I put it down to his fasting and his abstinence. But he was becoming uncomfortably quick in understanding the unspoken thoughts in a companion’s mind. He walked along the gangway to the shore, his eyes fixed on the ground six feet ahead of him, as indifferent to the crowd which thronged the bank as to me. But his indifference affected me not at all. For once more the old spell was upon me. As I climbed back from the lighter on to the Moulmein, I was as certain as he was of his new Faith that I had not done with him nor he with me.
Chapter 8 The First Ascent of the Dent du Pagoda
THE DECISION, INDEED, was taken out of our hands. It was made for us during the previous night whilst our steamer had been lying at Katha; and by men whom Uncle Sunday would have pitied and I should have arraigned.
A few days before, whilst Michael was still sitting at the feet of the American monk at Pagan, two men came to the monastery. They had shaven heads and both wore the yellow robe. No one challenged them. They declared themselves to be students and novices, and they were both of an age in the late twenties. They had the right to lodge there, so long as they observed the Ten Commandments, just as they had the right to depart whensoever they wished; and without question or complaint. They spread their sleeping-mats on the floor of the great hall and, rising with the others at the time when there was just light enough to see the veins of the hands, they lined up behind the abbot before the image of Buddha in the order of their degree in the brotherhood, and joined in chanting the morning service. They then helped in the household work, filtering the drinking-water so that no living thing might be destroyed when it was drunk, sweeping the floors and watering the plants in the enclosure; all very dutifully and neatly. They then studied the book of Weenee which describes the Whole Duty of the Monk. This for an hour. Towards eight o’clock they took their begging bowls, and in single file behind the abbot and again in their due order of precedence, they marched round the town, receiving, with a proper absence of gratitude, the food which the charitable, acquiring merit, heaped high in their bowls. Their last meal of the day eaten before noon, or, let us say, supposed to be eaten before noon, they passed the long afternoons in study and meditation. If a head nodded, who should notice it? If eyelids closed, was not abstraction more complete? Were not all thoughts fixed upon the Law and the Assembly and the attainment of Nirvana? A slow and pensive walk for health’s sake followed upon the afternoon. And while you contemplated such majestic opacities, would a voice in your ear call you back to earth or even the nudge of an elbow in your ribs? Not a well-fed pongyi anyway. Towards evening, meditation lost its hold. From time to time the bow must be unbent or it will snap.
These two new-comers received monastic names. They were called in the secular tongue Nga Pyu and Nga Than; and they were very, very glad to be called something else, since the prefix Nga has associations to which they were anxious not to draw attention. They were two very bad men but they became Pyinya and Thoukkya, excellent names for a pair of jugglers in a music hall or for novices in a brotherhood.
Their great moments were after nightfall, when the great doors of the teak stockade were closed and perhaps the abbot or the American monk, Nageinda, or one of the elders, would discourse. Pyinya and Thoukkya were second to none in their attention. And when the evensong was intoned at nine before the image of the Buddha, they were second to none in the humility of their voices. They would ask, thereafter, devout questions about the new white pagoda in the compound, which reared its two hundred glistening feet of spire to the golden, umbrella-shaped Hti.
“A great lady gave it? Surely in her next life she will have deserved to be a man?” one of them would ask.
“Or perhaps she will enter at once into Peace?” asked the other.
“Who shall say?” would be the answer. “The noble lady has acquired great merit.”
“Is it true that a great diamond is set in the Hti?” Pyinya enquired with awe.
“Gifts have the same value if they are equally proportioned to the means of the giver,” U Nageinda answered. “Thus, the sapphire and the silver ornaments of our brother U Wisaya confer no less merit upon him than the great diamond upon the lady.”
“And those too are on the Hti?” asked Thoukkya with a glance of admiration towards Michael, reading his book in a corner.
“They encircle the spire like a bracelet just below the Hti,” said U Nageinda proudly. He was still unregenerate enough to dislike any depreciation of his own particular convent.
