Golden Earth (20 page)

I asked for news of conditions over the frontier. Were, for instance, land reforms being put into practice? Land reforms! the headman echoed scornfully, it wasn’t land reforms the hill-peoples wanted. The people over the frontier were Shans, Kachins and Palaungs, just as they were on this side. If they wanted land, there was nothing to stop them clearing the bush and cultivating it. What the Kachin people wanted was not land, but education. That, he understood, their new masters in China were going to give them, although he had heard that the first samples to return from the school in Kunming had soon shown, to the scandal of the villagers, that they had lost respect for their parents. One of the worst things about the present situation was the closing of the frontier to ordinary
respectable
people. If you were dressed up like a hill savage in a turban and strings of beads, nobody said anything to you – you could cross
backwards
and forwards as much as you liked. But if you wore decent clothes – a pair of trousers and a hat bought in Rangoon – they arrested you as a spy. Draining his glass sorrowfully to the memory of departed liberties, the headman reached over and struck the gong. There was an almost immediate irruption into the room of domestics carrying dishes of food. Along with them came the headman’s wife – Seng’s sister – a strapping Ludmila of the remote Asiatic mountains, who, relieved of the headman’s necessity for high-minded seriousness, giggled frequently, especially when in difficulties with the serving of the food. There was a continual coming and going of flouncing, pig-tailed forms, until the table
was closely covered with dishes, scarlet curries with surface currents of ochreous oil, three varieties of what looked like seaweed (inevitably recommended as abundant in vitamins), a paste made of ground beans and chillies, pickled tea-leaves, great bowls of red rice, cups of tea with a container of salt by each. Having brought in the food, the female staff bowed, and one by one withdrew. Their place was taken by soldiers, who took up position behind the chairs and helped with the dishes, into which they sometimes let ash fall from the cheroots they were smoking. In between their duties, they kneeled down to play with several of the headman’s young children who had escaped from the nursery to take refuge here, and were crawling about on the floor.

Later that day, I found out from Seng that his brother-in-law had just received definite information of the location of the Chinese band. They were in a jungle village, about five hours’ ride to the north, and next morning the headman would lead a party of his men to attack them. By this time Seng and I were on such good terms that I felt able to ask him to persuade the headman to take me with them. The headman, too, had suddenly thawed out with a revelation of charm that was like the unexpected appearance of the sun on a dull day. We talked about such things as education, particularly the flashier subjects like psychology, to which provincial Asiatics are often specially attracted, finding that the transition to such studies is not difficult after a grounding in, say, horoscopy or in the art of making oneself bullet-proof. In the cool of the evening all the able-bodied household, including the womenfolk, were chased out to do physical jerks in the courtyard while the headman, himself, rapped out the orders in Kachin – knees-bend, knees-stretch. This ritual was thoroughly enjoyed, especially by the women who
usually
overbalanced while in the knees-bend position. Nothing was said, one way or other, about the next day’s expedition.

However, soon after dawn, Seng followed the pig-tailed serving-girl into my room, and said, ‘The horses are ready.’ He was trying to buckle on a Kachin dah, a weapon of monstrous unsuitability, over his Rangoon
clothes. Seng was manipulating the dah – a heavy bladed affair,
half-sword
and half-axe – with a civilised lack of enthusiasm. ‘If I do not carry this,’ he said, with an apologetic smile, ‘the headman will think I have become soft. But I have lost the habit of the strokes.’ The soldiers were armed with Sten guns or rifles, but the headman and his brother-in-law were by tradition invulnerable, and carried dahs for reasons of prestige alone.

