by Norman Lewis
No sooner had I put my bedding down in a corner than a Kachin girl came in. She had a wide Tibetan face with bright pink cheeks which seemed to continue right up to her eyes, which were narrow, black and glinting. She was smiling with abounding good humour, and bounced round the room in a kind of brisk tour of inspection, skirts swirling and hawser-like pigtails flapping on her back. It seemed as though she wished to assure herself that all the non-existent furniture had been properly dusted, and that the towels had been put out. Finally satisfied with the good order of the void, she withdrew with a slight bow, indicating, as she did, the cubicle, where I found a bowl of hot water had been placed. Five minutes, perhaps, passed while I was unpacking a few things; then I heard footsteps in the cubicle, to which there was also an outside door, and looking up I saw that another handmaiden had arrived with a second steaming bowl. The first was removed. Next the beaming Seng arrived with a chair to put my clothes on. Having arranged my wardrobe on this, and laid out my mosquito net ready for use, I made for the wash-place, just in time to see the water being changed for a third time.
I washed and hung up my mosquito net, and was wondering what to do with myself when there was a tap on the door and Seng was back again. ‘Do you like rum?’ he asked. I said that I did, and followed him into the central room, where the headman was staring severely at several bottles. We sat down and the headman took three half-pint tumblers, half filled them with rum, and topped them up with the now familiar Mandalay Pale Ale. One of these he handed to me. The headman and his brother-in-law raised their glasses in my direction. Seng smiled brilliantly; he said ‘Chin-chin’. The headman managed a faint grimace. Two heads were flung back and two glasses drained. The headman looked up with faint reproach while I gulped painfully, fulfilling at enormous effort what was expected of me. Immediately the two bottles were raised, threateningly, and I realised that the abstemious and puritanical Burma of the plains was now behind me and that I had fallen among a race of hard-drinking hill-folk.
The headman spoke a little now, groping for words, about local conditions. In recent years they had seen plenty of fighting. When the Japanese had finally gone there had been a plague of Chinese bandits, and then a Kachin insurrection against the Burmese led by a self-promoted Brigadier Naw Seng, who when defeated had escaped with his adherents into China. The headman supposed that he would reappear one of these days in the guise of a Chinese-backed liberator of the Kachin people. He was not disturbed at the prospect. ‘We Kachins lack education,’ he said. ‘We like to fight and to drink country spirit.’ If the Chinese Communists ever came over the frontier it would be a good scrap while it lasted, although he was the first to admit that it wouldn’t last long. Up to the moment there had not been a single instance reported to him of the violation of the frontier by a Communist soldier, although waves of fleeing Nationalists kept coming over. The road ahead, between this and Nam Hkam, had been closed for a week now because of the attacks they had made on traffic, and in the near future he would have to go and drive them out of the area. He had a two-pounder gun that hadn’t been used since the war, and now he was hoping for the chance to fire a few rounds. The headman’s voice when he said this lacked the ring of conviction. It was more of the sportsman’s gesture to a convention of optimism, than a matter of serious hope.
I asked for news of conditions over the frontier. Were, for instance, land reforms being put into practice? Land reforms! the headman echoed scornfully, it wasn’t land reforms the hill-peoples wanted. The people over the frontier were Shans, Kachins and Palaungs, just as they were on this side. If they wanted land, there was nothing to stop them clearing the bush and cultivating it. What the Kachin people wanted was not land, but education. That, he understood, their new masters in China were going to give them, although he had heard that the first samples to return from the school in Kunming had soon shown, to the scandal of the villagers, that they had lost respect for their parents. One of the worst things about the present situation was the closing of the frontier to ordinary respectable people. If you were dressed up like a hill savage in a turban and strings of beads, nobody said anything to you – you could cross backwards and forwards as much as you liked. But if you wore decent clothes – a pair of trousers and a hat bought in Rangoon – they arrested you as a spy. Draining his glass sorrowfully to the memory of departed liberties, the headman reached over and struck the gong. There was an almost immediate irruption into the room of domestics carrying dishes of food. Along with them came the headman’s wife – Seng’s sister – a strapping Ludmila of the remote Asiatic mountains, who, relieved of the headman’s necessity for high-minded seriousness, giggled frequently, especially when in difficulties with the serving of the food. There was a continual coming and going of flouncing, pig-tailed forms, until the table was closely covered with dishes, scarlet curries with surface currents of ochreous oil, three varieties of what looked like seaweed (inevitably recommended as abundant in vitamins), a paste made of ground beans and chillies, pickled tea-leaves, great bowls of red rice, cups of tea with a container of salt by each. Having brought in the food, the female staff bowed, and one by one withdrew. Their place was taken by soldiers, who took up position behind the chairs and helped with the dishes, into which they sometimes let ash fall from the cheroots they were smoking. In between their duties, they kneeled down to play with several of the headman’s young children who had escaped from the nursery to take refuge here, and were crawling about on the floor.
