The Moat, Fort Dufferin, Mandalay.

THROUGH
INDIA AND BURMAH

WITH PEN AND BRUSH

BY

A. HUGH FISHER

"The beauty of the world is simple like a looking-glass."

LONDON
T. WERNER LAURIE
CLIFFORD'S INN

TO MY FRIENDS IN ENGLAND

PREFACE

The following series of "Travel Pictures" is an endeavour to embody some of my impressions and experiences in India and Burmah.

For kind permission to reproduce among the illustrations eight of the painted sketches I made for them, my thanks are due to the Visual Instruction Committee of the Colonial Office who sent me out to the East as their artist.

The two chapters "The Moharam Festival" and "Rakhykash" are included in this book by the courtesy of the Editor of The Fortnightly Review, in which publication they have already appeared.

A. HUGH FISHER.

CONTENTS

CHAP.

I. [RANGOON]
II. [HIS HIGHNESS THE SAWBWA OF HSIPAW]
III. [UP THE IRRAWADDY TO BHAMO]
IV. [THE DEAD HEART OF A KINGDOM]
V. [MANDALAY]
VI. [SOUTHERN INDIA, THE LAND OF HINDOO TEMPLES]
VII. [CALCUTTA]
VIII. [MY FIRST SIGHT OF THE HIMALAYAS]
IX. [BENARES]
X. [LUCKNOW]
XI. [CAWNPORE]
XII. [THE HOUSE OF DREAM]
XIII. [DELHI]
XIV. [DEHRA DUN AND LANDOUR]
XV. [AN EVENING OF GOLD]
XVI. ["GUARD YOUR SHOES"]
XVII. ["A GATE OF EMPIRE"]
XVIII. [THE CAPITAL OF THE PUNJAB]
XIX. [AT THE COURT OF HIS HIGHNESS THE RAJAH OF NABHA]
XX. [IN SIGHT OF AFGHANISTAN]
XXI. [RAJPUTANA]
XXII. [SIR PRATAP SINGH]
XXIII. [THE MOHARAM FESTIVAL]
XXIV. [RAKHYKASH]
XXV. [POLITICAL]
[INDEX]

ILLUSTRATIONS

[THE MOAT, FORT DUFFERIN, MANDALAY ... Frontispiece]
["THEY COULD NOT LIE DOWN WITHOUT OVERLAPPING"]
[MONGOLIAN TYPE OF MOHAMMEDAN]
[MUTAMA, A HINDOO BABY]
[HINDOO GIRL, SHOWING ELABORATE JEWELLERY]
[ALTAR TABLE AT A BUDDHIST SOCIETY'S CELEBRATION]
[BOY SHOWING TATOOING CUSTOMARY WITH ALL BURMESE MALES]
[IN THE SHAN STATES: GUARD AND POLICEMAN]
[KATHA]
[AT A BURMESE PWE]
[BURMESE ACTORS AT BHAMO]
[A VILLAGE ON THE IRRAWADDY]
[BURMESE MURDERERS]
[PAGAN]
[BURMESE DWARF (3 ft. 5 in. high) SUFFERING FROM CATARACT]
[BURMESE PRIEST AND HIS BETEL Box]
[BURMESE MOTHER AND CHILD]
[THE SACRED TANK AND THE ROCK, TRICHINOPOLY]
[THE MAIN BAZAAR, TRICHINOPOLY]
[KARAPANASAMI, THE BLACK GOD]
[HINDOO MOTHER AND CHILD]
[BENGAL GOVERNMENT OFFICES, CALCUTTA]
[BENGALEE ACTRESS, MISS TIN CORRY DASS THE YOUNGER]
["A CHARMING OLD GENTLEMAN FROM DELHI"]
[AVENUE OF OREODOXA PALMS, BOTANICAL GARDENS, CALCUTTA]
[THE KUTAB MINAR AND THE IRON PILLAR, FATEHPUR SIKRI]
[THE FORT OF ALI MASJID, IN THE KHYBER PASS]
[HIS HIGHNESS THE RAJAH OF NABHA]
[THE PALACE OF THE MAHARAJAH OF UDAIPUR (DRYPOINT ETCHING)]
[THE MOHARAM FESTIVAL AT AGRA]

THROUGH INDIA AND BURMAH

CHAPTER I
RANGOON

Down came the rain, sudden, heavy and terrible, seeming to quell even the sea's rage and whelming those defenceless hundreds of dark-skinned voyagers in new and more dreadful misery.

Terrors were upon them, and in abject wretchedness and hopeless struggle men, women and children spread every strip of their belongings over their bodies and even used for shelter the very mats upon which they had been lying.

What trouble a Hindoo will take to keep his body from the rain! Extremely cleanly and fond of unlimited ablutions he yet detests nothing so much as a wetting from the sky, and now, wholly at the mercy of the elements, do what they would, no human ingenuity availed to keep these wretched people dry.

It was the season of the rice harvest, when South India coolies swarm over to Burmah much as the peasantry of Mayo and Connemara used to crowd to England every summer.

If anybody is really anxious to remember that there are paddy fields in Burmah he should cross the Bay of Bengal in December.

Somebody said that our ship was an unlucky one—that it ran down the Mecca on her last trip and killed her third officer; but we got through safely enough, though that crossing was one of the most disagreeable as well as the most weird I ever made—disagreeable because of the bad weather, and weird because of the passengers.

The deck and the lower deck were tanks of live humanity, and when it began to get rough, as it did the morning after we left Madras, catching the end of a strayed cyclone, it was worse than a Chinese puzzle to cross from the saloon to the spar deck, and ten chances to one that even if you did manage to avoid stepping on a body you slipped and shot into seven sick Hindoo ladies and a family of children.

There were six first-class passengers, all Europeans, and 1700 deck passengers, all Asiatics, and the latter paid twelve rupees each for the four days' passage, bringing with them their own food.

"THEY COULD NOT LIE DOWN WITHOUT OVERLAPPING."

The first evening all six of the Europeans appeared at dinner—a Trichinopoly collector, a Madras tanning manager and his wife (who told me that half your American boots and shoes are made from buffalo skins shipped from Madras to the United States), a young lieutenant going to take charge of a mountain battery of Punjabis at Maimyo in Upper Burmah, and a young Armenian, son of a merchant at Rangoon, who had been to Europe about his eyes.

After coffee the man next to me suddenly leapt from his chair with a yell. He thought he had been bitten by a centipede. The centipede was there right enough, but as the pain passed off the next day we supposed the brute had only fastened his legs in and had not really bitten.

The nights were sultry and the ship rolled worse every watch. I think, however, that I never saw people try harder than those natives did to keep clean. They had all brought new palm-leaf mats to lie upon, but they could not lie down without overlapping. I asked the captain what he did about scrubbing decks, and he said it was always done at the end of the voyage! Next morning the downpour, already referred to, began and did the business with cruel effectiveness.

As we neared Burmah the sea grew calm again and the rain abated. The sun dried sick bodies and cheered despondent hearts. I spoke to a woman crouching by some sacks and tin cans, with an old yellow cloth round her head and shoulders, and another cloth swathing her loins. She had very dark brown eyes, and her fingernails were bright red and also the palms of her hands from the "maradelli" tied round the nails at night. She was the wife of a man the other side of fourteen people, some four yards away. I asked his name, not knowing that a Hindoo woman may not pronounce her husband's name. She called him "Veetkar," which means uncle or houseman: the man was of the Palla caste, which is just a little higher than the Pariah, and they had been married five years but had no children. This was the man's second marriage, his first wife having died of some liver complaint he said. Like most of the passengers they were going out for paddy-field work, but unlike so many others, they were "on their own" not being taken over by a labour contractor. The man said he should get work at Kisshoor village, about eight miles from Rangoon. Every year for seven years he had been over.

Altogether, this man had saved, according to his own statement, two hundred rupees in the seven years' work, and had invested this in bullocks and a little field near his village, which was named Verloocooli. He had left the son of his first wife to look after the house and the field.

MONGOLIAN TYPE OF MOHAMMEDAN.

Under a thin muslin an ayah was watching our talk. She said she was a Christian and came from Lazarus Church. Her husband ran away, leaving her with three children in Madras, so she works now as an ayah to an Eurasian lady, while her mother looks after the children in Madras.

About twenty people round one corner of the open hatch seemed to belong to one another. They came from the Soutakar district and were drinking rice-water—that is the water poured off when rice is boiled. A Mohammedan with two sons was going to sell things. The boys would watch the goods, he told me. He was returning to Upper Burmah, where he had lived twenty-four years, and he had only been over to Madras to visit his mother and father. He has "just a little shop" for the sale of such goods as dal, chili, salt, onions, coconut oil, sweet oil, tamarind, matches and candles.

Then there was the Mongolian type of Mohammedan. He was very fat and greasy, and had one of his dog teeth long like a tusk. He was a tin-worker and made large cans in his shop in Rangoon.

I went down between decks and never saw people packed so closely before except on Coronation Day. Even "marked" men discarded all clothing but a small loin cloth: most of them could not move hand or foot without their neighbours feeling the change of position; and as upon the deck above, they often lay partly over each other. Yet in spite of the general overcrowding, I noticed a woman of the Brahmin caste lying at her ease in a small open space marked out by boxes and tin trunks. There was a large lamp in a white reflector hanging by the companion-way, and some of those lying nearest to it held leaf fans over their faces to keep the light from their eyes.

The next day was brighter. There was a light wind and the whole sunlit crowd was a babel of excited talk. A little naked Hindoo baby, just able to walk, was playing mischievously with me. I had been nursing her for a while and now she was laughing, and with palms up-turned was moving her hands like a Nautch dancer as her eyes twinkled with merriment. She was called Mutama, and the poor mite's ears had had a big cut made in them and the lobes were already pulled out more than two inches by the bunches of metal rings fastened in for this purpose.

A purple shawl, tied up to dry, bellied out in the wind over the side of the ship in a patch of vivid colour. It had a border of gold thread and was of native make. Not that the gold thread itself is made in Madras. It is curious that English manufacturers have tried in vain to make these shawls so that their gold thread shall not tarnish, whereas the gold thread obtained from France does not do so.

On a box in the midst of hubbub, a Mohammedan was praying, bending his body up and down and looking toward the sun.

MUTAMA, A HINDOO BABY.

