Golden Earth

by Norman Lewis

  It occurred to me to comment on the behaviour of the Burmese woman, who was now coming towards us, her sugar-cane held in her hand, in a series of leaps. He said, ‘This lady has bad nerves, sir.’ I had begun to suspect as much, and now something else struck me. In the Burmese theatre the insane are always shown as Ophelias, distraught and wildly eccentric. Although their condition is pitiable, and sorcerers are called in to heal them by the medieval equivalent of shock treatment, they dance and sing in an absurd fashion, and adorn themselves ridiculously with such things as condensed-milk tins. This then was the recognised pattern of Burmese insanity, and it looked as if the Burmese went mad along accepted lines. It was curious to consider that an element of pose probably lurked beneath the authentic state of derangement. I asked what had been responsible for the woman’s misfortune, and my friend, who introduced himself as Seng, said, ‘This lady has lost all her children. For this reason her nerves have become bad.’ But there was no way of discovering the circumstances of her children’s death; my further enquiries only producing flashing smiles of incomprehension. Later he told me that the woman, who had caused a disturbance in Lashio, was being removed under escort to her home village. And where did she learn all these extraordinary hymns, carols, negro spirituals, bawdy army choruses? The answer, when the question had been repeated several times, in different ways, was unconvincing. ‘They teach these songs in the schools, sir.’ Seng was a Kachin who had been down to Rangoon for his education and was now on his way home. Gradually and rather painfully our conversation expanded. At first there were long pauses while the thoughts in Kachin were translated into English via Burmese; but after a while the sentences began to come more readily, and with their proper Anglo-Asiatic injection of rotundities, euphemisms and prudery.

  * * *

  Our road wound through low hills clothed in formless scrub, and the slow reanimation of secondary jungle, where cultivation has long been abandoned. Occasionally there were patches, ragged in shape as Hebridean islands, which had only recently been given up and where the self-sown maize and the tea-bushes spread in increasing dilution through the ferns, the creepers and the thorns. In this desolation we passed a single, human form, a Shan who wore gauntlets of tattooing and a ring of tattooed dragons leaping up from his waist as if to devour his torso. He stood motionless by the roadside, his arms curled inexplicably round a slender tree trunk, looking, somehow, against this seething background of curving fronds and tendrils, like a capital in a richly illuminated manuscript.

  Near here, the Indian girl left us. She was accompanied by an ageing man, who now struggled up from the depths of the baggage, and the pair of them set off down a thorn-lined track, bound, under the relentless sun, for who knows what strange haven of domestic bliss. At Mongli, which although marked on fairly small-scale maps, seemed to possess only one hut, there was a halt for refreshment, and the post-wagon discharged its passengers like seeds exploded from an over-ripe pod. I found that the package Tin Maung’s mother had given me contained raw onions and fried meat balls, beautifully done up in banana-leaves and then the locally made, tough, translucent paper. I shared this with Seng, who gave me some tea out of a section of bamboo fitted with a neat, wooden cap. It was here for the first time that I noticed the beautiful baskets carried by the Palaungs, who had gathered in a ball-players’ huddle.

  Being without anthropological training I do not know whether one is entitled to form theories on so slender a basis of evidence, so I only place on record the fact that although regarded as a Mongolian people, the Palaungs possess beautiful woven and lacquered baskets, of a quite extraordinary shape, which are identical with those made by the Indonesian Mois of Central Annam, which, as the crow flies, is about fourteen hundred miles away. These baskets, which I have photographed in both countries, are not owned by any of the peoples by whom the Palaungs are surrounded. Their construction is very complicated, and they are beautiful on the score of shape and texture, as they are not decorated in any way. I think that the possibility of coincidence is ruled out. It is, by the way, curious that the handicrafts of a people so remote, so neglected, and apparently so low in the cultural scale, should be so much superior to those of the relatively sophisticated Shans and Kachins who are their neighbours. The Palaungs speak a Mongolian language, and I believe that on this linguistic evidence, they as well as so many of the Burmese minorities, have been classed as Mongolian people. From a cursory and superficial study of their features, as well as those of many other obscure racial types I encountered in my travels, I should guess that although these people may have adopted the language of powerful neighbours, and have intermarried with them, they probably also possess pre-Mongoloid Indonesian blood. Many of them have the Caucasian type of eye and thick, wavy hair. The French, who have carried out intense ethnological studies in Indo-China, produce a map showing enclaves of Indonesians clustered along the western frontier of that country, where it is contiguous with the Southern Shan States of Burma. It would be unreasonable to suppose that these cease to be found as soon as one crosses into Burma, when the frontier is, of course, a purely political one. Perhaps if instead of the linguistic classification which has hitherto sufficed, a study were made of the laws, ceremonies, legends, religious customs and the traditional designs of weaving of these peoples, an entirely new light might be thrown on their origins and racial affinities.

