Golden Earth

by Norman Lewis

  The defiles of the Irrawaddy are said to be of extreme depth, and I have read that a steamer which dropped anchor here failed to reach bottom when six hundred and thirty feet of chain had run out, and, getting out of control, was lost. The butler told me that Burmese Loch Ness monsters are seen with fair regularity, undulant creatures with the inoffensive heads of asses or sheep, which show themselves at times of national crisis, or when comets are seen. Their appearance has no more than a monitory significance, and without harming passing boatmen, they are content to belch a little smoke before disappearing below the surface. It is an accepted fact that river-sharks haunt some of the bays.

  * * *

  We stopped at the village of Shwegu, where most of the population seemed to have gathered on the sloping bank to sell crude earthenware pots, vilely decorated by the moulded addition of glossy, ceramic peacocks. The art of Shwegu in particular and Burma in general is a disaster, ranking in the scale of debasement, with the honourable exception of its lacquer-ware, as about level with that of modern Egypt. But the little saleswomen, most of them in sparrow’s-egg blue longyis and big Shan hats, were charming, and their pots – however deplorable separately – were arranged in the most effective mass compositions. The passengers were delighted with them, and scrambled ashore as soon as the gangplank was let down, to buy great quantities of these depressing souvenirs.

  Beyond Shwegu a few barren islands appeared, fringed with sand-spits bearing ranks of motionless cormorants, some sunning themselves with wings heraldically opened. Once we saw an eagle wading majestically in the shadows, thus revealing itself as a surprisingly long-limbed bird. Pied kingfishers hung motionless in the air, their long beaks hanging down like hornets’ stings, and sometimes dropped, as if an unseen thread had snapped, upon their insect quarry. In its fishing this bird employed a different technique, involving an extraordinary aerobatic feat – a trick which I had never seen practised before. While travelling at full speed, at perhaps seventy miles an hour, parallel to, and just above the water’s surface, it would suddenly – at least, so it appeared to me – spot a fish, and then, unable to turn quickly, would at once lose speed and reverse its direction by purposely striking the water. It did so with wings partially opened, in such a way that the impact actually caused it to bounce back, at the same time allowing it to change direction and then go into a shallow dive after its prey. The whole operation, which I was never tired of watching, took about a second, and I wondered when and how the first kingfisher had discovered the possibilities of this manoeuvre, and whether it was generally practised throughout the pied-kingfisher clan, or only by the Burmese birds.

  * * *

  Towards the evening, while the sun was still fairly high in the sky, the landscape suddenly lost its colours. The creamy-yellows of the water, the gilding of the sand-spits, the infinitely varied greens of the jungle trees, the banks, which were sometimes the bluish-white of water seeping through chalk, sometimes brick red, all relapsed into a leaden uniformity, a flat, photographic monochrome; it was more like a brightly moonlit scene than one viewed by the light of day. As the line of the distant mountains was erased from the sky and a tide of mist began to rise up the jungle tree-trunks, the ship was turned into the shore to join a dark cluster of junks.

  This was Katha, where we were to stay the night, but although the town was said to be in Government hands, the Chop-Chop Shop, alas, was out of bounds, and a trip ashore was not thought desirable. Bren guns had been set up on both decks, and on the bridge – which was also armoured – and their muzzles thrust shorewards in the gathering gloom, which was suddenly violated by the brusque glare of the ship’s searchlight. Extra guards had been posted over the prisoners who, with the failing light, had stopped gambling for matchsticks and were singing those rather tuneless European-type marching songs which are believed in the Far East to instil martial virtue. The opium-smokers among the Chinese had been humanely issued with an opium-ration, and had been sent away into a corner to smoke it. The officer who pointed this out was very proud of the fact that there was no opium-smoking in the Burmese army. Even the dacoits – two of whom it was whispered would be executed next day – had not been forgotten. Earlier in the day, after some self-examination as to the propriety of the action, and with the officer’s permission, I had given them cheroots. Now there was an official issue.

