But it was important not to leave these people with the impression that we had abandoned them. I had left Sên Chai’s village with the promise to return. So I went up with the Mūsô Christian boys, and spent a last night with them. The village again assembled, and we had an interesting evening. The Sên was greatly disappointed that none of the other villages would join him. But the New Year was at hand, when the clan must be unbroken. They would wait another year, and try to get the other villages to join them. On the whole, I was encouraged. When we left them we were escorted out of the village to the music of their plaintive flutes, more like a victorious than a vanquished army.
After a day or two with the Chieng Sên church, we visited the ridge to the southeast of that city, between it and Chieng Kawng. Our experience there was but a repetition of that from which we were just come—cordial receptions, night audiences, manifest interest, individual believers, anxious consultations, promises for the next year; but the tribal bond was too strong to be broken.
But Cha Pū Kaw was anxious that we should not pass by his own mountain villages on the Mê Kok. So we turned southward again toward Chieng Rāi. This, moreover, was one of those famine years, such as we have already encountered in our story, and shall encounter yet again; many people were on the verge of starvation. In places we could not get food for our own men. And famine was beginning to be followed by disease and death. This was a serious obstacle to our work.
Another serious obstacle was the use of opium, which became more prevalent the further west we went along the Mê Kok range towards Mûang Fāng. We presently reached villages where the poppy was cultivated, until, in the last village, men, women, and boys, and sometimes even girls, were its slaves. Fevers and dysentery prevail during the rainy season. These people have a very scanty pharmacopœia, and no antidotes whatever for these diseases. Opium in some form is probably their surest remedy. Many persons told me that they began by using it in sickness. As sickness recurred the habit grew, until they were fast bound in its chains. These facts largely determined the character of the instruction we gave, and made our tour a kind of anti-opium crusade. Encouraged and disappointed at every village, I was still tempted on by visions of capturing some large village that would prove a more effective entering wedge for the tribe than Cha Pū Kaw’s poor little hamlet. The six weeks so spent were at the time the most novel and exciting, as well as most arduous, of all my missionary experiences so far.
We took both the old Mūsô men as assistants, and the younger ones as carriers for our equipment. Our first day’s journey was a fair sample of what we had to do continually. In many places it would be a misnomer to speak of the track we travelled as a path. We left the plain in the morning, and it was half-past two in the afternoon when we reached the first summit. It was five o’clock when, desperate with thirst, we came upon a flowing brook. There was, then, still another hard climb before we saw our long looked-for first village ahead. And, in general, because of the habit these people have of planting their villages upon the very highest points where they can get water, the journey from one of these villages to another in plain sight, and, apparently, but a short distance away, would take hours of the hardest travel. Sometimes we would walk weary hours through rain, or through bushes as wet as rain, to visit a village; only to walk back again after sitting three hours in wet clothes trying in vain to awaken some interest in old or young.
One of the most interesting, and, at the same time, one of the saddest, cases we met was that of Mûn Kamprai, the head man of a village which clearly bore the impress of his character in the intelligence and industry of its inhabitants. From opium he had kept entirely aloof until, only a few years before this time, under the stress of a severe illness, he began to take it. The poor man now realized that he was becoming a wreck, but seemed to have no will-power left to make the effort to break away from the habit. He was much interested, however, in his two fellow-tribesmen whom I had brought as my assistants; and Cha Waw’s example seemed to afford him a faint gleam of hope. If we would stop a week and teach his people, and would stand by to aid him, he would try. If successful, he would surely become a Christian—and then his village would be the one we had been hoping for to free itself from the tribal bond, and become Christian.
The experiment was, indeed, pathetic. Removing all temptation, he began with a desperate determination to succeed. We encouraged him with human sympathy and the hope of divine aid. We pushed as far as we dared the use of a tonic which Dr. McKean had given me for such cases; and it aided him perceptibly. He held out manfully for several days. But, at last, in an evil hour, he could endure the torture no longer, and before we knew it, he had resumed the use of the drug. For two nights he had not slept. In his own expressive language, it was not his eyes, but his heart that could not sleep. Poor man! his sufferings must have been as near those of the infernal regions as it is possible to experience in the body. And then his absolute wreck of mind, and the contempt he felt for himself when he gave up the struggle as hopeless!
We spared no labour to reach the homes of these people, or their hearts. We tried to become Mūsôs to the Mūsôs that we might win them. Sometimes we had to sleep in their huts—on a floor raised two or three feet from the ground, which the dogs shared with the family, while the pigs and goats were on the ground beneath. In the centre was a raised fireplace on which the native teapot always boiled. Sleeping-mats or thin bedding lay about on the floor, and on this, before bedtime, some of the inmates would lie down and fall asleep even while listening to the conversation.—But everywhere the tribal bond was too strong to be broken.
MŪSÔ PEOPLE AND HUT NEAR CHIENG RAI