Round the Wonderful World

by G. E. Mitton

The first thing we see when we arrive at it are two enormous monsters, not like any animal in existence, made of white plaster with glaring red eyes. They have dragons' heads and tigers' bodies and are most terribly ferocious. These guard the entrance to the pagoda and are called leogryphs. Between them there is a long ascent rising to the pagoda platform. The place is like a bazaar with people in their gay clothes coming and going, and the sun glinting through between the pillars at the open spaces. It is difficult to tell the difference between men and women, for all alike wear skirts and jackets, and you never see a man with a beard, hardly ever with a moustache. But the true distinction is that the men have a gay handkerchief called a goungbaung wound round their heads, and the women wear no head covering, and, as you have seen, they never think of veiling their faces, like the Mohammedan women. The men's head-gear is very different from that we saw in India; it is not a huge and heavy erection, but just a silk or cotton scarf twisted up and tucked in, and very often there is a "bird's nest" of dark hair sticking out in the middle of it, for the men's hair is long as well as the women's, but they roll it up so that it is not seen.

THE LEOGRYPH.

Everyone is very bright and friendly, and the girls who are selling all sorts of little tawdry things on the stalls by the stairs call out to us persuasively to buy from them. On the whole the place is clean, and there is no bazaar smell, only a certain sharp wood-smoke flavour and the scent of many flowers. But at the foot of every white column are horrible deep-red stains that look as if some little animal had been slaughtered there. It is not so bad as that. You remember we saw a man whose mouth was stained red with chewing betel-nut, which he did in the same way that some of the roughest men in England chew tobacco? These are the stains of that betel-nut, for nearly everyone here has the nasty habit.

Up the steps we pass, higher and higher, and come out on to a great platform which looks like a street, for it is lined with buildings on all four sides and in the middle too; but rising above those in the middle is the great pagoda, the Shwe Dagon,—shwe means golden,—and this is the most wonderful thing in Burma.

It is so wide at the base that it takes quite a long time to walk round it, and then it goes up in a bell-like curve, tapering to a steeple little less than the height of St. Paul's Cathedral. At the very top of all, so high that we can only see it by cricking our necks, is an iron cage called a htee, meaning "umbrella," decorated with swinging bells. Listen for a moment and perhaps you can hear them as the wind sways them about. No, the air is too still to-day. Deep in the innermost chamber of the pagoda are no less than eight hairs of Buddha, besides other relics of other Buddhas who lived before the last.

The marvel of it is that this great monument is pure gold from top to bottom. Much of it is covered with thin plates of real gold, and the rest, yards and yards of it, is plastered with gold-leaf.

Did you see that red glint from the top as the sun caught the htee at an angle? That was probably a real ruby, for it flashed out like a sword blade. There are many real stones set up there, and the htee alone cost £50,000!

Coming back to earth, look at the glitter on all these shrines that line the platform on both sides. Though it looks like a street it isn't really, for there are no houses, only shrines and temples. That one close to us is dazzling to look at. No, those blue and red flashes are not from real jewels; examine them and see. The shrine is encased with little pieces of looking-glass, some red and some blue and some plain, all fitted in together like mosaic.

The next is made of the wonderful carved woodwork the Burmans do so well, and it is gilded all over; for my own part I prefer the dark teak ungilded, but still this looks very handsome among the rest. That tall post like a flagstaff, with streamers flying from it, is a praying-post; can you make out the figure like a weather-cock at the top? It is a goose instead of a cock, and doesn't tell the direction of the wind. It is the sacred goose. The brilliance of all this detail takes one's breath away. On every side we see the people worshipping, and yet it is not a festival day, for then we should hardly be able to move for the crowds on the platform—where there are tens now there would then be thousands. The worshippers drop down quite simply on the pavement before a favourite shrine and hold up their hands toward it, sometimes with an offering of flowers in them, or even a big taper. There is a woman passing smoking a monstrous "green" cigar. It is a huge thick roll of light-coloured stuff like shavings, about as long as your arm from elbow to wrist, and as thick as a man's finger. She has to open her little round mouth wide to get the end in. It is not filled with pure tobacco, but a chopped mixture of all sorts; even you could smoke it without any harm. Why yes, women smoke here almost all day, and children too. They do say the mothers give the babies-in-arms a whiff, but I haven't seen that myself!