The following morning we reached very turbid water, thick and yellow, with blue reflections of the sky in the ripples. We could just see the coast of Burmah and about noon caught sight of the pilot brig, and entering the wide Rangoon river, passed a Chinese junk with all sails spread. Now the mats began to go overboard and gulls swooped round the ship. We had passed the obelisk at the mouth of the river when, above a green strip of coast on a little blue hill, the sun shone upon something golden.

"The Pagoda!" I cried, and a pagoda it was, but only one at Siriam where there is a garrison detachment. The Golden Pagoda—the Shwe Dagon—appeared at first grey and more to the north. The water was now as thick and muddy as the Thames at the Tower Bridge. It was full of undercurrents too, and there was a poor chance for anyone who fell in.

Over went the mats, scores and scores and scores of them!

There is a bar a little further on called the Hastings, and it was a question whether we'd get over it that afternoon. A line of yellow sand detached itself from the green, and then the water became like shot silk, showing a pale flood of cerulean slowly spreading over its turbid golden brown. On the low bank were green bushes and undergrowth, and beyond—flat levels of tawny-yellow and low tree-clad rising ground that reminded me of the Thames above Godstow.

Beyond the green point of Siriam, just after the Pegu River branches off to the right, the Rangoon River sweeps round in a great curve, at the far end of which stretches the city. It was pale violet in the afternoon light, with smoke streaming from vessels in the harbour, and on the highest point the Shwe Dagon just showing on one edge that it was gold. Far to the right were some twenty tall chimney-stacks of the Burmah Oil Works, but their colour, instead of being sooty and unclean, was all blue and amethyst under a citron sky.

The Customs Officer came out in a long boat, pulled by four men in red turbans, and in his launch the medical officer of the port with a lady doctor. There is a constant but ineffectual struggle to keep plague out of Burmah, and every one of our 1700 deck passengers had to be thoroughly examined—stripped to the waist with arms up, while the doctor passed his hands down each side of the body.

The same night, on shore, I drove to the Shwe Dagon past the race-ground, where a military tattoo was going on by torchlight.

Two gigantic leogryphs of plaster-faced brick stand one on each side of the long series of steps which lead under carved teak roofs and between rows of pillars up to the open flagged space on which the Pagoda stands.

I left the "tikka gharry" on the roadway and went up the steps of the entrance alone. It was a weird experience, walking up those gloomy stairs at night. Alone? At first it seemed so—the stalls at the sides of each landing or wide level space between the flights of steps were deserted; but, as I walked on, a Pariah dog came snarling viciously towards me and another joined him, and then like jackals, their eyes glowing in the darkness, more and more of them came. I had no stick with me, and as I meant going on it was a relief to find that among the shadows of the pillars, to right and left, men were sleeping. One stirred himself to call off the dogs and I walked up another flight of steps, which gleamed a little beneath a hidden lamp.

Between great pillars, faced with plaster, red on the lower portion and white above, I walked on while more dogs came yelping and snarling angrily. I heard a low human wail which changed to a louder note and died away—someone praying perhaps. Then all was quite still except for the crickets. Now I was in a hall of larger columns and walked under a series of carved screens—arches of wood set between pairs of them. Half-way up these columns hung branches of strange temple offerings, things made in coloured papers with gold sticks hanging from them.

At last I came out upon the upper platform on which stands the Pagoda itself. Facing the top of the last flight of steps at the back of a large many-pillared porch, reeking with the odour of burnt wax, I saw a cavernous hollow, and set within it, behind lighted candles, dimly a golden Buddha in the dusk. Outside, a strip of matting was laid over the flagged pavement all round the platform, and in the stones little channels cut transversely for drainage in the time of the rains lay in wait to trip careless feet.

Some years ago when the great "Hti" was brought down from the summit of the Pagoda, after an earthquake, to be restored and further embellished, people of all classes brought offerings of money and jewellery through the turnstiles on to this platform. What a sight it must have been to see the lines of Burmese people crowding up through these two turnstiles, one for silver and one for gold—one woman giving two jewelled bracelets and the next a bangle; a receipt would be given to each donor and then bangle and bracelets thrown into the melting-pot after their jewels had been taken out for adding to the "Hti."

HINDOO GIRL, SHOWING ELABORATE JEWELLERY.

Glittering metal drops quivered from the edges of richly-decorated umbrellas; columns, covered as in a kind of mosaic with jewels and bright glass, shone and sparkled; colossal figures cast grim shadows, and over all the vast mass of the Shwe Dagon rose in its strange curved grandeur of worn and faded gold far up into the night sky with a compelling loveliness, and from the air above came floating down the sweet silvery tinkle of jewelled bells shaken by the breeze.

Night had driven unscourged the money-changers from the temple, and the magic light of the moon weaving silver threads through every garish tint of paint had changed crude colours to ideal harmonies. Not colour alone but form also was glorified. The grotesque had become dramatic, confusion had changed to dignity, all surrounding detraction was subdued and the great ascending curves of the Pagoda rose in simple, uncontested beauty. Nature adored, acknowledging conquest, and the sound of those far wind-caught bells was like that of the voices of angels and fairies singing about the cradle of a child.

I had seen no building of such emotional appeal nor any that seems so perfectly designed to wed the air and light that bathe it and caress it. But imagine the Shwe Dagon transplanted to the cold light of some gargantuan museum near the Cromwell Road; the nicest taste, the most steadfast determination, could not unlock its charm. Here, upon easy hinge, the door swings back at every raising of the eyes, and illumination is for all beholders.

The following afternoon I was again at the Shwe Dagon, and to watch its beauty under the glory of the setting sun was a further revelation. It seemed to show fresh and delicate charm at each part of the day, and after burning at sunset, like a man filled with impetuous passion, shone in the after-glow with the diviner loveliness of the woman who gives her heart.

The river front of Rangoon is a wide, busy and dusty thoroughfare, on to which wide streets open—Phayre Street, Bark Street and the rest, and great piles of office buildings face the water—buildings with Corinthian porticoes and columns with great drums like those of the Temple of Diana at Ephesus without their sculptures. A line of white stucco houses curves round the bend of the Sule Pagoda Street, wide and tree-bordered, like a road at Dorchester or a Paris boulevard, making a handsome vista with its Pagoda surmounting a flight of steps at the far end.

Building proceeds at such a rate that the big city seems to be growing while you look at it, but there are plenty of open spaces. Government House, in red brick and white stone, with an old bronze bell hung in front of the portico between two brass cannon, stands in a goodly park with fine trees and wide lawns and the Royal Lakes, across which there is a beautiful view of the Shwe Dagon, are surrounded by large grounds with trim, well-kept walks and drives. While I was painting by one of the lakes a water-snake every now and then lifted its head above the surface, sometimes a foot and a half out of the water like some long-necked bird.

I was driving back towards the hotel along the Calvert Road when I noticed a temporary wood-framed structure, covered with coloured papers and painted trellis-work. On inquiry I found it had been erected by a Buddhist Society of that quarter of the city, and that the same night upon a stage close to it in the open air a "Pwe" would be given, to which I was bidden welcome about nine o'clock.

At my hotel two people had been poisoned by tinned food a few weeks earlier, but whatever the table lacked in quality it made up in pretentiousness. I quote that day's menu for comparison with the items of another repast the same evening:—

Canapes aux anchois.
Potage à la Livonienne,
Barfurt—sauce Ravigotte.
Inlets mignons à la Parisienne.
Civets de lièvre à la St Hubert.
Cannetons faits aux petits pois—salade.
Fanchonettes au confiture.
Glace—crême au chocolat.
Dessert.
Café.

It was after an early and somewhat abridged version of the above that I drove in the cheerless discomfort of a "tikka gharry" through Rangoon again in the moonlight. After twenty minutes I saw once more the paper temple. There were two long lines of lanterns high in the air in the shape of a horizontal V, and under them a great crowd of people. The trellised temple itself was also charmingly decorated with lanterns.

ALTAR TABLE AT A BUDDHIST SOCIETY'S CELEBRATION.

Inside I was effusively welcomed. A chair was placed for me on gay-coloured carpets at one side of a raised altar platform, at the back of which was a glass-fronted shrine containing an alabaster Buddha and strange lamps in front, with two large kneeling figures and a pair of bronze birds. The whole raised space before the shrine, some ten yards long by four yards deep, was covered with white cloths, on which was placed close together a multitude of dishes and plates of rich cakes, fruits and dainties. There were green coconuts, piles of oranges, melons with patterns cut upon them, leaving the outer green rind in curves and spirals, while the incised pattern was stained with red and green pigment, and a mighty pumpkin with a kind of "Christmas tree" planted in it, decked with packets of dried durian pickle pinched in at a little distance from each end so that they looked like Tom Smith's crackers. Now refreshment was brought to me in the shape of dried prawns and, upon a large plate in neat little separate heaps, the following delicacies:—

Green ginger, minced.
Sweet potatoes, shredded.
Fried coconut.
Sesamum seeds in oil.
Dried seed potatoes.
Tea leaves.
Fried ground nuts.

The president of this Buddhist Society, a stout Burman, with a rose-pink silk kerchief rolled loosely round his head, came and bowed to me, raising his hands and then sat upon another chair at my side, while a young Burman stood behind to interpret our mutual felicitations.

Four silver dishes were now brought to me on a lacquered box, and these contained Burmah cheroots, betel leaves and areca nut, tobacco leaves and chunam (lime). Chilis were also brought, which made me long in vain for a cool drink.

Outside, beyond the walls of pale green trellis, glowed the lanterns, and faces peered at us between the strips of wood. Cloth of red and white stripes lined the roof, and countless flags, quite tiny ones, were fastened along the outer green railing.

In front of the Buddha had now been placed some beautiful gold chalices. The white alabaster figure of Gautama was half as high as a man, and a band covered with gems glittered across its breast.

The interpreter informed me that the whole gathering was a festival of the Buddha Kaitsa Wut Society, and he added:—"We are the people in Burmah always polite to everybody—do please whatever you like here." He spoke English with assurance, but to me his meaning was not always clear. Here are some of his actual words in answer to my request for further information:—"In time long past the monies of the members were according to the orders of the chief here, but they always used to pray every night with white dress, not any sort of fancy dress. Whenever we pray in order yearly we used to give charity to everybody."

About ten o'clock I moved outside, where another arm-chair had been placed for me, this time in the midst of a great crowd of people.

In front of me rose a staging of bamboo framework, with seven oil lamps hanging before it. Immediately below this staging a native orchestra played strange instruments by candle-light and upon the ground, which sloped conveniently, were ranged considerably over a thousand people. I counted thirty-six rows of over twenty-five each, and ever-increasing crowds thronged back and sides. Most of the seated audience were on mats or low bedsteads, and many were smoking the large light-coloured cheroots.

