The Burmese fancy has a peculiar flavour of its own. In the reigns of the good kings, for example, there were repeated showers of gems, a phenomenon of which I do not remember to have read in the fabulous history of any other people. And what remarkable things happened whenever a king died! Sometimes it was merely a matter of smoke issuing from the palace. But it was seldom that the country got off so lightly; a royal death ordinarily produced effects of a much more disturbing character. Planets and even the Pleiades would pass across the disk of the moon, or remain stationary for as much as seven months at a stretch. Sometimes the river would flow up country and light would stream from the earth.
Sometimes—a mystery which the translator does not condescend to explain—the deinnatthè coincided with the thingyan. But perhaps the most unpleasant incident of all occurred when King Hkanlat died. “About the time of his death an ogre wandered laughing over the whole country for full seven days; and the people who heard the ogre’s laugh durst not sleep.” Long live the King; the Burmese must have repeated the loyal formula with a special and peculiar fervour.
This random selection of incidents from Burmese history is sufficient, I think, to indicate the character of the chronicle as a whole. It is a collection of fabulous anecdotes. But the charm of the fabulous quickly palls, and it would be impossible to read more than a very few pages of the Glass Palace Chronicle, if it were not for the solemn absurdities introduced into it by the compiling scholars. These learned men collated the several sources of their chronicle with the most laudable industry; they weighed the credibility of varying texts; they applied the principles of Higher Criticism to the ancient records and were bold to reject even that which was old, if it offended against reason and authoritative tradition. How learnedly and with what sober criticism do they deal, for example, with the story of the Naga princess who had an affair with the Sun Prince and, in consequence, laid a number of eggs which hatched out, some into human children and some, surprisingly, into iron and rubies! The comments of the scholars are too long and too intricately learned to be quoted in full. But this is how they deal with the question of the Naga princess’s eggs:—
“As for the statement that a human being was born from the union of the Sun Prince and a female Naga, these are the only parallel instances in the books: in the Bhuridatta Jataka, the birth of a human being after the father’s kind from the union of a human prince with a female Naga and the birth of a Naga after the father’s kind from the union of Dhattharattha, the Naga King, with the Princess Samuddaja; and in the Mahavamsa, such tales as the birth of Prince Sihabahu after the mother’s kind from the union of the human princess, daughter of King Vangaraja, with a lion. Even if there were real union between the Sun Prince and the female Naga, either a spirit or a Naga should have been born, after the kind either of the father or the mother. Therefore, that a human son was born and not a spirit, nor a Naga, is contrary to reason, and this is a point of variance with the books.
As for the statement that one golden egg broke in the land of Mogok Kyappyin and became stone, iron and ruby, this land of Mogok Kyappyin being thus singled out from among the fifty-six places of precious stones on the surface of Jambadapa, it is worth considering whether, in other places also, the various kinds of gems, stones, iron, ruby, gold and silver, and pearl, were likewise the result of the breaking of a Naga egg. Not a shadow, not a hint, the scholars vehemently conclude, appears in the books that in all these fifty-six places a Naga egg broke and became stone, iron, or ruby.”
It is crushing, it is utterly conclusive. The female Naga and all her eggs must be rejected. Reason and authority demand that we should accept a more probable account of the origin of the young Pyusawhti, the Prince who killed, with a magic bow, the Great Boar, the Great Bird, the Giant Tiger and the Monstrous Flying Squirrel.
It is as though a committee of Scaligers and Bentleys had assembled to edit the tales of the nursery. Perrault’s chronicle of Red Riding Hood is collated with Grimm’s, the variants recorded, the credibility of the two several versions discussed. And when that little matter has been satisfactorily dealt with, there follows a long and incredibly learned discussion of the obscure, the complex and difficult problems raised by Puss in Boots. What language did the cat talk? And was he black or tortoise shell, ginger or common tabby? Scaliger inclines to Latin and tortoise-shell. Bentley, with more weight of evidence, prefers black and Hebrew. A pleasing fancy. But when we pass from Red Riding Hood and Puss in Boots to the fables of the Old Testament, the fancy becomes a fact. In America it would appear, there are still people who can discuss the first chapter of Genesis, the stories of Noah and Joshua with all the earnest gravity of Burmese pundits discussing the Sun Prince and the eggs of the female Naga.
PART II Malaya
PENANG
Penang has a certain Sicilian air. It is a sort of Palermo, lacking indeed the architecture and the orange groves, those characteristically Mediterranean amenities, but rich in a tropical wealth of wicker huts and naked children, of coco palms and jungle. Walking on the Peak, we found ourselves at a certain point looking down an almost precipitous ravine into the forest. We were in a fold of the hills, shut off from the sea breeze. It was prodigiously hot, and from the dense green tangle below us there came up a thick and hardly breathable steam, that smelt like that first hot and sweetish puff of air which fills your nostrils and condenses in blinding moisture on your spectacles, as you open the door of the Great Palm House at Kew Gardens. There could be no mistake this time; we were genuinely in the tropics.
PENANG
We were in Penang on the last day of the Chinese New Year celebrations. The temples were thronged with a crowd mostly of women and young girls. They were exquisitely and richly dressed. Gold pins and flowers were stuck in their glossy black hair. Their earrings and bracelets were of the translucent jade which commands among the Celestials a price that seems to us fantastic.
And what beauty, what a charm they had! From the smooth ivory faces the bright and, for us at any rate, strangely expressionless eyes looked out, startlingly black against the pale skin. The lovely and perverse creatures who float through Marie Laurencin’s paintings have the same smooth whiteness of cheek and forehead, the same black, bright and bird-like regard. And the long slender Chinese necks—these too were Laurencinian. And the exquisite fine hands. But Marie Laurencin’s beauties have a length of leg and a grace of movement in which these charming Celestials were sadly lacking. Chinese hands are generally beautiful, and the gestures that are made with them have a wonderful refinement, a traditional and artistic elegance. But the walk of the Chinese woman is curiously without grace. It is a toddle, charming and appealing in its absurdity, but totally without dignity. Their hands move classically and in the Grand Manner; but their walk is trivially rococo. They are, so to speak, High Renaissance from the waist upwards and a Louis Philippe bibelot below. The imperial deportment of the Indian woman seems to be quite unknown among the Chinese. But then the Indians, like the peasant women of Italy, who bear themselves like queens, are accustomed to carrying burdens on their heads. The Chinese, so far as I know, are not. Nothing so much improves the deportment as the balancing of a six gallon jar on the crown of the skull. There are plenty of European as well as Chinese ladies, whose appearance would be vastly improved by a daily performance of this exercise. It would as effectively correct the western droop and slouch as the Extreme Oriental toddle.
BETWEEN PENANG AND SINGAPORE
Our journey from Penang to Singapore began at night. We were carried in darkness through the invisible forest. The noise of the insects among the trees was like an escape of steam. It pierced the roaring of the train as a needle might pierce butter. I had thought man pre-eminent at least in the art of noise making. But a thousand equatorial cicadas could shout down a steel works; and with reinforcements they would be a match for machine-guns.
Morning revealed the forest, hushed now under the light. The railway line was a little groove, scored through the growing layers of green down to the red earth. Fifty yards to either side of the train rose the walls of the cutting. Looking at them I wondered where in this solid verdure the uproarious insects found a place to live.
Every tourist is haunted by the desire to “get off the Beaten Track.” He wants, in the first place, to do something which other people have not done. The longing
