Hot Countries (16 page)

“And the only festivity, you say, is the Christmas meet, when the assistants come in from the jungle. But that would
only mean about fifty people all told. And, anyhow, they would be people that you know already. My word, I can't imagine anything more terrible. I should think that they'ld all be on each other's nerves so completely that they'ld be wanting to cut each other's throats.”

If you were to picture Chiengmai in terms of England that is what it would be like and that is what would happen. But you cannot picture it in terms of England. Chiengmai is so far and the whites there are so few. Their life is hard and testing. It has many dangers, many difficulties. It is only by mutual tolerance, by interdependence, by loyalty and friendship that it can be made tolerable. In most small communities you will find gossiping and malice and petty spite. But in Chiengmai you will not. The white community has the solidarity of a small band united against a common foe.

§

During the month that I spent in the jungle I was to realise the nature and capacities of that foe. We were three of us who made the trip. The Siamese Government leaves to certain companies the right to work for a number of years certain sections of forest land. There are a number of restrictions laid upon the companies, and the two men with whom I was travelling were making a tour of inspection on behalf of the Government to see that the agreements were being faithfully carried out.

During the War I often felt that life in a quiet part of the line would be rather a pleasant picnic if one were without responsibilities; if one had not to inspect the packing of limbers and the equipment of one's men; if the moment one arrived, hot and weary after a long march, one could rest in one's dug-out instead of having to rush round gun emplacements to see that one's men were settled in. In Siam that wish was granted. It was the War without its danger and without its responsibilities. We travelled with an establishment of nine elephants and forty coolies. The hard work of camping was taken off our shoulders. At quarter to six in the morning we woke to a cup of tea and the sound of packing. While we
dressed and breakfasted at our leisure the camp was struck. Our bedding and our food were stacked on elephants and coolies' shoulders. The supervision was in the hands of a head boy. By half-past seven our ponies were waiting for us and our procession was half an hour's march away. Elephants move slowly. Two miles an hour is the maximum. Fourteen miles is a long day's march. Not that you can picture jungle miles in terms of English miles. Along the majority of the roads you could not drag a bullock cart. For the most part you are piloting yourself with the aid of a heavy staff along steep and stony paths or slithering over slippery paddy fields. The streams through which you wade are high above your knees. The average village road is a narrow isthmus of caked mud running between bogs into which you are likely to slide every seven steps. You are caked in mud. You are soaked with sweat. The mornings are few during the autumn when you are not drenched with a heavy downpour of rain. You are very weary by the time you reach, after a seven-hour march, the compound on the stream by which you are to spend the night. You sit forward on a log, limp and motionless, while the coolies cut away a clearing in the bush and your boys run up your tent and your cook prepares your tiffin. You are too tired to talk over your meal, and the moment it is over you fling yourself upon your bed. In a couple of minutes you are asleep.

§

The country through which you travel is varied.

The word ‘jungle' evokes a picture of tangled undergrowth, of scarlet macaws, of monkeys screaming to each other from every bough, of large many-coloured butterflies, of snakes and bears and natives shooting at you from behind hills with blowpipes. It may be that in South America that is what it is But in Siam it is a friendly landscape. There are cobra, it is true, but you rarely meet them. I only saw a couple of small snakes, neither of which was poisonous probably. You will hear the screech of monkeys, but they remain invisible. Though you will come upon the tracks of
a bear, the bear is an animal that must be hunted. And though the foliage is in places overpoweringly luxuriant, the country is for the most part open. The flat land is planted with rice, and the undergrowth is inconsiderable in the actual forests.

The Laos are quiet, simple, decently-lived people. They cultivate their rice, carry their produce to the markets, tend their animals and chew their betel nut. And though, when you ask how far it is to such a place, you will be answered in such simple methods of reckoning as “Half a bullock's march” or “As far as you can hear a dog bark,” it is hard to believe that you are a hundred miles from a road, from what is called civilisation. It is only at odd moments that you will realise how remote these people are from the practical organisation of the big cities.