My interpreter had now gone to join some ladies, and I was left to make the best I could of this, my first, Burmese "Pwe."

Two characters were dancing on the stage when I took my seat. Perhaps they were a prince and princess—at any rate they were dressed in old Burmese court style, in very narrow skirts similar to the "hobble," and strange short jackets cut with curled bases like horned moons stretched and held in shape by bamboo frames. There was much swaying and posturing of the body, combined with quick, jerky movements, the arms were moved a great deal with bent elbows and the hands with fingers straight and the palms bent back sharply at the wrists. When these dancers left the stage two men entered in long white gowns, with broad white bands tied round the head in big bows. They turned their backs upon the audience at first, and then turning round squatted upon the floor. Two more similarly dressed came in in the same manner, and after they had squatted beside the others two quite astounding figures came on the scene with long bare swords.

The music all this while kept up an accompaniment of jingle and clapper and tum, tum, tum—jingle and clapper and tum, tum, tum, with a particularly squeaky wind instrument going ahead at the same time like a cork being drawn backward and forward over a pane of wet glass.

I discovered now that on turning their backs to the audience on first entering, the performers made obeisance to a draped bench at the back of the stage. Two more sword-bearing figures came in and two lance-bearers in very lovely bejewelled dresses of old gold. There was a long shrill speech now—then a loud bang, at which all the actors fell to the ground, and a figure entered bearing a short-pointed mace and sat at once on the draped bench.

It was the beginning of a long drama of old Burmese court-life which would go on all night long. The sword and lance-bearers went out, leaving the gentleman with the mace talking to the four white-gowned men (they were probably a king and his ministers), and he went on talking to them for a long half-hour, during which, at rare intervals, one of them sat up and made some remarks. At last a curtain came down, leaving two of the white-gowned ones outside it. These were joined by a manifestly "comic" character, a man with bare chest and a dark blue skirt, who kept the audience in continual merriment while he was on the scene.

Every now and then I turned my head to look up at the great V-shaped line of lanterns hanging high in the air overhead from tall bamboo poles, and the stars shining over all from the night sky. A number of the children were sleeping, though their elders made a good deal of noise, laughing heartily at the comic actor as the play went on and on and on. I should like to have stayed longer, but an appointment with some elephants at an early hour the next morning made me reluctantly leave the "Pwe" at midnight and hunt among the back rows of the audience for the driver of that "tikka gharry."

Everyone has heard of the Burmese elephants piling timber. The largest of the timber companies employing elephants is the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation, Limited. The logs, floated down the river from forest-lands, eight hundred or a thousand miles upstream, are stranded at high rain-tides at Poozoondoung, a tract of lowland to which I drove in the early morning.

I reached there just after sunrise, before the dew of the night was yet evaporated, and the logs, on which one had to walk to avoid the mud, were very slippery and more difficult to negotiate with boots than without.

The work of the elephants is to push, drag or pile the teak logs, and on the morning of my visit there were three of the great quadrupeds at work:—Hpo Chem, aged fifty, a fine tusker who had been twenty years at the work, and two female elephants, Mee Cyan, seventy years of age, and Mee Poo, thirty. The male elephant has, of course, tremendous strength in his tusks and uses them for carrying, holding the log firmly with his trunk as he gravely walks up the pile of logs to place his burden on the top. Female elephants can only pile by a combined lift and drag, and do not raise the log entirely from the ground. Pushing with the head is called "ounging."

Most of the elephants in use in Burmah have been got by Kheddah operations, the Kheddah being a big stockade built under Government direction in a similar way to the Kraals of Ceylon. At the last Kheddah many elephants died suddenly of anthrax (some two hundred in about three days), and a number of the trained animals were lost as well as those newly captured.

The hours of elephant labour at Poozoondoung are strictly limited, being from six to nine in the morning and from three to six in the afternoon.

At Poozoondoung, not far from the timber-yards, the chief rice-mills are situated. They were idle now, but when I saw them again after the harvest their big chimneys were belching forth black smoke from the burning husk. The husk obtained from the milled grain is not only sufficient for all fuel requirements, but much has to be shot into the creek for waste.

The engine staffs are, as upon most of the flotilla steamers, Chittagonians, Burmese being employed chiefly as clerks.

Native boats called "Loungoes" brought such of the "paddy" from the country as did not come by rail.

"Hulling" the rice is the operation of breaking off the husk. There were rows of pairs of round flat stones, the under ones stationary, the upper ones revolving, not grinding but merely breaking off the husk. Both grain and husk fell from these stones together to the floor below, and were carried by bucket-elevators to a fanning-room, where the husk was blown off. After leaving the fans the grain had its remaining inner skin taken off in "cones"—cement-faced stones made to press the grain against an outer jacket of perforated wire. At the base of the cone a cloth hung round an opening in the floor, through which the rice dropped, while the white skin fell upon the floor outside to be called "bran," and shipped to Europe for use in the manufacture of cattle cakes.

In the process of "whitening" much of the grain is broken and sorted by graduated sieves, into four or five degrees of size. Finally the rice bags are shipped on to a cargo boat in the creek, for despatch by steamer to India or Europe.

When the rice-mills are in full work the smoke of their chimneys hangs above Rangoon, but overhead every evening the flying foxes pass as usual, and the beautiful Pagoda is far enough away to remain untarnished upon its little hill.

BOY SHOWING TATOOING CUSTOMARY WITH ALL BURMESE MALES.

CHAPTER II
HIS HIGHNESS THE SAWBWA OF HSIPAW

I left the Phayre Street station at Rangoon on a bright morning, which made me think of England and the perfect beginning of a warm summer day at home. The paddy-fields were like an ocean on each side of the railway line, and as yellow as ripe corn: some distant hills, the Eastern Yomans which divide Burmah from Siam, were faintly visible and became clearer after I had passed Pegu. There are no elephants in those hills, though they are yet in their thousands in the Western Yomans (one man I met had counted sixty in a single herd).

Railway journeys with unshuttered windows are like miscellaneous collections of snapshot photographs—now men in the paddy-fields wearing the huge low conical bamboo hats of the Shan States; then big anthills and snipe; a banyan tree—the gutta-percha banyan tree, Burmese Nynung, out of which the natives make their birdlime; grey squares of flat hard mud, the Burmese threshing floor; a crowd of brown hawks about a group of natives drying fish; a small eagle with four-foot spread of wings, sometimes called a peacock hawk, having blue eyes instead of the usual eagle yellow; an Eng tree, a taxed tree largely used for building purposes (a tree that comes up and is of no use is called here a Powk-pin); in a stream a man swinging a fishing-net hung on crossed arched hoops at the end of a pole—a net of just the same pattern I have seen on Arno shallows at Florence; a dull leaden-coloured layer of rotting fish on bamboo screens raised above the ground on poles—when rotted enough and full enough of insects, it will be pounded up to make a national dish called "Ngape."

In the distance on the other side of the line the Western Yomans now appeared: they are lower than the Eastern Yomans, and do not rise much above four thousand feet. The window pictures went on changing: little streams full of tree-climbing perch; small fisheries—everyone of them taxed to swell the revenue; bright coloured bee-eaters, the only insectivorous birds that build in the earth and not in trees; corrugated iron—oh! very much corrugated iron—even in the smallest villages, it is used for the hut roofs wherever the railway goes.

I was now passing through the home of the hamadryad, that serpent of temerity and unprovoked assaults, but soon came nearer to the foothills and the edge of the jungle. It was about five o'clock, the time when at this season of golden paddy-fields the jungle fowl come out to steal the rice—peacocks with tails longer than they grow in captivity, and even more numerous than those unnumbered I have seen in the grounds of Warwick Castle. About this time of year, when he has been feeding on rice for a few weeks, your peacock is considered very good eating and is not difficult to get on a moonlight night. He gives three calls before he settles to sleep, just to tell anyone who may be interested which tree he is in.

Pale and feathery the tall tufts of elephant grass quivered gently, and through them I could see a village stockaded against dacoits. A fellow-traveller told me that any man who owns ten houses has to fence the village, and remarked that two hundred dacoits were killed hereabouts during the previous year. My companion was a well marked man. He had a white scar on his chin where he had been clawed by a leopard, and a mark on one arm where he had been shot by boxers in China.

We were passing Kanutkwin, which means "the crooked place," and was the scene of great man-eating operations a few years back, when one tiger killed twenty-five people before he was accidentally shot! A man was out in the jungle after birds with a shotgun, and seeing something move near him, fired precipitately and with great luck ended the career of that four-footed dacoit.

The night was cold and the early morning colder still. I noticed that the third-class carriages were crowded with passengers—long compartments with a third row of people on a long bench down the middle. Rolled up in shawls or thick wadded and quilted coats, the natives kept their heads in woollen wrappers, hoods or "Balaclava helmets," while up on the racks and heaped at the open ends of the carriages were the huge bamboo hats, looking like savage shields or targes, which would be needed in the heat of the day. Some men also carried long swords, for here in the Shan States a man may go armed without question.

At Sedaw, a little after seven o'clock, I reached the beginning of the hills, and about three of that afternoon, with a live hen and some provisions obtained while the train waited at Maimyo (a station where there is a native Indian mountain battery), I got out at Gokteik—Gokteik of the famous bridge—Gokteik of the gorge and the cave and the highest graded railway in the world. But if you asked a Shan to take you to Gokteik, it is not here he would take you, but to a Shan village many miles away, surrounded as all Shan villages are by thick clumps of bamboos.

Along the steepest part of the railway track are laid a second pair of rails, which lie covered with sand between wooden side-slips, so that in case of brakes failing a runaway train could be switched on to these as retarders. At Gokteik Bridge I think the only purpose for a railway station is for the convenience of the engineer, who has occasionally to come up and examine the structure. I found a dak bungalow near the station, with clean rooms but without any cook, so that Tambusami, my servant, had an opportunity of showing his skill with the pots and pans placed there for the stranger's use.

