Through India and Burmah with pen and brush

by A. Hugh Fisher

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.