Golden Earth (18 page)

A day or two later, there was another report of a lorry going to Nam Hkam. It was said to be loading in the market – news which sent me hurriedly packing my things. When I was ready I wanted to go straight down and take my seat, and not leave it for a moment until we were on our way. But Tin Maung would not hear of this undignified procedure. A message would be sent for the lorry to call for me, and I could wait in comfort and propriety where I was. It might be hours before it was ready to depart. I wanted to photograph the family before I left, so they all retired for a few minutes to prepare themselves. U Thein Zan appeared dressed with flamboyant conservatism in a taung-mathein, a long, white coat, a sartorial survival of the last century equivalent to a frock-coat. His paso had been wound tightly round the waist and tied in front with a fine, impractical ebullience of material. The made-up turban was replaced by a scarf, tied with the swagger of a buccaneer. It was a fine turn-out, combining the maximum of difficulty of manipulation with good taste. By him stood his wife, wearing all the jewellery she had left to her after U Thein Zan’s gambling losses, flowers in her hair, her face powdered ghastly white. The youngest son was dressed as usual for the pampas; the second son with his everyday buckish elegance, which in any case could not have been improved upon; while Tin Maung, undaunted by the heat, had put on an army pullover. I photographed the little group in colour, amongst their flowers, having promised U Thein Zan to give him some lasting record of the rather pallid glory of his snapdragons and sweet peas. This was all done rather hurriedly, with an eye on the road, and my bags standing by the garden gate. But as the shadows lengthened and the hills across the valley began to gather about them their drapings of mist, there was no heartening cough, rattle and thump of well-worn mechanism
coming up the hill. In the end, I went down to the market again where I heard that at the very last moment the lorry had been requisitioned by the Army.

Early next morning, without heralding, salvation came. A post wagon was taking mail to Nam Hkam, or as far as it could go along the road, and someone had told the driver about me. There was a scramble to get my things out. When I said goodbye to the others, the old mother was missing, and just as the lorry was moving off she came rushing out with food for the journey tied up in a palm-leaf bundle. She tried, without success, to persuade me to accept also the contents of a handkerchief, which appeared to be several precious or semi-precious stones – another reminder of the fact that, to the Burmese, liberality is the chief of the ten great virtues, and the second of the three works of perfection.

The post-wagon was undoubtedly the most decrepit, the most exhausted vehicle in which I had ever travelled. It was a phantom from a breaker’s yard, something which had been unearthed from a bombed building. The treads of all four tyres displayed a rippling pattern of canvas. There was no spare. Before the steering wheel could influence the car’s
direction
, it had to be spun through half a turn. Gaping sockets showed where all the instruments had been wrenched out of the dashboard. The
floorboards
above the engine had been removed, releasing a furnace heat and the rattling vibration of a million nails being shaken in a metal box. Above this pit sat the driver, stabbing like a frantic organist at the control pedals, which in some way had lost their normal independence of each other, since the application of the brake slightly opened the throttle, and the engine had to be switched off, or the accelerator held back, whenever this was necessary. Whenever he wanted to blow the horn, the driver, reaching out as if to catch a butterfly, seized two dangling wires and held them together. The body was insecurely fixed to the chassis, but settled down on a straight road to a steady seesawing motion to which one soon became accustomed, although the sudden opening of the doors as we took corners continued to surprise.

Our first stop was at the marketplace again where two Shan
policemen
, armed with swords, arrived in company with a Burmese women. The woman was singing in a penetrating voice, and the policemen looked embarrassed. All three climbed into the back. The policemen unbelted their swords, laid them down beside them and settled themselves. Two or three onlookers gathered; the woman waved gaily to them and started another song. One of the policemen picked up his sword, leaned over and tapped the driver on the shoulder with it, nodding to the road ahead. The driver screwed up his face, but said nothing. More onlookers strolled up and stood about, their faces amazed under their turbans while the Burmese woman serenaded them. Another policeman appeared, and checked the travellers’ passes, and then, as with a resounding crash the driver engaged bottom gear, our musical passenger broke into ‘I put my money on a coal-black mare, doodah, doodah’, and away we went.  

Within minutes the last of Lashio’s cottage gardens was behind us. We were going down a gradient with a steep, flowering slope on our right, and then my heart sank. There was another lorry in the middle of the road, clearly in trouble. From it swarmed like troubled bees a
colourful
collection of passengers, Kachin women with a chain-mail of silver coins over their breasts, Palaungs with hips swathed in metal bands, and betel-stained holes where their mouths should have been. In the Far East, the courtesies of the road are observed with punctilio. We drew up alongside and immediately a team of experts from the post-wagon was formed to investigate and pronounce upon the breakdown. Petrol lines, pumps and carburettor were dismantled in a leisurely manner, fiddled with and reassembled. The engine started, wuffled for perhaps ten seconds, and stopped. Meanwhile our singer had reached a number in her repertoire which seemed to give her special pleasure, and was singing that simple tune, ‘Happy birthday to you’, for the fifth or sixth time.  

A moment later it became clear that the driver of the post-wagon had made a generous decision, for there was a sudden rush of whirling skirted forms in our direction, and in a few seconds we had taken on a jingling cargo. There was something miraculous about the compression
involved
. A young Indian girl of distracted Pre-Raphaelite beauty joined
us. Jewels dripped from a nostril, and round her neck she wore a large iron key. Passing by an act of levitation over the crowded forms, she subsided in a ballet posture among some vegetable marrows. The Palaungs, a compact racial heap, stared around them with the frightened eyes of children in the presence of violence. The singing Burmese woman had been driven by the invasion into a position immediately behind me, although slightly higher. Every time she moved she struck me with her knee in the back of the neck. Forced thus into close contact, I took in the details of her dress, the grubby, flowered longyi, the unbuttoned blouse and, rather alarmingly, the necklace of beer-bottle tops.

We moved off down the hill, the overloaded post-wagon wallowing with a nautical motion. Whenever we went over a bump there was a sound from the interior like the clashing of circus accoutrements. Having covered a mile or two, we reached a gradient that was too much for us. Everyone got out, and while the passengers trotted by its side the lorry made a groaning, faltering climb. At the top of the hill there was a pause to let the engine cool. The Burmese woman, still singing, leaped suddenly from her perch, easily cleared a low hedge into a field, where, producing a clasp-knife, she hacked down a sugar-cane and began to tear at it with her teeth. I thought this extraordinary because I could never remember having seen a woman run in the Far East before. I got out my notebook and started to write and a young man dressed with striking formality came worming his way through the baggage, pulled my sleeve, and asked courteously, ‘What are you writing, sir?’ I told him I was writing poetry and received a brilliant smile from under the brown trilby hat.

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.