I left him to attend to the kitchen and crossed the long trestle bridge of steel girders—it is 820 feet above the torrent at the bottom of the gorge; then, following the railway line through a couple of short tunnels, I climbed out on to a spur of the mountain from which I could look back at the gorge. The torrent below comes out through a vast stalactite cave or tunnel, the lower opening of which is like part of some great cathedral dome. The rock above crosses like a natural arch 500 feet high, and it is upon that arch that the stupendous, though spidery-looking structure of the viaduct has been raised by an American firm. Their tender was very much less than that of any English house, and although it is possible that American engineers have had more experience in this kind of work, it is suggested that the lowness of the tender was partly to ensure a big advertisement. Walking alone high in air across the 750 yards of that narrow bridge, which has no kind of railing, was certainly one of the "sensations" of my journey, and in a thick mist the experience must be weird in the extreme.

The present engineer of the line was, at the time of my visit, also staying at Gokteik (investigating a suspected change of curve through heat expansion), and he took me in the early hours of the morning through some of the dense jungle in the gorge above the feet of the bridge. The engineer carried a Winchester repeater, and I was armed with a good double-barrelled rifle, but our hopes of seeing certain stripes reported to be near were vain. We crept for a long time stealthily through dense jungle-growth, with a variety of prickles and spikes, and came upon fresh hoof-marks of wild boar, small deer, saumbur and buffalo but no sign of a tiger, and I could not remain for a second attempt.

My next stopping-place was Hsipaw, a town of some size, in which is the palace of Sawche, the Sawbwa of Hsipaw. I was sorry to find that this gentleman's English adviser, to whom the authorities had promised to write about my coming, was away on leave. There was no other English resident at Hsipaw except the keeper of the refreshment-room at the railway station, which included the usual accommodation of a dak bungalow. This was a man with a pronounced Cockney accent and a humorous twinkle in his eye, and in view of the approaching Christmas season he had laid in a large number of cured hams, which hung all round the room. At Hsipaw that evening there sat at table with me two other passengers who were changing trains; one, the medical officer for the Shan States, whom I had joined on leaving Gokteik, and the other, a mining engineer who had had blackwater fever at Buluwayo and had come to Burmah for a change of air.

The doctor was on the look-out for plague cases, and where he had native assistants they waited at the railway stations to report to him as he passed through. Thus at Kyankine I had heard a native assistant tell the doctor that a Shan woman, who was selling bringalls in the market, had declared she had seen four or five people dying at an outlying village.

"Can you rely on her statement?" said the doctor.

"I can't exactly say."

"You should have sent for the poogi" (the "poogi" or "pudgy" is the village headman who collects the taxes and takes them to the "Nabang," the head of a circle of villages and responsible to the Government). "You should have sent for the poogi," said the doctor.

"I did, sir," the assistant answered, "but he said he had not heard anything about it."

"What about the Jaremai Nabang—isn't he here?"

"He is away from here, sir; he goes sometimes to Lashio—the woman said it was seven or eight days ago, but the poogi did not know anything about it."

"Well, keep your ears open and find out all you can. I'll run that poogi in—wire for Chatterjee for any bad case."

I was amused at the Cockney talk of the keeper of the refreshment-room as he brought in the dishes, when the mining engineer said to him as he came up to the table:—"I don't want to be offensive, but a man at Tongu told me you have committed bigamy."

"Let 'em prove it," said the Cockney, "let 'em prove it—that's what I say. I'm not a going to give myself away to you gentlemen nor to my own frens—what I say is, they've got to prove it. I'm not a-saying, mind yer, that there isn't nothin' I've been foolish about or no mistake as I 'aven't made in the past. They tried 'ard to arrest me yesterday—yes, they did, doctor, but they couldn't do it, not they."

"But the man at Tongu showed me a marriage certificate," said the mining engineer. Here the doctor applied the closure and we got on with our dinner.

When it was over I took a Shan boy as a guide to find the Sawbwa's house. Tambusami, my own Hindoo servant, was, of course, useless here as regards conversation. The Shan boy knew some English, being able to say "yes," "no," and "railway station." It was just after eight o'clock when we started, and after walking one and a half or two miles along a white road and turning twice, we crossed two small bridges over a stream or moat, and I saw in front of us some large buildings. When I asked at a guess if this were the house of the Sawbwa, the boy assented "Sawbwa."

Under a covered arcade two men were crouching in the cold over a fire of sticks, watching a giant kettle, which I think was copper and not brass. The arcade led into the hall of a large house whitewashed and with a coloured pattern running round the wall and across several doors. At one side was a staircase leading to the floor above, and at the bottom of the stairs eight or ten pairs of plush slippers were scattered about untidily near a large red-lacquered box and a cat, which was eating from a round dish.

Some kind of guard or policeman in a red turban and bearing a long sword outside his ample cloak came to have a look at me, and was soon joined by another in similar uniform. I talked to them and the men by the kettle and thought they understood that I wanted them to take my card to the Sawbwa, and that I wanted to see him. They all put their heads on one side with cheek on hand and shut their eyes, by which I supposed they meant he had gone to bed. It was not yet nine o'clock, however, and as I had been told that Sawche had been educated in England, I doubted such early hours and I persisted in pretending that I did not understand.

I walked up and down the covered way, and presently a little lady, with her face painted white, crept gingerly down the stairs and into the hall, furtively peeping at me. As soon as she knew that I could see her she scurried back like a frightened rabbit, and there was another long silence. Two big hounds, as tall as great Danes but with sharper noses, came strolling up and allowed me to pat them. It was bitterly cold, but at last I persuaded one of the men with swords to go into the house and presently he returned with the following message:—

"His Highness the Sawbwa has gone to sleep. If there is anything to be said please leave a chit to the policeman or come to-morrow again at about noon. Nothing is able to wake His Highness at present. This note is sent to explain what the policeman at the gate wanted to say."

IN THE SHAN STATES: GUARD AND POLICEMAN.

The next morning I was calling again at the house of the moat, when I beheld the Sawbwa approaching through the grounds carrying a black umbrella and followed by a dozen men, walking slowly behind him. He was rather thin and small-limbed, had dark eyes, not Mongolian in type, and a small moustache over a delicate mouth with a small narrow chin. On his head was a yellow turban, which added a little to his short stature, and he wore a dress or gown over-all of black silk with woven black pattern, fine black silk rolled round his neck for about five inches up to the chin. Thin white trouser-ends showed beneath the gown over dark socks and patent leather dancing-pumps with black ribbons. Of jewellery he wore little, his chief ornament being a fine ruby in a gold finger-ring.

The Sawbwa shook hands delicately and said, "How do you do?" and chatted in good English for a few minutes. He explained that he was extremely busy with an important case at the Court and asked me to join him there. He is a busy man, whose position is by no means a sinecure involving the direction of the three Shan States of Mihung, Hsunhai and Mintoung, and all the magisterial work of the district.

The Court-House was a two-storeyed wooden building, with a veranda and a balcony opposite the gate of the palace compound on the other side of a white dusty road. In the Court-Room the Sawbwa sat on a rotary chair upon a raised platform, and an arm-chair was placed for me beside him. Sawche had now discarded the yellow turban and wore a piece of rose-coloured silk round his head in the ordinary Burmese fashion. Behind us hung a portrait in black and white of Queen Victoria, and in front, on the top of a wooden railing, was a red narrow box, two feet long, tied in the centre with crossed tapes and containing some sacred writings for oath administration. On the platform beside the Sawbwa's chair, upon a low, round stool of red lacquer ornamented with a gold pattern, were china cups and teapots.

A man stood in one of two small docks or railed enclosures, and a number of people with documents in their hands squatted upon the floor outside.

I could not understand any of the speaking, and after he had been talking quite a long time to the man in the railed enclosure, the Sawbwa turned to me and proposed in his soft voice that he should send someone to show me round his compound. The moated house I had called at previously was far from here within the town.

Conducted by one man who spoke a few words of English and followed by another who did not, I crossed the road and entered the compound through red gates. It was surrounded by tall wooden palings, ten or eleven feet high, which were roughly whitewashed, and in the centre of the road-front, with small doors in the hoarding at each side, were these large wooden gates with a little rude carving about the top of them. Within, upon a rough cylinder of red brick in the middle of a level space of poor coarse grass, flying a little white fork-shaped flag, a tall flagstaff was set in front of the palace, which is built of wood upon a raised platform of cement and stucco-covered bricks, five or six feet from the ground. It is partly old and in the centre is surmounted by a series of gables, one above another, with well-carved barge boards. In the middle of the front, as well as at the two ends of the building, a flight of steps with low side walls leads to the top of the cement platform, and the centre flight is closed below by a small green railing with a wicket gate. Within, through the outer square-cut wooden pillars, you can see the red round stucco columns of the hall of audience. Outside, from the centre of the roof, a tall, very narrow spire shoots up above and behind the gables, and the top of this is richly ornamented and gilded like the "hti" of a pagoda.

The residence of the chief queen, the Maha Devi, a Shan woman, adjoins the palace immediately behind. A girl stood on the veranda bending forward and combing out her long black hair, which fell to the ground, and behind her between two of the posts of the veranda hung a large piece of tapestry with figures worked upon it in gold thread. Further back among trees are the houses of the second, third and fourth queens, and two for the twenty-six wives of minor importance. Here they live from one year's end to another, very rarely leaving the compound, and dwelling, though without its austerity, in the same seclusion as that of a nunnery.

Whatever influence it has had upon his ideals, an Oxford education has not led the Sawbwa to adopt Western practice in his matrimonial relations; yet it is doubtful if the Cockney keeper of the railway refreshment-room would have so far discounted his sense of superiority to an Asiatic as to have envied him even such privileges as these.

Soon after I returned to the Court-House the Sawbwa adjourned the sitting, and we were talking together upon the balcony when he went up to the railing and pointing to a figure upon the ground below said to me, "This is one of my gardeners."

I had noticed the man earlier; he was a thin tall Hindoo who had walked very slowly to the Court-House, and as if with much difficulty. He was dressed in a white robe and had squatted upon the ground, wrapping the drapery round him and over the top of his head. A fat man with a large buff turban had strolled after him and was walking up and down. It appeared that the latter was a doctor. The Hindoo gardener was suffering badly from dysentery, but was unwilling to go away to the hospital because he had a Shan wife and feared she would run away while he was shut up. "If he goes," said the Sawbwa, "I will keep his place for him and let him come back to work when he is cured." The man, however, was still unwilling and resisted all persuasion. "Then let him die," said the Sawbwa, and went on talking to me about England.

Although Sawche has so many wives he has only one son, a boy of twelve or thirteen, named Maung Nyo. I saw him coming through the central avenue of the bazaar, dressed in rich silks and with his face whitened like a woman's with ground sandalwood. He was being wheeled slowly along upon a smart plated bicycle by two men, while another pair of attendants carried a long-handled gold umbrella on each side of him. In a few days Maung Nyo was to enter upon his period of Hpoongi or priest-training, in accordance with orthodox Burmese custom.

