Golden Earth (21 page)

At this restaurant I was hardly surprised to find the police lieutenant sitting, with eyes modestly lowered, at one of the tables. I went over and joined him and tried to buy him a meal. After a great deal of explanation in which the restaurant owner and several customers joined, I was finally made to understand that my host, or keeper – whichever the case might have been – was a strict Buddhist and was observing some kind of penance, or Sabbath as it is known locally, involving a semi-fast and some
meditation
. He could therefore only be prevailed upon to accept a little plain rice.  

While we lingered over tea the day was declining. Children came
down from the crest of a bare hill, from which a diminishing cone of light had finally disappeared, dragging at their kites which shone like minute fish against the blue depths of the Yunnanese mountains. The
tooth-extractor
packed up, unhitching the strings of his trophies from the frame on which they were exposed, and lowering them string by string, as tenderly as if they had been matched pearls, into a bag. The last
bullock-cart
was driven away, producing with its greaseless axle a plain tune consisting of four notes of the pentatonic scale repeated
ad infinitum
. Suddenly the square of Mu-Sé had lost a dimension, the wooden shop façades, splashed with their vigorous Chinese characters had become a backcloth, dramatic and even menacing, before which a band of
posturing
actors with pikes and lances might soon present themselves in the nocturnal scene of such a play as ‘Stealing the Emperor’s Horse’. As the twilight deepened, the restaurant owner went softly from table to table, placing on each a tiny oil-lamp. Over the kitchen he hung a lantern providing a sympathetic illumination for the tapestry of viscera. From various directions came a soft, tentative strumming as if plucked from single-stringed instruments hung in space. Three or four distant voices were raised quaveringly, as if to exorcise this Asiatic mood, in the chanting of a revivalist hymn, a tune to which the words usually sung are, ‘Jesus wants me for an angel’. Occasionally, when these sounds subsided, a bugle could be heard, very faintly, being blown in China.

We went back to the police barracks and turned in. The lieutenant dimmed the lamp till there was just enough light for him to be able to pick up his tommy-gun without groping for it, and lay muttering his prayers. Beyond the window ebbed and flowed all the sweet, sleep-inducing, night sounds. The monotonous grumbling gossip of the Kachin policemen was woven through with a silver thread of mono-chordic music. This was blown away by the rush of wind through the bamboo thickets, and into the following silence fell a dribble of nightingale notes. The Kachins took up their topic again, and now the subdued rattle of monosyllables was
coagulating
and shaping itself in the rising tide of drowsiness into odd English phrases. As I fell asleep, someone said quite clearly, ‘a shortage of timber’.

The chief was up when I awoke soon after dawn, but shortly appeared with a pot of tea. Both of us were wearing, like the insignia of some exclusive club, those popular oriental towels which bear the words, ‘Good morning’, and in the language of smiles and signs we passed with each other the time of day.

Afterwards I took a brisk stroll over to the border, noticing, as I had done on the previous day, that within a few minutes a Chinese appeared, wearing semi-transparent white pyjamas, and pedalling very rapidly on a gaily decorated but much under-geared cycle. Separated by some twenty-five yards, the Chinese and I stood, two solitary and insignificant figures poised over the grandiose setting of this natural frontier, while beneath us the peasants of Burma and of China were to be seen leading out the buffaloes to their morning tasks in the fields. When I turned away and made for the village through the lanes of cactus, whose leaves were covered in elegant Burmese script with what I supposed to be amorous inscriptions, the Chinese was still there, but soon he overtook me, legs whirling and garments streaming. By the market place I was met by the Indian of the previous day. ‘What are you interested in, sir?’ he asked. ‘Rubies and jade’, I told him. ‘But there are no rubies or jade at Nam Hkam.’ The tone contained a mild reproof. He was clearly hurt at an unflatteringly clumsy attempt at deception. He had a fine sensitive face, with that brooding nobility of expression one often finds in Indians, even when in mediocre occupations. As he always appeared, to put some new, straightforward question whenever I visited the market, I supposed that he was the informer assigned to this area, just as the flying Chinaman was probably in charge of the frontier proper.

