Golden Earth (23 page)

A
T BHAMÓ
there were other aids to civilisation to go with that yard of glimmering fluorescence. I was able, for instance, for thirty rupees a day plus the cost of petrol, to hire a jeep with its driver; and next morning in the dawn and with the frantic whistling and shrilling of birds in our ears, we took the road north, to Myitkyina. It was a great luxury to be travelling at last with the power to stop whenever I wanted to, to linger as long as I liked over the most charming parts of the journey. By the time the heat of the sun could be felt we had reached the Tapeng river. A track from the main road, passing under a bower of orange flamboyants, followed the bank for a way, and up this we went in search of a clear stretch of river in which to swim. Down the narrow valley – most fateful of all the ways of entry into Burma – the water came, frothing among the white boulders, plunging in polished cascades of marbled green into profound pools, where a resistant bubble or a gyrating insect were the only indications of movement and direction.

Over the river hung a cold, sweet smell, carrying with it a sharp association of the shock and the delight of a plunge into opaque depths. Bamboos and tall blond grasses with feathered tops had decayed at their bases and fallen across the rocks, where, roasting in the sun, they gave off a concentrated scent of hay. Here river perfumes poured through and washed aside those of the forest. Small, dun birds – brown dippers – bobbed and flitted from rock to rock; and sometimes pied kingfishers passed, hanging for seconds in motionless contemplation above a pool, before darting away. Down by the water there was nothing flamboyant, mysterious or repellent. It was all familiar and nostalgic. There could have been no better place in Burma than this to study butterflies. They
seemed attracted by the damp boulders, on which they alighted in infinite variety, wings spread and gently pulsating. There was no display here of garish colour, no exaggeration, but a rather subdued elegance and sombre good taste, like the
grande tenue
of a nobleman at the Court of Philip the Second.

During the rainy season the level of the water was much higher; now boulders had been left uncovered in which deep basins had been scooped by the action of the water. Some of these contained water, the colour of medium sherry, in which a few small, lethargic fish miraculously survived, a feat which only lost in stature when one remembered that this was the country of climbing perch and of lung fish, which, when their native pools dry up, undertake long overland treks in search of water.

Until 1769 all the area had been Chinese territory, and down this narrow, unimpressive valley the Mongol host had come riding, in 1284, to avenge the slaughter of their envoys by the Burmese king. Somewhere in the plain, within fifty miles of where I stood, at a spot which is now unknown because of the changing of the place-names, the spirits conjured up by the Mongol shamans – favoured perhaps by the reflex bow with its one hundred and sixty pounds pull – shot the Burmese guardian spirits full of arrows, and the Burmese army was annihilated. For full three months, according to the Burmese chronicle, they, the Burmese, slew the enemy and spared not even the feeders of elephants and horses, but when ten myriads were dead, the chief of the Mongols sent twenty myriads, and when the twenty myriads were dead, he sent forty myriads. The conflict seems to have made less impression on the Mongols, and Marco Polo speaks more of a punitive expedition carried out by a frontier force, a march of ‘gleemen and jugglers’ with a ‘captain and a body of men-
at-arms
to help them’ – a notable lack of agreement upon the fable of history.

Five hundred years later and, once again, at the mouth of this valley, the Burmese handsomely vindicated themselves. First of all there had been a dispute over a Chinese merchant who had wanted to build a bridge over the river for his ox-caravans. Just as in the case of the Mongol
envoys, the Burmese found that disrespect had been shown, and they flung the merchant into prison. Shortly afterwards another Chinese merchant was killed in a brawl in Burma. In the comparatively primitive Burmese law manslaughter was a trivial offence, compoundable by the payment of compensation. The Chinese, however, had arrived at the
eye-for
-an-eye stage, and demanded the handing over of the killer, or a substitute, for execution by strangling. To their great credit, the Burmese, although menaced by a nation they knew to be infinitely more powerful than themselves, refused to give the man up – a resoluteness which shows up particularly well against the weak-kneed conduct of the British, in the next century, when, in similar circumstances, a British seaman was surrendered at Canton. However, the Chinese, under the Ch’ing emperor, were in the mood when wars like that of Jenkins’ Ear are fought. The refusal by the Burmese to comply with their demands was thought outrageously unreasonable, particularly when, as it was pointed out, execution by strangling was not to be regarded as more than the just settlement of a debt, involving no stigma for the sufferer.

