We climbed the endless vaulted stairway to the sacred hilltop, in company with hundreds of natives bearing their shoes, when such they possessed, in their hands, and amid the bedlam of clamoring hawkers. Now and again a pious pilgrim glanced at our rough-shod feet, but smiled indulgently and passed us by. The village of shrines at the summit of the knoll was an animated bazaar, stocked with every devotional requisite from bottled arrack to pet snakes. Even the tables of the money-changers and the desks of the scribes were not lacking to complete the picture.
Barefooted worshipers, male and female, wandered among the glittering topes, setting up candles or spreading out lotus blossoms before the serene-visaged statues; kowtowing now and then, but puffing incessantly, one and all, at long native cigars. Near the mouth of the humanity-belching stairway creaked a diminutive clothes-reel overburdened with such booty as the red-man, returned from a scalping expedition, hangs over the entrance to his wigwam. While we marveled, a panting matron with close-cropped head pushed past us and added to the display a switch of oily, jet-black hair. Her prayer had been granted and the shorn locks bore witness to her gratitude.
Shrines and topes were but doll-houses compared with the central mass of masonry, towering upward to neck-craning height and covered with untarnished gold from tapering apex to swollen base. It was a monument all too brilliant in the blazing sunlight. Tiny pagodas floated before our eyes as we glanced for relief into the deep shadows of the encircling sanctuaries. Burmen from the sea to the sources of the Irawaddy are inordinately proud of the Shwe Dagón. Its destruction, they are convinced, would bring national disaster in its train. Their rulers have turned this superstition to account. Down at the edge of the cantonment below, John Bull has mounted two heavy cannon that are trained on the pagoda day and night. A brief word of command from the officer in charge would reduce the sacred edifice to a tumbled mass of ruins. Ten regiments of red-coats would be far less effective than those two pieces of ordnance, in maintaining the sahib sway over Burma.
Rice of Chicago scorned to share the simple life among the wearers of the yellow robe. As the day waned, he joined us at the Home with the announcement that he had “dug up a swell graft” among the European residents and, declining to disclose the details thereof, strutted away towards the harbor.
We set off alone, therefore, the Australian and I, to the monastery that had witnessed the metamorphosis of the erstwhile Larry O’Rourke. The far-famed institution occupied an extensive estate flanking Godwin Road, a broad, shaded thoroughfare leading to the Shwe Dagón. Its grounds were surrounded by a crumbling wall and a shallow, weed-choked ditch that could not be styled moat for lack of water. Three badly-warped planks, nailed together into a drawbridge that would not draw, led through a breach in the western wall, the main entrance, evidently, for many a year.
Inside was a teeming village of light, two-story buildings, with deep verandas above and below, scattered pell-mell about the inclosure as if they had been constructed in some gigantic carpenter-shop, shipped to their destination, and left where the expressman had thrown them off. The irregular plots and courts between them were trodden bare and hard or were ankle-deep in loose sand. Here and there swayed a tall, untrimmed tree, but within the area was neither grass nor flower nor garden patch. For the priest of Buddha, forbidden to kill even a grub or an earthworm, may not till the soil about his dwelling.
Bungalows along the way in rural Burma
Women of the Malay Peninsula wear nothing above the waist-line and not much below it