Golden Earth

by Norman Lewis

  * * *

  Until 1769 all the area had been Chinese territory, and down this narrow, unimpressive valley the Mongol host had come riding, in 1284, to avenge the slaughter of their envoys by the Burmese king. Somewhere in the plain, within fifty miles of where I stood, at a spot which is now unknown because of the changing of the place-names, the spirits conjured up by the Mongol shamans – favoured perhaps by the reflex bow with its one hundred and sixty pounds pull – shot the Burmese guardian spirits full of arrows, and the Burmese army was annihilated. For full three months, according to the Burmese chronicle, they, the Burmese, slew the enemy and spared not even the feeders of elephants and horses, but when ten myriads were dead, the chief of the Mongols sent twenty myriads, and when the twenty myriads were dead, he sent forty myriads. The conflict seems to have made less impression on the Mongols, and Marco Polo speaks more of a punitive expedition carried out by a frontier force, a march of ‘gleemen and jugglers’ with a ‘captain and a body of men-at-arms to help them’ – a notable lack of agreement upon the fable of history.

  Five hundred years later and, once again, at the mouth of this valley, the Burmese handsomely vindicated themselves. First of all there had been a dispute over a Chinese merchant who had wanted to build a bridge over the river for his ox-caravans. Just as in the case of the Mongol envoys, the Burmese found that disrespect had been shown, and they flung the merchant into prison. Shortly afterwards another Chinese merchant was killed in a brawl in Burma. In the comparatively primitive Burmese law manslaughter was a trivial offence, compoundable by the payment of compensation. The Chinese, however, had arrived at the eye-for-an-eye stage, and demanded the handing over of the killer, or a substitute, for execution by strangling. To their great credit, the Burmese, although menaced by a nation they knew to be infinitely more powerful than themselves, refused to give the man up – a resoluteness which shows up particularly well against the weak-kneed conduct of the British, in the next century, when, in similar circumstances, a British seaman was surrendered at Canton. However, the Chinese, under the Ch’ing emperor, were in the mood when wars like that of Jenkins’ Ear are fought. The refusal by the Burmese to comply with their demands was thought outrageously unreasonable, particularly when, as it was pointed out, execution by strangling was not to be regarded as more than the just settlement of a debt, involving no stigma for the sufferer.

  Several Chinese armies poured into Burma, the main force passing once again through this valley. In a war lasting four years they were completely out-generalled and finally defeated, and, by an act of magnanimity without parallel in Far Eastern annals, allowed to march back once more by the cool waters of this riverine Arcadia, to China. This time the disparity in armaments was reversed, because of the artillery which the Burmese had purchased or seized from the Europeans, with which, they shot the Chinese stockades to pieces. By allowing the defeated survivors to return to their country, the Burmese brilliantly avoided what would have become a war à outrance with all the resources of the Chinese Empire thrown into it. The Chinese were allowed to save their faces by conveniently forgetting the whole thing, without even a formal treaty of peace being negotiated between the two countries. After a few weeks, trade was silently resumed, and no further reference was made to the affair. No allusion is made in Chinese official histories to the Ch’ing invasion of Burma.

  * * *

  Seen from without, the jungle had more variety, more mystery, more charm, than the forests of the north. In the woodlands between Bhamó and Myitkyina there was none of the monotony to be observed elsewhere in the Indo-Chinese peninsula, where a particular tree had adapted itself so perfectly to its environment that no others could take root there, thus producing the regimented boredom of a plantation. Here there was infinite variety of shapes, of sizes, of colour, of degrees of luminosity, with each tree separated from its neighbours by a subtle variation of aerial perspective. There were some that raised themselves to impose upon the sky a symmetrical, trimly contained silhouette; others that exploded raggedly in anarchic confusion of branches; others which struggled up dripping with epiphytic plants, parasites and creepers, as if emerging weed-laden from the sea. There were trees that looked as if they were composed of moss, which soaked up the light in velvety absorption, and others that scattered the sun’s rays in cascades from their metallic leaves. At the road’s verge the trunks were screened by ferns, through which, as if in the arrangement of a gigantic bouquet, pale blue and lemon convolvulus flowers were threaded. Sometimes a scarlet carpet of let-pet, the edible blossoms of the cotton tree, had been laid across the road. The total effect was always one of brilliance, and freshness, and even gaiety.