Pyinya and Thoukkya wandered out on to the wide platform and, sitting on the steps, gazed upwards to the top of the soaring spire. There was still a scaffolding about it, for the great lady was decorating it with a string of electric light bulbs, which on dark nights, to people on the river far below, would glow amongst the stars.
But the nights were not dark now. The moon lit up the enclosure, the two pagoda slaves who watched the night through whilst the scaffolding stood, and the palm trees, till all was as light as day.
“To-morrow the scaffolding will be down,” said Pyinya in a whisper, lest he should disturb the serenity of the night.
“And the pagoda servants in their huts on the river-bank,” replied Thoukkya.
“We shall see the pagoda in its beauty,” said Pyinya joyfully.
“For a week, Brother,” Thoukkya warned him with a regretful shake of the head. “Only for a week. Then there will be no moon.”
Pyinya sighed, and then, like a man who has a happy thought, he smiled.
“But even if there is no moon, there will be the chain of electric lights from the top of the pagoda to the ground. It will be a comfort to us all to see it still.”
Thoukkya was very sorry to dash the pious hopes of his fellow novice. But it was better that he should know the truth. Thoukkya had made discreet enquiries. Economy had been considered.
“The lights will not burn after nine,” he said.
The two men gazed upwards to the Hti two hundred feet above the ground.
“The bulbs are hung upon a strong wire rope,” said Thoukkya.
“A doubled rope,” Pyinya added; “so that when one of the lamps fails it can be lowered and replaced.”
“Yes,” Thoukkya agreed. “It is all very beautiful.”
And both men, in spite of their concentrated meditations, had been very observant.
“It is a pity that we cannot see from so far below the great lady’s diamond sparkling in the moonlight and thus understand the better the greatness of her merit,” said Thoukkya after a pause.
“Yes, it is a pity,” Pyinya agreed. “But at all events we know that it is there. Instead of regretting, shall we not hope that the workmen too have achieved merit by setting it irremovably in the Hti?”
Thoukkya bowed his head.
“Yes, we must hope for that. But we know that workmen scamp even the most meritorious work.”
“Alas and alas!” said Pyinya. “But we shall learn the truth of all this when the moon has hidden her face.”
Thoukkya looked upwards to the soaring spire and thought how strange the world must look, if you were perched upon the top of it.
“I am dizzy,” he said. “I think that I am going to be sick.”
“These long meditations,” said Pyinya sympathetically.
It was nine o’clock now and behind them the lights were being extinguished in the hall. The two men rose and went within and unrolled their mats; and but for the blaze of moonlight at the open doorway the monastery was given over to darkness and to sleep.
But in a week there was no moon and only a star or two entangled in the branches of a tree showed to any wakeful monk that there was an open doorway at all. But the monks, with the exception of two, were not wakeful. These two, certainly, made up for the rest, for they were very busy indeed. Very quietly — one might have thought that they had been trained in stealthiness — Pyinya and Thoukkya would slip on hands and knees through the doorway and meet in a corner of the enclosure behind a great banyan-tree. There a long
bamboo pole, detached, surely by pious hands for a pious purpose, from the scaffolding before it was removed from the enclosure, lay hidden under leaves. It was twenty-five feet long, and for a couple of hours on two consecutive nights these devout novices worked upon it, splicing to one end a strong iron hook and strengthening the pole and making it easier to handle by coiling it tightly about with cord at intervals of three feet.
“It will be for to-morrow,” said Pyinya in a whisper; and the two men put their heads together for a little while.
“Muhammed Ghalli, the Indian, will meet us in the morning. It will all be easy,” Thoukkya said in conclusion, and they crept back like shadows to their mats in the great hall.
