Round the Bend (31 page)

“Did they do the plug change all right?”

“Oh, they did that. They found one or two cowling cracks, too, that our lazy muggers down in Bombay hadn’t noticed. They’re quite a good crowd in Sind Airways, if it wasn’t for all this religious nonsense. I think they’ve come on a lot lately.”

Connie did not keep me waiting. He came back down the tarmac punctually at the end of the hour with a crowd of forty or fifty engineers tagging along behind him as he walked with Salim. There was no ceremony and no trouble as he got into the machine; he paused in the door and looked back at them with that wonderful smile he had, and then he was lost to their view in the cabin. The rest of us got in and shut the door, and Arjan and I got up into the cockpit, and started up the engines, and taxied out for the take-off to Ahmedabad.

We stopped there for the night, and took off next day just before dawn, landing for fuel at Calcutta about midday. Nothing much happened there, and we took off again for Rangoon after an hour, and flew down the coast of Arakan past Akyab and Ramree in the evening. Passing Sandoway I went down into the cabin to talk to Connie.

I squatted down beside him on the load. “I’m night-stopping at Mingladon,” I said. “We shall find U Myin there, probably.”

He nodded. “He’s with B.N.A.”

“He’ll want to see you.” I paused. “Do you know anything about an old man called U Set Tahn?”

“The English monk?”

“That’s right,” I said. “U Myin took me to see him once. If he’s alive still, he’ll be very anxious to meet you. I was wondering how this would be. We’re night-stopping tonight at Mingladon and going up to Yenanyaung tomorrow with this chap who’s getting off there, and picking up two more bodies for Diento. I’m reckoning to be back at Mingladon tomorrow night and on to Diento next day, fuelling at Penang. Would you like to have the day off in Rangoon? There’s no sense in you coming with us to Yenanyaung unless you want to.”

He said, “I’d like that, if you’re sure you won’t need me. I’d like to meet U Set Tahn.”

“I shan’t need you,” I said. “There’s quite a bit going on here in your line; U Myin’s introduced a lot of your ideas from what I can make out. Have a talk with the chief engineer, Moung Bah Too, if you can manage it. He’s a very good type.”

I went back to the cockpit to my job. We cut in over the Arakan Yoma at a point just south of Sandoway and made from Rangoon across the Irrawaddy delta. The sun set before we came in sight of the city, and we put down at Mingladon airfield in the dusk and taxied to a parking place. We spent the night at the rest house upon the aerodrome.

I left Connie in the rest house when I got my party out at four in the morning for a cup of coffee in the restaurant and a dawn take-off for Yenanyaung. It’s only an hour’s flight or so and we landed in time for breakfast. I could have got back to Mingladon by noon and gone on to Bangkok that day, but I didn’t want to hurry Connie in his conference with U Set Tahn, and I had promised him the day. I stalled a bit at Yenanyaung and was glad when one of the passengers asked if he had time to go to the head office there. So we stayed there on the airstrip all the morning, and had lunch from what we carried with us in the aircraft, and took off for Rangoon at about one o’clock and landed back at Mingladon in the middle of the afternoon.

As we taxied in I could see there was a considerable crowd on the tarmac round the entrance to the Burmese National Airways hangar; there seemed to be a rope barrier keeping a clear space upon the tarmac in front of the building. We parked the aircraft and I sent my passengers to the rest house, and set to work with Arjan Singh and Phinit to get the Tramp refuelled and ready for the morning.

I sent Phinit to make contact with the fuel manager and get the petrol bowser up to the machine. He came back presently without it. “No driver,” he said. “Drivers and fuel men all over at the hangar, listen to Shak Lin. Manager says, in one hour, will that do?”

It would have to. “Shak Lin’s over there now, is he?”

He nodded. “Many pongyis there too, very holy men.” He hesitated. “May I go?”

There was little for him to do till the bowser came. “All right. Find the bowser driver, and bring him back here in an hour’s time.”

He went running off to join the crowd. I finished cleaning up the aircraft with Arjan and then, twenty minutes later, I strolled down myself to see what was going on at the B.N.A. hangar. There was an old Anson parked outside it. Connie was standing up upon the wing of this and talking to the crowd. There were several pongyis, monks in the yellow robe, standing by the wing, and in one of them I recognized the old man I had visited in his ashram, U Set Tahn, at one time Colonel Maurice Spencer of the R.A.S.C.

