From Edinburgh to India & Burmah

by W. G. Burn Murdoch

We stop at another village. Popa mountain detaches itself from surroundings, thirty or forty miles to the east; it is faint violet and rises from a slightly undulating wooded plain. It is a great place for game and nats. Most powerful nats or spirits live there, and if you go shooting you get nothing, unless you offer some of your breakfast as a peace-offering to these spirits in the morning. This has been found to be true over and over again by those who have shot there.

The day closes, the Arrakan Mountains far away in the west are violet. The river here is wide as a fine lake and so smooth it reflects the most delicate tints of cloud-land. In front of us a low promontory stretches out from the east bank; we have to spend the night there. It is heavily clad with trees, delicate pagoda spires, white and gold, rise from the dark foliage and gleam with warm sunset light against the cool grey sky in the north. Trees and spires, sands, cliffs, cottages, and the canoes with bright-coloured paddlers, are all reflected in the smooth water.

As we get within ten yards of the shore six of our Chittagong crew plunge into the glittering water with a light rope, and are ashore in a minute and are hauling in our wire hawser; the setting sun striking their wet bodies, makes them almost like ruddy gold, and their black trousers cling to their legs. It seems an elementary way of taking a line ashore; I think that with a little practise two men in a dinghy would be quicker and would look more seamanlike—but probably it was the way in the Ark, so the custom remains.

The Burmese villagers gather in groups and sit on the top of the bank in the growing dusk. We can just see a suggestion of their gay colours and the gleam of their cheroots. G. and I go ashore and stumble along a deep, sandy road; on either side are little and big trees with open cottages behind them, made of neatly woven bamboo matting, lit with oil crusies. We come to a pagoda, and tall white griffins at its entrance staring up into the sky, strange, grotesque beasts—the white-wash they are covered with looks violet in the fading light.

At dinner, yarns on the fore-deck, big beetles humming out of the night against our lamp, and the Captain telling us deep-sea yarns—how he signed articles as a cabin boy, and of the times before the annexation of Upper Burmah, when the white man skipper was of necessity something of a diplomatist and a soldier. Some sailors can't spin yarns, but those who can—how well they do it!

As we were at coffee there was a gurgling and groaning came from the people aft, so we took our cigars, and went to see the row, and order restored. There was a little crowd struggling and rolling in a ball, and it turned out there was a long Sikh in the middle of it in grips with a diminutive Chinaman, who might have been a wizened little old woman from his appearance. It was the big Sikh who had done the horrible gurgling; the silly ass had joined in with several Chinese, professional gamblers, and of course lost, and unlike a Burman or a Chinaman, the native of India can't lose stolidly. He vowed he'd been set on from behind, and had been robbed of fifty-four rupees. The Captain assessed probable loss at two rupees, and the first officer took him down the companion to the lower deck, the Sikh standing two feet higher than the little Scot. Later, the long black man went hunting the shrimp of a Chinaman round the native part of the ship, and caught him again and asked the Captain for justice, and looked at me as he spoke, which made me uncomfortable, for I could not understand, but guessed he expected the Sahib to stick up for a Sikh against any damn Chinee. I would have liked to photograph the two—they were such a contrast as they sat on their heels beside each other, the wizened little expressionless, beady-eyed Chinaman with his thread of a pigtail, and his arm in the grasp of the long Sikh, with black beard and long hair wound untidily round his head.

22nd January.—Another very distinctive charm about this river is that the two sides are generally quite different in character. On one side this morning, the sun is rising over a wilderness of level sandbank, buff-coloured against the sun, over this there is a low range of distant mountains, with Popa by itself, lonely and pink; and looking out on the other side from our cabin window we find we are steaming close under steep, sunny banks, overhung with luxuriant foliage.

Where there is a break in the bank we look up sandy corries that come down from hills, clad with park-like trees and scrub—the very place for deer! There are no inhabitants on the river side, though we pass every mile or two a ruined pagoda spire.