Golden Earth

by Norman Lewis

  At seven o’clock the Consul’s driver was sent down to the bazaar to find out if there was any news of transport. Soon after, he was back again to say that a truck was just about to leave, but that it would wait ten minutes for me. I said goodbye to Duffy, who gave me the usual advice about non-resistance and a smile when dealing with Burmese bandits, and we were off.

  But at the bazaar there was no sign of the lorry. Backwards and forwards we went, from the tea-shop to the tyre-surgery, from the tyre-surgery to the petrol filling point. The lorry had vanished, and while we were combing the back-streets of Maymyo, it might, of course, be already putting the miles between us on the road to Lashio. Finally the driver decided that it was no use looking further in Maymyo, and we went sprinting off, down the Lashio road. After a mile he pulled up to make enquiries from a man who was sitting outside his workshop, making a coffin. Only a minute ago, said the man, such a lorry had gone past. But to one engrossed in creative labour time’s relativity is very real; a minute may be an hour. On we went, full speed ahead; the last bullock-cart dropped behind, the jungle closed in.

  It is well known that the natives of all races who have only recently been introduced to mechanisation, drive in emergency with a special élan, but my driver was handicapped by a mysterious ailment of the jeep, a disfunction which I have never met before or since. We would accelerate, sometimes to nearly fifty miles an hour, and then suddenly the car would be seized by a violent convulsion, whose epicentre seemed vaguely located in the gearbox. Once in the grip of this palsy, the driver would be obliged to bring the jeep practically to a standstill, before the tremors died away, and we could accelerate once again. This rebellion of the mechanism could be avoided by keeping, say, at a steady thirty-five miles an hour, but it was clear that if we did this the lorry might be gaining upon us.

  On we went in this way, mile after mile, over hills and through valleys inundated with a frothing, vernal vegetation and filled with the odour of newly watered ferns in a glasshouse. We had been travelling for half an hour when I was alarmed to see that the needle on the petrol gauge had fallen nearly to zero. This I pointed out, but the driver shook his head reassuringly. He had probably laid some kind of wager with himself, and had become seriously interested in the outcome of our chase. Along we hustled, taking full advantage of the rolling downhill slopes when the speed could be kept up with relatively low engine revolutions, which did not bring on our mechanical ague. To me, it was incredible that the lorry should have covered such a distance in so short a time. Whenever we turned a bend, I expected to see it trailing its billows of dust along the next straight, but all we saw was an armoured-car with tyre trouble, and a couple of the crew covering with their rifles a third man, while he got on with the repair. The petrol gauge now said empty and I gesticulated at it dumbly again; but the driver had become possessed by his purpose and paid no attention, leaning away out of the car to sweep round a right-hand curve. Down a hillside we dropped through half a dozen hairpin bends, while large, winged insects, seemingly sucked up out of space, struck us in the face. We swerved wildly to avoid a rotten tree trunk that had fallen half across the road. Again we were stricken of our palsy, slowed down, re-accelerated, and there, at last, were the few huts of a hamlet, with the lorry, lying at an angle in the road’s camber, outside a tea-shop.

  The third of the Three Great Works of Perfection prescribed by the Buddhist faith, is a benevolent disposition towards all sentient beings, and I believe that apart from unfortunate incidents arising out of dacoity and warfare this is much observed by the generality of the Burmese people. But until one comes to know them better, there is sometimes a lack of expansiveness in first contacts, which tends to mask this. A number of faces looked down at me inscrutably from the lorry. Wishing to hear a confirmation of my driver’s assurances, I asked if they were going to Lashio. There was a long silence, and then a young man who had been scrutinising me from between narrowed lids said, ‘This car will go to Lashio.’ I then asked when it was expected to arrive, and there was another long pause. When I thought that my question had been ignored, the reply came, with slow and clear enunciation: ‘We do not know when it will get to Lashio.’ There was something about the spokesman that set him apart from the rest of the passengers; a piercing, speculative gaze, a quality of rather sinister deliberation, of the kind which might have been observed in the originals upon which Hollywood film directors modelled their Chinese generals. With slight nods and gestures he controlled the disposition of persons and baggage in the lorry. A lifting of the finger and a few murmured words, and I found a place made for me up in the front, but one place removed from the driver. Before we started off, I hid my two cameras in tool-filled cavities.