I am a plain horseman, content to keep my seat, and unfamiliar with equestrian refinements. The pony provided for me looked well-shaped enough and there was nothing unusual about it, except a certain sheepish quality about the head, and a drooping of the muzzle that reminded me of some other animal, perhaps a tapir. The stirrups were too short, and could not be lengthened enough for comfort. I mounted, and found myself, in this position, nearer the ground than I had ever been since on a donkey on the sands as a child. The short, fat back sagged springily as it took my weight, and I half expected the animal to collapse. Once firmly in the saddle I kicked experimentally at the pony’s sides, and it instantly threw me backwards, over the tail, with an irresistible oscillation, like that of a dog shaking the water out of its coat. One of the Kachin soldiers caught it by the rein, passed a caressing hand over its face, then smacked it fiercely with the flat of his dah. I mounted again, and sat there quietly. The soldiers went off, stringing out into a thin column, with the headman leading them. Behind him rode a soldier, steering a pony which had nothing but a large ceremonial drum strapped to its back. Then came the straggling column, with the soldiers in their British battledresses, with waistbands tied over them, and dahs stuck through the waistbands; so that they looked like Japanese swordsmen. Seng and I brought up the rear. My pony started when the others did, and stopped when they stopped. Without any urging on my part, it broke, when it was required to keep up with the rest, into a kind of scrambling gallop, but would tolerate no interference on my part; it danced about and tossed its head angrily if I tried to give it any encouragement other than a shake of the reins, or to influence its course in any way. But it was the smoothest animal to ride I had ever sat on, and Seng later told me that a Kachin pony
was unsaleable until it could be put through all its paces, with its rider holding a full tumbler in one hand, without spilling the contents.

That morning I had awakened with a vague sense of indisposition, and now as a growling malaise concentrated and defined itself, I realised that I was in for a mild bout of malaria. The fever soon cushioned the edges of sensation, and simplified things wonderfully. To me the jungle itself has never offered the brilliant variegation of the jungle as it appears in an air-terminal mural. It has never been a matter of orchids and black panthers; and now even the few modest highlights that this forest could have offered were suppressed by two or three degrees of fever. The impression remains that from the outside, as we rode through the wide clearings, it was like the trimly arranged asparagus of a bouquet from which, unaccountably, the flowers had been omitted. But as soon as we rode beneath those delicate awnings of fernery we passed into a seedy vegetable disorder, with many sallow, broken grasses, and moulting bamboos; and the sun showered its spears on us through a ragged armour of leaves. There were no serpents, nor startled fawns; not even, in fact, birds of sufficient presence for my fevered eyes to record them. This was a well-worn track, which wild animals had probably learned to avoid. Tribesmen, like any other travellers, are careful to keep out of the virgin jungle, and this narrow path probably carried as much or more human traffic than the metalled highroad.

We rode by the verge of swamps, over bare hilltops, and down into the untidy jungle again; and thus on and on. Some time in the early afternoon the soldiers ahead broke into a gallop, and a few minutes later we rode into a miserable Palaung village. The soldiers sprang from their horses, crawled into the huts and came out with a few women. They were half-naked, and all had goitre. The Chinese had gone off the day before, they said, but they had left two sick men behind. They took us to a shelter of leaves and branches, under which the two deserted men lay on the ground, half-conscious, and with their bare feet grossly swollen. The Kachins sat them up, tied their hands lightly, and tried to stick lighted cheroots between their teeth; but the Chinese were past smoking. It appeared that the band had gone off down the trail in the direction of the
border, so the headman, leaving a man behind with the prisoners, gave the order to ride on.

We rode out of the village, with the half-clothed, goitrous women standing by their huts looking after us, and down into the jungle, which was exactly as before. The thumping behind my eyes deepened, and with it, the monotony of the ride. Hours later we came down to a river. From our position we could not see the water, which at this time of the year was very shallow and split up by islands and sandbanks. There was a fording-place here, and China was on the other side. We could just make out a village, with an insect-movement of humans and buffaloes among the huts. The headman sent soldiers in various directions to make enquiries and, after a long wait, one of them came back with the news that the bandits had been seen crossing the ford. It was evident that the Kachins did not relish being checked by the purely political barrier. Seng explained that the people across the river were not Chinese, but Shans and Kachins; moreover, he said, ‘The actual border is in dispute. Every year the river changes its course.’

But the headman was against further action. There might be
Communist
soldiers on the other side. Not that he was prepared to cross, in any case. To satisfy the men, the big drum was beaten vigorously; and a few seconds later the reply came, a bugle-call, practised, unwavering and definite. That settled it. A new, unsympathetic authority had announced its presence.

Although I had no idea of it at the time, we were at this point actually within a few miles of Nam Hkam, having in the course of our expedition cut across the base of a triangle of country enclosed by the motor-road. In a few days I should be passing once again down the roughly-metalled track running parallel with the river.

