Golden Earth (13 page)

As the man was becoming lachrymose I was much relieved by the approach of Mr Bellamy, Ma Lat’s husband, a man of genial and confidential manner, who still occasionally makes a book. Mr Bellamy said, ‘If you want to talk to my memsahib, you’d better come over now, because we’re going in a moment.’

The Princess Ma Lat was at this time fifty-seven, although in the way
of many Asiatics who do no manual labour, she looked much less than her age. She was dressed in conservative Burmese style, and her still handsome features were continually enlivened by an expression which made one feel she was amused by something of which she did not entirely approve. Since it had been brought up several times in the evening, I had an intuition that a tactful allusion to the famous passage would not be badly received. The Princess’s characteristic expression deepened. ‘I object to the book,’ she said, ‘only because of its inaccuracy. Mr Collis said that although a member of the royal family, I could not be admitted to any of the European clubs of Rangoon … My father was an honorary member of
every
club.’ When she had said this, the amused disapproval brightened into quiet triumph.

The Princess’s grandfather was brother of King Mindon and Crown Prince – a perilous situation for any Burman to be in. In due course, in the preliminary manoeuvring for the succession, he was murdered by one of his many nephews, and as Burmese liquidations were usually extended to include any members of the family who happened to be about, his son – the Princess’s father – escaped, to take refuge with the British. Later he went off to the Shan States where he was recognised as ‘King of Burma’, and raised an army to attack Thibaw, but was forestalled in this by British action.

In these days Ma Lat had become the moving spirit behind various charities, particularly the local maternity hospital. She is the recognised expert in all matters pertaining to the cinema, and is able quite effortlessly to name the stars playing in any American film shown in the last twenty years. I mentioned my recent visit to her cousins in Mandalay, describing in passing the servants’ habit of crawling into their presence. Ma Lat nodded with approval, and said that she could remember the time when hers did the same, but, there – you knew what servants were nowadays. Discovering that we both expected to be in Rangoon in about a month’s time, we arranged to meet, and I promised to escort her to see the film of Cinderella.

The daughter of the union, June Rose, who was about twenty years of age, allied to the graceful beauty of the Burmese a quite European
vivacity. She had recently been co-winner of some sort of competition, and as a result had been invited with the other successful competitor, a Burmese boy called Richard, for a three months’ tour in the USA. There they had learned to jitterbug. When the family were about to leave, in an elderly and ailing British car, June Rose showed much skill in locating a short in the wiring, and much tomboyish energy in winding the
starting-handle
until the engine fired. On reconsideration of the whole episode I cannot really think that the Princess was any worse off as she was, enthusiastically immersed in the interests of any English or American woman of her age, than she might have been in the old days, living the stifling life of the Burmese royal seraglio, with the shadow of the red sack looming with each change of kingship.

It was now time to think of the journey to Lashio, and the Consul sent his chauffeur with me down to Maymyo bazaar, to make enquiries. We were told that the trucks leaving Maymyo that day were going no further than the towns of Naungkhio or Hsipaw. There might be some kind of transport coming through next day, from Mandalay, but no one was sure.

Maymyo bazaar itself was wonderfully lively. We were already on the edge of the Northern Shan States, and there were swaggering,
sword-bearing
hill men about the street in turbans and the short pyjama-trousers worn by the Shans. Some of them were tattooed so closely wherever their flesh showed, that they might have been wearing skin-tights of knitted blue wool. In the big, walled market they sold a fine selection of the bags the Shans carry over their shoulders, wonderfully woven in colours and sometimes decorated with small cowrie shells. There were piles of enormous coolie hats, some of them finished in a central cone of silver, any number of patent medicines, and towels with ‘good morning’ on them. Maymyo had many barbers’ shops, which had found a use for the waste products of the local ‘tyre surgery’. Lengths of outer covers were mounted complete in sections of rims on the bottoms of the barbers’ chairs, in which the customers rocked themselves in
perilous abstraction while the razors hovered over their chins. There were ranks of gharries that appeared to do no serious business, although occasionally a group of Shans would wake up a driver, bundle into one and go for a quick spin round the bazaar, much as in the old days one took a five shilling flip round the aerodrome in a plane. In Maymyo the exuberant fantasy of the Mandalay gharries was diminished, but I saw a pedicab with three pairs of handlebars, twenty-seven lamps and fourteen horns, one in the shape of a serpent.

At the Consulate, Duffy thought it a good thing to wait at least another day, to see if I could pick up a truck going all the way to Lashio, rather than run the risk of being stranded for a time in one of the smaller towns between. I felt ashamed of the eagerness with which I seized on this short respite.

In the afternoon we visited the local gardens. There was a small, trim lake, a few well-spaced trees and shrubberies in the English style, and here, said the gardener, in the early mornings passed a gaudy, transient population of hornbills, orioles and parakeets. But always with the mounting of the sun these exotics vanished and were replaced by the drab, skulking bird-life of the European woodlands. Where peacock and silver pheasant had strutted now only hardy, unabashed thrushes and sparrows hopped. But always the background was dominated by the mysterious calls of birds, aloof and invisible in the jungle; the sad hooting of the Burmese cuckoo, which is the call of the cuckoo we know with the notes reversed; the midnight rendezvous-whistle of the brain-fever bird, which repeated without respite, to the victim raving with malaria, becomes an hallucinatory addition to his torments. In the end these sounds become associated with the Indo-Chinese peninsula, and after being away from them for a time, I found myself longing to hear them again.

Dressing next morning I hid a small reserve of money in a bandage round a damaged ankle. The barometer of Burmese travel had fallen back
somewhat, since the news had just come through of the slaughter of two tin-miners near Tavoy – a rare and extraordinary occurrence, as foreigners have not been singled out for attack in Burma. They had been taken off a truck in which they had been riding with Burmese passengers, and riddled with Sten-gun fire. The truck had then been sent on its way, without any of the other passengers being molested. This was supposed to be the work of Red-Flag Communists, or perhaps local Mon
insurgents
, or perhaps a combination of both. Fortunately it was believed that there were no Red-Flags in the Lashio area.

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.