“As I was goin’ te tell ye, it’s U (oo) Damalaku.”
“Don’t sound Irish,” I remarked.
“No, indade,” laughed the priest, “that’s me Buddhist name. The ould wan was Larry O’Rourke.”
“Ye call thot graft, you and yer loikes,” he concluded, turning to Rice, “givin’ oop yer name and yer hair and a foine mustache, and yer clothes, an’ ownin niver a anna, and havin’ yer ouwn ignerant rhace laughin’ at ye, and havin’ yer body burned be the priests whin yer born agin in anither wan! But it’s the thrue philosophy, bless ye, and the roight way te live. Why is it the white min thot come out here die in tin year? D’ye think it’s the climate? Bless ye, no, indade, it’s the sthrong dhrink and the women. Luk at me. Wud ye think I was fifty-five if I hadn’t told ye?”
He was, certainly, the picture of health; deeply tanned, but with the clear eye and youthful poise of a man twenty years younger. Only one hardship, apparently, had he suffered during two decades of the yellow robe. His feet were broad and stumpy to the point of deformity, heavily calloused, and deeply scarred from years of travel over many a rough and stony highway.
“It’s a strange story,” said James.
“I’m askin’ no wan te take me word in this world of liars,” responded the Irishman, somewhat testily. “Here ye have the proof.”
He thrust a hand inside his robe and, drawing out a small, fat book, laid it in my lap. It contained more than a hundred newspaper clippings, bearing witness to the truth of nearly every assertion he had made. The general trend of all may be gleaned from one article, dated four years earlier. In it the reader was invited to compare the receptions tendered Lord Curzon and the Irish Buddhist in Mandalay. The viceroy, in spite of months of preparation for his visit, had been received coldly by all but the government officials. Damalaku had been welcomed by the entire population, and had walked from the landing stage to the monastery, nearly a half-mile distant, on a roadway carpeted with the hair of the female inhabitants, who knelt in two rows, foreheads to the ground, on either side of the route, with their tresses spread out over it.
When he had despatched a Gargantuan bowl of curry and rice in anticipation of eighteen hours of fasting, the Irishman drew us around him once more and began a long dissertation on the philosophy of Buddha. Two morning trains had poured a multicolored rabble into the mud village, and the deck of the steamer was crowded with natives huddled together in close-packed groups, each protected from pollution by a breastwork of bedraggled bundles. Newcomers picked their way gingerly through the network of alleyways between the isolated tribes, holding their garments—when such they wore—close round them, and joined the particular assembly to which their caste assigned them. The Irishman, at first the butt of Hindu stares, was soon surrounded by an excited throng of Burmese travelers.
As the afternoon wore on a diminutive Hindu, of meek and childlike countenance, appeared on board, and, hobbling in and out through the alleyways on a clumsily-fitted wooden leg, fell to distributing the pamphlets that he carried under one arm. His dress stamped him as a native Christian missionary. Suddenly, his eye fell on Damalaku, and he stumped forward open-mouthed.