That night we slept in a jungle-clearing on the way back. There was a remnant of a hut perched on stilts ten feet high, and into it the headman, Seng and I climbed. Every time one of us turned over, this construction swayed a little. Beneath us, the soldiers thudded with unflagging energy at
their drum, and sang a soldiering song with endless verses and an extremely monotonous air. The end of each verse would be signalled by howls of laughter. In the end, as the first wave of fever slowly spent itself, I relapsed into rambling, oppressive dreams. I was soon aroused by a discharge of shots. But it was only a soldier who had been tinkering with his Sten, which was loaded, and had shot off one of his toes.

T
HE LOCAL SECTION
of the Burma Road having been declared open to traffic, the headman took me down in his jeep to the point where the hill-track joined it, and where he had established a roadblock, guarded by his men. Seng had come down to see me off, and here we parted most cordially. The soldiers had already stopped a jeep. In it were two Chinese merchants on their way from Kutkai to Mu-Sé. This town was not marked on my map, the production of a very well known map-making firm, which was vague – and, as I later discovered, inaccurate – about this frontier area. The Chinese spoke of Mu-Sé as if it were a considerable metropolis, a local nerve-centre from which well organised transport services left regularly in all directions. This pernicious optimism in
informants
is one of the traveller’s worst enemies. They said there were lorries to Nam Hkam ‘plenty often’. More than once a day? Oh, sure, more than once a day. Would we get to Mu-Sé early enough to catch one? Oh, sure we would, sure thing.

The Chinese spoke English better than the Burmese perhaps because they had escaped the schools run by religious institutions, with their hallmark of tedious and involved archaism. By comparison the Chinese made it snappy, and cinema-argot ran like a rich vein of fool’s gold through their speech. Their Americanisms are, of course, dated, and as the cinematographic diet of the Far East is largely composed of
gun-toting
epics, they are drawn largely from the dialects of the cattle-raising states. ‘Well, I’ll be a son of a gun,’ said the driver in amazement, when he learned of my hitchhike from Mandalay.

The Chinese jeep reflected in its purposeful, surging acceleration, its efficient steering and brakes, and also in certain additional equipment,
such as fog-lamps, the tastes and calibre of its owner. Wherever a plain black handle or knob had existed, it had been replaced by one of
sky-blue
plastic. Badges in the dashboard announced membership of motoring associations in places like Hong Kong and Cuba, and would have appeared to be of little service to the Chinese member. Sometimes when approaching a corner, round which the odds of an approaching vehicle being hidden were several thousand to one, the driver would touch a button, and a tremendous fanfare of trumpets would flush from the undergrowth an unsuspected population of pigeons and quails.

This landscape was the wild, natural reserve common to most frontiers. Exposed to endless incursions of bandits, it had not been thought worth while to build villages, or to undertake any settled cultivation. From the absence of trees on the low hillsides you could see that the Palaungs or Kachins had moved through at some time, set fire to the forest and snatched a crop of ‘dry’ rice or maize. The road had been cut, a red whiplash round hillsides and through valleys filled with a dense low tundra of tropical vegetation. We saw few signs of animal life here, except some lizards in the red dust, one of which was carried off from beneath our tyres in the talons of a hawk, which missed annihilation by inches. After perhaps two hours of shattering the savage peace of this wilderness with our heraldic approach, we dropped down into a long valley running north-south, and beyond the end of this, their bases laced with an immediate foreground of tree-fern, loomed portentous and pallid the bare mountains of Yunnan. At the valley’s end we passed out into the unchallenged sunlight of a plateau, soon reaching a crossroads with a police post and a knot of harassed,
sword-bearing
travellers. From this point the Burma Road went on to cross the Chinese frontier, at Wanting, about three miles away. The road to the left went to Mu-Sé, and down this broken, calamitous track we plunged, after a cursory inspection by the Kachin frontier police.

Mu-Sé was a place of importance and animation. We pulled up in a considerable square with a market to which a row of Chinese tea-shops with outside tables had given a faintly Parisian atmosphere of graceful leisure. Banners, which might have flown at the fiat of a dictator, were found to advertise the practices of dentists, and were usually adorned with enormous sectional diagrams of the jaw, the danger-spots filled in in savage colour. There was a Shwebo Motor Store with an Indian-Gothic façade in red brick, complete with castellations. Combined grocers and tea-shops had their shelves well stocked with such commodities as nougat and Wincarnis. At one of these the two Chinese and I took tea together, while glossy, blue-black crows hopped about our feet or dived under the chairs to pick up crumbs of cake. Women with bound feet, and conservatively dressed Chinese in long gowns and Phrygian caps, passed by. As in Hsenwi a few of the shopkeepers were combating the tedium between customers by flying kites from the doors of their establishments. This was done with much expertness and the use of the best equipment, the string being wound on expensive-looking contraptions like
fishing-reels
. In one case some kind of competition seemed to be in progress between an Indian executive of the Shwebo Motor Store and a dentist, some hundred yards away, at the other end of the square. Their kites, flown at such a height that they were no more than white slivers in the sky, were going through the most complicated evolutions, feinting and thrusting, swooping and ducking. It seemed a most convenient kind of game that one could play with opponents in different parts of the town without neglecting one’s business.