The bazaar at Hsipaw was chiefly interesting on account of the Kachins who had come in from a distance. They carried gaily ornamented haversacks, and their women-folk, strong-looking and heavy-faced, wore about the waist and ankles large coils of bamboo as thin as fine string and black in colour.

The usual rows of bazaar shops were ranged under long arcades roofed with corrugated iron, and out in the roadway double and treble lines of sellers from outlying places had spread their market produce on plantain leaves. Of dried fish there was certainly an extraordinary variety—thirty kinds at the very least, but there was no profusion of strange fruits and no showy display of silks or finery, and the scene was animated without being gay.

The air was free and wholesome at Hsipaw, and the Shans had that healthy look which seems to be the common heritage of all people of the hills.

CHAPTER III
UP THE IRRAWADDY TO BHAMO

A group of white pagodas glowing in the sunlight: a flat shore rising to little hills further up the river—little hills with more pagodas on top of them, and beyond in the distance pale ghostly mountains almost lost in a faint haze. Perhaps there is no scene more typical of Burmah than this I looked upon from the deck of a steamer at Ferryshaw Siding, that meandered slowly across the wide water, just stirred by the least possible ripple.

A train waited on the far side above a stretch of loose grey sand. I was on my way to Katha to join there one of the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company's boats on its way up to Bhamo, and my dinner was eaten that Christmas evening in a small railway refreshment-room decorated with some prints after Landseer, and one of a sentimental girl's head called "The Soul's Awakening." Another man shared the same table in unbroken silence until, with some very bad coffee, the Hindoo "butler" brought the bills. "Excuse me," I said to the stranger, "but you are an Englishman, and this is our Christmas dinner—will you drink a glass of wine with me?"

So we drank toasts in port that was thick enough to have pleased Alfred Tennyson, and slept none the worse for it on the jolting lumbering train.

There was a dense mist at Katha when I left the railway for the river-boat, and progress was slow until the air cleared and long flat sandbanks became visible and a green tree-clad plain with blue mountains to the north-west. Teak rafts drifted past us downstream on their long journey to Poozoondoung Creek, and the old tusker Mpo Chem and his "lady helps." Many rafts of bamboos passed us also, supporting heavy teak logs below them, for teak is not easily rafted till it is three years dead, and recently-felled logs float reluctantly as if possessing still enough of life to tell their sorrow at leaving the upland forests.

Katha.

It is not many decades since rafts freighted with human bodies, more nearly still in touch with life than the new teak logs, floated down this river. Our captain, whose name was Teeldrup, a Dane with Icelandic blood, ran boats for the Irrawaddy traffic some years before the final annexation, and described to me a passage on this very piece of the river when no less than thirty unfortunate Kachins came floating down the stream crucified upon bamboo frames. "A lot has been talked of the cruelties," said Captain Teeldrup, "but I think the poor devils were generally soon put out of their misery."

Mora and Segaw we passed—villages on the banks—taking on a few native passengers from small boats that came out to us, and at eight o'clock in the evening we anchored in mid-stream. The deck was quite covered in with canvas, and canvas also covered all the cabin windows. Notwithstanding these precautions, however, the mist in the morning was so thick that when I came to dress all my clothes were thoroughly damp. At half-past seven the fog began to lessen somewhat, but there was no question of starting, although we were already many hours behind time. Lumps of brown spongy froth kept appearing to float past and out of sight again in the little space of thick muddy water visible round the boat.

Hours later we got away, and at length sighted Bhamo late in the afternoon. I could just make out the red building of Fort C and a white spot, which I was told was the "bell" pagoda. Of the two existing forts, A is for the military police and C for the regulars, B, the intermediate fort, having been done away with a few years ago.

The broad river with its innumerable eddies comes swirling down between its level sandbanks, and as the scenery was at Katha so it was at Bhamo—just a level plain of tall grasses and trees and beyond these, distant mountains now the colour of a ripe plum's bloom. Then suddenly slate-grey landing-flats appeared against the sand, and in a few minutes I was again on shore.

At Bhamo the agent of the Flotilla Company is a white-haired Frenchman, who once held an influential position in Burmah as minister to King Thebaw. He had gone to the East as a Bourbon exile and after years of unsuccessful schemes and vain intrigue, discredited and ruined by the failure of his own plans, Monsieur D'Avera, in a steamship office, now lavishes the distinguished courtesy of an old French family upon American tourists and such wayfarers as myself, and is said to have written an astounding book of memoirs for posthumous publication.

It is in trade that Bhamo's claim to attention lies, and in the street of Chinese offices and stores for the exchange of Manchester for Chinese goods. A Burman, to whom I had been talking on the boat, was related by marriage to the family of a Chinese merchant, and in the evening he took me to call at a house with the top of the gateway curved up at the ends in a way, he said, only affected by Chinamen of official position. The merchant was apparently some kind of consul, and over and above the details of his own business, watched on behalf of the Chinese Government the interest of his Bhamo compatriots.

The Chinese merchant himself was away, but his sons showed me over the warehouse and gave me tea in a living-room, where there was an aquarium of goldfish, and which was decorated with a few pieces of lacquer and long strings of Chinese New Year cards nearly a twelve-month old, which hung across the room near the ceiling.

Sitting there drinking tea I could see through the series of now dusky storerooms to the street entrance, and from little lattices at the sides of these rooms noted the glint of lamplight and saw that the clerks were busy over their books.

That night I went to another "Pwe," given this time under cover. A large bamboo structure upon the sandy shore of the river, which had been erected by Government for a recent durbar, had been rented by the "Pwe" impresario for use as a theatre, and as the affair was, in this case, entirely a business venture (a kind of Burmese touring company), a charge was made for admission, varying from four annas to one rupee.

The orchestra was very similar to the one I had seen at Rangoon, but being nearer to it I could see the performers better. It consisted first of a big drum slung in the air from a long horizontal dragon, whose fantastic head rose above the front of the stage; next, a circular wooden well frame or box, within which were placed a series of between twenty and thirty small drums, each about four to six inches across; then a lower circular enclosure with metal balls and cups in place of the drums. These three items were put in a line immediately in front of the stage, and inside the circle of small drums, with candles round him on the edge of the surrounding woodwork, sat the chef d'orchestre, who tuned up his drums, which he struck with his bare fingers, through all the intervals between the passages of music.

On one side of the chef sat a man at the big dragon drum and on the other one playing on the metal cups, while behind squatted several players of wind instruments and three or four men with split bamboo rods, four or five feet long, which made a loud clapping noise when suddenly closed. The playing of the tiny drums was extremely skilful, but the wind instruments were wheezy and screechy, though I thought the general effect of the whole orchestra was rather pleasing.

AT A BURMESE PWE.

My Burmese acquaintance had come with me to the "Pwe"; and his knowledge of English, which he spoke with a peculiarly soft and gentle intonation, enabled me to understand the thread of the narrative. The entertainment was sophisticated enough to include some simple drop-scenes which, however, had no appropriateness nor any connection with the story, and a curtain which rarely descended as the divisions of the drama were of great length.

There was again a terpsichorean heroine, the daughter of a powerful nobleman, and after she had danced for half an hour there followed a very long scene between a king and his ministers. In dancing the hands and arms were moved more than the feet, and there was much jerky and angular movement of the body. The costumes were again of old Burmese court style, and a curious detail was that the hats worn by the four ministers were tall domes, which curved over at the top in the same manner as the head-gear of Venetian doges. The king, who wore on his head a veritable pagoda, was haranguing his ministers about revenue and the unsettled state of his frontiers, but my Burmese friend explained that he only instructed his ministers by suggestion and not with direct orders. The story was wrapped round the raids of a great dacoit who had been harassing border country and had carried away and married the ever-dancing heroine. There was a very amusing scene between the lady's father and her two servants, comic parts which were acted with such droll and humorous gusto that it was a delight to watch them, even without a key to their words. Indeed this scene had a motive worthy of Molière, and recalled to me at the same time the incident in Yeats' play—Where there is nothing there is God,—in which an English owner of land is tried for the uselessness of his life by Irish tinkers in a barn.

The foolish master agrees that one of the servants, who has explained that he is himself very wise and the master very foolish about all things, shall take the place of judge and bids him sit in the middle of the stage to conduct a mock trial in which he, the master, is the accused. The scheme breaks down, of course, and when the master finally goes for his servant and trounces him well, there is wild rough and tumble on the stage and riotous laughter from the audience.

No people in the world can give themselves more gladly and light-heartedly to enjoyment than the Burmese, and there was not a single member of the audience—man, woman or child—who looked as if there were such a thing as care.

BURMESE ACTORS AT BHAMO.

Another droll scene was in the house of a timorous villager. This was supposed to be at night and quite in the dark, though the lamps hanging along the top of the stage (there were no footlights) were not lowered at all, so that the acting of the dark was not obscured by any attempt at realistic effect. The dacoit and his followers were groping and feeling about the stage to find the villager, who quaked and shook as if paralysed with terror; then one of the searchers would come upon him and touching some part of his motionless body would describe it to the dacoit as something other than the part of a man, and go on groping round the room till he once more encountered the quaking villager.

Men, women and children shouted, shook and rolled in a very ecstasy of delight at this piece of pantomime. Really it should not be difficult to govern such people as these! Unfortunately, however, his natural love of pleasure is combined in this short dumpy man, Jack Burman, with an indolence fatal to business success. His mortgaged land falls into the hands of the chetty, and in commercial matters he is being quietly walked over.

Burmah, so rich in natural resources, in spite of the statements of school geographies, must look for the future to be exploited not for peaceful improvement of its own comparatively small native population, but for the speculators of Capel Court and Wall Street, and the hordes of Hindoos and Chinamen flocking through its doors. There is in all countries a clash of interests between practical success (which implies the largest possible aggregation of healthy, well-nourished bodies having freedom of action) and ideal success (of which I might dream indefinitely without continuing this book), and it is that eternal combat that makes at once the bitter and sweet of government.

I left the "Pwe" at last to go on unravelling its long story till dawn, and myself got some hours of sleep in readiness for a morning in the Chinese quarter of Bhamo.