  Certainly the Palaungs’ legend of their origin sounds a Mongolian one, although it may have been adopted in recent times along with the language. The founder of the tribe was hatched from a serpent’s egg – a hint of totemism which is echoed by the women’s habit of encircling their hips by forty or fifty narrow cane hoops, which rest one on another, to a depth of about a foot or eighteen inches, and provide a suggestively undulant motion as they walk. Such an ancestry is considered utterly reasonable in the Far East, and the existence of a naga in one’s pedigree would have caused no comment, at least until recently, in the gravest of academic circles. The Glass Palace Chronicle – a collation of records combined with historical criticism – written in 1829, goes into the question of ‘egg-born kings’ at length, but the learned commentators are concerned only to establish their reasonable opinion that a certain Burmese monarch – Pyu Sawhti – could not have been born of an egg laid by a naga (a female serpent-god) as the result of her union with a spirit, and that since the king was human, one of the parents, at least, must have been human too. However, instances are given, and approved, of the oviparous birth of human beings where only one of the parents was supernatural – a naga, or a fabulous lion.

  * * *

  Hsenwi was an incrustation of huts where, in a bare plateau, the road was joined by another from the east. We crossed a rush-choked river, over which shaven-headed children in blue smocks held their fishing rods. There was a small lake with white ducks on it diving through the reflection of a bare mountain, and storks going round in circles overhead. Horsemen, their feet almost trailing on the ground, came charging through the grass to the verge of the road, and as we passed cavorted like movie-Indians and waved their yellow scarves at us. We passed a line of shops with the shopkeepers outside flying fish-shaped kites. A caravan of ponies, piled high with what looked like bean sticks, panicked at our approach and, turning, stampeded through the village in a charge like that of the bulls driven before Morgan’s pirates at the sack of Panama.

  This was Kachin country, although there were still plenty of Shan enclaves. The Kachins, comparatively recent arrivals in these highlands, have always been regarded by the Shans, whose country they invaded, with a kind of superstitious aversion. Their exceptional ability as hunters was apt to be ascribed to the works of the devil. This charge had some slight basis, because the Kachins had the unusual advantage of the protection of a powerful spirit called Kyam, in a country where the most that could be hoped for from the average nat was neutrality, bought at a cost of frequent sacrifices. Kyam led the Kachins to their game, which he fascinated, while the hunters shot th
em with their crossbows, using aconite-tipped arrows. The service was performed without any question of return, and not even a priest had to be paid.

  As far as the Shans could, they kept the Kachins back in their mountains, often burning the villages of those who tried to establish themselves in the more fertile Shan country. But the Kachins were under constant internal pressure to emigrate, the result of the destructive type of cultivation they practised, and of their custom by which the youngest son inherited all his father’s property, thus compelling the elder sons to set out to found new settlements. When the Kachins reached the stage when they had to expand or burst, they did so explosively, practising a form of warfare rarely known in the West since biblical times. All living beings were exterminated in the territory taken over. The operation was carried out without animosity, and the ghosts of the victims – who received a decent burial – were placated with inexpensive sacrifices.

