in which they had been riding with Burmese passengers, and riddled with Sten-gun fire. The truck had then been sent on its way, without any of the other passengers being molested. This was supposed to be the work of Red-Flag Communists, or perhaps local Mon insurgents, or perhaps a combination of both. Fortunately it was believed that there were no Red-Flags in the Lashio area.