“How wonderful!” murmured the babu, “And you are sahibs!”
When we acknowledged ourselves satisfied, two blankets were spread for us on the floor, the chattering visitors filed out into the night, and we stretched out side by side to listen a few hours to the croaking of irrepressible lizards.
The following noonday found us miles distant. It was our second day without a copper; yet the natives received us as kindly as if we had been men of means. The proximity of Moulmein, where sahib muscular effort might be turned to account, filled us with new hope and we splashed doggedly on.
Villages there were without number. Their tapering pagodas dominated the landscape. On the east stretched the rugged mountain chain, so near now that we could make out plainly the little shrines far up on the summit of each conspicuous peak. Tropical showers burst upon us at frequent intervals, wild deluges of water from which we occasionally found shelter under long-legged hovels. Even when we scrambled up the bamboo ladders into the dwellings, the squatting family showed no resentment at the intrusion; often they gave us fruit, once they forced upon us two native cigars. It was these that made James forever after a stout champion of the Burmese; for two days had passed since we had shared our last smoke.
Queer things are these Burmese cigars! They call them “saybullies,” and they smoke them in installments; for no man lives with the endurance necessary to consume a saybully at one sitting. They are a foot long, as thick as the thumb of a windjammer’s bo’s’n, rather cigarettes than cigars; for they are wrapped in a thick, leathery paper that almost defies destruction, even by fire. In the country districts they serve as almanacs. The peasant buys his cigar on market day, puffs fiercely at it on the journey home, stows it away about his person when he is satisfied, and pulls it out from time to time to smoke again. As a result, one can easily determine the day of the week by noting the length of the saybullies one encounters along the route.
To determine the ingredients that make up this Burmese concoction is not so simple a matter. Now and then, in the smoking, one comes across pebbles and fagots and a variety of foreign substances which even a manufacturer of “two-fers” would hesitate to use. But the comparison is unjust, for the saybully does contain tobacco, little wads of it, tucked away among the rubbish.
Men, women, and children indulge in this form of the soothing weed. As in Ceylon, the females, and often the males, wear heavy leaden washers in their ears until the aperture is stretched to the size of a rat hole. It is a wise custom. For, having no pockets, where could the Burmese matron find place for her half-smoked saybully were she denied the privilege of thrusting it through the lobe of her ear?
Dusk was falling when we overtook a fellow pedestrian; a Eurasian youth provided with an umbrella and attended by a native servant boy. When he had gasped his astonishment at meeting two bedraggled sahibs in this strange corner of the world and volunteered a detailed autobiography, I found time to put a question over which I had been pondering for some days.
“As your mother is Burmese,” I began, while we splashed on into the night, “you speak that language, of course?”
“Oh! yes,” answered the Eurasian, “even better than English.”