He must have found my explanation unsatisfactory because after our third encounter a new kind of policeman arrived and signalled me to follow him. I soon found myself in some kind of military headquarters where a Burmese officer, handsome and dapper in his well-pressed British uniform, grilled me with extraordinary suavity, while butterflies fluttered in and out of the open door and a blind beggar collected alms from the guard. It seemed that I had fallen into the hands of some kind of frontier force. The Burmese officer’s smile became glazed when, in
answer to his probings, I told him that I had spent the previous night in the barracks of the Kachin police. My lieutenant was fetched to testify, a rustic and self-effacing figure in these polished military surroundings. A little reluctantly, but with charming resignation, the Burmese officer declared himself satisfied. I could go on to Nam Hkam. A pass and an accompanying letter to the Amat were typed out, to be added to my now bulky collection of official documents. Meanwhile, said the officer, there was no point at all in wandering about the streets of an unattractive place like Mu-Sé. I could wait comfortably in his office until transport was found. Glasses of lemonade were brought in, and then the officer excused himself and went off in a jeep. When I sauntered to the door I found a soldier with a fixed bayonet there. He gulped nervously when I eyed him.

An hour or two later, the transport for Nam Hkam drew up outside. It was a Fordson, externally battered but intact, and scientifically packed with ageing Kachin ladies, who, I later learned, had organised a kind of Mothers’ Association outing to the bazaar of Nam Hkam, which was to be held on the next day. They were all dressed, with the sobriety of their years and station, in navy blue, and wore tall, cylindrical turbans in which their hair had been severely constrained. As usual, I was allocated a dignified position in the front. I found myself pinned firmly against the door-handle by the two dowagers wedged in between me and the driver. Unhappily the engine in this particular vehicle is set back and occupies much of the space in the driver’s cabin, from which it is only isolated by a housing of metal plates. Owing to the external temperature, plus the terrible roads and the decayed state of the engine, this housing soon became blisteringly hot, so that both my neighbour and myself squirmed and struggled endlessly in our efforts to avoid contact with it. The nudging and kneeing provoked by these conditions probably struck my companion, who was about fifty years of age, as improper, because at the first opportunity she changed places, providing a substitute of not less than eighty.

The journey to Nam Hkam, then, although a matter of only nineteen
miles, took several hours, and was endured in the most excruciating discomfort. After the first hour numbness spread from the feet to the waist. Only then could I begin to enjoy the scenery through which we were travelling. A mile or two away to our left across a cultivated plain were low ranges of densely forested mountains, while to the right the land slipped away, down to the Shweli river, an unimportant tributary of the Irrawaddy, which here, mysteriously, for no more than thirty miles, swelled into a shallow, much-divided flood, as wide as the Salween. Terraced paddy-fields came down the mountain sides like the
ceremonial
stairways of a race of giants, lapping the plains in mighty, rippling waves. Hundreds of buffaloes slogged through the mud and stagnant water, and egrets crawled about them. The villages were screened behind the matting of roots hanging down, almost to the ground, from huge, old banyans. Wells had stone covers like miniature pagodas – sometimes with horses carved on them. The pagodas themselves were on the Chinese joss-house model, with upswept eaves, often involving much ingenious joining of corrugated-iron, which had been artfully hammered and bent into the traditional shape of wooden logs. Tombs continued to carry their ephemeral palaces of paper. Sometimes we passed a tumulus. Under such mounds the Kachins buried the victims, man, woman and child, of the unlimited warfare they practised
whenever
compelled by dearth to migrate in force. There were a few isolated houses which advertised the wealth of their owners by the addition to a plain bamboo construction of a carved balcony or some fretwork embellishment of the eaves. Over the Shweli hung a golden mist, composed of particles of sand swept up from the uncovered bed of the river and held in suspension by the wind sweeping down the valley. Just outside Nam Hkam three Chinese Nationalist soldiers in blue cotton uniforms appeared at the roadside. I recognised them from the others I had seen in custody. They seemed to be unarmed, and were probably on their way to Nam Hkam to give themselves up.