This is a wide street with a gulley or gutter about 4 feet wide along the front of the shops, with four or five wooden planks laid across it close together as an approach to each. There were coolies under bamboo yokes or shoulder-poles bearing crates and baskets, Shan men on ponies bargaining green fodder, and Chinese women, with the traditionally contracted feet, making quilted woollen coats, while fat babies played securely in movable wooden pens. An Indian policeman, khaki-clad, with his legs in puttees, was trying to make himself understood by a party of Kachins—two men and an old and young woman. Three out of these four possessed large goitres, hanging wallets of flesh, which made them look dewlapped like bulls. La Naung was the name of the older man, and both the women were named Makaw. The girl was bare-headed and had her short hair cut in a thick fringe over the forehead, and had round her neck three large stiff rings. They carried the same gay-coloured haversacks I had seen at Hsipaw, and wore upon waists, arms and legs similar coils of thin black bamboo.

In the chief Chinese temple or joss-house two standing figures, about four times life-size—Shotsa and Quan Pin—were placed on either side of a central grille high up in the wall, through the meshes of which could be seen the long-bearded face of Quansa. The latter's expression might be described as benevolent; but that of the giant Shotsa, who held a mighty blade in the air with his left hand, was horrible enough to draw from an American lady, who came in while I was there, the remark:—"I guess if I stayed here that face'd just skeer me into religion," (Her companion replied:—"That's the only way you would get it!")

In a hall of this polytheistic temple beyond the one of Quansa, was a Buddha with small figures all round the walls, and in front of these as boxes for offerings an incongruous series of Huntley & Palmer's biscuit-tins, still decorated with their original paper coverings.

The Burmese houses at Bhamo are very different from the Chinese shops, being built on tall wooden piles with long flights of wooden steps up to them, and in sunset light a group of such houses is a pretty sight, especially if some silk cloths are spread to dry and some girls are looking out over the veranda.

Of course Bhamo has its pagoda too, and of more recent years its race-course and polo-ground, but I had only a peep at these before rejoining the river steamer.

On the return journey I had good views of the defile below Sinkan village, where the hills rise steeply from the edge of the water, and in some places sheer walls of bare rock rise precipitously several hundred feet—gaunt perpendicular cliffs more like some piece of scenery near Balholm or Dalen in Norway than any I had yet seen in the East, and doubly welcome after the comparative monotony of sandbanks. Most of the hillside was clothed with dense jungle, which made more effective contrast with the bare treeless places.

A VILLAGE ON THE IRRAWADDY

On the right bank, a little distance from the big rock of the defile, there is a village and this is where Lala was lost. Lala was a little black bear an engineer told me about. "It was one of those honeybears," he said—"had a white V-shaped mark on the chest." They kept chickens on board in a coop and one night Lala pulled a chicken out of this coop, practically skinning it between the bars; the Sakunny, the wheelman, declared that Lala took a piece of his bread and deliberately placed it in the chicken's trough outside the bars and waited till the bird put its head out. He was not the sort of man to make up such a story, but the engineer could hardly believe him and asked to be called the next time the Sakunny could see the bear was after the coop. Whether the engineer was in bed or not, Lala used to sleep not far from him on a mat by the engine-room door. One night the wheel-man called him up, and he actually saw the bear take along a piece of his bread and drop it into the trough. He was ready to cuff Lala if he touched a fowl, but the bear was too quick for him, and the very moment a hen put her head through the bars whipped it out clean through. The engineer never gave Lala meat, but somebody got feeding him on "bully beef," and that seemed to make him restive. He never really bit anybody, but the engineer felt it was safest to get rid of Lala. He got off one day at the village near the defile and took the bear a mile and a half away into the jungle and "lost" him.

Soon after the villagers petitioned the engineer to take the bear on board again. It seemed that Lala was haunting the village and stole chickens persistently. So there was nothing for it but to take him on to the steamer again. Then he gave him to the Rangoon Zoo.

It was months after that the engineer went to see Lala. He took with him a retriever, which had been a great chum and playfellow of the bear. When he asked about it at the gardens they said it had got very wild and would not take its food. I'll give the rest of the story in the engineer's own words.

"They were just going to give it rations, so I said, Give me the food and I'll go into the cage myself. I took the retriever in with me, and I'll never forget the way that bear looked at me as long as I live. The poor thing just stood up and put its forepaws on my chest and looked into my eyes as much as to say:—'Is this what you've done to me?' No, I'll never keep a wild animal again."

Below the defile the stream widened again and the banks were low sand-flats as before. The sun blazed on the water, but little pieces of tin tied to floating bamboo marks gleamed brighter than the water surface. In the evening a long wraith of white mist lay across the grey-blue of the mountains, and in the reflection of the afterglow bamboo stakes swung from side to side with the current, tied to the bottom by their sand-bags and shaken to and fro as a soul tethered to mortality quivers in the stream of circumstance.

On each side of the steamer a man was now trying the depths with a long pole, which he swung round in the air; like some monotonous prayer he chanted the depths of the water—Sari ache balm—ache balm—ache hart—chanted these words again and again.

BURMESE MURDERERS.

The easy charm of the river-road gains a hold upon the traveller. There is none of the irksome noise and shaking of the railway, and even the huge cockroaches seem friendly. At every riverside village stopping-place there is a bright scene of talk and laughter. The people on shore get all their news and do all their shopping on the steamer's arrival, and friendliness is as pervasive as the sunshine.

One night on the Irrawaddy I slept on deck among a crowd of passengers, and my immediate neighbours were three chained criminals. Two of them had killed somebody and were handcuffed together, a chain from the handcuff being fastened to an iron stanchion. When brought on board they were roped as well, but the ropes were removed and they smoked cheroots comfortably enough. Two Punjabis and a couple of smart little Burmese policemen had charge of them, and the Punjabis slept, but all night the Burmese police took turn about to watch. Whether it was the influence of the river or of the tobacco I know not, but the murderers seemed no more ill at ease than the rest of us; only, whenever there was a little chink or jingle, the policeman's eyes brightened.

Slowly the mountains darkened and the mirrored magic of a little moon floated upon the ever-moving stream.

CHAPTER IV
THE DEAD HEART OF A KINGDOM

How the wheels of that bullock-cart did creak!

The reason they had never been greased was because the driver loved the sound. He believed that the Nats (who are supposed to throng the neighbourhood) dislike it, and that while the wheels creaked the Nats would keep away.

I had just come down the Irrawaddy by steamer from Mandalay, and very early on the second morning had reached Nyaungoo. At three o'clock Tambusami (my Hindoo servant) appeared at my cabin-door in a state of excitement. I looked out and saw the boat's searchlight playing about the shore, three or four brown bodies jumping into the water, and the usual Flotilla Company's landing-stage—then the steep sandbank and collection of stalls with their oil-lamps. The air was full of the shrill voices of women talking, shouting and laughing. I dressed hurriedly, while fellow-passengers lay peaceful in the ghostly seclusion of mosquito curtains. The electric fan whirled on with fitful spits. There was no mist and the stars were bright. Cocks crowed and dogs barked—the red ends of many cheroots glowed from the bank, where people squatted smoking and talking.

When the steamer moved slowly away I and my servant were left, a little before dawn, upon the steep sandy bank pitted with innumerable foot-treads.

Tambusami had laid in food supplies at Mandalay, and dividing ourselves and our belongings between two bullock-carts at the top of the bank, we jolted along the road through Nyaungoo. The higher clouds were just caught by the new daylight as we passed under the tamarind trees of the village. The walls of the houses were mere screens of plaited bamboo, though often there was also an outer fence of bamboo posts 6 feet high.

A wan amber light now began to bathe the tops of a grove of 50-foot toddy-palms.

After leaving the village I began to pass tall cactus hedges and then a dilapidated pagoda with old grinning leogryphs, pale lemon in colour, and a gilded dome. There were broken masses of crumbling red brick, and under the now dove-coloured sky the glass facets of tall bird-topped votive poles gleamed brilliantly. Then the road entered the district of a myriad ruins and long lines of broken gods. Purple and violet and fiery orange-red, a multitude of small clouds scattered across the pale steely-blue. Tall trees of cactus with small leaves on spreading branches, as well as the upright column cactus springing green from the sand, now bordered the road. Suddenly all the red of the clouds changed to gold, the purple to pale soft heliotrope, and in a burst of golden light the sun rose over a line of violet mountains. Past stray bushes of wild cotton, with their mauve blossoms and pale-bluish leaves, men were carrying loads of red lacquer bowls. These bowls, packed in column and swinging in nets from the shoulder crosspole, looked like bundles of giant red sausages.

Mile after mile we jolted and creaked and presently passed between two great piles of red brick with a Buddha in a porch on the exterior of either side—all that remained of the great gateway—or one of the great gateways—of the ancient city of Pagan.

The building of Mandalay was only commenced about fifty years ago; Pagan was founded before A.D. 200. In Mandalay there are now close upon 200,000 inhabitants; at Pagan there are eight miles of brick-strewn sand and a few poor villages. Mandalay, situated where the Irrawaddy is joined by its chief tributary, is likely to become a great railway centre; Pagan, in the dryest part of the dry zone, has had no practical importance since it was sacked by Kubla Khan in 1286. But in that wilderness of rubble and cactus the remains of 5000 pagodas and monasteries (it is said there were once 13,000) can still be traced, and among them are certain buildings in a good state of preservation, vast in size and of quite peculiar interest.

A few small black pigs and a number of very mangy dogs loitered about some huts. I was now in a land of ruins. Dismantled shrines, broken pagodas and dilapidated temples stretched in every direction, but here and there were vast structures of plaster-faced brickwork, either unharmed by time or restored in spite of the popular belief that there is no merit in mere reparation.

The Circuit House which I reached at last is a substantial building of iron and teak, and letting daylight and air into the empty rooms, which reeked with new varnish, I chose a suite upon the upper floor which has a wide covered balcony. Hitherto travellers who wanted to visit Pagan have had either to take camping equipment with them or else to sleep at Nyaungoo, five miles away. In preparation for a recent visit of the Viceroy, however, a large and comfortable circuit house was built near the riverside, in the very centre of the ruins, and for the future there need be no difficulty in obtaining "lodging for the night." The Viceroy, on the occasion of his visit, abode in his launch, and I was told I was the first stranger to sleep at the Circuit House. I had obtained the key of the cupboard, which harboured plate and kitchen utensils, and while I went off to look round, Tambusami prepared a welcome breakfast.