  The road now became steeper. Painfully we ground our way up the hillsides, or lurched down them, never travelling fast enough to sweep the engine-heated air from the cabin. In these virgin forests the bird-life was more distinguished than at Maymyo. There were many bee-eaters, hoopoes, and swallows with iridescent blue backs. Jungle fowl scuttled across the road with the foolish panic of barnyard chickens. Vultures wheeled in the sky, and in alighting chose leafless trees – perhaps to leave a clear field of vision – about which they spaced themselves with curious regularity. Once when we stopped on a hill, where a precipice rose from the teak woods above us, I heard a thin, staccato shrieking and saw something which I had heard of but never before seen, a peregrine attacking a vulture, which avoided its furious stoops by negligent dippings of the wing. Besides this one heard continually a shrill, birdlike whistling, which was made by colonies of squirrels.

  My immediate neighbour in the driver’s cabin was a thin, lively Burmese lady, who at frequent intervals raised her longyi to dab at her left leg, which was thickly coated with mud and stained with blood. When we stopped she had some difficulty in getting down, and sometimes groaned slightly. Encouraged by the general acceptance of my cigarettes, I asked the admittedly chief passenger what the trouble was and received the astonishing information that she had fallen off a motor cycle. At one of our halts she washed her wounds in petrol, but then, although she hunted about and mixed up a few trial samples with water, was unable to find any suitable mud to replace the application.

  Frequent repairs to the lorry were called for. Minor engine parts were made fast temporarily by surplus strips of rattan torn off bales of cargo. All tyres were reinforced by patches of cover, held in place by nuts and bolts. Occasionally the engine would falter and choke, and the driver, jumping down and flinging up the bonnet, would utter the word ‘short’, which is now Burmese. At that, the chief passenger would lower himself from his perch on the highest point of the cargo, and after a brief, judicial scrutiny, point out what had to be done. Sometimes a screwdriver would be wiped and put into his hand, and with this he would operate while the driver and his various mates looked on as if at delicate surgery. This was the general condition into which Burmese road transport had fallen. I wondered what would happen when the day came when all these old ex-army lorries were utterly and finally worn out, when the ruined mechanisms could no longer be kept revolving by ingenious patching and by spare parts taken from other crocks which had completely disintegrated.

  * * *

  We passed through several small towns. They had no particular character and consisted of no more than a street and a square where the markets would be held. As we were deep in the Shan country, there were no more pagodas, but shrines had been erected on the town’s outskirts to the tutelary spirits, and some of them were hung with votive offerings of puppet-horses. Among the jumble of Burmese and Chinese lettering on the shop fronts, a single notice in English jumped out, ‘Pickle sold here’. At Kyaukme we stopped to unload a cargo of small green tomatoes. Here there was to be an hour’s wait, and the chief passenger took charge of my movements and told me that he would show me round the town. He now introduced himself as Tin Maung. As he was then delayed by being called in to consult on more engine trouble, I wandered over to a teaho
use. In this tea-growing country, plain tea is considered unbearably dull. It is served with a sediment of some kind of cereal, and many of the Shans, unsatisfied with this consistency, poured it into their saucers and proceeded to make up a kind of minestrone by mixing it with the contents of a small dough pie, for which the teahouse charged four annas.

