The Skeptical Romancer: Selected Travel Writing

  “That is just what I was saying to myself. But what is the good of information that means nothing to you? Information for its own sake is like a flight of steps that leads to a blank wall.”

  “I do not agree with you. Information for its own sake is like a pin you pick up and put in the lapel of your coat or the piece of string that you untie instead of cutting and put away in a drawer. You never know when it will be useful.”

  And to show me that he did not choose his metaphors at random the Czecho-Slovak turned up the bottom of his stengah-shifter (which has no lapel) and showed me four pins in a neat row.

  MANDALAY

  FIRST OF ALL Mandalay is a name. For there are places whose names from some accident of history or happy association have an independent magic, and perhaps the wise man would never visit them, for the expectations they arouse can hardly be realized. Names have a life of their own, and though Trebizond may be nothing but a poverty-stricken village the glamour of its name must invest it for all right-thinking minds with the trappings of Empire. And Samarkand: can anyone write the word without a quickening of the pulse and at his heart the pain of unsatisfied desire? The very name of the Irrawaddy informs the sensitive fancy with its vast and turbid flow. The streets of Mandalay, dusty, crowded, and drenched with a garish sun, are broad and straight. Tramcars lumber down them with a rout of passengers; they fill the seats and gangways and cling thickly to the footboard like flies clustered upon an overripe mango. The houses, with their balconies and verandas, have the slatternly look of the houses in the Main Street of a Western town that has fallen upon evil days. Here are no narrow alleys or devious ways down which the imagination may wander in search of the unimaginable. It does not matter: Mandalay has its name; the falling cadence of the lovely word has gathered about itself the chiaroscuro of romance.

  But Mandalay has also its fort. The fort is surrounded by a high wall, and the high wall by a moat. In the fort stands the palace, and stood, before they were torn down, the offices of King Thebaw’s government and the dwelling places of his ministers. At intervals in the wall are gateways washed white with lime, and each is surmounted by a sort of belvedere, like a summerhouse in a Chinese garden; and on the bastions are teak pavilions too fanciful to allow you to think they could ever have served a warlike purpose. The wall is made of huge sun-baked bricks, and the colour of it is old rose. At its foot is a broad stretch of sward planted quite thickly with tamarind, cassia, and acacia; a flock of brown sheep, advancing with tenacity, slowly but intently grazes the luscious grass; and here in the evening you see the Burmese in their coloured skirts and bright headkerchiefs wander in twos and threes. They are little brown men of a solid and sturdy build, with something a trifle Mongolian in their faces. They walk deliberately as though they were owners and tillers of the soil. They have none of the sidelong grace, the deprecating elegance, of the Indian who passes them; they have not his refinement of features, nor his languorous, effeminate distinction. They smile easily. They are happy, cheerful, and amiable.

  In the broad water of the moat the rosy wall and the thick foliage of the trees and the Burmese in their bright clothes are sharply reflected. The water is still but not stagnant, and peace rests upon it like a swan with a golden crown. Its colours, in the early morning and towards sunset, have the soft, fatigued tenderness of pastel; they have the translucency, without the stubborn definiteness, of oils. It is as though light were a prestidigitator and in play laid on colours that he had just created and were about with a careless hand to wash them out again. You hold your breath, for you cannot believe that such an effect can be anything but evanescent. You watch it with the same expectancy with which you read a poem in some complicated metre when your ear awaits the long delayed rhyme that will fulfil the harmony. But at sunset, when the clouds in the west are red and splendid so that the wall, the trees, and the moat are drenched in radiance, and at night under the full moon when the white gateways drip with silver and the belvederes above them are shot with silhouetted glimpses of the sky, the assault on your senses is shattering. You try to guard yourself by saying it is not real. This is not a beauty that steals upon you unawares, that flatters and soothes your bruised spirit; this is not a beauty that you can hold in your hand and call your own and put in its place among familiar beauties that you know: it is a beauty that batters you and stuns you and leaves you breathless; there is no calmness in it nor control; it is like a fire that on a sudden consumes you, and you are left shaken and bare and yet by a strange miracle alive.