  In their mountains, the Kachins live in long-houses, which are often occupied by several families. The dead are buried under the floor, where it is felt that they will be less lonely. Up to the time of marriage the women enjoy unusual freedom, and often try a succession of lovers before settling down. They then become chattels, descending to a man’s heir with the rest of his property.

  * * *

  Beyond Hsenwi we mounted a hill, entered a stockade, and drew up outside the local military headquarters. The driver expected to find the Sawbwa here, but we were redirected to his haw, a mile away on a hillside among a belt of trees. The haw, or palace, as the Sawbwa’s residence is usually known, was a substantial, single-storeyed building of plaited bamboo, with a formal, roofed-over approach, and a kind of exterior waiting-room where Seng and the driver were left, while a servitor conducted me up the steps to the entrance to the haw itself. Here the Sawbwa appeared. We had arrived rather unfortunately in the siesta time, and he showed signs of having dressed hastily. Like his brother, he was polite but without affability. Reading my letter he invited me to be seated at a table in his barely furnished reception room. He then gave an order to one of his sons, a boy of about twelve, who went away and shortly reappeared with cigarettes and airmail paper and envelopes, which, kneeling respectfully, he handed to his father. The Sawbwa then wrote out an open recommendation to any official I might encounter on the road to Nam Hkam to be of all possible assistance. He advised me to continue with the post-wagon as far as I could go, as it might be some time before another opportunity of transport offered itself. I should have liked to stay a day or two in Hsenwi, but although I made it clear that I did not wish to inconvenience the Sawbwa in any way, this delay was not thought advisable. The village had been thoroughly destroyed by bombing during the war and accommodation was very limited. My interview lasted five minutes. Perhaps the Sawbwa had given up all hopes of the English.

  * * *

  Kutkai was another Hsenwi, except that it was twenty miles nearer the Chinese frontier, and in that distance a marked increase in Chinese influence had taken place. I was surprised to see Chinese women with bound feet pegging along the single street, as if picking their way across a surface strewn with invisible eggs. In one’s school-days one was told that this practice had long been abandoned, and that examples of it were only to be seen in the case of old women, survivors from the Imperial days. At about the time this information was imparted, these women must have been undergoing the minor tortures which had finally moulded their feet into the lotus form. It was an extraordinary quirk of taste that could see the image of a symmetrical bloom in this deformation of the foot-bones.

  The village was in a low hollow of the hills. They were covered with whitened grass, a tough, austere growth heralding the vegetable dark-age, when the soil has been utterly exhausted by primitive cultivation. We could see Palaungs converging on the town, moving down from the hills in Indian file, loaded with green grass for use in feeding the animals; grass that every year, one supposed, would have to be brought from a greater distance. Here, at Kutkai, the post-wagon gave in. After its long, arduous and useful life, it had chosen just this day of all days to attain the Nirvana of final disintegration, or so the driver thought. The radiator had boiled steadily all the way from Hsenwi, emitting thin jets of steam and water through various perforations, and lately the even, almost rhythmic clatter of loose tappets, bearings and pistons, and the whine of worn gears, had been invaded by new, irregular and compelling sounds. Suddenly the power had faded away, absorbed in mechanical convulsions preceding the ultimate coma. We had limped into Kutkai at a slow walking pace. Now a line of turbanned heads was bowed, under the bonnet, over the smoking, reeking mechanism, and a murmur of advice in several of the Tibeto-Burman and Thai-Chinese languages arose. And then, the driver produced his diagnosis. A connecting rod had snapped and it was supposed that a macerated piston had dropped into the sump, where it had been ground into fragments by the crankshaft. If parts could be found a repair would take about four days. Otherwise the post-wagon would never travel further. Sadly the passengers dispersed towards the various caravanserais of Kutkai. With them went the crazy Burmese woman and her guards. She was still singing and gambolling with the inexhaustible vitality of her despair.

