XXXIII
IN EXILE
IN order that I may keep on perfectly safe ground, and successfully resist the temptation to depart from my resolve, I will tell you a story of my visit to Burmah, where, wandering aimlessly, I found an old friend in a distinguished Indian civilian, who invited me to accompany him on a tour of inspection. I gladly accepted his invitation, and we had been travelling for some time, driving, riding, walking, and, finally, after rafting over a magnificent series of rapids, had been some days paddling down the river in house-boats, when we reached a remote inland station called Phatmah. I caught my first view of the place as our boat swung round a bend in the great river, disclosing a reach of brown water, enclosed between high, jungle-covered banks, and shut in, at the end, by a green hill, crowned by a plank bungalow with a mat roof.
The boat was soon alongside the rough landing-stage, where a young civilian, introduced as Basset, was waiting to receive his chief. We climbed the steep hill, and Basset conducted us to the house devoted to our shelter for the couple of days we were to spend at Phatmah.
In my two days’ stay there, I had ample opportunities of seeing the place, and realising its few attractions and its many drawbacks. There was a tiny native village on the bank of one of the two streams that here united in one great river, and flowed in stately, ever-widening progress for over two hundred miles before it reached the sea: two hundred miles of virgin forest, save for the native villages and clearings that lined the banks at uncertain intervals. A few jungle tracks leading to distant mines were the only apology for roads; the river was the real highway, and the sole means of transport were native boats. Comfortable enough, these boats, for men used to jungle travel; flat and wide, with a palm-leaf roof, the fore-part occupied by the crew, the after-part by passengers. There was a deck of boards or split bamboos, and you could only move about it by crawling on your hands and knees. Entrance and exit were accomplished by the same means. A door, at the back of the enclosed after-deck, led on to a bamboo frame over the rudder; the steersman sat on the palm-leaf awning, and the only privacy was obtained by hanging a screen between crew and passengers. There was room for two mattresses on the after-deck, and there the passengers sat or lay through the blazing heat of the tropical day and the star-lit stillness of the Burmese night.
At this station there dwelt, besides Basset, an officer of police, another concerned with public works, and an apothecary in charge of a hospital. That was all. Their quarters were dotted about on the high land behind Basset’s bungalow. For the rest, the eye was met by jungle—near and far—endless jungle, and the river-reach. Silent and placid the waters, moving along in brown eddies, when, as now, the river was in flood; clear and shallow, disclosing groups of rocks dotted about the bed, in what was called the dry season.
At the time of our visit it was spring, and the jungle, especially in certain parts of the mountainous country, was a truly marvellous sight. The forest had put on its wedding garment, and the new leaves of many, even of most of the trees, were dazzling in the brilliance of their colouring. The prevailing hues were red and yellow; but then there were shades of red and of yellow that one never seemed to have dreamed of, such quantity, such intensity that the eyes almost ached with gazing at the glory of it all.
One is struck, especially in the East, by the wonder of flowering trees, or the striking creepers that cling to the tops of forest giants; but imagine these same trees in all their height, their wealth of foliage, and beauty of form, one mass of colour! There were trees of delicate lemon, of brilliant cadmium, of deepest orange; trees of such crimson that every leaf looked as though it were dripping with fresh blood; trees of copper and pale pink, of terra-cotta and scarlet—all these in one pure colour, or intermingled with every shade of green from palest apple, through varying tones of emerald, to the shining dark leaves that seemed all but black. Dotted about, here and there, stood trees of some shade of brown, or graceful forms clothed in darker or paler heliotrope. The virgin Eastern forest is a sight to see, but the glory of the jungle in the first freshness of spring leafage is a revelation.
That jungle was one of the attractions of Phatmah;—not monopolised by Phatmah, only shared, and not to so large an extent as by a thousand other places nearer the great hills.
Then there was the river reach, where all day long the shadows crept gradually closer under one bank as they were projected from the other; while now and then a native boat passed up or down the river, and, for a few minutes, broke the melancholy of that changeless stretch of water. The sunsets made the last, and perhaps the greatest attraction of Phatmah. Then, in the after-glow, great beams of light would rise, fan-like, from east and west, almost meeting in the zenith, and leave, between their rays, sharply-defined, heavenly roads of deepest blue; while the soft white clouds, riding through the sky, took shades of gold and rose and pearly-grey, until the stars shone out and set all the cicadas shrilling a chorus to waken every other denizen of the jungle.
Sunsets cannot be commanded; they are intermittent, and, though they are comforting—in a way—they do not always come when they are most wanted. In Phatmah it would rain in torrents on the evening that you had set your heart upon seeing a gorgeous sunset, and, when it did not rain, it was hotter than in almost any other spot in Burmah, and that is saying a great deal. Moreover, it was as dull probably as any place on earth, except to the three white men who lived there and had their work to do, or whose business took them, weekly, or at least monthly, into some other more or less desolate part of the district.