* * *
Later that day, I found out from Seng that his brother-in-law had just received definite information of the location of the Chinese band. They were in a jungle village, about five hours’ ride to the north, and next morning the headman would lead a party of his men to attack them. By this time Seng and I were on such good terms that I felt able to ask him to persuade the headman to take me with them. The headman, too, had suddenly thawed out with a revelation of charm that was like the unexpected appearance of the sun on a dull day. We talked about such things as education, particularly the flashier subjects like psychology, to which provincial Asiatics are often specially attracted, finding that the transition to such studies is not difficult after a grounding in, say, horoscopy or in the art of making oneself bullet-proof. In the cool of the evening all the able-bodied household, including the womenfolk, were chased out to do physical jerks in the courtyard while the headman, himself, rapped out the orders in Kachin – knees-bend, knees-stretch. This ritual was thoroughly enjoyed, especially by the women who usually overbalanced while in the knees-bend position. Nothing was said, one way or other, about the next day’s expedition.
However, soon after dawn, Seng followed the pig-tailed serving-girl into my room, and said, ‘The horses are ready.’ He was trying to buckle on a Kachin dah, a weapon of monstrous unsuitability, over his Rangoon clothes. Seng was manipulating the dah – a heavy bladed affair, half-sword and half-axe – with a civilised lack of enthusiasm. ‘If I do not carry this,’ he said, with an apologetic smile, ‘the headman will think I have become soft. But I have lost the habit of the strokes.’ The soldiers were armed with Sten guns or rifles, but the headman and his brother-in-law were by tradition invulnerable, and carried dahs for reasons of prestige alone.
I am a plain horseman, content to keep my seat, and unfamiliar with equestrian refinements. The pony provided for me looked well-shaped enough and there was nothing unusual about it, except a certain sheepish quality about the head, and a drooping of the muzzle that reminded me of some other animal, perhaps a tapir. The stirrups were too short, and could not be lengthened enough for comfort. I mounted, and found myself, in this position, nearer the ground than I had ever been since on a donkey on the sands as a child. The short, fat back sagged springily as it took my weight, and I half expected the animal to collapse. Once firmly in the saddle I kicked experimentally at the pony’s sides, and it instantly threw me backwards, over the tail, with an irresistible oscillation, like that of a dog shaking the water out of it
s coat. One of the Kachin soldiers caught it by the rein, passed a caressing hand over its face, then smacked it fiercely with the flat of his dah. I mounted again, and sat there quietly. The soldiers went off, stringing out into a thin column, with the headman leading them. Behind him rode a soldier, steering a pony which had nothing but a large ceremonial drum strapped to its back. Then came the straggling column, with the soldiers in their British battledresses, with waistbands tied over them, and dahs stuck through the waistbands; so that they looked like Japanese swordsmen. Seng and I brought up the rear. My pony started when the others did, and stopped when they stopped. Without any urging on my part, it broke, when it was required to keep up with the rest, into a kind of scrambling gallop, but would tolerate no interference on my part; it danced about and tossed its head angrily if I tried to give it any encouragement other than a shake of the reins, or to influence its course in any way. But it was the smoothest animal to ride I had ever sat on, and Seng later told me that a Kachin pony was unsaleable until it could be put through all its paces, with its rider holding a full tumbler in one hand, without spilling the contents.