Several Chinese armies poured into Burma, the main force passing once again through this valley. In a war lasting four years they were completely out-generalled and finally defeated, and, by an act of
magnanimity
without parallel in Far Eastern annals, allowed to march back once more by the cool waters of this riverine Arcadia, to China. This time the disparity in armaments was reversed, because of the artillery which the Burmese had purchased or seized from the Europeans, with which, they shot the Chinese stockades to pieces. By allowing the defeated survivors to return to their country, the Burmese brilliantly avoided what would have become a war
à outrance
with all the resources of the Chinese Empire thrown into it. The Chinese were allowed to save their faces by conveniently forgetting the whole thing, without even a formal treaty of peace being negotiated between the two countries. After a few weeks, trade was silently resumed, and no further reference was made to the affair. No allusion is made in Chinese official histories to the Ch’ing invasion of Burma.

Seen from without, the jungle had more variety, more mystery, more charm, than the forests of the north. In the woodlands between Bhamó and Myitkyina there was none of the monotony to be observed elsewhere in the Indo-Chinese peninsula, where a particular tree had adapted itself so perfectly to its environment that no others could take root there, thus producing the regimented boredom of a plantation. Here there was infinite variety of shapes, of sizes, of colour, of degrees of luminosity, with each tree separated from its neighbours by a subtle variation of aerial perspective. There were some that raised themselves to impose upon the sky a symmetrical, trimly contained silhouette; others that exploded raggedly in anarchic confusion of branches; others which struggled up dripping with epiphytic plants, parasites and creepers, as if emerging weed-laden from the sea. There were trees that looked as if they were composed of moss, which soaked up the light in velvety absorption, and others that scattered the sun’s rays in cascades from their metallic leaves. At the road’s verge the trunks were screened by ferns, through which, as if in the arrangement of a gigantic bouquet, pale blue and lemon convolvulus flowers were threaded. Sometimes a scarlet carpet of let-pet, the edible blossoms of the cotton tree, had been laid across the road. The total effect was always one of brilliance, and freshness, and even gaiety.

Once, as we rumbled along, a school of gibbons dropped from the overhanging boughs, and avoided us with languid athleticism. We chased a baby wild boar that worked up such a speed that when it finally hurled itself into the jungle it left a noticeable hole in the screen of leaves. Here we saw many jungle fowl. They were almost as tame as the barnyard variety and just as stupid, running in demented zigzags in our path before taking to an easy, floating flight, their tails streaming out behind. Sometimes, in the rare clearings, we saw a most immaculate white harrier, with black wingtips, flapping low over the ferns. The most common bird along this forest road was the bee-eater, both the species which is almost indistinguishable from the European one, and the Burmese green variety, birds with an outright tropical panache. In flight the most streamlined of avian shapes; they were silhouetted like
supersonic
planes in the long, gliding interval following a few, quick
wing-beats, as they swept from the branches after their prey. Green and golden-backed woodpeckers glinted at the mouths of flutelike rows of holes in the stumps of dead trees. Butterflies hovered in dark swarms over the buffaloes’ droppings, and we were obliged to stop twice, when the engine boiled, to brush a blanket of them, an inch thick, from the radiator.

The Kachin villages we passed through had geometrical shapes in bamboo erected on posts at their outskirts, perhaps to mark the parish limits for the benefit of the tutelary spirit, whose shrine, or cage, was suspended near by. In one case a typical nat-shrine had been put up over a water-pipe which had been enterprisingly built to collect the water from a spring, and, perhaps, to imprison its presiding demon. The feathers of hoopoes and eagles – usually an arrangement of their tails and wings – were flown from masts. There were spirit-shrines too, built far from the villages in the jungle itself, wigwam-shaped constructions of leaves on a framework of branches, which looked as if they should have contained something, but which proved to be empty.