  After a few minutes Tin Maung made a dignified appearance to take tea. There was the usual preliminary silence, then he asked, ‘Are you carrying a weapon with you?’ I said no, and Tin Maung said ‘That is a good thing. Before the war we used to carry guns for tigers. But now it is not a good thing to carry guns any more. If we carry guns we shoot.’ I nodded understandingly. The market here was exceptionally lively. Some of the local tribespeople wore patchwork cloaks in bright colours, with Moroccan-looking hoods. I asked Tin Maung if he thought I could photograph them and he went over, and, to my mind, with undue formality, called for the head of the family. There was a long discussion, followed by a refusal. Since all Tin Maung’s utterances were preceded by the intervals of silence occupied by the marshalling and translation of his thoughts, I shall cease to mention these pauses. On this occasion he said, ‘They do not refuse from shyness, but from superstition.’ Later when I thought the incident had been forgotten, he said, ‘Our minds have to be adjusted to the medieval conditions, which are variable.’

  Here in Kyaukme there was a legless leper, who propelled himself along on his haunches, with pads fitted to his hands. He was assisted most tenderly in his passage round the market by a small boy, whose arm was round his neck. From experience gained in Mandalay, I judged that the boy was in the first stages of leprosy.

  * * *

  Through the brazen hours that followed high noon, we crept onwards through a tunnel of glittering verdure. Then in the early afternoon came the official stop for breakfast. We were in a tiny hamlet, a few branch-and-leaf huts round a well. A single half-blind pariah dog slunk up to inspect us and was immediately chased away by a pair of lean, hairy swine that came rushing out of one of the huts. A cavern had been hollowed out of the wall of rock that formed the background to the village, and wisps of smoke trailed up through a sort of bamboo veranda that had been built over the mouth of it. This infernal place was the restaurant.

  The moment had now come when all European prejudices about food had to be abandoned; all fears of typhoid or dysentery had to be banished resolutely from the mind. Even if I held back now and refused to enter this murky grotto, there was a long succession of others awaiting me, and ultimately sheer hunger would settle the matter. Remote journeyings had their advantages, the occasional sense of adventure, the novelties of experience. They also had their drawbacks, and this was one of them. And as there was no turning back from them, it was just as well to be bold.

  In the dim interior – a model of most remote oriental eating-houses – we were awaited by a cook who was naked to the waist. Tattooed dragons writhed among the cabalistic figures on his chest and arms. A snippet of intestine was clinging to a finger, which, shaken off, was caught in midair by an attendant cat. Tin Maung gave an order and in due course the head-waiter arrived, a rollicking Shan with shining bald head and Manchu moustaches, carrying a dish heaped with scrawny chickens’ limbs, jaundiced with curry, a bowl of rice and a couple of aluminium plates. When uncertain how to behave, watch what the others do. A few minutes later I was neatly stripping the tendons from those saffron bones; kneading the rice into a form in which it could be carried in the fingers to the mouth. But the spécialité de la maison was undoubtedly pickled cabbage, with garlic and chili-pepper. This Shan delicacy was gravely recommended by Tin Maung as ‘full of vitamins’. It had a sharp, sour flavour, for which a taste was easily acquired; I should certainly have missed this and many other similar experiences had I been able to follow the advice given in the Burma Handbook: ‘… there are no hotels, and the traveller, when he quits the line of railway or Irawadi steamer, must get leave from the Deputy Commissioner of the district to put up at Government bungalows, and must take bedding, a cook and a few cooking utensils.’

  * * *

  Although Tin Maung had said that it was most unlikely that we should reach Lashio in one day, we found ourselves by the late afternoon within a few miles of the town. We had just crossed the Nam Mi river, where I had admired the spectacle of landslides of the brightest red earth plunging down the hillside into deep, green water, when we were stopped by a posse of soldiers. They told us that Chinese Nationalist bandits had temporarily cut the road, only four kilometres from Lashio, and had shot-up and looted the truck in front of ours. As this had happened several hours before, it was not exactly a narrow escape. But there was a delay until an officer of the Shan police arrived to tell us we could carry on. As we came into the outskirts of Lashio, the sun set. Flocks of mynas and parakeets had appeared in the treetops, where they went through the noisy, twilight manoeuvres of starlings in a London square.