N
AM HKAM
in the white, dusty haze of the afternoon, was a less concentrated Mu-Sé, a sprawling collection of bamboo huts. The driver pulled out of the main street with its emptiness and aching light, and found the Amat’s compound. There he put me down, shook hands and departed, refusing to accept a fare. Almost collapsing as my legs touched the ground, I waited a moment for circulation and strength to return before picking up the iron bar provided and striking the gong suspended by the gateway. Apart from the medieval grandiosity of this gesture there was nothing impressive about the circumstances of my arrival. The compound consisted of three sides of a square of mean huts, surrounded by a broken fence of the kind which sometimes encloses a suburban allotment. A wrecked two-pounder gun, with wheels askew, stood in the centre of this space. It was attended
continually
by a guard armed with a rifle. I was led in to the presence of a man with a mild, empty Kachin face, whom I felt instinctively to be a clerk. And a clerk he was. The Amat was away but, said the clerk, I could stay in his haw.

The haw proved to be the biggest of the huts. It was raised on piles, about five feet from the ground. I was installed in one of the two large bare rooms, which, when I arrived, was occupied by a circle of soldiers playing cards, and some children who were annoying them. The soldiers left, one by one, although the children returned later to watch me as I washed. Shortly afterwards four soldiers staggered in with a massive mahogany table and two chairs. When the table was put down, the bamboo floor sagged beneath it. The soldiers went away, and the clerk appeared in the doorway. He was carrying a bottle of shoum, or country
spirit, as it is politely called by the Kachin bourgeoisie. This was not the ordinary market stuff, he assured me, but a bottle from the Amat’s reserve, of special potency and flavour. He was right. A judicious sip roughened the lip membranes before passing in a scorching trickle down the throat. It tasted like vodka. Before withdrawing, the clerk asked me at what time he should arrange breakfast for the morning, adding that there would be various curries to order. I asked what was the usual time, and he said about eight o’clock. In Mu-Sé it had been eleven-thirty. It seemed that in the nineteen miles I had run into a new breakfast-time zone.

There was no way of closing the door except by tying it, which would have been churlish. It sagged perpetually eighteen inches open, a
circumstance
which gave endless pleasure to the clerk’s children who lived in a kind of dependent hut, just across the bamboo landing outside. In this causeway they settled down, a sober, well-behaved group, to learn what they could of my way of life, absenting themselves only for an occasional bowl of rice. In the late afternoon a Kachin soldier arrived. He seemed to have been attached to me for some unknown duty, as he unstrapped a long, heavy-bladed dah, and propped it with an air of finality in a corner, before laying out his kit beneath it. To find out whether this incident involved supervision or control, I went out and ploughed through the dust down to the dismal main street, where, having discovered a Chinese eating-house, I employed my recently acquired knowledge to order a meal. I was waited on by the owner’s Burmese wife, who carried a baby in a shawl upon her back. A dog lay curled in a shallow depression scraped in the earth under each table, and a huddle of Tibetans, wrapped in their togas, slept in a corner. Later, as a mild yellowness seeped into the waning sunlight they awoke and tried gently to arouse the interest of the customers in their dried lizards and coloured stones. All the Tibetans, here, as elsewhere in Burma, carried these treasures in British army haversacks. The senior member of the party, who wore a purple beret-shaped hat of plaited and lacquered osier, was the possessor of a jar of black unguent which caused some excitement. This I gathered was an extract of the organs of several rare animals. The restaurant owner licked it with connoisseurship, and made
an offer, which was smilingly rejected. Someone bought a piece of glass which looked like a ruby for eight annas, one of which the vendor immediately gave to a beggar who was sipping a cup of free tea. The wares were then rewrapped in their grimy rags and put back in the haversacks; after which the Tibetans settled down to sleep again.