  CHAPTER 18

  A Mild Alarm

  MORNING CAME, accompanied by soft fluvial sounds, the light slap of water on the hull, the creaking of the junks’ timbers, the splash of leaping fish. Night evaporated along the western horizon and, with it, a rippling veil of egrets was drawn back from the water. A little red had seeped into the leaden landscape, and presently where sky and water met without division, the sun raised itself on a long, clean-cut shaft of reflection. It was a polar spectacle, an arctic night in midsummer. Soon the ship quickened with the engine’s subdued convulsion. Nosing out into the stream, it dragged in its wake ropes of unearthly blue through water the colour of tin. Wherever the water was stirred up, it leaped to life as if brilliant lamps had suddenly been lit below the surface. The sun, which had now broken away from its shaft of reflection, climbed swiftly into the sky, and as it did so the mists passed up out of the jungle, like the plumes of smoke from a railway station where many expresses are about to depart.

  Here the river was shallow, and our course wound through a hidden channel. Speed was reduced, with the clanging of bells, and one of the Malabar crew stood in the bows taking soundings with ritual cries and the flourishes of a temple dancer. Whenever a satisfactory depth was reached he gave a triumphant shout of ‘Allah akbar!’ a pious equivalent of ‘All’s well’.

  Tigyaing was in insurgent hands – what brand of insurgents was not clear – but by virtue of some kind of live-and-let-live arrangement, we were allowed to anchor there, a little offshore, to discharge and take on cargo. The river-barges here were the most handsome boats I had seen in the country – in fact, in any country. They were built of rich, red teak, providentially left unpainted. By keeping the deck free of any encumbrances but a single, elegant deckhouse, placed well back, and with the curved line of its roof exactly repeating that of the high, carved stern, an extraordinary purity of outline had been achieved. There was an element of what is now known as streamlining in these flowing curves, which undoubtedly reflected the tastes of Burmese boat-builders of bygone centuries. I hoped to have the opportunity to study one of these boats at leisure in Rangoon, but later found that they were a speciality of Upper Burma, and not to be found on the lower reaches of the river.

  A few miles below Tigyaing there was some excitement. The river’s course was divided here by a large island, and the right-hand channel we took was a narrow one, obliging us to approach sometimes very close to the bank, which was thickly wooded. We passed a village in a clearing, which might have been the objective, previously, of a Government landing party, because only the framework of the houses remained. The place had not been burned. The people had just moved elsewhere and taken their portable sections of bamboo walls with them. A red flag still flew from one of the roofs.

  Further down we passed the sister steamer, making the journey upstream to Bhamó. She signalled that she had just been attacked. This news was received with the utmost phlegm, and was passed on to me, without sign of emotion, by the butler. The soldiers of the Kachin Rifles set about organising the defence, settling themselves comfortably in a row of chairs along the lower deck, with muzzles of rifles and Bren guns supported by the deck rail. A few others lay down behind the funnel, on the corrugated-iron covering to the top deck. From this position they were soon driven out by the escape of smoke and fumes produced when the engines were driven at full-speed. The passengers’ behaviour was equally restrained. The young people took refuge, without excitement, behind a flimsy barricade of bales of fish. The Chinese prisoners showed amused interest. The old people and the convicts were indifferent. Only the pongyis paraded in the open, secure in th
e armour of righteousness, and peered and pointed into the green tangle, which sometimes came so near that we passed almost beneath the branches of the largest jungle trees.

  But no signs of aggression were forthcoming at the spot where the other ship had been fired upon, and soon the soldiers put their guns down; the Chinese, who had gathered at their backs with professional interest, went back to their gambling, and the ordinary well-behaved tumult of the shipboard life started again. There had been no official declaration of a state of alarm, and now no responsible person decreed that the emergency had passed. The passengers just got tired of waiting for something to happen and decided to go on playing cards, or cooking their food.

