Golden Earth

by Norman Lewis

  His conviction seemed to lack solidity after the account of a similar incident I had just been reading in a copy of The Burman, bought at the last station. ‘It was ten o’clock in the morning,’ stated the account in the consciously literary style favoured by Burmese reporting, ‘that the Special left Shwebo. Twenty-five minutes later it reached milestone 439¾ and struck the mine. With the detonation the ill-fated train was subjected to heavy rifle fire. Insurgents then came forwards towards the train to loot … The exchange of fire quickly drew Township Officer Wetlet, and a squad of UMP (Union of Burma Military Police) on the scene. After a brief engagement the insurgents were routed.’ Mr Pereira was quite convinced of his ability to defeat any such assault by the sheer weight of moral authority. At all events, if the insurgents attempted to approach our compartment, he would throw them into utter confusion by the preaching of the Law. For himself, he was quite imperturbable, for besides the other advantages of being a pagoda-builder, he was assured of release from the earthly effects of the Three Calamities: Starvation, Plague and Warfare.

  * * *

  But there were no signs of life from the village. Time passed slowly, and the old man entertained the company with the resumé of a paper he had read to the Rotary Club of Rangoon. The subject was Charity, and it was illustrated by many instances, some of which were difficult to appreciate in the grotesqueness of the guise the virtue had assumed. There was the story of King Mindon, which I heard for the first time. In a previous existence the king had been a female demon, inhabiting Mandalay Hill, who had sheltered the Buddha, and, cutting off her breasts, had presented them – ‘in a devotional ardour’, as Mr Pereira put it. This act of merit was rewarded in the next incarnation by a change of sex, as well as the dignity of the Dragon Throne. He also recounted two familiar instances of the Buddha’s all-embracing compassion, in his previous existences. On one occasion, when as a human being he had come across a starving tigress with two cubs, he had surrendered himself to be eaten. In the other instance happening to be incarnated as a jungle-fowl at a time of famine, he had sought out a pilgrim and saved the holy man from death from starvation by the supreme sacrifice. There was nothing in these stories which his hearers would have found difficult to believe. They were not even particularly amazed when the Deputy Inspector of Wagons described a camera he had seen. Persons when photographed with this in their normal attire, came out in the nude.

  * * *

  Two hours passed in this way, and a gloominess began to infect the company. The way things were going, it looked as though we should be four days in getting to Rangoon. The train was not allowed to travel at night, and we should be stranded in some God-forsaken spot, with nothing to eat. The exhilaration of escaping a major danger having passed, the smaller inconveniences and imponderables now loomed disproportionately. Mr Pereira began to fret, and to plot alternative courses of action. He had important friends at Thazi, which we might reach in an hour after we started off again, and he wondered whether they could be persuaded to hire us a car to go as far as Yamethin. Or we could leave the train at Thazi, spend the night there in comfort, and then look round for some way of carrying on next day. But supposing we took this chance, and then found that his friends were away? That meant that we might be stranded high and dry for days. No, Mr Pereira finally decided, this was not a good idea. It was too risky. But what were the chances, he wondered, of persuading the station master at Thazi to put a ‘petrol special’ at the disposition of four distinguished travellers? We could then dash ahead, full speed, in front of the train, and be sure of getting to Yamethin that night. There might be something in that. Once at Yamethin, he could pull strings in all directions to get transport to Pyinmana – even Toungoo. Thus it appeared that even his year’s meditation on such themes as futility and evanescence had not entirely cured Mr Pereira of a habit of vain hopes and vain illusions.

  Somebody then told him that there was a gang of workmen on the train, going on leave to their homes, and Mr Pereira emitted a scandalised cry. Why had he not been told before? We were carrying spare rails; so let the foreman or senior workman be called into his presence and he would exhort them, with all the weight of his moral influence, to replace the torn rail. Mr Pereira’s suitcase was opened in the middle of the carriage floor, and there displayed on the top, were his neatly folded yellow robes.

  Someone had just gone off for the men, when a distant rattling was heard, and all the passengers were suddenly looking in the same direction. It was a ‘petrol special’ from Myittha, and it carried not only a breakdown gang, but vendors of samusa (fried mincemeat and onion patties), fried chicken and Vimto – a nonalcoholic beverage which sometimes takes the place of Coca-Cola in soft-currency areas.