  In accordance with the recommendations already quoted from the Burma Handbook, I asked the driver of the lorry to put me down at the Dak Bungalow, but there appeared to be some difficulty, and Tin Maung told me that it had been taken over by the army. He invited me to come to his house, where I could leave my luggage while making further enquiries. Lashio had been partly destroyed by bombing but, it seemed, rebuilt along the lines of the English hill-station it had once been, with detached bungalows, each with its own garden. We stopped at one of these. It was now nearly dark, and a young man clad only in shorts came running down the path, and opened the gate. Approaching us, he crossed his arms and bowed in a rather Japanese fashion, only partially straightening himself when he turned away. Tin Maung nodded towards the baggage, and uttered a word, and the still stooping figure snatched up both suitcases and hurried away to the house with them. He was not, as I imagined at the time, a servant, but a younger brother.

  I was then invited to go and sit on the balcony of the house, where I was met by Tin Maung’s father. U Thein Zan looked like a lean Burmese version of one of those rollicking Chinese gods of good fortune. Even when his mouth was relaxed his eyes were creased-up as if in a spasm of mirth. He had learned, in fact, as I soon discovered, to express his emotions in terms of smiles: a gay smile (the most frequent), a tolerant smile (for the shortcomings of others), a roguish smile (when his own weaknesses were under discussion), a rueful smile (for his sharp losses, the state of Burma and humanity in general).

  In the background hovered the mother. In her case no formal presentation was made. The three of us, father, son and myself, sat there on the balcony making occasional disjointed remarks about the political situation. From time to time the younger brother came out of the house, bowed and went in. The mother appeared, curled herself up in a chair well removed from the important conclave of males, and lit up a cheroot. There was no sign of stir or excitement. Later I learned that this was the return of the eldest son after an absence of two years, during which time the brother next in age to him had been killed by insurgents. I could have imagined Chinese etiquette imposing these rigid standards of self-control, but it came as a great surprise that old-fashioned Burmese families should follow such a rule of conduct.

  The matter of finding somewhere to sleep now came up, and the younger son was sent off to make enquiries about a bungalow belonging to the Public Works Department. He was soon back to say that it was full of soldiers, although there might be a room free next night. Upon this Tin Maung said that I would have to sleep in his father’s house, and signalled for my baggage to be taken inside. I apologised to the old man for the trouble I was putting him to, whereupon he handsomely said, ‘Anyone my son brings home becomes my son,’ accompanying this speech with such a truly genial smile that it was impossible to feel any longer ill at ease.

  But before there could be any question of retiring for the night, U Thein Zan said, there were formalities to be attended to. He thought that owing to the unsettled local conditions I ought to be on the safe side by reporting, without delay
, to the Deputy Superintendent of Police, and after dressing himself carefully, he took up a lantern and accompanied me to the functionary’s house. The DSP soon mastered his surprise at the visit, seemed relieved that I was under the control of such a pillar of local society as U Thein Zan, and found me several forms to fill in. In the morning, he said, I must report to the office of the Special Commissioner for the region, and to the commanding officer of the garrison. The latter obligation was one of which nothing had been said in Rangoon, and I decided to avoid it if possible. With Chinese bandits in the vicinity I could imagine this officer considering himself justified in putting me under some kind of restrictive military protection, or even sending me under escort back to Mandalay. When I brought up the matter of the attack on the truck, the DSP firmly announced that it had been the work of local Shans.

  We went back home and sat for a while chatting desultorily and listening to the radio. Two stations were coming in fairly well: La Voix d’Islam broadcast on a beam from Radio Toulouse, and a station which might have been Peking, because the announcements were in Chinese, and the music Western and evangelical in flavour, with the exception of one playing of a marching song of the Red Army. U Thein Zan was a fervent Buddhist and liked to talk about his religion whenever he could. He was delighted because next day a famous abbot would be preaching several sermons at the local monastery and he was to play a prominent part in the welcoming ceremony.