At another place the hills came nearer; the narrow strip of plain between the river and their feet was covered with teak trees, intensely and darkly green. It was late afternoon; the trees shone in the warm and level light, the hills behind them were flushed and at a certain moment the vision framed in the open window was a strong and glowing Constable. And in the defiles, where the river breaks through a range of hills and the thick multitudinous jungle comes swarming down to the water’s edge, each turn of the stream revealed a rich fantastic composition—the composition of some artist not yet born, but destined, it was obvious, to be a master.
But not every landscape is a work of art and river travelling is not invariably delightful. So, alas, we discovered, as we journeyed down stream from Mandalay towards Rangoon. The weather, as we advanced, grew almost hourly more oppressive; the cattle and hides with which our streamer was loaded, piercingly stank; the landscape was almost as poor as the food. On either side of the mile-wide river the country was mostly flat and treeless. For a day we steamed through the pale and arid hills of the Burma oil-fields.
An immense black smoke, visible through all a morning’s navigation, streamed half across the sky. A strike was in progress; the Burmese, who objected, justifiably from all accounts, to the Wild West methods and cinema manners of the American drillers, had committed a murder and set alight to eight hundred thousand gallons of petroleum. A spirited race, the Burmese—a little too highly so, perhaps. But whatever the rights and wrongs, in these particular circumstances, of murder and arson, that streamer of black smoke certainly did something to enliven the prospect. I regretted it, when at last it sank out of sight.
But the monotony was not entirely without alleviations. At Pakkoku, for example (Pakkoku, which the French lady on the steamer would insist on calling “Pas Cocu”—I suppose because her husband so manifestly was one) an acrobat was doing extraordinary things on a slack rope. At another town, whose less significant name I have forgotten, we stopped for several hours to embark some scores of tons of monkey nuts. They were bound for Rangoon and thence, I learned, for Marseilles, where, in due course, they would be turned into Pure Superfine Provençal Olive Oil. At a village lower down the river, we shipped the best part of a thousand lacquered kettle-drums—for home consumption, I suppose.
They were charming instruments, shaped like enormous egg-cups—a foot, a stalk, a bowl with the parchment stretched across its mouth. What a cargo of potential Burmese happiness we were carrying under those taut diaphragms! But none leaked out into the ship. It was an odious voyage, and when at last we reached Prome, whence the railway starts for Rangoon, it was with a feeling of profound relief that we disembarked. Near the landing-stage stood two tall trees, sparse-leaved against the sky, and laden with an innumerable and repulsive fruitage of sleeping bats. The sun was sinking. With the waning of light, the bats began to stir. What had seemed a vegetable unfolded and slowly stretched a leathery wing. There was a sudden flutter, an agitation of twigs, and two of the pendulous black fruits came together and began to make love, head downwards.
BHAMO
Between the main street of Bhamo and the river-bank, or what will be the river-bank, after the rains—for at this dry season the water is distant a hundred yards or more across a beach of sand—lies a little plain of two or three acres. It is a much trodden, dusty plat of land and, save for one enormous tree growing in the midst, quite bare. It is a fine tree, not at all tropical in aspect, but oak-like, with long limbs branching almost horizontally from the trunk some fifteen or twenty feet above the ground. The very image of those great trees which, in Callot’s etchings, give shelter to the encamped gypsies, protect the archers, as they do their target practice on St. Sebastian, from the rays of the sun, or serve as convenient gallows for the victims of war. But it was not alone the tree that reminded me of Callot; it was its setting, it was the whole scene.
The river in its mile-wide bed, with the flat fields beyond it, provided for the solitary tree that background of blank interminable extension, to which Callot was always so partial. Nor was the bustle immediately beneath and around the tree less characteristic than the blank behind it. Horses and little mules stood tethered beside their loaded pack-saddles. Men came and went with burdens, or stood in groups round one of the patient beasts. In the foreground food was being cooked over a fire and, squatting on their heels, other men were eating. Under the huge tree and against the blank background of receding flatness and empty sky, a multitudinous and ant-like life was being busily lived. It might have been the break up of a gipsy encampment, or the tail end of Impruneta Fair, or a military bivouac out of the Miseries of War. It might have been—but in fact it was the starting of one of the caravans that march, laden with cotton and Burmese silk, Burmese jade and rubies, over the hills into China.
BHAMO
Lying as it does but thirty miles from the Chinese frontier, Bhamo is more than half a Chinese town. On its northern fringes stands a sizeable joss-house. The Chinese resort there to pray, to burn candles and incense, to record their wishes, and to discover by the religious equivalent of tossing—heads or tails—whether the gods have consented to their fulfilment. They go there also to drink tea and gamble, even to smoke a quiet pipe of opium. One spectral creature, at any rate, was doing so when we walked through the temple. Near him a group of his fellows were busily dicing; blank-eyed, ivory-faced, he sat apart, remote, as though he were inhabiting, as indeed he was, another world.
The inner courts, the actual shrine of the joss-house, were extravagant in their chinoiserie. Those fretted roofs, those great eaves turning up at the corners like horns, those tall thin pillars, those golds and scarlets, those twilights peopled by gilded images, serene or grotesque—all these things, one felt, might almost have been designed by Lady Orford, they seemed almost the dix-huitième parody of Chinese art. Fantastic they were, eminently amusing, even good in their way; only the way happened to be rather a tiresome one. But if, within, the joss-house was a Manchu extravagance, without, it achieved the simple and supremely elegant beauty of an earlier period. The gate-house of the temple was a small white stuccoed building, quite plain except for the raised panels of brickwork which strengthened the angles of the façade and, like the ornamental pilasters of our classical architecture, served to underline the vertical movement of the design. It was covered with a low tiled roof, discreetly turned up at the corners, that the dead horizontal line might be made supple and alive.
At the bottom, in the centre, one of those circular gateways, to which the Chinese are so partial, gave access to the inner courts of the temple. Above and to either side of it a pair of square windows lighted the upper floor. And that was all. But the proportions were so perfect, the gate and the windows so rightly placed, the faintly curving roof so graceful, that the little building seemed a masterpiece. Its simple and assured elegance made me think of Italy—of little stucco pavilions on the Brenta, of Tuscan and Roman villas, of all those unpretentious yet beautiful, yet truly noble houses which adorn the Italian countryside. This Chinese gate-house was classical, the product of an ancient and traditional art, slowly perfected.
Here in Burma, where the national architecture is the architecture of the travelling circus and the amusement park, it seemed doubly beautiful. And when we went out into the streets, we found the same perfected and classical beauty for sale at every Chinese shop at two or three annas a specimen. The little Chinese tea-cups of earthenware, glazed white within, bird’s egg green without, are the cheapest crockery, and among the most beautiful, in the world. The Chinese shopkeepers were all but giving them away. And the bowls like eight-petalled flowers, painted with cocks and roses, yellow and pale vermilion and green on a softly glazed white ground—how much were we asked for those? I forget; but it was certainly well under sixpence apiece. Their beauty was worth a little fortune.
We spent a shilling and walked back to the steamer, loaded with the lovely product of centuries of human patience, skill, and genius. In our cabin we unpacked our shillingsworth of Chinese civilisation and examined it at leisure: it was overwhelmingly impressive.
ON THE IRRAWADDY
My reading on the Irrawaddy was The Glass Palace Chronicle of the Kings of Burma. This curious work was prepared in 1829 at the