The next night was as dark as any marauder could have wished for. At two o’clock in the morning Pyinya and Thoukkya carried their pole to the foot of the pagoda. Seven small ledges, representing the sacred seven roofs of the great monasteries, broke the line of the cone at intervals of twenty-five feet, and from the topmost of them the final spire of gilded iron sprang with an ever-diminishing girth for fifteen feet and at that height expanded to its umbrella top. Pyinya dropped his robe and his waist-cloth on the ground. He rested the claw of his pole upon the lowest ledge near to the wire rope on which the lamps were hung. He was as lithe and silent as a lizard. With one hand holding the wire rope and the other grasping the bamboo, he crawled up, his toes clinging to the stone of the pagoda. On the first of the seven ledges he rested and breathed, his face and his body flat against the cone. So far the expedition had made no great demands upon him. A few minutes later a sound of breathing beneath his feet, a quiver of the wire rope at his side, and a rattle of an electric globe against the stone, and Thoukkya stood beside him.
It needed the strength of both to draw up the pole, steady the butt of it upon the ledge on which they stood and catch the hook on to the ledge above them. Then they mounted to the next stage.
The great cone tapered as they climbed. Both men blessed the darkness which hid from their eyes the height to which they had reached. They had emptiness now on each side of them as well as behind them. Their breath came in labouring spasms which threatened to burst heart and lungs; their bodies ran with their sweat. Upon each one of them in turn came the almost irresistible impulse to let go, plunge down to earth with a shriek of fear, and so finish, meat, not man. Had there been one, so he would have died. But every now and then, a whisper or a touch kept them astoundedly aware that they were still alive, clinging like lizards to the spire. And above all their natural fears, there was this: At the very apex might there not be waiting a guardian spirit, the Nat of the pagoda, who would smite them with a colic, cramping their stomachs in an agony which no strength could resist?
They stood on the last tiny ledge, clinging to the final spear of gilded iron which rose fifteen feet to the gold mushroom at the top. And as Thoukkya whispered in a sobbing voice: “I am finished. I dare not,” they heard in a faint stir of wind the little gold bells tinkling above them, so near now, so near! To Pyinya they were a call, an encouragement. They tinkled so prettily! If there was a Nat up there, he was on their side. Very likely there was one. Very likely the great lady had offended it. Nats were very easy to offend and never forgot to let you have a nasty upper-cut in return.
“I’ll go, Nga Than,” he said. “Cling tight! A few minutes and we can buy Rangoon.”
The iron lance shook as he swarmed up it with knees and feet and hands. Every inch of his body seemed to cling close to it and support him. He mounted by the friction of muscle and flesh rather than by foothold and handhold. Thoukkya, gasping, and clinging with bruised hands on the tiny shelf below, suddenly heard above him a jangle of bells, as though they tossed in a storm. So loud they seemed to him that he glanced down in terror, expecting to see a lamp glimmer far beneath him in the compound, to hear a cry tear the still night. But no light shone, no cry was heard. There was nothing but the black emptiness below him and about him. His stomach was turned upside-down within him. Once let him feel solid earth beneath the soles of his feet and see it stretching out all round him — which he would never, never do — he would not even climb the smallest of garden trees for a diamond as big as an abbot’s paunch. Thoukkya sobbed. He waited for a thousand years and then a scuffling noise sounded just above his head. He looked up; against the dark sky a dark bulk was just visible. Pyinya slid down beside him.
Thoukkya asked no questions. For around his companion’s arm ornaments glistened. For a little while Pyinya leaned against the iron spear breathing and catching his breath like a man who has run a race and reached the end of his strength. Then he said:
“Let us go down, very carefully. For I am very tired.” But Thoukkya was more tired by fear than Pyinya by exertion.
The descent, however, was easy compared with the climb. The coils of cord about the pole gave grips for hands and feet. So long as neither leaned back and dragged the hook from the ledge there was no danger for these men. But between the fourth and the third ledge a small mischance occurred. Pyinya knocked with his elbow one of the glass bulbs on the wire rope. It clashed too hard against the stone of the pagoda and tinkled down to the ground in fragments. Both men stopped where they were, their hearts in their mouths, one on the ledge flattened against the pagoda, the other clinging like a monkey. As each thin sliver of curved glass leaped against the spire and was shattered again, it seemed to them that cymbals clashed and loud enough to wake the dead.
