CHAPTER X. — THE KIYI PROPOSITION—SADLER CONCLUDED.
It happened in the year '84 that I took in sailing orders at Hong-Kong to go round to Rangoon for a cargo of teak wood. It's a hard wood that's used in shipbuilding. That was a new port to me, and it wasn't a port-of-call at all till the English took it. You go some thirty miles up the Rangoon River, which is one of the mouths of the Irrawaddy, which is the main river of Burmah; and the first you see of the town is the Shway Dagohn Pagoda, the gilded cone above the trees. Rangoon had already a good deal that was European about it, hotels and shops, stone blocks of buildings, the custom house, offices of the Indian Empire, and houses of English residents. The gilded pagoda looks over everything from a hill. The crowds in the streets are Eastern, Chinamen, Malays, and Bengalees, and mainly the Burman of the Irrawaddy. I was anchored over against the timber yards. I says to myself:
“Rangoon! Pagoda! Why, Green Dragons and Kid Sadler!” I wondered if he was there to be asked, “How's business? How's the dyspeptic soul?” and whether he had an office maybe near the custom house, and exported gold leaf and bronze images of Buddha. I started to find the temple of Green Dragons, and followed a broad street, leading to the right, for nearly a mile. Then it grew wooded on each side. Gateways with carved stone posts and plaster griffins, took the place of shops, and behind them you could see the slanting roofs of the monasteries, and their towers, strung to the top with rows of little roofs. A stream of people moved drowsy in the road, monks in yellow robes with their right shoulders bare, women with embroidered skirts, men with similar skirts, men with tattooed legs, and men in straw hats with dangling brims. There were covered carts looking like sun-bonnets on wheels and pulled by humped-necked oxen. There were little skylarking children, and Chinamen, and black-bearded Hindoos.
Then I saw a stone stairway going up the side of the hill. I went on, staring ahead at the cone that shone in the air, and getting bewildered to see so near by the quantity of dancing statues on the roofs of the temples that crowded the hill, and those acres of tangled-up carving. So I came to the foot of the stairs.
Close to the right was a gateway in a white wall, and on each side was a green lacquer dragon, that had enamelled goggle eyes and a size that called for respect. The gateway led under a row of roofs held up by shiny pillars. Over the wall you could see a gilded cone pagoda with a bell on top.
It looked pretty inside of the gate, with flowers and trees and little white and gold buildings. A yellow-robed man sat under a roof near the gate with some children squatted around. He wasn't Sadler. He didn't look as if an inquiry for Sadler would start anything going in his mind. There was a faint tinkle of bells, and the far-off mutter of a gong.
Anyway there were green dragons. I went in, thinking of the years gone, of Fu Shan, who used to sit, sucking his porcelain pipe on Sadler's porch, and looking down on the creek where the boys were rowing with his countrymen, and looking down on Saleratus that was a pretty unkempt community, and saying, “Vely good joss house, gleen dlagon joss house by Langoon;” and then of Sadler saying: “Stuck-up little cast-eyed ghost! Speak up, Asia, if you've got any medicine for me.”
Farther on another man in a blue robe sat under a tree, with his feet stuck out in front. By the black clay pipe he was smoking, and by his hair that was red enough to keep a man surprised as not harmonious with his robin's-egg blue robe, the same was Irish.
He whooped joyful to see me, and said I'd find Sadler over “beyont the boss pagody.”
“Tommy boy,” he says anxious, “ye won't be shtirrin' oop the Kid. He ain't been into anything rampageous, nor the women, nor the drink, nor clawin' to do nothin', since we coom, and me gettin' fat with the pacefulness of it. Lave him aisy for the love of God!”