Dragon Apparent, page 10
The Moïs cultivate rice by the ‘dry’ method, which is to say that they burn down parts of the forest just before the beginning of the rainy season, drop their rice seed into the holes in the ground and leave the rains to do the rest. The name Moï is Vietnamese for ‘savage’. The Moïs have been enslaved by all the technically superior races, Siamese, Laotians and Cambodians, among others, who have come into contact with them. Far from having derived any benefit from this association with their superiors, the greater the degree of external influence the more deplorable the condition of the Moïs who have suffered it.
The free survivors seem to the casual observer to lead gay and sociable existences, much occupied with gluttonous feasting and the consumption of rice-spirit. This hearty manner of living is said to depend upon and be proportionate to the tribe’s inaccessibility. Unless compelled to, Moïs do not work for wages and their civilised neighbours are shocked by what they consider their incurable sloth. Village labours, however, such as the erection of houses or the clearing of the forest, are undertaken communally and with great zest. The Moïs are art-collectors, and wealth consists in the possession of gongs, drums and jars, some of which are of ancient Chinese or Cham origin and therefore of great value, even in the West. Occasionally such museum pieces are wheedled out of them by Europeans who tend to remain in ignorance of the treasure they have stumbled upon, under the impression that they have acquired nothing more than an interesting example of Moï artisanship.
Apart from being used to store rice-wine, jars are accumulated in the hope that spirits will take up their residence in them. When a spirit moves into a jar, the fact is revealed to the owner in a dream, but official recognition is only accorded after an examination by experts for certain external signs. The jar thus honoured is not necessarily an antique, although the spirits usually show artistic discrimination. In any case the jar becomes a valuable piece of property and may be sold, complete with spirit, for a large number of buffaloes. As the spirit, or talismanic virtue, is thought of in some way as being divisible, a handle is frequently broken off when a jar is sold, and worshipped in the same way the complete jar was before. A considerable inter-tribal trade exists in such jars, and expert appraisers and negotiators carry out the transactions. They are said to exact large profits.
According to scientific investigators, such as Doctor Jouin, the most extraordinary thing about the Moïs is their unique racial memory. It is even suggested that a concerted study of their sagas (which are on the point of perishing), might throw an unprecedented light on man’s existence in prehistoric times. The Rhadés, one of the least degenerate of the tribes, possess, according to the doctor, a name for and a description of the mammoth and the megatherium as well as the hippopotamus – which has been extinct in the Far East in the historic epoch.
The unique value, it would appear, of the Moï saga resides in the fact that it is ritual and sacrosanct. It may be recited only in certain specified circumstances, and without the slightest modification. Even if words and phrases have lost their meaning, are mutilated or incomplete, no attempt, under powerful religious sanction, must be made at restoration. The sagas, therefore, although involving great interpretational difficulties, have remained a treasure-house of information relating to the remote past. Events of the last thousand years or so seem to have made little impression on the Moï imagination. The brilliant Indianised civilisations of the Khmers and the Chams are hardly referred to. Angkor Thom is the work of ‘strangers recently arrived in the country’. The sagas describe the Moïs own establishment in Indo-China after leaving their island homes at an unknown period, which must antedate the fifth century bc, since at that time they are already referred to in the annals of the kingdom of Fu-Nan.
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The non-scientific visitor appears to be most impressed by the innumerable rituals with which the Moïs surround their existence. The most onerous of these are concerned with death. Those which are associated with good health are the least important and tend to be quite perfunctory because to die of sickness is a sign of the spirits’ favour and ensures a comfortable hereafter in the bowels of the earth. Doctor Jouin had the greatest difficulty in persuading the Moïs to accept any kind of medical treatment, as they pointed out to him that he wanted to deprive them of the chance of a ‘good’ death, exposing them therefore, when cured, to the possibility of a ‘bad’ death by accident or violence. Such a ‘bad’ death condemns the ghost to wander in eternal wretchedness in the heavens.
Lepers are regarded as having been born under a lucky star, as they do no work, are fed by the tribe and are certain of an exemplary end.
The death rites, on the contrary, are prolonged over two years and are so costly that a single death may exhaust the equivalent of the village income for one month, whereas an epidemic, by causing it to use up in sacrifices the whole of its reserves, is certain to bring starvation in its train.
In arranging their ceremonies the Moïs pay great attention to the type of death the defunct has suffered. There are specially complicated and expensive rites for those who have died from various kinds of violence, who have died in a foreign country, have disappeared and are presumed dead, for young children, lunatics and, of course, for women dead in childbirth who are believed to turn into revengeful demons. The village is surrounded by open tombs, the occupants of which are ‘fed’ daily and kept informed of all family affairs.