When, for example, you purchase a six-satang object with a tical, you will receive as your change not the ninety-four satangs you expect, but eighty or eighty-one. You count the change over three times. Then protest. The shopkeeper shakes his head. “We are giving eighty-five satangs for a tical.”

“But the tical,” you say, “is worth a hundred satangs.”

“Oh, no, at the most not more than eighty-seven.”

For a while, perhaps, you will argue. Then you will decide that thirteen-hundredths of one and tenpence are not worth quarrelling over. You will seek enlightenment. “It's quite simple,” it will be explained to you. “The tical is too big a coin for these people. It's a nuisance to them, and they can't get rid of it easily. They say it isn't worth more than eighty-five satangs to them. It's rather like a man in a remote English village saying that it'll be a fearful nuisance to him changing a five-pound note. None of his friends will be able to. He won't be able to buy anything with it. He'll have to wait for a chance of changing it. But that if you care to take ninety shillings for it you can have it.

“At one time,” he will go on, “we used to have all the men's wages sent up here in copper coins by donkeys. But it didn't pay, we found. It was more trouble than it was
worth. In fact, you're really lucky to get as much as eighty-five satangs for a shilling.”

It is at such moments that you realise how distant from civilisation the Lao still is, but for the most part you feel that you are in as ordered and developed a world as you would in Europe within half an hour's stroll of telephones and cars. Their villages are tidy, their huts clean and airy, their single store is bright with printed cotton. Each village has its temple and its school. And the presence of the priests, with their cropped heads and their yellow robes, lends a dignity to life. The complicated Buddhist faith, over which metaphysicians will split hairs indefinitely, is a direct and simple thing to the simple Laos. They have retained the capacity to wonder.

§

A few weeks before my arrival a white elephant, the sacred symbol of the faith, the occasion years back of war with Burma, had been born on one of the teak company's workings. Such a thing had not happened within the memory of man. For miles round the villagers came to pay it homage. Every evening, when the calf was brought down to the river to be bathed, a hundred and fifty to two hundred people were gathered in the compound. They wore their richest and brightest clothes. They had brought flowers to cast before the infant's feet. And sugar cane to refresh the mother. There was a hush of religious awe. The brown eyes of the Lao maidens grew wide and solemn, luminous and dilated. Their lips parted in a sigh. Their little crinkled hands were joined together, lifted before their faces in simple and silent worship as the calf trotted turbulently towards the water.

It was a curious and moving sight, and I could not help following the curving sequence of analogy as I watched the pink urchin bound and leap in the brown water. There it sported, like genius in a nursery, unaware that there was any difference between its playmates and itself, unconscious of its own importance, undreaming of its fate and future, the high rewards, the applause, the honour. All along the analogy held. Like genius it had won tardily to recognition.

The rider who presented himself with the news that his charge had given birth to a white elephant was laughed at. There was a sad smile on the district assistant's face as he started his interrogation. To begin with, he asked, how many toes had it? Eighteen, he was told, and that, in his view, settled it. All real white elephants had twenty. But the rider was persistent. The elephant was no ordinary one. Would not the
nai
be gracious enough to come and see it? In the end the assistant went. It was the waste of a day, but one had to humour a good rider. When he saw it, however, the pitying smile changed to one of wonder. He had never seen a white elephant in infancy. There are not so very many people in the world who have. But the pink urchin that tottered between its mother's legs was emphatically unlike any calf that he had seen before.

The report he sent into Chiengmai was the occasion for loud and continued laughter. It was suggested that he should try the wagon. But the weeks passed, and the calf, instead of growing darker, became each day more faintly pink. All along the analogy held good—the mistrust of relatives, the incredulous contempt of critics, the admittance made grudgingly at last that “at least there was something unusual here,” their refusal definitely to commit themselves. For the critics are never happy till they have qualified their testimonial, till they have contrived a loophole for their escape should their swan reveal itself to be a goose. The experts remained dubious about those eighteen toes.