  Once, as we rumbled along, a school of gibbons dropped from the overhanging boughs, and avoided us with languid athleticism. We chased a baby wild boar that worked up such a speed that when it finally hurled itself into the jungle it left a noticeable hole in the screen of leaves. Here we saw many jungle fowl. They were almost as tame as the barnyard variety and just as stupid, running in demented zigzags in our path before taking to an easy, floating flight, their tails streaming out behind. Sometimes, in the rare clearings, we saw a most immaculate white harrier, with black wingtips, flapping low over the ferns. The most common bird along this forest road was the bee-eater, both the species which is almost indistinguishable from the European one, and the Burmese green variety, birds with an outright tropical panache. In flight the most streamlined of avian shapes; they were silhouetted like supersonic planes in the long, gliding interval following a few, quick wing-beats, as they swept from the branches after their prey. Green and golden-backed woodpeckers glinted at the mouths of flutelike rows of holes in the stumps of dead trees. Butterflies hovered in dark swarms over the buffaloes’ droppings, and we were obliged to stop twice, when the engine boiled, to brush a blanket of them, an inch thick, from the radiator.

  The Kachin villages we passed through had geometrical shapes in bamboo erected on posts at their outskirts, perhaps to mark the parish limits for the benefit of the tutelary spirit, whose shrine, or cage, was suspended near by. In one case a typical nat-shrine had been put up over a water-pipe which had been enterprisingly built to collect the water from a spring, and, perhaps, to imprison its presiding demon. The feathers of hoopoes and eagles – usually an arrangement of their tails and wings – were flown from masts. There were spirit-shrines too, built far from the villages in the jungle itself, wigwam-shaped constructions of leaves on a framework of branches, which looked as if they should have contained something, but which proved to be empty.

  When we came out into open fields, buffaloes were wandering about, each with half a dozen tick-eating egrets perched on its back, and a retinue of others accompanying it on foot. On one occasion, when we had stopped to clean the butterflies out of the radiator, we happened to witness a buffalo fight. We had noticed, without paying any special attention, two bulls standing facing each other, about a hundred yards away, on the edge of a stream. In the background a few cows were grouped, and the bulls watched each other with the introspective air natural to these deliberate and lumbering creatures. I had looked away and then back again just at the moment when both animals moved towards one another, breaking, to my surprise, into a rapid, shambling run. The hollow crash as they met must have been audible a mile away; and startled by the sound a cloud of egrets, and several previously unseen cranes, launched themselves on the air. The fight developed into a pushing match, the buffaloes straining away, with front legs planted widely apart, and heads lowered until their muzzles almost touched the ground, the thick bosses of bone between the horns in continual, grinding contact. Unless one of the beasts could succeed in cracking the other’s skull with the first impact, it seemed a harmless sort of conflict, as the horns were swept back in such a way that their points could not be brought into use. In the end, after fifteen minutes had passed, and neither animal had gained an inch, one suddenly gave way, and allowed itself to be shoved into the river, thus pro
viding itself with the excuse to break off the battle by swimming away. Having followed it into the water as far as honour demanded, the victor waded back to the unshared responsibility of the waiting cows.

  * * *

  Myitkyina lay in a scorching plain across the Irrawaddy, to be reached by ferry, a leisurely, time-wasting service run by the Burmese Army. The ferryboat, its shape blotted in the glare, was tied up under the opposite bank, indifferent to the croakings of our horn, and a yellow, half-mile wide flood ran between us. We pushed the nose of the car into the speckled shade of some willows, and plucked the heads off the yellow daisies that cut off our view of the river. There was a hot, sweet smell of water that had baked in the sun on the mud-flats all day.