Meanwhile the streets were astir in the cool of the evening and the eating-house was filling up. Customers lined up before the meat
showcase
where one of the proprietor’s virgin daughters, acting as sales-lady, was producing delicacies which passed from hand to hand, to be dangled and pinched, before being returned to their hooks. When a sale took place the sliver or collop was passed to another daughter whose headdress proclaimed her knowledge of the world, and, working with a pair of scissors, she snipped the purchase into fragments manageable with chopsticks. These she arranged in neat piles to await free space in one of her father’s frying pans. All this activity was abnormal and was due to the influx of visitors and merchants to the celebrated bazaar to be held next day. My arrival at Nam Hkam at just this moment was the only lucky piece of timing in all my travels in Burma. I had been warmly recommended in Rangoon to see the Nam Hkam bazaar, if at all possible; it was said to be one of the most important and colourful in the Far East, serving Western Yunnan as well as the Northern Shan States. Since it would be in full swing less than an hour after dawn, and I was tired, I went back to the haw as soon as it was dark. I found my bodyguard sitting at the table, looking into space; but when I got out the country spirit he soon cheered up.

I was up and about by seven, trying to prepare myself by a vigorous walk for the threatened ordeal of the breakfast table. Irregular, sporadic feeding and strange provender were beginning to take their toll, and I felt queasy at the thought of the ‘various curries’ the Amat’s clerk had promised for the first meal of the day. At this hour Nam Hkam benefited from a background of mountains, cloaked in a mist which separated hill from hill and range from range. On these grew towering clumps of bamboo,
pale, feathery eruptions in a landscape of smoking precipices and ravines. Below this ethereal panorama the town’s profile seemed stunted and broken: this is a normal feature of provincial cities of the Far East and due to an ancient Mongolian prejudice – a racial memory perhaps of the nomadic tent – against the erection of buildings of more than one floor. Sumptuary laws, too, have operated against imposing architecture, except for religious ends. It was perhaps to be expected of the relatively democratic Mongolian order of society – democratic in that its rewards have always been attained in the main by merit and effort, rather than birth – that office and status when acquired should have been hedged about with so rigid a protocol. The position which a man had won was advertised by all the adjuncts of his existence, by the size and materials of his betel-box and spittoon, by his clothes, his animals, his house. It was all laid down. There was no question of living beyond one’s means to impress the neighbours. If you had no official position you lived in a single-roomed shack with a palm-thatch. When you became a headman you were allowed something more solid, with teak pillars supporting a log roof. Myozas, or governors, were privileged to shelter beneath a roof of two storeys. Only the Sawbwa could aspire to the glory of a spire, to go with his gold umbrella, his velvet sandals and his peacock. Nam Hkam, then, was flat and straggling, with a few liquor and opium stores, tailors’ establishments and inns, but very few shops to face the annihilating competition of the bazaar. There were a few small, uninteresting pagodas, one of which seemed to have been struck by a bomb. A heap of broken masonry in the courtyard contained several hundred Buddhas, some unusually well-carved and coloured, but although they seemed to have been abandoned there, I doubted the propriety of taking one away. By the wall a buffalo lay abandoned to die. Several sprightly crows were already pecking at the soft, accessible parts of the body; the anus, the nostrils and the lips. Occasionally a lid slid slowly back, disclosing a terrified eye, the head rolled sadly from side to side, and the crows hopped back. To have attempted to put the animal out of its misery in this consecrated spot, would have caused grave scandal, if not a riot.

Breakfast was all I had feared. It was preceded by a stiff aperitif of country spirit; then followed an inexorable succession of dishes, vegetable soup, red rice with spring onions, the promised curries, pickled vegetables, tea, poured from a great pot with a chain as handle – two cups at a time for each person. With forthright Kachin hospitality the Amat’s clerk ladled out my portions, perplexed and disappointed at the size of my appetite. Feeling that only a twenty-four hours’ fast could help, I staggered down the steps of the haw and made for the market. I could not have hoped for a more brilliant spectacle.