That morning I had awakened with a vague sense of indisposition, and now as a growling malaise concentrated and defined itself, I realised that I was in for a mild bout of malaria. The fever soon cushioned the edges of sensation, and simplified things wonderfully. To me the jungle itself has never offered the brilliant variegation of the jungle as it appears in an air-terminal mural. It has never been a matter of orchids and black panthers; and now even the few modest highlights that this forest could have offered were suppressed by two or three degrees of fever. The impression remains that from the outside, as we rode through the wide clearings, it was like the trimly arranged asparagus of a bouquet from which, unaccountably, the flowers had been omitted. But as soon as we rode beneath those delicate awnings of fernery we passed into a seedy vegetable disorder, with many sallow, broken grasses, and moulting bamboos; and the sun showered its spears on us through a ragged armour of leaves. There were no serpents, nor startled fawns; not even, in fact, birds of sufficient presence for my fevered eyes to record them. This was a well-worn track, which wild animals had probably learned to avoid. Tribesmen, like any other travellers, are careful to keep out of the virgin jungle, and this narrow path probably carried as much or more human traffic than the metalled highroad.
We rode by the verge of swamps, over bare hilltops, and down into the untidy jungle again; and thus on and on. Some time in the early afternoon the soldiers ahead broke into a gallop, and a few minutes later we rode into a miserable Palaung village. The soldiers sprang from their horses, crawled into the huts and came out with a few women. They were half-naked, and all had goitre. The Chinese had gone off the day before, they said, but they had left two sick men behind. They took us to a shelter of leaves and branches, under which the two deserted men lay on the ground, half-conscious, and with their bare feet grossly swollen. The Kachins sat them up, tied their hands lightly, and tried to stick lighted cheroots between their teeth; but the Chinese were past smoking. It appeared that the band had gone off down the trail in the direction of the border, so the headman, leaving a man behind with the prisoners, gave the order to ride on.
We rode out of the village, with the half-clothed, goitrous women standing by their huts looking after us, and down into the jungle, which was exactly as before. The thumping behind my eyes deepened, and with it, the monotony of the ride. Hours later we came down to a river. From our position we could not see the water, which at this time of the year was very shallow and split up by islands and sandbanks. There was a fording-place here, and China was on the other side. We could just make out a village, with an insect-movement of humans and buffaloes among the huts. The headman sent soldiers in various directions to make enquiries and, after a long wait, one of them came back with the news that the bandits had been seen crossing the ford. It was evident that the Kachins did not relish being checked by the purely political barrier. Seng explained that the people across the river were not Chinese, but Shans and Kachins; moreover, he said, ‘The actual border is in dispute. Every year the river changes its course.’
But the headman was against further action. There might be Communist soldiers on the other side. Not that he was prepared to cross, in any case. To satisfy the men, the big drum was beaten vigorously; and a few seconds later the reply came, a bugle-call, practised, unwavering and definite. That settled it. A new, unsympathetic authority had announced its presence.
Although I had no idea of it at the time, we were at this point actually within a few miles of Nam Hkam, having in the course of our expedition cut across the base of a triangle of country enclosed by the motor-road. In a few days I should be passing once again down the roughly-metalled track running parallel with the river.
* * *
That night we slept in a jungle-clearing on the way back. There was a remnant of a hut perched on stilts ten feet high, and into it the headman, Seng and I climbed. Every time one of us turned over, this construction swayed a little. Beneath us, the soldiers thudded with unflagging energy at their drum, and sang a soldiering song with endless verses and an extremely monotonous air. The end of each verse would be signalled by howls of laughter. In the end, as the first wave of fever slowly spent itself, I relapsed into rambling, oppressive dreams. I was soon aroused by a discharge of shots. But it was only a soldier who had been tinkering with his Sten, which was loaded, and had shot off one of his toes.
CHAPTER 13
Protective Custody
THE LOCAL SECTION of the Burma Road having been declared open to traffic, the headman took me down in his jeep to the point where the hill-track joined it, and where he had established a roadblock, guarded by his men. Seng had come down to see me off, and here we parted most cordially. The soldiers had already stopped a jeep. In it were two Chinese merchants on their way from Kutkai to Mu-Sé. This town was not marked on my map, the production of a very well known map-making firm, which was vague – and, as I later discovered, inaccurate – about this frontier area. The Chinese spoke of Mu-Sé as if it were a considerable metropolis, a local nerve-centre from which well organised transport services left regularly in all directions. This pernicious optimism in informants is one of the traveller’s worst enemies. They said there were lorries to Nam Hkam ‘plenty often’. More than once a day? Oh, sure, more than once a day. Would we get to Mu-Sé early enough to catch one? Oh, sure we would, sure thing.