I stood on the outskirts of the crowd, but they were so massed I could not hear what he was saying. He was speaking in English; I could hear that much, and in the crowd of Karens and Burmese and Chinese and Indians there was a good deal of whispered translation going on, which made a low hubbub drowning all but a few sentences of what he was saying. He was impressive, standing up there on the Anson wing, speaking quietly, with that wonderful smile he had.

I had not seen him quite like that before. Looking up at him silhouetted against the sky, it struck me suddenly how very thin he had become. He had always been a lean man but now, and from that point of view, he looked almost emaciated. It was a good thing, perhaps, that he had left the Persian Gulf for the milder and more generous climate of the isle of Bali. Two years of the desert seemed to have taken a good deal out of him. I wondered vaguely if it had not taken a good deal out of me.

I couldn’t hear, and so I turned away and walked around outside the crowd. On the other side of the Anson I met Moung Bah Too, the chief engineer of the airline. He recognized me, and came towards me with a smile.

“I’m sorry about this,” I said quietly, indicating Connie on the Anson wing. “It seems to have stopped work a bit.”

He shook his head. “I allowed it. We heard that Shak Lin was to come through here four days ago, and I arranged a holiday.
We are treating it as a duty day.” He meant, as if it was a Sunday.

He paused. “It is a great honour,” he said quietly. “He is a very wonderful man.”

“I’ve only just come up,” I replied. “What has he been talking about?”

He said, “He took as his thesis the Mingala-thut, our sermon on the Beatitudes,” he said. “He took the words of the Buddha in the list of the blessed things, that a man ought to hear and see much in order to acquire knowledge, and to study all science that leads not to sin. He has been saying that in studying the stresses and the forces in the structure of an aircraft, the thermodynamics of an engine or the flow of current in the oscillating circuits of a radio transmitter, we are but following the injunctions of Guatama who said expressly that we were to learn these things. The world is full of suffering and pain caused by our wrong desires and hatreds and illusions, and only knowledge can remove these causes of our suffering.…” He paused.

He listened for a moment. “Please forgive me,” he said. “It may be years before he comes this way again.” And he left me and pressed through the crowd towards the Anson.

I stood on the outskirts of the crowd and listened, and for a few sentences I could hear him plainly. “You know that aeroplanes do not crash of themselves,” he was saying. “You are intelligent men. You do not think there is a jealous God who stretches out a peevish hand to take an aeroplane and throw it to the ground. Aeroplanes come to grief because of wrong cravings and wrong hatreds and illusions in men’s hearts. One of you may say, ‘I have not got the key to the filler of the oil tank. I cannot find it. I looked yesterday and there was plenty of oil. It is probably all right today.’ So accidents are born, and pain and suffering and grief come to mankind because of the sloth of men.…” His voice was lost in the murmurs of the crowd.

It was the same message that he had preached so often in the hangar at Bahrein, that the maintenance of aeroplanes demanded men of a pure and holy life, men who would turn from the temptations of the flesh to serve their calling first. Here the message was transmuted into terms of Buddhism, but it was the same
set of ideas, that good work and good living were one and indivisible.

I turned away, and strolled back to the Tramp, deep in thought. It seemed to me that Connie had done something quite remarkable. He had gained support for his ideas both from the Imams of the Persian Gulf and from the pongyis of Rangoon; he had succeeded in impressing both Moslems and Buddhists with the same message. True, it was all coloured by the fact that he was talking to the men who maintained aircraft, whose profession made a bond of internationalism which might transcend the narrower boundaries of their religion. But all the same, it seemed to me to be a remarkable achievement. I wondered if he would make his mark upon the degenerate Hinduism of Bali.

After a time the meeting broke up, and presently Phinit came with the bowser and we refuelled the Tramp. When that was over I went back with Phinit and Arjan Singh to the rest house. There was a small crowd of Burmese around the verandah and the door of Connie’s room was closed; squatting outside it was U Myin, the Burmese lad that we had found at Damrey Phong.

I greeted him. “Evening, U Myin,” I said. “Is Shak Lin inside?”

He got to his feet. “The Teacher is very tired, and he must rest.”