  I was just about to look for a teahouse myself, speculating on whether Kutkai could provide even one-star accommodation by local standards, when Seng, who had gone off as soon as we stopped, reappeared in a bullock-cart. It was a vehicle of a kind I had not seen before, high-wheeled and rakish, and having about it something of the chariot. It was drawn by two fine and almost spirited-looking animals, constrained only by a light yoke. They approached in a quick, shambling gait. Directing the driver, a tattooed and muscled Asiatic Ben Hur, to put my baggage in this contraption, Seng invited me to accompany him to the house of his brother-in-law, a Kachin headman, who lived only a few miles away. Here I could put up in comfort while enquiries were being made about transport for the next stage of the journey. Accepting this very welcome suggestion, I climbed in and sat down with Seng in the bottom of the cart, the driver cracked his whip, and the bullocks moved off at a sharp pace.

  A few miles out of Kutkai we turned off the Burma Road into a rough, rutted track leading up into the hills. Within minutes there was a change in scenery. It was like the escape from a concreted highway with the flat boredom of its surroundings into the sanctuary of the undisturbed woods. The dazzling white deadness of the grass was broken by sere but fluorescent bushes and thickets of bamboo, and among these the trees, pipuls, banyans and flamboyants, massive eruptions of verdure, became increasingly frequent. Huge rollers flew strongly among their branches, their wings flashing with Aegean blues. ‘The foolish bird,’ said Seng, following my gaze of admiration. ‘This is its designation in the Kachin tongue, because it eats its own faeces.’ As we penetrated into these high forests, the butterflies threading among the trees had already lost the pallor of those of the tropical steppe-lands and taken on a wash of colour, a token of the magnificence that awaited us in the deep undergrowth ahead. Palaungs, gowned like pantomime witches and bent under their bundles, flitted away into the trees until we had passed.

  The headman’s house was on a bare hilltop. It was as big as the Sawbwa’s haw, an important construction of stone and corrugated iron, which had been smashed in the passage of the war, and half rebuilt in woven bamboo. Two or three rifle-armed soldiers of the headman’s bodyguard were hanging about outside, and a jeep painted with a vigorous, primitive design of tigers and deer was drawn up outside the door. Seng directed our driver to continue round to the back of the house, where we found a kind of tradesman’s entrance, surrounded by much domestic activity, cooking on outside stoves, and babies sitting in the dust eating rice out of bowls. Here also was the headman’s private lock-up, a species of chicken-house strengthened with thick, timber bars, in which three inmates were sitting, whom from their blue-cotton clothing I took to be Chinese. The door was unceremoniously opened by the headman himself, a short man of almost theatrical inscrutability,
dressed like a Soviet official in a plain loose tunic and trousers. He greeted his brother-in-law without surprise or effusion, and invited me to enter. We went in and sat down in chairs placed against the wall, in a room furnished like the waiting-room of an old-fashioned, poor persons, dispensary. The headman took my collection of permits and letters in English, Burmese, Shan and Kachin, and began to read them with extreme deliberation, his lips silently forming the words.

  While this process went on, my eyes wandered round the room, passing over the repetitious bamboo pattern of the walls, then arrested by a crudely coloured picture of a number of figures in vaguely Palestinian dress, who were peering into a cave, which they were prevented from entering by a stern-faced, white-robed form. Under this was printed the legend: ‘He is not here, but is risen.’ The aristocracy of these parts, it seemed, were Baptist converts. Beneath this picture hung a gong, and when the headman had finished perusing my documents he reached up and tapped it lightly with his knuckles. Immediately a soldier came in. He was dressed in a British battledress, was barefooted, and carried a rifle slung on his shoulder. The headman muttered something and the soldier went out and came back almost immediately carrying a tray loaded with three cups of tea and basins of sugar and salt. In the Burmese hill-country, tea-leaves are grilled, and the addition to the brew of salt as well as sugar produces a result which differs greatly in flavour from tea as drunk in the West. The headman passed the tea, having added the sugar and salt with his own hands. This courtesy accomplished, he was called away to other duties. I could not make up my mind whether I was welcome or not, but resigned myself to Seng, who showed me to a bare chamber leading off a central room, and told me to make myself at home. It was part of the original stone construction, and there was an attached cubicle with a stand, a pitcher and a hole in the floor, where a shower could be taken.