Enquiring in the market place, I found that there were no lorries going to Nam Hkam that day. This did not surprise me. I had learned no longer to expect a dovetailing in such travelling connections. Mu-Sé was said to possess a circuit house, but supposing it to be in some exposed position, outside the town, I decided that I might as well stay in one of the Chinese places in the square. Returning to the shop where we had had tea, I managed with some difficulty – since the Chinese are not a gesticulatory people – to make the waiter understand what I wanted, and was led into a dim, lattice-screened interior, where, upon a board raised
a few inches from the earth, I put down my bedding. Mu-Sé was a hot town, and outside an ardent breeze had sprung up, carrying processions of whirling dust-genii through the streets.

I decided to take a siesta, and had just settled down when a form darkened the doorway, which in this room was the only source of light and air. In obedience to a silent beckoning, I got up and went out. My visitor – who had shrunk somewhat in the light – proved to be an elderly Kachin police officer, with a flat, sensitive face. He was dressed in
khaki-drill
shorts, a grey woollen pullover, and a forage cap, worn, after the fashion of all Asiatics, on the top of his head. His manner was apologetic and discouraged, as with a slightly sad smile he led me to a jeep and motioned me to get in. The Indian who had so recently been flying a kite outside the Shwebo Motor Store, and who was a mildly interested onlooker, now moved towards me and said, ‘He is taking you to the police station, sir.’ Owing to the complete absence of everything that might have been described as autocratic in the police officer’s attitude, I could not decide whether I was under arrest or not. I got into the jeep and we drove away, turning off the main square into a side street, which emptied its dust and ruts after a hundred yards into what looked like a neglected playing field. At the end of this was a long low bamboo construction, raised on piles. This I judged to be the police barracks, as uniformed Kachins were lounging about, or sitting on the steps leading up to the several entrances of the long house. The distant prospect was splendid. Behind the barracks the ground rose gently, scored with paths like intersecting lines drawn idly with a compass. Gradually the groves of trees, the bamboo thickets closed in, till summits of the low hills were covered with frothing vegetation. Somewhere beyond came the dividing line, the true frontier, where the forests of Burma shrivelled and expired on the slopes of the mountains of Yunnan. With this rampart of pyramids the horizon was closed; golden and glowing slag-heaps, other-worldly in the purity of their utter desolation.

Policemen took my luggage out of the jeep, and carried it up to the lieutenant’s room. My bedding roll was laid out on the bamboo floor next to the lieutenant’s. Between them was a soap-box, on which the
lieutenant’s washing-kit was exposed in military style. A tommy-gun leaned against the box. A tinted photograph on the wall showed my host, or gaoler, dressed as a Buddhist novice. While I was examining it I felt a light tap on the arm and turned to find myself now also provided with a soap-box, on which stood a bowl of hot water, a neatly folded towel and a tablet of some much-advertised brand of soap. The lieutenant smiled as if at the memory of secret pain, and went out. I washed, got out a camera, and followed him, noticing as soon as I had reached the bottom of the steps, that a policeman had appeared behind me, carrying a chair. When I stopped, he stopped, and put the chair down. As soon as I moved on, he picked the chair up and followed me. It seemed to me that I had better fall in with the inference and sit down. I did so, and in a few minutes the lieutenant came up and squatted beside me. He put a tumbler in my hand. It was a brand new one, just unpacked, and was lightly coated with straw dust. The manufacturer’s label was in position, bright and unsoiled. Raising his pullover, the lieutenant groped underneath, found the breast-pocket of his shirt and brought out a pinch of dried herbs, which he dropped into the tumbler. A waiting policeman now approached with a kettle, and filled up the tumbler with hot water. At the bottom, the herbs stirred with sudden impulse, and blossoms uncurled like moths newly released from their chrysalises. Petals unfolded and straightened, stamens thrust forth, until the bottom of the glass was gay with daisies. While the lieutenant looked on eagerly I sipped, for the first time in my life, an infusion of camomile.

