Through India and Burmah with pen and brush

by A. Hugh Fisher

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.