When we came out into open fields, buffaloes were wandering about, each with half a dozen tick-eating egrets perched on its back, and a retinue of others accompanying it on foot. On one occasion, when we had stopped to clean the butterflies out of the radiator, we happened to witness a buffalo fight. We had noticed, without paying any special attention, two bulls standing facing each other, about a hundred yards away, on the edge of a stream. In the background a few cows were grouped, and the bulls watched each other with the introspective air natural to these deliberate and lumbering creatures. I had looked away and then back again just at the moment when both animals moved towards one another, breaking, to my surprise, into a rapid, shambling run. The hollow crash as they met must have been audible a mile away; and startled by the sound a cloud of egrets, and several previously unseen cranes, launched themselves on the air. The fight developed into a pushing match, the buffaloes straining away, with front legs planted widely apart, and heads lowered until their muzzles almost touched the ground, the thick bosses of bone between the horns in continual,
grinding
contact. Unless one of the beasts could succeed in cracking the other’s skull with the first impact, it seemed a harmless sort of conflict, as the horns were swept back in such a way that their points could not be brought into use. In the end, after fifteen minutes had passed, and neither animal had gained an inch, one suddenly gave way, and allowed itself to be shoved into the river, thus providing itself with the excuse to break off the battle by swimming away. Having followed it into the water as far as honour demanded, the victor waded back to the unshared responsibility of the waiting cows.

Myitkyina lay in a scorching plain across the Irrawaddy, to be reached by ferry, a leisurely, time-wasting service run by the Burmese Army. The ferryboat, its shape blotted in the glare, was tied up under the opposite bank, indifferent to the croakings of our horn, and a yellow, half-mile wide flood ran between us. We pushed the nose of the car into the speckled shade of some willows, and plucked the heads off the yellow daisies that cut off our view of the river. There was a hot, sweet smell of water that had baked in the sun on the mud-flats all day.

We had discovered an Indian in a yoga pose by the track leading down to the ferry, and now he unfolded his legs and joined us. He was an engineer, working on a bridge-reconstruction job near by. He had been marooned in the jungle for eighteen months and, after endless days of silence – he never troubled to learn more Burmese than was necessary to give his instructions – his speech was beginning to slow down, coming when it did in gushing releases, to be checked again as if by a troublesome airlock in his throat. With despairing tenacity he clung to such of the English rites as he could. It was Saturday evening, and he was going to Myitkyina, he said, ‘to paint the town red’. It was difficult to imagine this sad, earnest, fevered man, giving himself, even in homage to tradition, to the debauchery he hinted at. This strange, distorted echo of things English was renewed when the ferry, having finally noticed us, dawdled over; a pair of linked Viking boats, opening behind them a fan of glittering reflections in the sallow water. ‘Bad show to keep you waiting,
old man,’ said the Burmese officer, slapping me sharply on the back. ‘Why didn’t you blow your horn?’

The town of Myitkyina I saw only by night, as after an early-evening lunch at the Circuit House – a replica of that of Bhamó – I lay quietly awaiting the sunset before venturing out. Myitkyina was the last town of size before the Indian frontier, and there was a corresponding increase in Indian influence. Here there was an active and prosperous business community, and the long, single main street was radiant in the tropical night. Flickering myriads of winged insects filled the neon haze, and a man in flowing white robes went up and down playing on a pipe sweet, wild Pyrenean airs, of the kind you might have expected to hear in the Sierra del Cadi. I sat in a tea-shop and drank plain tea. There was a mosque across the way, a sort of two-dimensional Taj Mahal, the main structure and the flanking towers being cut out of flat metal, suitably painted, and supported on a framework. When viewed from the side, the whole construction vanished, as if subjected to enchantment, leaving only a minaret, like an ornamented oil-derrick. From its summit the muezzin was announcing at this moment, in a voice of exceptional quality, the truths of his religion, to the guitar players sitting in the rows of jeeps parked beneath. The radio in the tea-shop was tuned in to a Chinese station, which was broadcasting a slightly rearranged oriental version of The Lambeth Walk, a current favourite in Chinese South-East Asia.