“Be quick!” Thoukkya whispered from the ledge, his teeth chattering, his belly turned to water. “Oh, be quick, Nga Pyu!” And indeed on such a night sound travelled like voices over water.
“It is well,” answered Nga Pyu. “It will not be noticed until the lights are turned on to-morrow night, and by then we shall be very far away.”
They were at the base of the pagoda on the ground. Thoukkya felt the soil with his toes. It was incredible. He stretched out a foot gingerly. Surely it would touch nothing. It touched soil. He was like a man who comes down to the lowest tread of a flight of stairs in the dark. The floor jars him.
At the base of the pagoda they put on again their waist-cloths and their robes. Silently they carried the bamboo pole back to its hiding-place. They waited in the darkness of the compound until the violence of their breathing ceased. Then they wriggled through the monastery doorway to their corner of the hall and in a few moments were asleep.
When the keeper of the monastery at daybreak beat upon his wooden gong and roused the monks, the two devout novices performed the sacred offices with the others. Only when all had scattered upon their household duties did they move quietly to the open gate of the stockade. They passed out, and with their eyes dutifully fixed upon the ground six feet ahead of them, but their ears most unmeditatively alert, they paced down a narrow lane to the river’s edge. On the bank one man squatted, a large bundle by his side. The two novices paid no heed to him. They dropped their robes upon the ground close to him and bathed in the river. As yet no one else was abroad. The hovels of the pagoda slaves were still shuttered and a mist hung upon the water. There were just those three, the two novices bathing and the third man who spread out his bundle. In the bundle were two skirts of pink cotton, two white jackets. He wrapped in his bundle in their place the yellow robes, laid upon them a heavy stone and tied up all securely. He stood on the brink of the stream and looked this way and that. Then he flung the bundle in. The men of the pagoda mounted the slope. Nga Pyu and Nga Than warmly greeted their old fellow-convict, Muhammed Ghalli, the Indian, and dressed themselves in the usual cheap garments of the poor.
When Uncle Sunday returned from the burial of the Abbot of Schwegu he saw from the steamer’s deck, with a throb of alarm, that the scaffolding was once more erected about the pagoda. He hurried to the monastery in a growing agitation. His American friend, U Nageinda, was waiting for him and drew him aside.
“They were released convicts, of course,” he said. “None but monks and convicts have shaven heads. It is a
common practice for convicts on their release to take the yellow robe. Then, after a few days, they can go back to the world saying they had no vocation for the priesthood, and no one can point the finger at them. They are novices who have found themselves unequal to the monastic life.”
“They stole, then?”
U Nageinda looked upwards to the spire.
“They were men of great strength and daring. The great diamond they could not reach. It is inset on the very summit above the overhang of the Hti. But your offering was suspended like a girdle below.”
“And that they have?” said Crowther.
“Yes.”
He sat on the ground, his hands clasped together and the fingers working, his eyes moody and his face like a mask.
“Nga Pyu... Nga Than...” he said very softly, and again: “Nga Than... Nga Pyu....”
U Nageinda shook his head. He seemed to hear a note in that soft repetition of the names which was anything but monastic. He said gently:
“Let us remember that for so great a crime against our Lord Buddha and the Law, those two poor creatures may live for a thousand years in each of the eight Hells.”
Apparently the words brought no consolation to Michael Crowther. He sat by himself and brooded for the greater part of that day, and just before nightfall he got to his feet. U Nageinda observed the movement and was in two minds whether he should himself stir a finger or no. Each man must follow the steady star along the rock path of his own volition. To proffer advice was not within the four corners of his creed. Moreover, it could amount to nothing more than a plea that his pupil should not sully this newly-found soul of his by any passion, whether it be to recover a stolen thing or to avenge the theft. But his glance, lowered though it was, warned that such advice would be unprofitable. There stood Uncle Sunday hardening before his eyes into Michael Crowther, his head lifting, his shoulders squaring. But U Nageinda could help a little out of his long experience — if he would. He saw Michael take a step and he did. With a most unpriestly hurry he bustled to Michael’s side.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 643