The elephant stood beside us as we lunched, under the trees, flapping its ears in the shade, and occasionally adding a branch of a tree to its morning meal. The sunlight and patches of shadow on its grey skin made its great bulk blend into the background of stems and deep shadows, so that I understood what hunters say about the difficulty of seeing them in heavy jungle: it was as hard to see as an elk in pines. I wondered why it did not join its wild companions in the neighbourhood; for it was once wild, and there was nothing to prevent it going off if it pleased.
After lunch we decided to try for duck; that turned out a failure, but not for anything would I have missed the experience of wandering through jungle, where, without an elephant, we could not have moved. I am glad I am not yet very keen about orchids, or how my teeth would have watered! for they clothed the branches above us; they seemed generally to grow on branches about twenty or thirty feet from the ground, towards the light and air; some trees were literally covered with them at that height.
Our men we had to leave behind, as there was no track, and the Burman guide climbed up the crupper beside us, and we wandered away to some pools he knew, where there might be duck. I think we dozed a little—it was so hot and silent in the forest. There was a feeling of being lost, for there were no landmarks in the interminable beauty of tall trees and undergrowth. It was a puzzle for the mahout and elephant to find openings wide enough to take us and the side boxes on the pad through the tangle. Often a wrong direction was taken, and a circuit had to be made to get round a tree, a mass of creepers, or a deep pool. Both the Burman and the elephant seemed to calculate, to a hair's breadth, the height and width of all it carried. I think the corner of one box only once touched a branch, and when we lay low no branches touched our heads; either the Burman's dah or the elephant's trunk cleared them off us.
The first pool was lit by a golden shaft of light through the greenery, rising fish were breaking its smooth weedy surface, but duck there were none; so we plunged on in the silence in another direction, came out into the kaing grass again, left the comparatively open forest behind us, and entered a trackless sea of reeds, which closed round us thickly on all sides.
The elephant surged through this steadily, waving its trunk in front, then pressing the reeds to right and left, or raising it high, and pulling down masses that threatened to sweep us off the pad. The dust and the heat of the sun overhead, and the monotony of the surging sound was a little oppressive.—It reminded me of moments long ago, in smaller reeds, and a small boy hunting duck round a loch in Perthshire; the stuffy, closed-in feeling, the crashing of the reeds, and the silence when you stopped to listen. Here we paused too, now and again, and the Burman stood up on the pad and tried to get our bearings. We got pretty well lost, I believe. Then on we went, the huge beast crushing through the endless savannahs, as at home in its reeds as a liner surging through pathless seas. The motion and sound kept going all night in my dreams, the slow rolling of vast bones and muscles under the pad, and the crash of the reeds giving way, and the swish as they closed behind us. Here, as in the jungle, pretty blue convolvuli twisted up dead reeds nearly to our level, and peeped up at the sun. When we finally struck the long-sought for pools there were no duck, leastwise, but two, and some snake-birds, as they call a cormorant here that has a neck like an S. Round the edges the grass had been regularly grazed, so I'd bet on a shot there for one who could wait, but, apart from the shot, what would one not give for the pleasure of watching some of Burmah's beasts in their natural state. We were both a little tired by the time we got back in the afternoon to the path to the river, and an hour or two after, when we crossed the sands, and slid off our elephant's back at the river's edge, we had to take kinks out of our lower extremities, and even our elephant seemed very exhausted as it stood in the shallows, and slowly lifted water in its trunk and squirted it into its mouth. She and her mahout lodged the night on the far side.
As we crossed the river in our canoes, the sun was setting, and Carter said, "Isn't this like the West Highlands?" I had been thinking the same, almost admitting to myself that this country is perhaps as beautiful—certainly to the sportsman who neither rents nor owns lands at home, it must be out and away better. The view from his window in the Fort to the west was splendid. The Military Police Bungalow is on the top of the river bank, and beneath us stretched the sands, and the river reflecting violet and gold from the after-glow; then the rolling woods and the distant Chin hills, in purple and red, against the sunset, with one tall rain-column, very slowly passing across the yellow sky. Swing a branch of a heavy-leaved tree across the top of the wide window in Japanesque arrangement, put two men, two pipes, and two pegs in the foreground, the rising bubbles sparkling yellow in the level sunset rays, and the pipe's incense ascending in blue perpendiculars, and you have a suggestion of the perfect peace and entire absence of bustle which we associate with a certain Valley of Pong.