  THE NUNS AT MENGON

  THEN I WENT to see the great bell at Mengon. Here is a Buddhist convent, and as I stood looking a group of nuns surrounded me. They wore robes of the same shape and size as the monks’, but instead of the monks’ fine yellow, of a grimy dun. Little old toothless women, their heads shaven but covered with an inch of thin grey stubble, and their little old faces deeply lined and wrinkled. They held out skinny hands for money and gabbled with bare, pale gums. Their dark eyes were alert with covetousness, and their smiles were mischievous. They were very old, and they had no human ties or affections. They seemed to look upon the world with a humorous cynicism. They had lived through every kind of illusion and held existence in a malicious and laughing contempt. They had no tolerance for the follies of men and no indulgence for their weakness. There was something vaguely frightening in their entire lack of attachment to human things. They had done with love, they had finished with the anguish of separation, death had no terrors for them, they had nothing left now but laughter. They struck the great bell so that I might hear its tone: boom, boom, it went, a long low note that travelled in slow reverberations down the river, a solemn sound that seemed to call the soul from its tenement of clay and reminded it that though all created things were illusion, in the illusion was also beauty; and the nuns, following the sound, burst into ribald cackles of laughter, hi, hi, hi, that mocked the call of the great bell. Dupes their laughter said, dupes and fools. Laughter is the only reality.

  ON THE TRAIL

  BUT EVEN WHEN I had learned by experience that if I wanted a quiet ride I must give the mules an hour’s start of me, I found it impossible to concentrate my thoughts on any of the subjects that I had selected for meditation. Though nothing of the least consequence happened, my attention was distracted by a hundred trifling incidents of the wayside. Two big butterflies in black and white fluttered along in front of me, and they were like young war widows bearing the loss they had sustained for their country’s sake with cheerful resignation: so long as there were dances at Claridge’s and dressmakers in the Place Vendôme they were ready to swear that all was well with the world. A little cheeky bird hopped down the road, turning round every now and then jauntily as though to call my attention to her smart suit of silver grey. She looked like a neat typist tripping along from the station to her office in Cheapside. A swarm of saffron butterflies upon the droppings of an ass reminded me of pretty girls in evening frocks hovering round an obese financier. At the roadside grew a flower that was like the sweet William that I remembered in the cottage gardens of my childhood, and another had the look of a more leggy white heather. I wish, as many writers do, I could give distinction to these pages by the enumeration of the birds and flowers that I saw as I ambled along on my little Shan pony. It has a scientific air, and though the reader skips the passage it gives him a slight thrill of self-esteem to know that he is reading a book with solid fact in it. It puts you on strangely familiar terms with your reader when you tell him that you came across P. Johnsonii. It has a significance that is almost cabalistic; you and he (writer and reader) share a knowledge that is not common to all and sundry, and there is the sympathy between you that there is between men who wear masonic aprons or Old Etonian ties. You communicate with one another in a secret language. I should be proud to read in a footnote of a learned work on the botany or ornithology of Upper Burma, “Maugham, however, states that he observed F. Jonesia in the Southern Shan States.” But I know nothin
g of botany and ornithology. I could, indeed, fill a page with the names of all the sciences of which I am completely ignorant. A yellow primrose to me, alas! is not Primula vulgaris, but just a small yellow flower, ever so faintly scented with the rain, and grey balmy mornings in February when you have a funny little flutter in your heart, and the smell of the rich wet Kentish earth, and kind dead faces, and the statue of Lord Beaconsfield in his bronze robes in Parliament Square, and the yellow hair of a girl with a sweet smile, hair now grey and shingled.