  I had just gone down for a shower, when there was a sound, muffled, yet amplified in the iron sounding-box of the bathroom, like the rattle of a distant anchor-chain going down. Immediately the room began to jar and vibrate under the hammering of the Bren guns above. I ran up on deck, but there was nothing left of the action but a smell of cordite. The gunners, lolling back in their chairs, were slapping fresh magazines into the breeches, and taking leisurely aim again, and as they did so the crowded cloisters of the jungle suddenly slipped away as our course took us into midstream again. There were no casualties, a fact which convinced me that such attacks are without terroristic intention, and aim only at compelling the Burmese Government to divert the maximum number of troops to escort duties. It would have been impossible to empty a machine-gun magazine into such a crowded ship, at twenty yards – even at random – without killing and wounding a number of people.

  * * *

  We had been delayed, so that the sun set while we were still some way from our destination for the night – Kyaukmyaung. At the approach of dusk, the terns, absent since the morning, returned, drifting past us up the river in groups, flapping languidly just above their reflections in the water. All round us dark smoke rose up where the Shans were firing the jungle before sowing their rice, and when the dark came the mountains were ringwormed with fire. The ship’s searchlights stabbed out, and swung from side to side, illuminating stark boulders fringing the water’s edge as we neared the third cataract, and patches of floating weed streamed past like silver plaques, stars and medallions. Soon brilliant motes appeared in the beam. These thickened until, with speed reduced, we appeared to be pushing forward into a blizzard. The flakes composing this singular storm proved to be winged insects, half fly and half moth, which soon filled the ship, flapping softly in the face and hair, churned by the electric fans into glittering whirlpools, deadening the footfalls in the carpet of their fallen bodies. There was no way of escaping them. When the cabin’s windows were shut they spurted, as if under pressure, beneath the door, toasted themselves on the electric light bulb and fell into the washbasin and drinking glasses. Had they possessed the power to sting, we should all have died, but they were quite harmless, though evidently suffering from some mass dementia. Curiously enough, they were all at the point of death, because after whirring round the room for a few moments they dropped to the floor, and lay still. Within twenty minutes it was all over, the air cleared and the ship’s decks, passages and companionways were covered with a layer, half an inch thick, of small, feebly moving shapes.

  The Kyaukmyaung shore, as we came in, twinkled with a dancing, firefly illumination. This was produced by a night market, held on the deep, sloping bank, to coincide with the boat’s arrival. The water’s edge and a path leading up to the village were lined with stalls, each lit by a wick standing in a cup of oil. Villagers coming down to meet the boat swung torches as they walked; hence the flickering effect. Most of the passengers went ashore to stretch their legs, and to buy the soup, rice, eggs, or members of chicken offered by the stall-holders. A speciality of this place was yard-long tubes of bamboo, filled with a much sought-after variety of sticky rice. These cost six annas each. All these edibles were sold by the village beauties, silk-clad and beflowered. It is not considered demeaning in Burma to keep a market stall, and in this way marriageable girls present themselves discreetly for the inspection of prospective husbands. The market at Kyaukmyaung performed, in fact, a double function.

  Kyaukmyaung, too, was for the dacoits the end of the road. Here the irons of each man were joined to a long chain, and thus they were marched away with the clinking anklets of earthbound dancers, up the bank and into the darkness.

  Dawn again showed us a landscape engraved in steel, ragged ardent clouds stirred into the sky, a river coldly ensanguined.