  Immediately the picnic atmosphere revived. Ladies fluttered from the carriages like unsuspected butterflies from the shadows of a wood; someone began to pluck at the strings of a guitar, and a conjurer gave a free show by the side of the track. Mr Pereira ate heartily, although restricting himself to putto rice, baked in a length of bamboo. Afterwards he spotted my bottle of mepacrine. ‘What are those tablets? Pray give me two to try.’ I assured him that they did not contain the vitamins by which he was mildly obsessed; but there was no way of dissuading him from taking the tablets, which he put in his mouth, and sucked with contentment and appreciation.

  * * *

  Soon after we were on our way again. At the next station we collected another permanent addition to our party. This was a junior station master, an Anglo-Burman who was inoffensively drunk for the whole journey. He carried with him a bottle of country spirit, retiring with it to the lavatory from time to time, to avoid Mr Pereira’s censorious eye. His Burmese wife and his children were travelling third class, and whenever the train stopped, the numerous family was reunited in our compartment. The degree of this man’s befuddlement was uneven, following the curve of an irregular graph which rose and fell gently, dependent upon the maintenance of fresh supplies of country spirit in the villages we stopped at. When he was in a semi-sober condition, he seemed, like most Anglo-Burmans – although they swarm in official positions – to be unhappy with his lot; but soon after the bottle had been refilled he became expansive, in a quite un-Burmese way. As this was happening, his opinion of me steadily increased, till by the time he reached the top of the manic curve he believed I was the American Ambassador, and presented me as such to various friends travelling on the train.

  At Thazi we met the up-train, returning – six hours late – from Yamethin. It reported the impossibility of reaching Tatkón, as three bridges had been demolished on this side of the town. Bridge-guards had been mortared, and a railway repair-staff kidnapped on the outskirts. Hearing of this, the junior station master, who had promoted himself, in a happy fantasy, to an executive position, decided to go and confer with the engine driver. But by this time we were already on our way again, doing thirty miles an hour, and escaping the restraining hands, he got the door open, swung out into space and back again, collapsed on the floor, and went to sleep.

  For a short time we had a companion who was not a railwayman but an officer of the Military Police, a thickset fellow with an unusually brutal face. From him I learned a sinister fact which explained the insurgents’ war to the death with the UMP, and also, perhaps, threw some light on Tok Galé’s ghost story. ‘When we take insurgents,’ said this man, with a ferocious leer, ‘we cut them.’ Cut them? – I did not follow. ‘We cut them with our dahs,’ the fellow said, bringing down his arm in a ferocious swipe. ‘In our country there is a belief that the spirits of dead men will guard the bridges.’ So that was it, and I wondered how many misguided peasants had been sacrificed to the river spirits in this way.

  The bridges were without number. All the important ones were guarded by slit trenches and machine-gun nests, and we stopped to give water to their defenders. Near one was a recent wreck with what looked like a brand-new American locomotive, still shining and well-oiled, lying on its side so that we could stud
y its complicated internals. The guards had comfortably installed themselves in ‘basha’ huts, put together quickly with branches and palm-leaves in a couple of the trucks which had landed upright. The record number of bridges to be blown up in one night in any one administrative area, was five, said a member of the repair staff. It was raining ‘like the dickens’ at the time, and he had to issue fourteen quarts of country spirit to the men, to keep them on their feet and to get the work done. ‘By the morning, the trains were speeding on their way. Then my chief sends for me, intending, as I suppose, to bestow a compliment. But this is not so, and all he wants to know is, who is going to pay for the country spirit?’ And the man, fat and cheerful, roared with laughter at the memory of his disillusionment.