  I passed a party of Shans cooking their dinner under a tree. Their wagons were placed in a circle round them, making a kind of laager, and the bullocks were grazing a little way off. I went on a mile or two and came upon a respectable Burman sitting at the side of the road and smoking a cheroot. Round him were his servants, with their loads on the ground beside them, for he had no mules, and they were carrying his luggage themselves. They had made a little fire of sticks and were cooking the rice for his midday meal. I stopped while my interpreter had a chat with the respectable Burman. He was a clerk from Keng Tung on his way to Taunggyi to look for a situation in a government office. He had been on the road for eighteen days and with only four more to go looked upon his journey as nearly at an end. Then a Shan on horesback threw confusion among the thoughts I tried to marshal. He rode a shaggy pony, and his feet were bare in his stirrups. He wore a white jacket, and his coloured skirt was tucked up so that it looked like gay riding breeches. He had a yellow handkerchief bound round his head. He was a romantic figure cantering through that wide upland, but not so romantic as Rembrandt’s Polish Rider, who rides through space and time with so gallant a bearing. No living horseman has ever achieved that effect of mystery so that when you look at him you feel that you stand on the threshold of an unknown that lures you on and yet closes the way to you. Nor is it strange, for nature and the beauty of nature are dead and senseless things and it is only art that can give them significance.

  But with so much to distract me I could not but suspect that I should reach my journey’s end without after all having made up my mind upon a single one of the important subjects that I had promised myself to consider.

  THE SALWEEN

  WHEN I SET out in the early morning the dew was so heavy that I could see it falling, and the sky was grey; but in a little while the sun pierced through, and in the sky, blue now, the cumulus clouds were like white sea monsters gambolling sedately round the North Pole. The country was thinly peopled, and on each side of the road was the jungle. For some days we went through pleasant uplands by a broad track, unmetalled but hard, its surface deeply furrowed by the passage of bullock carts. Now and then I saw a pigeon and now and then a crow, but there were few birds. Then, leaving the open spaces, we passed through secluded hills and forests of bamboo. A bamboo forest is a graceful thing. It has the air of an enchanted wood, and you can imagine that in its green shade the princess, heroine of an Eastern story, and the prince, her lover, might very properly undergo their incredible and fantastic adventures. When the sun shines through and a tenuous breeze flutters its elegant leaves, the effect is charmingly unreal: it has a beauty not of nature, but of the theatre.

  At last we arrived at the Salween. This is one of the great rivers that rise far up in the Tibetan steppes, the Bramahputra, the Irrawaddy, the Salween, and the Mekhong, and roll southwards in parallel courses to pour their mighty waters into the Indian Ocean. Being very ignorant, I had never heard of it till I went to Burma, and even then it was nothing to me but a name. It had none of the associations that are forever attached to such rivers as the Ganges, the Tiber, and the Guadalquivir. It was only as I went along that it gained a meaning to me, and with a meaning, mystery. It was a measure of distance, we were seven days from the Salween, then six; it seemed very remote; and at Mandalay I had heard people say:

  “Don’t the Rogerses live on the Salween? You must go and stay with them when you cross.”

  “Oh, my dear fellow,” someone expostulated, “they live right down on the Siamese frontier; he won’t be going within three weeks’ journey of them.”

  And when we passed some rare traveller on the road perhaps my interpreter after talking to him would come and tell me that he had crossed the Salween three days before. The water was high but was going down; in bad weather it was no joke crossing. “Beyond the Salween” had a stirring sound, and the country seemed dim and aloof. I added one little impression to another, a detached fact, a word, an epithet, the recollection of an engraving in an old book, enriching the name with associations as the lover in Stendhal’s book decks his beloved with the jewels of his fancy, and soon the thought of the Salween intoxicated my imagination. It became the Oriental river of my dreams, a broad stream, deep and secret, flowing through wooded hills, and it had romance, and a dark mystery so that you could scarcely believe that it rose here and there poured itself into the ocean, but that, like a symbol of eternity, it flowed from an unknown source to lose itself at last in an unknown sea.

  We were two days from the Salween; then one. We left the high road and took a rocky path that wound through the jungle in and out of the hills. There was a heavy fog, and the bamboos on each side were ghostly. They were like the pale wraiths of giant armies that had fought desperate wars in the beginning of the world’s long history, and now, lowering, waited in ominous silence, waited and watched for one knew not what. But every now and then, straight and imposing, rose dimly the shadow of a tall, an immensely tall tree. An unseen brook babbled noisily, but for the rest silence surrounded one. No birds sang, and the crickets were still. One seemed to go stealthily, as though one had no business there, and dangers encompassed one all about. Spectral eyes seemed to watch one. Once when a branch broke and fell to the ground, it was with so sharp and unexpected a sound that it startled one like a pistol shot.