  Immediately below Kyaukmyaung, we entered the third and lowest defile of the Irrawaddy. It was less impressive than the second, but still sufficiently a wonder of nature to be surrounded with its magic aura. Here there was an island, and it was quite inevitable that a monastery should have been built upon it. The monastery of Thihadaw, now seemingly ruined, long possessed an engaging reputation because of the monks’ skill in taming fish. In Burma, fish suffer from their position on the fringe of animal creation, and are victimised by the cunning sophistry which sees no harm in eating them if they happen to have died when taken out of the water. For this reason they have always evoked a special compassion in the breasts of the gentle Buddhist brotherhood, and many monasteries have tanks where fish, saved from the nets by these holy men, lead a pampered existence, sharing with their protectors the alms of the pious. At Thihadaw the monks had tamed the resident population of the Irrawaddy for half a mile around, and it was a favourite tourist spectacle to see them calling up five-feet dogfish, to feed them and stick honorific patches of gold-leaf on the backs of their heads. These fish were intelligent enough never to wander far from their sanctuary. It is said that the arrival of the English had a deplorable effect on such pleasant customs. Unhappily, the fish which were most readily tamed were also the most appreciated for the table by the barbarous newcomers, and the prices offered tempted the cupidity of the fishermen. To combat the slaughter, the monks adopted many extraordinary measures. Once, at the mouth of the Irrawaddy, a canal was dug at immense labour, joining the river to a monastery tank, and the fish were trained upon a danger signal given vocally or by the beating of the banks, to swim up into the monastery enclosure, where the good men stood guard over them, cudgel in hand.

  * * *

  Below the defile the river spread out, its surface broken by wooded islands and rippling with shallows, where groups of fishing adjutants and herons waded. The banks were steep but shallow, and as the boat’s wash reached them, parched earth showered down, and floated like powdered chocolate on the water’s surface. Here there were more villages, the grey of their low bamboo shacks pierced by the fierce green of the river’s edge grass. There was also more traffic; in particular, barges going upstream, poled forward smoothly and swiftly by teams of men – usually three on each side – who, laying their weight on their poles, marched with languid precision from stem to stern, returning endlessly to repeat the manoeuvre. Small steamers also began to appear on the river. They were flying white flags.

  Just above Mandalay the skyline was sharply broken by what looked like one of those freak hills which are a feature of the Moulmein area. For several miles I had watched the growth of this small, isolated mountain, which, as we approached, loomed from the tall trees surrounding it, to overtop a low range of distant hills. Noticing my interest, the butler told me that this was an unfinished pagoda, and only then I remembered the notorious Mengun, which I had not expected to find by half so huge.

  The Mengun Pagoda was the work of King Bodawpaya, one of the many oriental princes who at one time or another set out to put up the greatest building in the world. The work was started in 1790, and occupied most of the labour force of the country, which was conscribed and organised on military lines for seven years. At the end of that time a prophecy became current – it had been heard before during the pagoda-building mania which preceded the Mongol invasion: ‘The great pagoda is finished, and the country is ruined.’ There was something in this, because in a roundabout way this lunatic en
terprise certainly accelerated the downfall of the Burmese kingdom. When Burmese manpower seemed insufficient, Bodawpaya recruited thousands of Arakanese, none of whom returned home. The Arakanese belief that the king considered their nation expendable brought about a revolt followed by mass emigration across the border into Assam. When the Burmese went after them, they clashed with the British and thus, eventually, the first Anglo-Burmese war came about. The Mengun Pagoda, when work on it ceased, had reached one hundred and sixty-five feet of the proposed height of five hundred feet.

  Bodawpaya, a kind of Burmese Ivan the Terrible who never slept twice in the same bed, affected a monkishness commonly found in a certain type of tyrant, and it must have made him all the more sinister to his people. He was much concerned with works of merit, of which the Mengun Pagoda was to be his greatest. Believing that it would ensure his apotheosis, he went so far as to anticipate the work’s completion in announcing his divinity. In much the same way a modern Burman will adopt the title paya, pagoda builder (one entitled to enter Nirvana without further incarnation) as soon as the first instalment-payment on the building has been made. To their eternal credit – since the king thought nothing of burning a few pongyis to death in wicker cages – this claim was immediately contested by the Buddhist priesthood, whose particular glory it is, like the prophets of old, and unlike many of the spiritual leaders of our times, that they have never been ready to sell their religion for the State’s support, nor afraid to stand up to a tyrant. From the time when Narathihapate, fleeing before the Mongols, gave the order for his concubines to be drowned, and his chaplain warned him that their murder would entail as a consequence the king’s reincarnation as an animal, Burmese history is full of such instances.