  We had discovered an Indian in a yoga pose by the track leading down to the ferry, and now he unfolded his legs and joined us. He was an engineer, working on a bridge-reconstruction job near by. He had been marooned in the jungle for eighteen months and, after endless days of silence – he never troubled to learn more Burmese than was necessary to give his instructions – his speech was beginning to slow down, coming when it did in gushing releases, to be checked again as if by a troublesome airlock in his throat. With despairing tenacity he clung to such of the English rites as he could. It was Saturday evening, and he was going to Myitkyina, he said, ‘to paint the town red’. It was difficult to imagine this sad, earnest, fevered man, giving himself, even in homage to tradition, to the debauchery he hinted at. This strange, distorted echo of things English was renewed when the ferry, having finally noticed us, dawdled over; a pair of linked Viking boats, opening behind them a fan of glittering reflections in the sallow water. ‘Bad show to keep you waiting, old man,’ said the Burmese officer, slapping me sharply on the back. ‘Why didn’t you blow your horn?’

  The town of Myitkyina I saw only by night, as after an early-evening lunch at the Circuit House – a replica of that of Bhamó – I lay quietly awaiting the sunset before venturing out. Myitkyina was the last town of size before the Indian frontier, and there was a corresponding increase in Indian influence. Here there was an active and prosperous business community, and the long, single main street was radiant in the tropical night. Flickering myriads of winged insects filled the neon haze, and a man in flowing white robes went up and down playing on a pipe sweet, wild Pyrenean airs, of the kind you might have expected to hear in the Sierra del Cadi. I sat in a tea-shop and drank plain tea. There was a mosque across the way, a sort of two-dimensional Taj Mahal, the main structure and the flanking towers being cut out of flat metal, suitably painted, and supported on a framework. When viewed from the side, the whole construction vanished, as if subjected to enchantment, leaving only a minaret, like an ornamented oil-derrick. From its summit the muezzin was announcing at this moment, in a voice of exceptional quality, the truths of his religion, to the guitar players sitting in the rows of jeeps parked beneath. The radio in the tea-shop was tuned in to a Chinese station, which was broadcasting a slightly rearranged oriental version of The Lambeth Walk, a current favourite in Chinese South-East Asia.

  * * *

  Myitkyina was the starting-point for the great and tragic trek of the refugees who fled from Burma through the Hukawng Valley, before the Japanese advance, in the summer of 1942. Why should this mass flight have turned into a disaster, in which it is estimated that twenty-thousand persons lost their lives? On the map the distance from Myitkyina to Margherita, the first town over the Indian border, does not look great. It cannot be over three hundred miles, and the first hundred of them – to Sumprabum – were covered in many cases in motor vehicles. No hostility was shown to the refugees by the tribesmen inhabiting the thinly populated hills through which they passed. How was it, then, that so few escaped? A few extracts from the diary of my friend Lee, who was caught up in this exodus, may help to explain.

  His original party of eight – which was later swollen to twenty – consisted of his wife, Ma Pyo, a Burmese girl, their eighteen-months-old son, their servants, a junior officer, and his batman. They arrived at Myitkyina on May 4th, ‘organised’ and hid vehicles on the west bank of the river and spent the next three days ferrying civilians and a few wounded soldiers across, using the ferryboat which had been deserted by its regular crew. On May 7th the Burmese steersman ran off, Japanese fighters strafed the last of the transport planes on the Myitkyina airfield, and the Japanese ground troops were reported very near the town, coming up the Bhamó road. The last party of refugees was therefore ferried across, and Lee and his people set off in their three cars and reached Sumprabum – where the motor road comes to an end – next day. A great multitude of bewildered refugees were encamped here, trying to find coolies before setting out on foot. No one had any idea of what lay ahead, and a usual estimate of the distance to be covered was ninety miles. Lee notes that thirty-eight schoolgirls from the Baptist school in Moulmein had got thus far. A few months later, in hospital in India, he met one of the two survivors.