  But at last we came out into the sunshine and soon passed through a bedraggled village. Suddenly I saw the Salween shining silvery in front of me. I was prepared to feel like stout Cortez on his peak and was more than ready to look upon that sheet of water with a wild surmise, but I had already exhausted the emotion it had to offer me. It was a more ordinary and less imposing stream than I had expected; indeed, then and there, it was no wider than the Thames at Chelsea Bridge. It flowed without turbulence, swiftly and silently.

  The raft (two dugouts on which was built a platform of bamboos) was at the water’s edge, and we set about unloading the mules. One of them, seized with a sudden panic, bolted for the river and before anyone could stop him plunged in. He was carried away on the current. I would never have thought that that turbid, sluggish stream had such a power. He was swept along the beach swiftly, swiftly, and the muleteers shouted and waved their arms. We would see the poor brute struggling desperately, but it was inevitable that he would be drowned, and I was thankful when a bend of the river robbed me of the sight of him. When with my pony and my personal effects I was ferried across the stream I looked at it with more respect, and since the raft seemed to me none too secure I was not sorry when I reached the other side.

  The bungalow was on the top of the bank. It was surrounded by lawns and flowers. Poinsettias enriched it with their brilliant hues. It had a little less than the austerity common to the bungalows of the P.W.D., and I was glad that I had chosen this place to linger at for a day or two in order to rest the mules and my own weary limbs. From the windows the river, shut in by the hills, looked like an ornamental water. I watched the raft going backwards and forwards, bringing over the mules and their loads. The muleteers were cheerful because they were to get their rest and I had given the headman a trifling sum so that they could have a treat.

  Then, their duties accomplished and the servants having unpacked my things, peace descended upon the scene, and the river, empty as though man had never adventured up its winding defiles, regained its dim remoteness. There was not a sound. The day waned, and the peace of the water, the peace of the tree-clad hills, and the peace of the evening were three exq
uisite things. There is a moment just before sundown when the trees seem to detach themselves from the dark mass of the jungle and become individuals. Then you cannot see the wood for the trees. In the magic of the hour they seem to acquire a life of a new kind, so that it is not hard to imagine that spirits inhabit them and with dusk they will have the power to change their places. You feel that at some uncertain moment some strange thing will happen to them and they will be wondrously transfigured. You hold your breath waiting for a marvel the thought of which stirs your heart with a kind of terrified eagerness. But the night falls; the moment has passed, and once more the jungle takes them back. It takes them back as the world takes young people who, feeling in themselves the genius which is youth, hesitate for an instant on the brink of a great adventure of the spirit, and then, engulfed by their surroundings, sink back into the vast anonymity of human kind. The trees again become part of the wood; they are still and, if not lifeless, alive only with the sullen and stubborn life of the jungle.

  The spot was so lovely, and the bungalow with its lawns and trees so homelike and peaceful, that for a moment I toyed with the notion of staying there not a day but a year, not a year but all my life. Ten days from a railhead and my only communication with the outside world the trains of mules that passed occasionally between Taunggyi and Keng Tung, my only intercourse the villagers from the bedraggled village on the other side of the river, and so to spend the years away from the turmoil, the envy and bitterness and malice of the world, with my thoughts, my books, my dog and my gun and all about me the vast, mysterious, and luxuriant jungle. But alas, life does not consist only of years, but of hours, the day has twenty-four, and it is no paradox that they are harder to get through than a year; and I knew that in a week my restless spirit would drive me on, to no envisaged goal, it is true, but on as dead leaves are blown hither and thither to no purpose by a gusty wind. But being a writer (no poet, alas! but merely a writer of stories) I was able to lead for others a life I could not lead for myself. This was a fit scene for an idyll of young lovers, and I let my fancy wander as I devised a story to fit the tranquil and lovely scene. But, I do not know why, unless it is that in beauty is always something tragic, my invention threw itself into a perverse mould and disaster fell upon the thin wraiths of my imagination.