Life and Travel in Lower Burmah: A Retrospect

by C. T. Paske

The effect of music on nations, and through them on individuals, certainly furnishes matter for a deal of interesting study and comparison. In the primitive state it is simple and natural: Eastern nations make use of it to produce temporary excitement, a method that we have retained in our military bands, or, combined with dancing, as the food of love.

It has always been inseparably connected with religion and religious observances, from the organ and choir of Western religions to the drum and cymbals of the East. If the imagination of the poet can give to “airy nothing a local habitation and a name,” music has a yet greater power; and they are indeed twin sisters, poetry and music raising the civilized mind far above the ordinary range of things earthly. There will doubtless always be some mortals, even in the highest stage of civilization, who are nowise susceptible to the beauties of music; of them our poet for all time has spoken in uncomplimentary terms, perhaps harshly; but, if such a being is not to blame, he is at least incomprehensible.

Among the many disadvantages under which Eastern nations labour, is the absence of melody in the voices of the feathered tribe. Our nightingale, thrush, and lark are all birds of sober plumage; but in the East there are no vocal artists; no lark poising itself in mid-air warbling forth in the early morn, and gladdening the heart of man with its song; no thrush singing to its lady-love from the topmost branch of a may-tree; no nightingale to lend its charm to a summer twilight—nothing but gaudy plumage and burnished colours that dart hither and thither “brief as the lightning in the collied night.”

The birds utter for the most part harsh, discordant sounds; and it appears to me that the reason for this want of vocal sweetness is to be found either in the climate or in the number of carrion-eaters. A nightingale, for instance, singing from the leafy branch of a tamarind tree, with a pack of jackals yelling beneath, would be a contrast repugnant to nature, a dislocation of the fitness of things.

Our English vanity enables us to tolerate peacocks in the gardens of the wealthy. For the sake of seeing them strut about terraces and spread their tails in the sunlight, people will endure their torturing cry at daybreak, and even turn a deaf ear to the complaints of the gardener, who soon loses all patience with this most mischievous of birds. I do not remember them in Burmah, but in India they are very numerous, affecting in particular the denser jungles frequented by tigers.

An idea prevails indeed among the natives that the peacock follows such animals, but its only foundation lies in the coincidence that both love solitude. I remember on one occasion coming upon some hundreds of these beautiful birds committing rare havoc in a cultivated field. But they soon took cognizance of the intruder, and I had only just time to shoot a male and a young female, when all traces of them had vanished; the former for the sake of his feathers, the latter for the table. Certain shady trees bordering a canal near our encampment turned out to be a favourite roosting-place for them, but ere they could settle down for the night a general scrimmage would take place for the best seats: fine feathers may make fine birds, but do not always cover amiable dispositions—not, at least, in the ornithological biped!

Oh, my digressions! You wanted to hear about Burmah and its inhabitants, and here I have been discoursing on music and peacocks!

Being subject to a heavy annual rainfall, all their dwellings are built on piles, and are thereby raised to several feet above the ground. This expedient, a sanitary precaution against damp floorings and emanations from the soil, a sine quâ non, in fact, under such climatic conditions, gave a special character to their villages, which were constructed for the most part of bamboos.

But while steering clear of Scylla, they ran into Charybdis. Fire played great havoc with them, and its annual course was “short, sharp, and decisive.” The wonder was that it did not occur a dozen times a year instead of once; and I doubt whether a hydrant close at hand, with an unlimited supply of water, would have been of any real service.

They never took the least precaution with regard to fire, although their houses, furniture, and mats, and all consisted of nothing but bamboo; perhaps they thought that the annual fire was as inevitable as the annual monsoon. Indeed—to borrow an illustration from our own historians of the seventeenth century—I am strongly of opinion that this annual conflagration stifled the origin and prevented the spread of epidemic disease. Witness the fact that, a few years later, when more substantial buildings had taken the place of these flimsy wooden structures, thereby reducing such visitations to a minimum, cholera raged with great virulence, a disease hitherto almost unknown to the country, where doctors had been occupied chiefly with cases of fever and dysentery.