Outside once more, we stood looking up until our necks ached at the towering Shwe Dagón, which was covered from peak to swollen base with brightest gold. It was all too brilliant in the blazing sunlight. When we turned aside and looked into the shadows to rest our eyes, tiny pagodas floated before our vision for a long time afterward.
“Mate,” said James, later in the day, as we stood before a world map in the Sailors’ Home, “it looks to me as if we’d come here to stay. There’s nothing doing in the shipping line here, and not a chance to earn the price of a deck passage to Singapore. And, if we could, it’s a long jump from there to Hong-Kong.”
“Aye,” put in a grizzled seaman, limping forward; “ye’ll be lucky lads if ye make yer get-away from Rangoon. But once ye get on the beach in Singapore, ye’ll die of ould age afore iver ye see ’Ong-Kong, if that’s ’ow yer ’eaded. Why, mates, that place is alive with sailors that’s been ’ung up there so long they’d not know ’ow to eat with a knife if iver they got back to a civilized country. Take my word for it, and keep away from Singapore.”
“It would seem foolish, anyway,” I remarked to James, “to go to Singapore. It’s a good nine hundred miles from here, a week of loafing around in some old tub to get there, and a longer jump back up north—even if we don’t get stuck there.”
“But what else is there for us to do?” objected James.
“See how narrow the Malay Peninsula is,” I went on, pointing to the map. “Bangkok is almost directly east of here. We’d save miles of travel by going overland, and run no risk of being tied up for months in Singapore.”
“But how?” demanded the Australian.
“Walk, of course.”
The sailors grouped about us burst out in a roar of laughter.
“Aye; ye’d walk across the Peninsula like ye’d swim to Madras,” chuckled one of them. “It’s bats ye have in yer belfry from a touch o’ the sun.”