From the house you look over the wide river, which is not more than a quarter of a mile away, to a range of mountains beautiful at every hour of the day. I walked inland a little way to the Thatbyinnyu Pagoda (the Temple of Omniscience), the loftiest of the buildings at Pagan, 200 feet high and standing upon rising ground. It is square in plan but with a large projecting porch on one side. The middle portion is a huge quadrangular mass of brickwork supposed to be solid, but between this solid centre and the outside there are upon the lower three of the five storeys of the building external terraces and internal corridors with stairways connecting the floors, in the thickness of the walls. Dark and sombre within, it is easy on descending from the upper storeys to choose wrong stairways and to wander about as in a maze. Upon the third storey, on the side of the great projection, there is in a recess against the inner wall a colossal seated Buddha.

PAGAN.

Again and again I found myself groping alone in the silence of dark passages, and after such an approach there is a strange solemnity about sudden intrusion on the presence of a mighty seated figure so grandly peaceful, so splendidly aloof and so serenely lasting.

Looking towards the river from the white terraces of this pagoda, another of somewhat similar design to the Thatbyinnyu, appears on the right among a number of smaller buildings mostly in ruins. This is the Gawdawpalin Pagoda, built as a thank-offering by Narapatisezoo, a king who reigned in Pagan through the last quarter of the twelfth century A.D. One day he boasted "I am the best of all kings who ever sat on the throne of Pagan," whereupon he was struck blind, nor could any doctor cure him; but when told what he had said, his ministers advised him to make images of the great kings he had insulted by such a boast of superiority and to do homage to them. Narapatisezoo did this and regained his sight, and then had the Gawdawpalin Pagoda erected in gratitude to Buddha.

I came again to these terraces in the late afternoon when the more mellow light of a low sun made everything glow with warm colour, as if it wanted to give back the heat of the day before night came. And standing then with my back to the river and looking inland I saw in front of me the great Ananda, the most beautiful as well as the most curious of the Pagan temples.

In the Ananda there is a large projecting porch on each of the four sides of the square, adding about 40 feet on each side and making thus a cruciform plan 280 feet across. The highest of its seven diminishing storeys is shaped like a tall pyramid with four sides curved vertically as in Hindoo temples.

An ingenious feature of the Ananda is the lighting of the four colossal figures of the Buddha which stand in niches of the central mass and face the four porches. They are all standing figures and are higher than the arches, the pointed arches of the entrance porches, and are lighted from above by hidden openings in the wall. Running round the central portion are two colonnades which cross the porch approaches to the four shrines. The gilded figures of the four Buddha dispensations, Gautama, Kathaba, Gawnagon and Kankkuthan, tower up gigantic, and in each case the mysterious illumination of the head and shoulders adds to their grandeur. Under tall white arches, as in some Gothic church, I walked slowly along the pavement, watching the upper portion of the statue appear as I advanced. In the west porch there is, about the middle of the transept, a raised circular slab with a pair of Buddha footprints cut in stone in conventional arrangement, and covered with engraved symbols. In the niche facing this porch the gilded figure is that of Gautama himself.

The horizontal circular slab is raised upon a four-sided white plinth to about the height of a man's waist. Looking across it the next tall archway is seen flanked on either side by 'guardian' figures, each with the arm towards the arch close to the body, except for the hand which is stiffly bent outwards and upwards. The other arms are bent sharply at the elbows and have the hands raised. To right and left of these figures the transverse colonnades cross parallel to the outer walls.

From the stone slab with the impress of the feet you cannot quite see the head of the great image in the distance, the top of the farthest arch still hiding the upper part of the face. The figure is gilded all over and stands upon a lotus. In front there is a low railing composed of thick glass balusters, and having two little doors in the centre. Approaching nearer you see at last in brilliant light the benign countenance.

Of the four of these colossal statues that called Kankkuthan on the north side is believed to be the original figure, though it has been frequently repaired. The hands are pressed together in front of the breast. The figure wears a garment with sleeves close-fitting from the elbow to the wrists, but from the elbows hanging straight down in a line with the upper arm to make a conventional shape, which stops at an angle and ends in a slightly curved border which meets the legs just above the ankle. The background of the niche is covered with very elaborate glasswork, and on the silvery face of some of this are patterns in a kind of gesso.

About the white walls of the corridors are numerous small niches in which in high relief, coloured in red and gold, are representations of scenes in Buddha's life. Parts of the corridors have tier above tier of similar niches right up to the top of the wall, almost as in some Roman columbarium.

In a similar niche on the right as you walk towards the centre through the western portico there is a small figure of the builder of the Pagoda, King Kyansittha, a remarkably intrepid warrior whose chief adventures happened before he came to the throne in the reign of his mightier predecessor, King Naurata.

Naurata was the greatest of all the kings of Pagan—it was under his rule that its territory increased till it stretched from Siam to Kachin and China, and from Chittagong to Tonquin, and it was Naurata who destroyed Thaton and brought 30,000 prisoners thence to Pagan, including artists and craftsmen, as well as a king and queen.

Kyansittha was in disgrace for some years before Naurata was killed by a white buffalo in the jungle. It was all about a certain present to Naurata from his vassal, the King of Pegu. The present was a princess in a golden palanquin, the King of Pegu's very beautiful daughter; and Kyansittha, who seems to have been able to resist everything except temptation, lifted the purdah, with the disastrous consequence of Naurata's jealous wrath. He only returned from banishment upon Naurata's death, and the building of this Ananda Pagoda was the chief event of a reign apparently much quieter than that of his stormy and zealous predecessor. Verily, great building is more lasting than the kingdoms of men!

On the outside of the Ananda Pagoda I saw a line of green glazed tiles upon the outer walls. All round the base a series of such tiles a foot square is let in just above a lower flange in the position of a dado. Each of them is a separate figure illustrating a Jataka story, and each has the title underneath it upon the tile in old Burmese characters. Many have been restored in an absurd way (which has led to their being wrongly described) and some have disappeared, but a great number remain, and careful drawings should be made of these spirited reliefs before it is too late.

Near the Ananda there is a small museum containing a number of stone slabs found at Pagan, covered with inscriptions in the old Burmese square lettering. Among the objects in the museum are some good small bronzes, wooden figures of Nats and some small votive bricks in the shape of a pointed arch, within which Buddhas have been stamped upon the clay. So little interest, however, are any English visitors expected to take in these objects that the labels are only in Burmese characters.

On one of my days at Pagan, Tambusami drew my attention to someone riding towards us on a white horse. This was Mr Cooper, who had come over from Nyaungoo to call upon me. Tambusami and a Burman did the best they could to make a show with our diminished stores, and after dinner on the wide veranda we found that we both knew Haslemere and the old Portsmouth Road and Paris, and then Mr Cooper, who was a subdivisional magistrate, told me about the kind of cases that are brought before him in the Pagan district,—about an island for one thing. Now at Salay, just along the river, there is an island which has been steadily growing in size. Originally it was the property of one village on the mainland. It had been allotted to the villagers after it had first appeared, and then some time ago it increased suddenly in size a great deal more, coming up out of the river. Then the headman of another village, on the strength of saying that he had a verbal order from the Barman township magistrate, allotted plots to his own friends and relations. Naturally the people of the first village were objecting.

BURMESE DWARF (3FT. 5IN. HIGH) SUFFERING FROM CATARACT.

Most of the cultivated land here pays revenue at the rate of four annas an acre, and as assistant collector in revenue work, Mr Cooper had to put things right.

He went on to tell me about a question of property concerning two golden heads. There is a mountain called Popa (5000 feet high) standing right in the middle of the plain. We could see it from the back of the house. It is an extinct volcano and is the home of two of the most important Nats in all Burmah. They have lived on Popa ever since about 380 A.D. They were brother and sister, and used to have a festival held on this mountain every year in their honour.

About the middle of the eighteenth century one of the kings of Ava—Bodawpaya—presented to the Popa villagers two golden heads, intended to represent these Nats. At that time Popa village, for some reason, was a separate jurisdiction outside the jurisdiction of the Pagan governor. What happened was that these heads were kept in the Royal Treasury at Pagan for safety, and taken up to Popa every year for the festival and brought back again. Subsequently, Popa came under the jurisdiction of the Pagan governor. Then apparently the Pagan people began to think that these heads really belonged to them, and they were kept in Pagan until the annexation in 1886. After this, our Government, thinking they were very valuable relics which ought to be preserved, sent them down to the Bernard Free Library in Rangoon, where they have been lodged ever since.

Some time ago the Popa villagers sent in a petition that they might be allowed to have their heads back, as they wanted them for the festival. Investigations were started and about a month before my visit Mr Cooper had been up to Popa and there dictated a written guarantee, signed by the principal men of the village (the Lugyis, as they are called), that they would undertake the responsibility of looking after these heads if they were given back to them. Then Mr Cooper came to Pagan and had a meeting of the Pagan Lugyis, asking them to sign a written repudiation of claim, and that's where the matter rested.

I asked Mr Cooper to tell me the story of these famous Nats, in whose honour a coconut is hung up in houses in this part of Burmah just as regularly as we do for the tomtits at home, so that they can eat when they like, and here is the story in his own words as he told it to me at Pagan.

These Nats have a good many names, but their proper names are Natindaw and Shwemetyna, and they used to live in a place up the river called Tagaung, a thousand years ago. Natindaw, the man, was a blacksmith. He was very strong indeed—so strong that the King of Tagaung was afraid of him and gave orders that he should be arrested. The man (he had not become a Nat then) was afraid and ran away, but his sister remained and the king married her. After some time the king thought of Natindaw again and believed that although in exile he might be doing something to stir up rebellion. So the king offered Natindaw an appointment at the Court, and when Natindaw came he had him seized by guards and bound to a champak tree near the palace. Then the King had the tree set on fire, and Natindaw proceeded to burn up. Just at that moment the queen (Natindaw's sister) came out of the palace and saw her brother being burnt. She rushed into the fire and tried to save him, and failing, decided to share his fate.

The king then tried to pull her out by her back hair but was too late, and both the brother and sister were utterly consumed except their heads. That finished them as human beings, but they became Nats and lived up another champak tree at Tagaung, and there, because they had been so shockingly treated, they made up for it after death. They used to pounce on everyone who passed underneath—cattle and people. At last the king had the tree with the brother and sister on it cut down, and it floated down the river and eventually stranded at Pagan. Well, the King of Pagan, who was at that time Thurligyaung, had a dream the night before that something very wonderful would come to Pagan the next day by river. In the morning he went down to the bank and there he found the tree with the human heads of Natindaw and Shwemetyna sitting on it, and they told him who they were and how badly they had been treated. The king became very frightened and said he would build them a place to live in on Popa. So they thanked him and he built them Natsin, a little sort of hut on Popa, and there they have lived ever since.