  At this moment, things did not look too bad – at least, to an old mining prospector. Lee knew that they had a long walk in front of them, but he had no doubt that by keeping good discipline, and by covering reasonable daily stages, they would get to India in two weeks at the most. The chief drawback was Ma Pyo’s condition. She was six months pregnant, and Lee was furious when she turned down the offer of a female missionary to take her and their baby son, and to keep them safe with her in the Kachin hills, where the missionary had great influence, and proposed to hide out. With an outburst of wrath which establishes the Old Testament mood of their expedition, he assured her that she would be shot if she held the party up by going sick. ‘But,’ he says, ‘I should have known better than to doubt the stamina of a Burmese girl. They are small and dainty, but mighty tough. At one time or another every man in my party lost heart and gave trouble, so that I had to drive them like animals; but Pyo calmly carried on. She did more than her share.’ There are further references in the diary to the superior resistance of the womenfolk. ‘We met a huge Sikh woman with her six children, the eldest about ten years and the youngest a few weeks old. She had no one else with her, no food, spare clothing or bedding. She was worried about her milk lasting out for the baby, but was otherwise cheerful, and too proud to ask for assistance. We did what we could, and left her plugging steadily along, carrying two kids, with the other four helping each other.’

  So they had started out confidently enough, with Lee, the professional backwoodsman, at their head. But that night the Wet Monsoon broke, and without their knowing it, twenty thousand had been condemned to death. With the first showers, the mosquitoes came out, and it rained without stopping for ten days. Ten days happens to be the incubation period of malaria, and by the end of that time most of the refugees had it. A few who were taken with cerebral accesses died within a few hours. Others lay down in the wet jungle, and shivered and starved. A few, like Lee and his party, kept staggering on through the rain, fever or no fever. Lee, who had it worse than the others, became half-blind. When his head cleared a little he remarked that they were passing the first of the dead bodies, and learned, to his surprise, from the others, that they had passed many dead during the previous two days. It was particularly bad in the outskirts of the villages, where the semi-domesticated pigs hung about to feed on the dead – and on the dying. After that Lee gave up trying to shoot pigs for food, finding that his people would no longer touch their meat.

  From this time until they crossed the frontier of India, a month later, they were never out of the sight and smell of death; and at this point the refugees dropped, as if with loathing, their civilised poses and pretences. Civilisation provides a whalebone corseting, and when this is unfastened, the individual either turns to jelly or begins to flex unsuspected muscles. From now on Lee found something exaggerated in people’s conduct, including his own. They had turned into ham actors in an old-fashioned movie, either heroes or villains. It was a study in black and white, with no halftones.

  The g
regarious instinct survived these apocalyptic conditions. ‘The go-downs were crammed full of refugees; with smallpox, cholera, dysentery and malaria rampant,’ but decency was the first casualty, ‘… they would not even leave the camp and go into the jungle to answer the call of nature.’ And colour prejudice persisted to the bitter end. ‘We found an Anglo-Burmese boy of about thirteen years, calling “Aunty, Aunty”. When we asked him what he was doing there all alone, he replied, “My legs will not work, so my Daddy and Mummy have gone on with my sister, who is very white and not dark like me.”’

  They kept on coming upon camps which the Tea Planters’ Association had been operating, but which had been abandoned, and were like waterlogged graveyards, with unburied corpses everywhere. Lee, as something of a connoisseur of death on battlefields, was offended by the incorrectness of these civilian postures. They were all undignified. People had died while defecating, or drinking, and had polluted the water supply with the corruption of their bodies. ‘The only person I saw who died in a dignified manner was an elderly Mohammedan gentleman. He was a wealthy man, as he had a number of servants with him. When he could travel no further and knew his end was near, he had his servants spread rugs of good quality under a shelter, and then had them stretch him out on them. He crossed his arms and told his people to spread the last rug over him. They did so.’

  As for himself, Lee noticed the rapid growth of a protective shell of callousness. To illustrate this, he mentions that on May 24th – the second day of his recovery from malaria – they found a Chinese, unable to walk, but sitting with a happy grin on a pile of rice he had found in a shed. A mile further on they came upon another, lying face downwards, in the last stages of hunger and exhaustion. Lee rolled him over, and sacrificed a little of his precious store of brandy to bring him round. After a while they got him on his feet, cut two walking sticks for him to pull himself along with, and told him how to join his countryman on the rice heap. ‘At that time I felt sentimental,’ Lee says. ‘Had this incident happened three weeks later, I would have passed the man, and left him to die without a second thought.’