From the sheer multiplicity of the rites, all of which require alcoholic consumption, the intriguing side-issue emerges that respectability and drunkenness are allied. The upright man gives evidence of his ritual adequacy by being drunk as often as possible, he is respected by all for his piety, a pattern held up to youth. The words nam lu uttered in grave welcome to the stranger in a Moï village, and meaning let us get drunk together, have all the exhortatory value of an invitation to common prayer. Moï villages are said to be one of the few places in the world where the domestic animals, dogs, pigs and hens, having fed in the fermented mash from the sacred jars, are to be seen in a state of helpless intoxication. Conviviality is the rule; a norm of polite conduct. Passers-by are begged to join in Moï orgies of eating and drinking and it is bad taste – that is offensive to the spirits – to eat or drink less than is provided by the fearsome liberality of the hosts. To prevent any possibility of the visitor’s unwittingly committing this kind of discourtesy, or remaining in a state of disreputable sobriety, an attendant squats at his side keeping a careful check on his consumption and ensuring that he drinks at least the minimum measure of three cow’s horns.
The other aspect of the Moï way of life that seems to have created the greatest impression upon those who have studied them is that, although, by occidental standards, crimes are few, the conceptions of right and wrong seem to be quite incomprehensible to them. In their place, and incidentally governing conduct by the most rigid standards, are the notions of what is expedient and what is inexpedient. The Moï is concerned rather with policy than justice. Piety and fervour have no place in his ritual observations. Contrition is meaningless. There is no moral condemnation in Moï folklore of those who commit anti-social acts.
All this as well as the elaborate ceremonials accompanied by their ritual drunkenness is explained by the Moï conception of a universe dominated by a number of powerful spirits who, together with the manes of their own ancestors, control their destinies. The relationship is a contractual one; the spirits and the manes appearing rather in the light of strict and exacting creditors. Broadly speaking there is nothing either particularly benevolent or hostile in the attitude of these ghostly autocrats towards their human feudatories. All they claim are their just debts – the ceremonies. No more and no less than these. As long as they are scrupulously paid, all goes well with the individual, the family and the tribe. Drought or deluge, ‘the bad death’, epidemics – in fact, misfortunes of all kinds are merely indications that the rites have been violated, and the only remedy lies in finding the offender, and compelling him to put the matter right by providing the prescribed reparation.
The view taken of human conduct and its effects is totally opposed to the religious teachings of the West, which accept that the wicked man prospers and that the moral debts of those who break all but the eleventh commandment are settled in another existence. Among the Moïs retribution is swift and terrestrial. The wicked – that is, the ritually negligent man – is quickly ruined. If he continues to pile up spiritual debts he is certain of a sudden death – the invariable sign that the ghostly creditors, becoming impatient, have claimed his soul for non-payment.
The thing works out in practice much better than one might expect. Crimes against the individual, such as theft or violence, are viewed as contravening the rites due to the plaintiff’s ancestral manes. The aggressor, however, is seen as no more than the instrument of one of the spirits who has chosen this way to punish the victim for some ritual inadequacy. The judge, therefore, reciting in verse the appropriate passage of common law, abstains from stern moralisation. Both sides are in the wrong, and rather illogically, it seems, the aggressor is sentenced to make material reparation and also – what is regarded as far more important – to provide the animals and liquor necessary for the ritual reparation to be paid to the offended spirits. The ritual reparation, of course, takes priority, and in cases of hardship may be paid for in instalments. The offender is compelled by law to take part in this feast which provides as a secondary function the means of reconciliation of the two parties.
There is no distinction among the Moïs between civil and criminal law and no difference is made between intentional and unintentional injury. If a man strikes another in a fit of temper or shoots him accidentally while out hunting, it is all the work of the spirits and the payment to be made has already been laid down. No eyebrows are lifted. It is just another human misfortune to be settled by a drinking bout at which the whole village gets tipsy. The Moïs do not apply the death penalty, since otherwise the community would expose itself to the vengeance of the ghost of the executed man. Two of the greatest crimes are the theft of water and of rice, which are under the protection of powerful spirits. Owing to the sacrilegious nature of such an offence, which exposes the community to the resentment of the spirits involved, the offender in this case is banished for life.
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The white colonist, in his treatment of the Moïs, has been at once both sentimental and predatory. The smaller administrators, disinterested – since they have nothing to lose whether the Moïs work or not – tend to regard them as delightful children. An outstanding example of this attitude was the celebrated Sabatier who refused to allow missionaries in his territory, had the bridges demolished when he heard that a high official was on his way to investigate the labour problem, and is said to have married three Moï wives.
After seeing the first effects of white encroachment in the Moï country, he went even further than this, advocating complete withdrawal and allowing the Moïs to live their lives in their own way. But the government found it impossible to refrain from meddling, from suppressing tribal warfare, judging, counting, taxing and above all – and fatally – making labour compulsory for the requirements of Europeans. It was the action of the planters who were determined to have labour for their plantations that defeated Sabatier.
