The Englishman who flung open the door with a bellow of delight was a boisterous, whole-hearted giant of a far different type from our noonday host; a soldier of fortune who had “mixed” in every activity from railway building to revolutions in three continents, and whose geographical information was far more extensive than that to be found in a Rand-McNally atlas. His bungalow was a palace in the wilderness; he confided that he drew his salary to spend, and that he paid four rupees a pound for Danish butter without a pang of regret. The light of his household, however, was his Eurasian wife, the most entrancing personification of loveliness that I have been privileged to run across in my wanderings. The rough life of the jungle seemed only to have made her more daintily feminine. One would have taken his oath that she had just budded into womanhood, even in face of the four sons that rolled about the bungalow; plump-cheeked, robust little tots, with enough native blood in their veins to thrive in a land where children of white parents waste away to apathetic invalids.
We slept on the veranda high above the river, and, in spite of the thirty-two miles in our legs and the fever that fell upon James during the night, rose with the dawn, eager to be off. As we took our leave, the engineer held out to us a handful of rupees.
“Just to buy your chow on the way, lads,” he smiled.
“No! no!” protested James, edging away. “We’ve bled you enough already.”
“Tommy rot!” cried the adventurer, “Don’t be an ass. We’ve all been in the same boat and I’m only paying back a little of what’s fallen to me.”
When we still refused, he called us cranks and no true soldiers of fortune, and took leave of us at the edge of the veranda.
Sittang was a mere bamboo village with a few grass-grown streets that faded away in the encircling wilderness. In spite of explicit directions from the engineer, we lost the path and plunged on for hours almost at random through a tropical forest. Noonday had passed before we broke out upon an open plain where the railway embankment began anew, and satiated our screaming thirst with cocoanut milk in the hut of a babu contractor.
Beyond, walking was less difficult. The rampant jungle had been laid open for the projected line; and, when the tangle of vegetation pressed upon us, we had only to climb to the top of the broken dyke and plod on. The country was not the unpeopled waste of the day before. Where bananas and cocoanuts and jack-fruits grow, there are human beings to eat them, and now and then a howling of dogs drew our attention to a cluster of squalid huts tucked away in a productive grove. Every few miles were gangs of coolies who fell to chattering excitedly when we came in view, and, dropping shovels and baskets, squatted on their heels, staring until we had passed, nor heeding the frenzied screaming of high-caste “straw-bosses.” Substantial bungalows for advancing engineers were building on commanding eminences along the way. The carpenters were Chinamen, slow workmen when judged by Western standards, but evincing far more energy than native or Hindu.
The migratory Mongul, rare in India, unknown in Asia Minor, has invaded all the land of Burma. Few indeed are the villages to which at least one wearer of the pig-tail has not found his way and made himself a force in the community. His household commonly consists of a Burmese wife and a troop of half-breed children; and it is whispered that the native women are by no means loath to mate with these aliens, who often prove more tolerant and provident husbands than the Burmen.
Those Celestial residents with whom we came in contact were shrewd, grasping fellows, far different from the gay and prodigal native merchants. The pair in whose shop we stifled an overgrown hunger, well on in the afternoon, received us coldly and served us in moody silence. Their stock in trade was exclusively canned goods among which American labels were not lacking. Their prices, too, were reminiscent of the Western world. When we had paid them what we knew was a just amount, they hung on our heels for a half-mile, screaming angrily and clawing at our tattered garments.