The Chinese spoke English better than the Burmese perhaps because they had escaped the schools run by religious institutions, with their hallmark of tedious and involved archaism. By comparison the Chinese made it snappy, and cinema-argot ran like a rich vein of fool’s gold through their speech. Their Americanisms are, of course, dated, and as the cinematographic diet of the Far East is largely composed of gun-toting epics, they are drawn largely from the dialects of the cattle-raising states. ‘Well, I’ll be a son of a gun,’ said the driver in amazement, when he learned of my hitchhike from Mandalay.
The Chinese jeep reflected in its purposeful, surging acceleration, its efficient steering and brakes, and also in certain additional equipment, such as fog-lamps, the tastes and calibre of its owner. Wherever a plain black handle or knob had existed, it had been replaced by one of sky-blue plastic. Badges in the dashboard announced membership of motoring associations in places like Hong Kong and Cuba, and would have appeared to be of little service to the Chinese member. Sometimes when approaching a corner, round which the odds of an approaching vehicle being hidden were several thousand to one, the driver would touch a button, and a tremendous fanfare of trumpets would flush from the undergrowth an unsuspected population of pigeons and quails.
This landscape was the wild, natural reserve common to most frontiers. Exposed to endless incursions of bandits, it had not been thought worth while to build villages, or to undertake any settled cultivation. From the absence of trees on the low hillsides you could see that the Palaungs or Kac
hins had moved through at some time, set fire to the forest and snatched a crop of ‘dry’ rice or maize. The road had been cut, a red whiplash round hillsides and through valleys filled with a dense low tundra of tropical vegetation. We saw few signs of animal life here, except some lizards in the red dust, one of which was carried off from beneath our tyres in the talons of a hawk, which missed annihilation by inches. After perhaps two hours of shattering the savage peace of this wilderness with our heraldic approach, we dropped down into a long valley running north-south, and beyond the end of this, their bases laced with an immediate foreground of tree-fern, loomed portentous and pallid the bare mountains of Yunnan. At the valley’s end we passed out into the unchallenged sunlight of a plateau, soon reaching a crossroads with a police post and a knot of harassed, sword-bearing travellers. From this point the Burma Road went on to cross the Chinese frontier, at Wanting, about three miles away. The road to the left went to Mu-Sé, and down this broken, calamitous track we plunged, after a cursory inspection by the Kachin frontier police.
* * *
Mu-Sé was a place of importance and animation. We pulled up in a considerable square with a market to which a row of Chinese tea-shops with outside tables had given a faintly Parisian atmosphere of graceful leisure. Banners, which might have flown at the fiat of a dictator, were found to advertise the practices of dentists, and were usually adorned with enormous sectional diagrams of the jaw, the danger-spots filled in in savage colour. There was a Shwebo Motor Store with an Indian-Gothic façade in red brick, complete with castellations. Combined grocers and tea-shops had their shelves well stocked with such commodities as nougat and Wincarnis. At one of these the two Chinese and I took tea together, while glossy, blue-black crows hopped about our feet or dived under the chairs to pick up crumbs of cake. Women with bound feet, and conservatively dressed Chinese in long gowns and Phrygian caps, passed by. As in Hsenwi a few of the shopkeepers were combating the tedium between customers by flying kites from the doors of their establishments. This was done with much expertness and the use of the best equipment, the string being wound on expensive-looking contraptions like fishing-reels. In one case some kind of competition seemed to be in progress between an Indian executive of the Shwebo Motor Store and a dentist, some hundred yards away, at the other end of the square. Their kites, flown at such a height that they were no more than white slivers in the sky, were going through the most complicated evolutions, feinting and thrusting, swooping and ducking. It seemed a most convenient kind of game that one could play with opponents in different parts of the town without neglecting one’s business.