The planters are a very small group of men; a few families who possess Indo-China’s richest fortunes. Their attitude towards the Moïs is probably identical with that of any of the old slave-owning aristocracies towards the producers of their wealth. It is one of utter contempt; without which effective exploitation would probably be impossible. In the past they have employed labour recruiters, paying high premiums for each man who could be induced or tricked into signing on for three or five years – a period of indenture which the labourer rarely survived. Coolies were kept under armed guard and thrashings were liberally administered. Sometimes they were re-sold and transported to the Pacific Islands. Recent attempts to temper these conditions have met with the most resolute opposition, the planters asking, pertinently as they believe, what after all is the purpose of a colony?
Thus the conflict between administrator and planter continues, and whatever mitigations of the Moïs’ lot may have taken place, the principle of compulsion persists. For the privilege of having the white newcomers in his country each adult male pays a tax in rice and must give up a number of days annually for labour on the plantations or roads. It is the infringement of the Moï’s liberty which is the fundamental vexation. For fifty days he is prevented from performing the rites, therefore compromising him heavily with the spirits, who demand to be repaid. There enters also the factor that in a finely balanced economy the loss to him and his family of this amount of time may make the difference between sufficiency and ruin. Moï society recalls that of Islam or the pre-Columbian civilisation of America in that every action of the individual from birth to death is rigidly controlled. It is a tightly unified system which has shown itself fairly successful in dealing with the internal life of the tribe, but brittle and without resistance to external shock. Moï customary law and the rites deal with every eventuality, and take into account every situation but one. The Moï has not been permitted the initiative to meet an attack from an unexpected quarter. If someone offends the village’s tutelary spirit, the thing can be put right without much trouble. But if a timber-cutting company with a concession comes along and cuts down the banyan tree that contains the spirit, and takes it away, what is to be done? It is the end of the world.
CHAPTER 8
Darlac
THE WHOLE DISTRICT of the Dak Lac is seen as if through dark glasses. There is not a great deal of colour. It is a study in smoky blues, greens and white. The light has a cool Nordic quality and the lake itself is an Icelandic vatyn with the mountain reflections blurred in the dim sparkle of the frosted surface. The islands seemed edged with ice, but this edging is a packed fringe of egrets and when an eagle drops among them the ice dissolves as the egrets rise, to reform again as they settle. One’s views of the lake seem always to be obtained through the spare branches of the frangipani or the lilas de Japon – negligent brush-strokes on silk, with a sparse adornment of white blossom.
In the morning the mountains float above a cauldron of mist in which islands slowly materialise, and along the near shore, below the administrator’s bungalow, the topmost branches of the trees are elegantly supported upon layers of vapour. Later the scene solidifies and the lake is seen to be encircled by mountains, covered to their peaks by a tight webbing of jungle. The water’s edge is feathered by bamboos. As the sun drops in the sky, its light is no longer reflected from the moss-like sheath of vegetation on the distant highlands, which, instead of glowing with yellow light, as they would in Northern climes, turn to the darkest of smoky blue. Fishing eagles turning against this dark background show their white underparts and the end of their dive is marked by a fountain rising from the water. At this hour the butterflies appear and fly down to the lake. They are black, slashed with lemon and as big as bats. Egrets pass in drifts on their way to roost. The last movement is a curved line of cranes, with black, heraldic silhouettes against the darkening sky. All day and all through the night the cool sound of gongs comes over the water from unseen Moï villages.
The administrator’s bungalow was built on a prominence by the lake’s verge. Standing on the balcony you could look down at the groups of white herons mincing through the shallows beneath, and flapping their wings in a sudden flurry of panic to free themselves from the entangling weeds just below the surface. The bungalow was surrounded by a defensive palisade and there was an inner belt planted with sharpened staves, their foot-long protruding points hidden in the grass. Below was a military post with a few Moï conscripts. The post stands at the head of a pass guarding the way to Ban Méthuot. At the other – the eastern end – of the winding, marshy valley is the coastal town of Nha Trang. But long before Nha Trang, and not very far, in fact, from the post at Dak Lac, are the first outposts of the Viet-Minh. Up to the present the Viet-Minh have not troubled to come up into the mountains. But one day my friends supposed they would and when they did it would certainly be up that valley, where every morning we could hear the schools of monkeys howling at the dawn.
Apart from the huts the Moï guards and their families lived in, there was only one other human habitation in sight. This was the Emperor’s new shooting box, in the process of completion, which crowned a pinnacle still higher than that of the administrator’s bungalow. It was less than Imperial in style; a cubic structure of vaguely Germanic inspiration. There was more of the pillbox than the pleasure-dome about it, an unconscious reflection, perhaps, of the unhappy times. A steamroller – a truly amazing apparition in such an environment – was flattening the surface of a well-laid asphalt road leading to the summit when I visited the site. It had been chosen, they said, so that His Majesty, when not actually hunting could have the satisfaction of watching herds of wild elephants from his windows. On the occasion when I made free with the Imperial viewpoint, it goes without saying that there were no elephants to be seen.