The Laos themselves, who are the public, had no doubt, however. The calf's progress to Chiengmai was regal. And later, when vindication came, in the same way that genius when it visits poverty will lift out of obscurity a host of humble people, so did this freak of birth bring recompense to the associates of its infancy. Not alone was it to march to triumph. For the director of the teak company there was royalty's recognition. For the rider—that ignorant Lao peasant—there was at Bangkok in the royal stables the dignity of leisured comfort. For the mother, that blind fulfiller of destiny, there had come an end for ever to the harsh jungle
days. She was never to know work. Ended her days of
ounging
and
tontawing;
the long, heavily burdened marches under a tropic sun; the dragging of timber, the breaking up of stacks. She was immune. She had mothered prodigy. She was entitled to an old age of honoured ease. All along the analogy held good. And there was a quality curiously satisfying in the thought that somewhere in the jungle still, unhonoured and unrecognised, the anonymous begetter of divinity, the chance partner in a haphazard coupling, was trumpeting his servitude to “the reverberate hills.”

§

We were inspecting the workings of the Borneo and of the Bombay Burma companies. And most of the time was spent with one or other of the assistants. The work of an assistant consists mainly in long marches to supervise the work in the various sections of his district. There is a good deal to supervise. First of all there is the selection and girdling of the trees that are to be felled. Girdling is the process by which the sap is prevented from rising, so that the tree is dry and floatable when the time comes later for it to be felled. The logs are then dragged by elephants to the river. It takes four or five years for a log to float to Bangkok. Very often there are blocks along the way. During the dry season at the river's bends the logs will heap themselves into immense stacks which have to be broken up by elephants. There are also to be arranged the innumerable details of road-making and commissariat. The district is large that each assistant covers. He has a big central compound where he keeps his clothes and books. But the greater part of the time he is on the march. Sometimes he has a rest house to stay in. As often as not he clears himself a camp near a stream where his elephants can water.

The weeks we spent there were very like a picnic. But I could picture what the life of the assistant must be during ordinary periods. For months on end, through the sequence of rain-drenched weeks, he might never see a white man. There would be no cheery companionship at the end of a long
day's marching; no antidote to the maladies of jungle life, the discomfort; the itch of prickly heat, the leeches, the mosquitoes and the mud-sores; the sandflies that no netting can keep out; the red ants that night after night make sleep impossible; the long depression of the September rains, when bedding and kit are soaked and for days it is impossible to wear dry clothing; the fever that takes its toll, slowly, spasm by spasm, of your vitality and courage. Fever comes suddenly upon you, and in a few hours you are incapable of movement. I remember returning to a compound where three hours earlier we had said “Good-bye” toa strong and vigorous assistant, to find waiting for us a pale, lined, white-faced figure laid out on a long chair, shivering with a rug over him. I could not believe that it was the same man.

It is in a place such as Northern Siam that the question of the brown woman is insistent. Siam is a hard country for the white woman. In the earlier days assistants were not encouraged to marry. And though the construction of the railway has brought Chiengmai into close touch with the basis of civilisation, and though the greater capacities of the modern girl have made it possible for a man to run the risk of bringing a white wife with him, the girls are not many with the courage and strength to face the loneliness and monotony of station life. It depends on the type of girl that one attracts and is attracted by. As one man said to me: “The only type of woman that I'ld care to marry would go mad in five weeks in a place like this.”

For such a one the alternative of the brown woman is difficult to avoid. It is not so much actual physical necessity as the need, when one returns to Chiengmai, to find waiting there a friendly and familiar atmosphere. During the War the one thing that the soldier longed for was a quiet domestic life; an ordered routine, with a train to be caught each morning and slippers warmed against his return. In the same way the young assistant, seated at nightfall on his verandah, will picture to himself a house well kept and comfortable and affection waiting for him.