I was still unable to make up my mind whether this was protective custody, or no more than strangely spontaneous hospitality on the police’s part. After a few moments, therefore, I decided to define the position if possible. Gesturing vaguely in the direction of a neighbouring belt of trees, and incidentally, of China, and at the same time smiling inoffensively, I tried to convey the idea that I proposed to go for a walk. This produced no obvious symptoms of disapproval, so I got up, smiled again and strolled away in a casual manner. Having taken an aimless and wavering course for a couple of hundred yards, I bent down to pick something up, at the same time glancing behind. The lieutenant was no longer to be seen, and as no
one was following me, I quickened my pace. On the edge of the level, open space was a cemetery with perhaps a couple of hundred mounds. The recent ones were covered with elaborate miniature palaces made of white paper, stretched over a framework of cane. A few of these were intact, minor works of art; and there were others in all stages of disintegration until, on the old mounds, only a few sticks lay strewn about. Beyond the graveyard, the houses were reached again. A street of bamboo-shacks led almost to the edge of a chasm. Standing on the edge of this I found myself looking across a valley. From where I stood, steep banks dropped away to the bed of a wide river, riven by numerous islands and sandbanks. This was the Shweli River, and the opposite bank was China. Peasants with their buffaloes were cultivating strips of land left by the recession of the waters, both in Burma and in China and on the islands that lay between and came under who knows what jurisdiction. From across the river came the sound of cocks crowing, and most strangely, what sounded like the ringing of church bells.

That evening a lorry went to Nam Hkam, but, for the first time, I learned that even in the Orient a vehicle can be crammed to a degree when not a single passenger more can be taken. Bales had been piled high into the air, so that, in order to reach their perches, the passengers had to scale sheer precipices of merchandise. And either the weight had been unevenly distributed or a spring had given way, because the load tilted most dangerously. Here it was that I began to long once more for a smattering of Chinese, that valuable lingua-franca of all who travel or have affairs in the backwoods of the Far East. It was laborious and a little ridiculous having to keep up this patrol round Mu-Sé bleating hopefully, ‘Car (now a Burmese word) Nam Hkam?’ Finally an Indian appeared with a polite ‘What is your destination, sir?’ And from him I learned that there was no hope of getting to Nam Hkam until the next day.

There was a permanent market place in Mu-Sé where a nucleus of traders sold such essentials as liver-salts and Vaseline, and a tooth-drawer publicly removed teeth with astonishing speed and address. The market was served by a Chinese restaurant, a grim, open-sided booth with a kitchen in its centre, where the sinister routine of a low-class Chinese
eating house was practised without attempt at concealment from the patrons. Here I resolved to tackle the language problem – at least so far as eating went – and persuaded the proprietor, who was grubby as usual in vest and slacks but anxious to help, to accompany me on a tour of his pots. From him I acquired the basic smattering to deal with gastronomic emergencies, and this carried me through Burma. The only adjective that really mattered was
chow
– fried; from which, of course, the American army slang for food was derived. By keeping to fried dishes, I could reasonably hope most of the bacilli had been destroyed.
Mien
, which is usually associated with
chow
in the Chinese restaurants of the West, meant noodles, although here it was pronounced ‘myen’. Chicken was
chi
; eggs,
dan
; rice,
fan
; pork,
youk
. If you wanted the pork chopped up and mixed with vegetables as well as fried, all you had to do was to precede
chow
with the onomatopoeic and memorable adjective
tok-tok.
Strangely enough, this system worked, in spite of my repudiation of the notorious tones which are supposed to be so baffling to the Westerner, in Chinese. No restaurant owner ever failed to understand my order or even had to have it repeated, and one even went through the complimentary farce of asking me in what part of China I had picked up my knowledge of the language. The word for salt,
yem ba
was very important. This always seemed to be a rare commodity, only produced grudgingly, on special request. Warm Mandalay Pale Ale was sometimes forthcoming at the average price of a bottle of medium quality wine, by uttering the magic words
ku dziu
. Tea,
sha
, was always silently placed on the table as soon as you sat down.