  Listening to such stories I could not help feeling that the keeping open of the Mandalay-Rangoon line must be almost the outstanding example of tenacity in the face of appalling obstacles in the annals of railway history, and that it illuminated a side of the Burmese character which had received little recognition in Colonial days. The speaker had often run up against insurgents, but found them easy enough to get on with if you didn’t make the fatal mistake of associating with soldiers. ‘They observe us at our labours without hindrance. Sometimes a warning shot rings out and we get to hell. That, my dear colleagues, is the set-up. From running continuously I am rejuvenated. All appetites and sleeping much improved.’ Only the other day his ‘petrol special’ had refused to start after he had been out to inspect a sabotaged bridge, and while he was cleaning out the carburettor a couple of White-Flag Communists had come along and taken him to their headquarters. They took his watch and pocketbook and, after questioning him about the number of government troops in Toungoo, told him that he could go. They expected him to walk home seven miles, although it was after dark. Naturally, he refused, saw to it that he got breakfast next morning, and then asked to see an officer, told him about the watch and pocketbook, and got them back.

  CHAPTER 20

  Rival Parties

  CONFOUNDING all the pessimistic prophecies, we got into Yamethin at nightfall. It was announced that the train would stay there for the night, and return to Mandalay next day, and that passengers might sleep in the train. While Mr Pereira stayed on guard, the junior station master, or JSM as he had better be known, a young Indian wagon-inspector called Nair, and myself, went out to buy our evening meal. There was actually a shop licensed to sell beer. It was tucked away in a side-street, and customers went in under the eye of two or three of the kind of people who gather when an accident has happened, and drank with furtive bravado, standing at an ordinary store-counter. Ice was sent out for and charged separately. We ate curried chicken in an Indian shack where the dust settled so quickly that we covered our plates with palm leaves in the pauses between eating. Afterwards we chewed betel – in my case for the first time. The taste was at first sweet and sharp, and afterwards slightly soapy, with a faint childhood recollection of the taste of bath water on a sponge. At this point the JSM announced that he was going in search of ‘the fancy’ which was to be found on the edge of the jungle, and with a cry of ‘cheery-bye’ reeled happily away into the night. We found out later that he was driven back, without having achieved his purpose, by a government patrol. There was a great deal of military activity in the Yamethin area. The Communists had a stronghold ten miles away at Aingto, and penetrated to the outskirts of the town, where, as I learned from a newspaper when we reached Rangoon, they had held a people’s court on the night we were in Yamethin, and executed a prisoner.

  A curfew was imposed at nine o’clock, but this did not seem to apply to the precincts of the station where the town’s nocturnal activities were concentrated. The water-supply, turned on for a few minutes daily, had been cornered by the enterprising and reissued here in the form of slabs of ice-cream on sticks. It was also possible to buy a cup of tea, the sale being conditional on the consumption of pyagyo – a fried ball of ground peas and curry. With traditional magnificence a burgher of the town had chosen to celebrate some windfall by offering a free theatrical show – also in the station yard. It was a well-known piece with a plot about a queen’s love for a legless dwarf, that Anouilh himself might have been proud to have invented. For several hours I watched the leisurely unfolding of the story, with its numerous interruptions by slap-stick and dancing. About a third of the way through the play I gave up and went back to the carriage.

  The others were already there and Mr Pereira, who had just decided to get up and go for a stroll, was told of the curfew. ‘Curfew,’ he said dreamily, a little later, ‘a curious word. Have you ever thought of its origin? I read something about it in a Reader’s Digest.’ He lay stretched out along one of the lower benches, and above him a plank had been let down on a chain to form an upper bunk. Upon this Nair reposed, uncomfortable at the thought of the disrespect involved in sleeping above a venerable pagoda-builder. An argument had raged for some time before the sleeping arrangements had finally been settled and anyone could be induced to occupy this position, left vacant by the fact that Mr Pereira was incapable of the physical effort involved in climbing into the upper bunk.