Beyond ranks of innumerable pack-animals, bullocks and ponies, tethered with the regimented discipline which characterises the parking of cars at a sporting event in the West, the scene might have been taken from a lavish stage production of ‘Prince Igor’. The first English administrator to reach Nam Hkam reported in 1889 that about six thousand people visited this market every five days, and this number had certainly not decreased. From Burma, I could identify various Shans, in their enormous hats; Kachins with their strings of coins and skirts woven in the colours and zigzag motifs of the Indians of Central America; Palaungs, and
occasional
Lishaws, who looked like untidy Cossacks in their belted tunics and shapeless trousers. But there were visitors from Yunnan who escaped identification; strapping maidens in voluminous white turbans; spirited groups which scattered and dispersed at the sight of a camera, flouncing away with flashing back-cast glances, and a swirl of long skirts, pigtails and sashes.

The Palaungs of Nam Hkam were particularly elegant in dashingly cut ankle-length coats of cotton-velvet panelled with light and dark blue and with purple inserts at the elbow. They wore made-up cylindrical turbans of dark blue material, from the back of which tumbled, in medieval European style, a veil or panel, reaching half way down the back. Jewellery was plain: a double or triple collar of silver beads. One patrician figure, who out-topped her neighbours’ average of four-feet-nine by at least three inches, wore a turban that had developed into a kind of busby, its upper edge decorated with a looped chain of beads to match her necklace. Beside this majestic ensemble most European folk-costumes would have
looked trivial and doll-like. It appears from the reports of the first administrators that such finery was previously restricted to the use of certain clans: it has now spread as one beneficial result, at least, of the degeneration of tribal organisation. One can imagine the horror of the ladies of the senior clan, the Patorus – there was only a handful of them – when the whole of the female section of the Palaung nation took to wearing their exclusive model.

It is said that the Palaungs are the most peace-loving of the Burmese minorities. Peoples become in the first instance ‘warrior peoples’ by using up or outgrowing the resources of their habitat. As soon as the economic origin of their bellicosity is forgotten, it tends to be regarded as inherent martial virtue, to be secretly respected whether one approves of it or not. The Palaungs are an example of a people who through efficient adaptation to an environment do not need a regular fresh supply of
lebensraum
. They live in harmony with each other; crimes of violence are rare, and murder unknown. Clearly, they make bad soldiers and they were much despised as recruiting material in the British colonial army, whereas the turbulent and aggressive Kachins were the darlings of their British commanders and ‘proved themselves magnificently’ against the Turks in the 1914–18 war.

The Palaungs are terribly afflicted by goitre. I estimated that
twenty-five
per cent of the older women I saw were sufferers. Sometimes the head was no more than a promontory upon a mass of shapeless flesh, reaching as far as the breasts. One poor woman I saw had to go about supporting her goitre with her hands.

Like so many hill-peoples the Palaungs have a dislike of the plains which is strongly tinged with superstitious aversion, an attitude found in reverse among the plainsmen of the Far East, whose awe of heights causes them to locate their most sacred places on mountain tops.

The bazaar of Nam Hkam, where the first British administrator noticed that much Manchester cloth and haberdashery was sold, had not lost its enthusiasm for all the West had to offer. Local products included crudely carved and vilely coloured Burmese toys, bearing only a token
resemblance to the owls and alligators they were supposed to represent, coarse pottery, exquisite Chinese crockery, stiff Mandalay silk used in the making of longyis, and artificial flowers. Indian influence showed itself in plastic models of the Taj Mahal. But two-thirds of the market space was allotted to the West – toothpastes, patent medicines, beauty products, cigarettes – even the well-known beverage claimed to possess extraordinary soporific qualities. There were tins of condensed milk too, valued as much for the container as the contents, empty tins having become a recognised Burmese measure. Thus two
let-kut
(the quantity which may be heaped upon the surface of two hands joined together) equals one condensed-milk tin – originally a
Kônsa
, or the amount of rice required by one person for a meal.

A demand had been produced for all these products by advertising in the Rangoon press; and the Rangoon agents would ship a proportion of what they received out to such markets as Nam Hkam, assuming that whatever the nature of the goods, their place of origin would sell them. Sometimes it was clear that the purpose of the product was not
understood
. A cheroot-seller, for instance, would on request, smear a little Vick Vapour-rub on the mouthpiece of a cheroot, before handing it to his customer.