“May I go and speak to him?”

He hesitated, and then stood aside and opened the door for me. Connie was lying stretched upon the charpoy in a short pair of pants; it was very hot in the room with the door shut, and he was sweating in streams, so that dark patches showed upon the sheet on which he lay. I noticed again how thin he had become.

He raised his head as I came in, and then raised his body on one elbow. “Evening,” he said. “I was just having a lie-down.”

I grinned. “Takes it out of you, I suppose—all that talking.”

“A bit.”

“Let me send over for a whiskey—a chota.”

He shook his head. “I never touch it. You know that.”

I nodded. “Have you eaten anything today?”

He shook his head. “I’ll wait till the crowd’s gone, and then I’ll slip over to the restaurant.”

“That crowd’s a fixture,” I said. “I’ll send one of the boys over for a tray. They’ve always got a curry there. Curry and rice?”

He thanked me, and got up, and went across the room and had a long drink of water from the chatty. I went out, and spoke to U Myin and Phinit, and U Myin went to the restaurant leaving Phinit to guard the door and keep the crowd away. He came back presently carrying a tray covered with a white cloth, a meal of curry and rice and fruit. I went into Connie’s room and saw him settled down and eating it.

“Take off at dawn tomorrow morning,” I said. “Refuel at Penang and enter the Dutch Indies at Palembang, and then to Diento for the night. That okay with you?”

He nodded. “I’ve got nothing more to do here.”

“What about all those chaps outside? There’s one or two monks with them.”

“I’ll go out presently and say good night to them. Tell U Myin to tell them that, would you?”

I nodded. “I’ll tell him.”

He looked up at me, smiling. “I sometimes think that you’re a very patient man.”

I grinned. “I’m a chap who’s been operating aircraft for three years without a sniff of engine trouble,” I said. “If the price is to send for a meal of curry and rice over from the restaurant, well, that’s okay by me.”

We got to Diento at dusk next day without incident, and spent the night with those hospitable people in their tropical country club by the riverside. Next day we flew on. We passed Batavia and went on down the length of Java to Sourabaya and landed there to refuel; then we got going again and flew to Bali. We landed on the airstrip there about the middle of the afternoon. There was no other aircraft there, but just as we were preparing to leave the strip to drive into the city, Den Pasar, a Dakota appeared from the east, circled once, and came in to land. It taxied to park by our Tramp and stopped its engines.

I had not met Eddie Maclean before, though we had cabled and corresponded. He drove with me into the hotel, and when we had had a shower and changed our clothes we met in the wide, airy forecourt for a drink. At his end everything was working out all right, and he was anxious to retain the contract and prevent the Arabia-Sumatran people from operating the service themselves;
I said that that was his affair. He was anxious to examine my Tramp and very interested to know how much it cost, and he had heard a garbled tale of Connie Shaklin that I had to put right for him. I liked him well enough, and we sat for a long time together in the blue of the night in the cool forecourt of the Bali Hotel, drinking Bols and talking about aircraft and their maintenance. From time to time Balinese young men and girls passed by in the road, talking and laughing softly together in quiet, musical voices. Both men and women wore much the same clothes, a sarong with a blouse or shirt above, for they were in their best clothes now and walking out together. They seemed to me to be a very beautiful people.

We all went out to the aerodrome early next morning and transferred the load from the Tramp to the Dakota, a troublesome business because each of the great drills weighed seven or eight hundred pounds. It took us two hours with a gang of men to get the eleven drills out of the Tramp and into the Dakota, and then we set to work to refuel. Finally Maclean took off in the Dakota and vanished over the island of Lombok in the direction of Australia, and I was left upon the airstrip with Connie and Phinit and Arjan Singh.

I stayed two days at Bali with them, which was all the time that I could spare. With the changes that had taken place at Bahrein I had to get back there as soon as possible; I could not spend a week or ten days holidaying in Bali as I had intended. I went and called upon the Dutch administrator, Bergen, that I had met when I was there before, and took Connie Shaklin with me and introduced him. With Bergen and Voorn, the airport manager, we went back to the strip and inspected the store and workshop building that I wanted to rent, built into the side of the hangar. The buildings were in fair condition and the rents were not too bad, and having no option in the matter I arranged to rent them there and then.