  As it was, he was wakeful and restless. ‘I am unable to sleep, Mr Nair,’ he moaned. ‘Lacking my glass of Wincarnis, I cannot relax. The heat, too, is unseasonable.’ Then I found myself waiting for something, a further development of Mr Pereira’s discourse, which, as I seemed to have stumbled on a key to his thought-processes, I knew must follow. I had only a few moments to wait. ‘Psychology has shown us, Mr Nair,’ the harsh, pedagogic voice began, ‘that there are different levels of sleep …’ The JSM woke up with a groan, sat up in his bunk and said, ‘From the jungle’s edge, ravishingly she came out to me, like the actress of the screen – Joan, is it? – I do not know her name. But we were restricted by impediment, and – ah …’ he fell back, and his voice trailed off into snores. Out in the yard, the orchestra banged and squealed in endless, zestful improvisation. The wall of the carriage held the heat where the sun had struck it, and an invisible sheet of cellophane across the window prevented any air from entering. Passengers still clung to the platform in unhappy groups, and from the grumbling of their voices an uneasy pattern of dream was forming. A voice murmured, far back in the brain, it seemed, ‘Forty-two degrees. Multiply forty-two by nine, and divide by five. Now add thirty-two. Yamethin is the hottest place in Burma. But it is opinion that next month it will be hotter.’

  * * *

  With every morning, at the hour of setting out, came an unfailing exhilaration, when the perfume flowed steadily from the invisible flowering bushes in the forest, which – itself unseen – was there somewhere, beyond the low hills, or as in Yamethin, crowding at the threshold of the town.

  In the early hours Mr Pereira had got up, switched on the light and gone into the lavatory for the scrupulous and lengthy ritual of his toilet. The best time to concentrate, he explained later, was between the hours of four and six, before the bustle of the world destroys the emanations of the higher sphere. ‘The brain, Mr Nair, may be likened to a radio machine, of highly-tuned receptivity.’ And so we lay and struggled weakly on the edge of consciousness, while Mr Pereira splashed about, recited his mantras, and acquired spiritual strength to face the day.

  By half-past six, when we stood in the station yard, waiting for lorries, some of this intake of magnetic power had already been expended, and there were even signs of nervous irritability. Besides a following of temporary associates – occupants of other carriages, with whom we were on terms of only slight familiarity – our party consisted of the four of the night before, plus the JSM’s wife and three children. Contrary to assurances, no arrangements had been made by the railway company to get passengers to Pyinmana. This was left entirely to their own ingenuity. And although Mr Pereira had several times mentioned powerful friends in Yamethin, who could be relied upon, if the occasion arose, to put transport at our disposal, they were no longer alluded to. Instead, having found that among
my many documents was a letter of introduction to the DSP of the town, he urged me to call on this official and endeavour, on the strength of this letter, to have a lorry placed at the disposal of our party. There were several objections to this proposition, the chief being that I saw no reason to appeal to the official unless in a case of genuine emergency. In any case – and this was the argument that carried the weight with Mr Pereira – it was to be supposed that the DSP would not be available before eight, or nine, and by that time any lorry going southwards would most likely have left.

  His hopes in this direction having been shattered, Mr Pereira now ordered Nair into action. Within a few minutes Nair was back to say that he had found a lorry that would shortly be leaving for Pyinmana. It was a three-tonner, engaged at that moment in taking on a load of five tons of lead, a few hundred yards from where we stood, down the railway line. It would complete its load with a ton of potatoes, and fifteen passengers, and their luggage. Shortly afterwards it appeared, but Mr Pereira shook his head. He had produced a small handbook on numerology, by an author with the pen-name of Cheerio; it was a best-seller in Burma, although this was the first time I had seen it put to practical use. The number of the truck he said flatly, was not propitious, and he would not travel by it. His disfavour quickly spread, and the other members of the group also turned away. Happily, another lorry arrived a few minutes later, and its number, 7101, was judged acceptable. It also stopped to take on an immense load of potatoes, upon the towering summit of which we perched, with a splendid but swaying view of the country.

  For some reason – probably connected with its supposed vulnerability in case of attack – Mr Pereira refused to accept a seat of honour in the driver’s cabin, and had to be lifted, by a kind of Alpine rescue feat, to a resting place among the peaks. At intervals of almost precisely five minutes our lorry stopped, while a member of the crew got down, partially dismantled the petrol supply-system, and blew air through it with a foot-pump. Mr Pereira, who had brought out a sheaf of notes dealing with a lecture he had given on the comparison of Buddhism with Christianity, and was about to hold forth, became exasperated with this and even rapped sharply with his stick on the roof of the driver’s cabin, whenever the tell-tale spluttering started.