Every year the kings of Pagan used to go in state and offer sacrifice to Natindaw and Shwemetyna of the flesh of white bullocks and white goats, and the Popa Nat story is still going on because of the latest development about the golden heads.

It is a Burmese saying that no one can point in any direction at Pagan in which there is not a pagoda, and on many of them in the mornings I saw vultures—great bare-necked creatures—thriving apparently on barrenness.

Lack of water is the great trouble to the villages. The average rainfall in this dry zone (which extends roughly from south of the Magwe district to north of Mandalay) is fifteen to twenty inches.

Tenacious of life, these Thaton villagers of Pagan and Nyaungoo, led into captivity by King Naurata, whose zeal as a religious reformer had been fired by one of their own priests, survived their conquerors. They became, nine hundred years ago, slaves attached to the pagodas, and under a ban of separation, if not of dishonour, they have kept unmixed the blood of their ancestors, are the only Burmese forming anything like a caste, and still include some direct descendants of their famous king.

In the villages there is some weaving and dyeing of cloth, and quite a large industry in the making of lacquer bowls and boxes.

It was not far to walk from the Circuit House to one of the villages,—across the dry baked, brick-strewn earth, past great groves of cactus and through the tall bamboo fence that surrounds the village itself. I passed a couple of carts with primitive solid wheels, and under some trees in the middle of the collection of thatched huts with their floors raised some feet above the ground, a huge cauldron was sending up clouds of steam. Some women were boiling dye for colouring cloth. This was Mukolo village. I called at the house of U Tha Shein, one of the chief lacquer makers, and he took me about to different huts to see the various stages of the work.

First, a "shell" is made of finely-plaited bamboo; this is covered with a black pigment and "softened" when dry by turning it on a primitive lathe and rubbing it with a piece of sand-stone. Then the red lacquer is put upon the black box with the fingers, which stroke and smear it round very carefully. In Burmese the red colour is called Hinthabada, from a stone I was told they buy in Mandalay. The bowls now red are set to dry in the sun, and next are placed in a hole in the ground for five days,—all as careful a process as that of making the wine of Cos described in Sturge Moore's Vinedresser.

When they are exhumed after hardening, a pattern is finally engraved or scratched on the lacquer with a steel point and a little gold inlaid on the more expensive bowls.

I was going from house to house to see the different stages of the work, when I heard a pitiful wailing and came upon the saddest sight I had yet seen on my journey. The front of a thatched hut was quite open. A mangy yellow pariah dog was skulking underneath, and some children were huddled silent upon the steps leading up to the platform floor. There lay a little boy dead, and his mother and grandmother were sorrowing for him. The grandmother seemed to be wrinkled all over. Her back was like a withered apple. She moaned and wailed, and tears poured from her eyes. "Oh! my grandson," she cried—"where shall I go and search for you again?"

She was squatting beside the little corpse and pinching its cheeks and moving its jaws up and down. "You have gone away to any place you like—you have left me alone without thinking of me—I cannot feel tired of crying for you."

And a Burman told me that the child had died of fever, and that the father had gone to buy something for the funeral. He added, "The young woman will never say anything—she will only weep for the children. It is the old woman only that will say something."

CHAPTER V
MANDALAY

Christmas morning at Mandalay was bright, crisp and cold, with just that bracing "snap" in the air that makes everyone feel glad to be in warm clothes. On such a day the traveller feels a sense of security about the people at home—they must be comfortable in London when it is so jolly at Mandalay!

I was drawn by some Chinese characters over a small archway in Merchant Street to turn up a narrow passage between high walls, which led me to a modern square brick joss-house. There were several Chinese about and I got to understand that the temple was especially for all people who were sick or ill, and I went through the very ancient method of obtaining diagnosis and prescription.

BURMESE PRIEST AND HIS BETEL BOX.

An English-speaking Chinaman told me that this temple was "the church of Doctor Wah Ho Sen Too," who lived, he added, more than a thousand years ago, and had apparently anticipated the advantages of Rontgen rays. The American who is watching in Ceylon the formation of pearls without opening of oysters, is yet far behind Doctor Wah Ho Sen Too, to whom all bodies are as glass. The stout Chinaman grew quite eloquent in praise of this great physician, explaining with graphic gestures how he had been able to see through every part of all of us, and follow the career of whatever entered our mouths.

In front of the round incense-bowl upon an altar, before large benevolent-looking figures, was a cylindrical box containing one hundred slips of bamboo of equal length (if any reader offers to show me all this at Rotherhithe or Wapping, I shall not dispute with him but gladly avail myself of his kindness). I was directed to shake the box and draw out at random one of the bamboo slips. This had upon it, in Chinese characters, a number and some words, and I was told that my number was fourteen. Upon the left-hand wall of the temple were serried rows of one hundred sets of small printed reddish-yellow papers. I was taken to number fourteen set and bidden to tear off the top one, and this was Doctor Wah Ho Sen Too's prescription.

I have not yet had that prescription made up; to the present day I prefer the ailment, but I asked the English-speaking Chinaman what the medicine was like, and he told me that it was white and that I could get it at Mandalay. When he was in South America Waterton slept with one foot out of his hammock to see what it was like to be sucked by a vampire, but I am of opinion there are some things in life we may safely reject on trust, declining taste of sample.

I went from the joss-house of Merchant Street to the Aindaw Pagoda, about the middle of the western edge of the city, a handsome mass, blazing with the brightness of recent gilding. From "hti" to base it was entirely gilt, except for the circle of coloured glass balls which sparkled like a carcanet of jewels near the summit. Outside the gate of the Aindaw Pagoda, where some Burmans were playing a gambling game, a notice in five languages—English, Burmese, Hindostani, Hindi and Chinese, announced, "Riding, shoe and umbrella-wearing disallowed."

The Queen's Golden Monastery at the south-west corner of the town is a finer specimen of gilded work, built in elaborately-carved teak, with a great number of small square panels about it of figure subjects as well as decorative shapes and patterns. Glass also has been largely introduced in elaborate surface decoration at the Golden Monastery, not in the tiny tessarae of Western mosaic but in larger facets, giving from the slight differences of angle in the setting, bright broken lights almost barbaric in their richness. No one seems to know where all the coloured and stained glass that is so skilfully used in Burmese temples came from—whether it was imported or made in the country.

The priests were returning to the monastery with bowls full of food from their daily morning rounds, but there were very few people about at all, and the place was almost given up that day to a batch of merry children, who came gambolling round me, some of them pretending to be paralysed beggars with quaking limbs.

It was very different at the Maha Myat Muni, the Arrakan Pagoda, which was thronged with people like a hive of bees. This pagoda includes a vast pile of buildings and enshrines one of the most revered images of Buddha, a colossal brass figure seated in a shrine both gorgeous and elaborate, with seven roofs overhead. Of shrines honoured to-day in Burmah the Arrakan Pagoda is more frequented than any except the Shwe Dagon at Rangoon, and is approached through a long series of colonnades gilded, frescoed, and decorated with rich carving and mosaic work. They are lined with stalls of metal-workers, sellers of incense, candles, violet lotus flowers, jewels, sandalwood mementoes, and souvenirs innumerable, among which the most fascinating to the stranger are grotesque toy figures, with fantastic movable limbs, which would make an easy fortune at a London toy-shop, and before long will doubtless be exported and gradually lose their exotic charm.

Passing through this Vanity Fair I at last reached the shrine, and in the dim interior light I climbed up behind the great figure and followed the custom of native pilgrims in seeking to "gain merit" by placing a gold-leaf upon it with my own fingers. At all hours of every day human thumbs and fingers are pressing gold-leaf upon that figure of Gautama. Outside in the sunlight white egrets strutted about the grounds, and close by was a tank where sacred turtles wallowed under a thick green scum. A swarm of rice-sellers besought me to buy food for the turtles, and their uncomfortable persistence was, of course, not lessened by patronage. The overfed animals declined to show their heads, leaving the kites and crows to batten on the tiny balls of cooked rice.

Now close to this turtle-tank and still within the precincts of the temple was a large structure, evidently very much older than the rest of the buildings—a vast cubical mass of red brick with an inner passage, square in plan, round a central core of apparently solid masonry. Against one side of this inner mountain of brick-work was the lower half of a colossal figure, also in red brick, and cut off at the same level as the general mass of the building. Whether the whole had ever been completed or whether at some time the upper half had been removed, I could not tell. It was as if the absence of head and shoulders cast a spell of death, which surrounded it with a silence no voice ventured to dissipate, and with the noise and hubbub outside nothing could have more strikingly contrasted than the impressive quiet of this deserted sanctuary.

That Christmas afternoon, as already told, I left Mandalay on my way to Bhamo, returning afterwards for a longer stay.

Far away, beyond Fort Dufferin on the other side of the city, rises Mandalay Hill which I climbed several times for the sake of the wonderful view. In the bright dazzle of a sunlight that made all things pale and fairylike, I passed along wide roads ending in tender peeps of pale amethyst mountains. I crossed the wide moat of Fort Dufferin, with its double border of lotus, by one of the five wooden bridges and, traversing the enclosure, came out again through the red-brick crenelated walls by a wide gateway, and re-crossed the moat to climb the steep path by huge smooth boulders in the afternoon heat. It was as if they had saved up all the warmth of noon to give it out again with radiating force. At first the way lies between low rough walls, on which at short intervals charred and blackened posts stand whispering, "We know what it is to be burned"—"We know what it is to be burned." They were fired at the same time as the temple at the top of the hill over twenty years ago; but the great standing wooden figure of Buddha, then knocked down, has been set up again, though still mutilated, for the huge hand that formerly pointed down to the city lies among bricks and rubble.

The Queen's Golden Monastery and the Arrakan Pagoda were hidden somewhere far away among the trees to the south of the city. Below, I could see the square enclosure of Fort Dufferin, with its mile-long sides, in which stands King Thebaw's palace and gardens, temples and pavilions, and I could see the parallel lines of the city roadways. Mandalay is laid out on the American plan, with wide, tree-shaded roads at right angles to each other. Nearer to the hill and somewhat to the left lay the celebrated Kuthodaw or four hundred and fifty pagodas, whereunder are housed Buddhist scriptures engraved upon four hundred slabs of stone. The white plaster takes at sunset a rosy hue, and in the distance the little plot resembles some trim flower-bed where the blossoms have gone to sleep.