Dragon Apparent, page 30
We were still eating when the chief’s messenger came back with the only dog on offer. It was a poor forlorn animal, suffering probably from some wasting disease, and an enormous price was demanded.
As there was no dog to be had from these intermediaries, there was nothing for it but to go to the source itself, even if it meant another stiff climb on foot. Instead of turning left, therefore, at the junction of the main road to Luang Prabang, we took the right-hand fork towards Xien Khouang, which, although it led us out of our way, went right through the heart of Meo country in Laos. Shortly after, we came up with a Meo family, who were struggling up a hill loaded down like beasts of burden with their possessions. The Meos threw down their bundles and looked us over with puzzled amusement. One of them, who wore pigtails to show that he was the head of the family, came over, cut the choice centre out of a sugar cane he was carrying and presented it to us, roaring with laughter. This was typical Meo conduct. The Meo is grateful to strangers for amusing him with their clownish faces and ridiculous clothes, and his first impulse is to look round for something to give them. Shouting with joy, the children leaped into the car and were cuffed out again by their father. The woman who, if a Thai or a Laotian, would have stood apart with downcast eyes, bent down to examine Dupont’s sandals. She wore several pounds in weight of solid silver jewellery round her neck and had had her head recently shaved.
Meo finery at its best is the most extravagantly colourful in Indo-China. The women are stiff with embroidery and heavy silver necklaces and chains, and are half-extinguished by enormous turbans that look like Chinese lanterns. But this family was in its workaday clothes, as its head was very anxious to explain to Dupont. They had been away a week, working in their opium-poppy fields, and now they were on their way home for a flying visit. Dupont asked about a dog, and the head of the family invited us to come up and see for ourselves, as he had no idea who was home and who wasn’t.
It was a long, slow climb up to the village, although the Meos, as they skipped along by our side, seemed in no way to notice the slope, nor their huge burdens. The coarse grass – usual legacy of Meo occupation – was replaced here by a noxious thorny scrub. For miles, in all directions from the village, nothing would grow but this ultimate of austere vegetations. This village was at the last stage before it would have to be moved. The fields under cultivation were now so far away that the villagers lived dispersed in temporary shelters where they worked. Very soon they would be too far from the village to return at all and it would be moved, ten or fifteen miles, always south; leaving behind the prairie grass and scrub. It only wanted the Mans to arrive here from Tonkin – the Mans cultivate on Meo lines between 1000 and 3000 feet – to reproduce eventually in Laos the denuded wilderness of southern China.
The Meo village consisted of nothing but a few most decrepit hovels. They were the lowest and the most barbarous examples of human dwellings that it would be possible to find. Why should the Meos be the most elegantly dressed and the worst housed people in the country? They are superb at the few handicrafts they undertake, but they just can’t be bothered about how they are sheltered or how they sleep. There is no compulsion; no household genie – like those of the Mois – demanding high standards of order and cleanliness in the house; no canons of taste and refinement spreading slowly downwards from an idly exquisite aristocracy, since all Meos are kept hard at work; no spirit of bourgeois emulation, since this is total democracy, with no betters to imitate. The Meos have only themselves to please, and the result is anarchy.
In the hovel we were taken to, the contents of a thousand schoolboys’ pockets lay strewn about; the lengths of string, the broken penknives, the buttons, the mirror glass, the tins, the bottles and the burned-out lamp bulbs. Here was accumulated the jackdaw harvesting, the valuable glittering rubbish which was all a Meo wanted of civilisation, and which he was free to take, while leaving the civilisation itself severely alone. What foolish, generous people, these town-dwellers were!
Our host’s wife, a child of fifteen, was lying with her baby on a heap of rags in the corner. The baby was sick, he said, but the only thing necessary was to keep it away from the light – and air – as much as possible. Most Meo babies die in their first two years, and one wonders what would have happened by now to the fertile land of Indo-China, if they didn’t.
There was a gun in the corner – a muzzle-loader of the kind it takes a Meo two years to make. They are copied from the guns first supplied by the Jesuits to the Chinese, but are turned out by an endlessly laborious process involving boring out a solid bar by twirling a white-hot iron in it. It was enormously long, like an old-fashioned Arab stove-pipe gun, and when Dupont took notice of it the Meo offered to show it to him in use. We went outside and he loaded it with powder and shot he made himself. This process took about five minutes. Before pressing the trigger he warned us to stand well away because of the muzzle blast. The target was a small banana-leaf, skewered against a bank at twenty paces. There was a tremendous bang when he fired, but the leaf remained intact. He blamed this on the maize-spirit which we had just drunk, and was quite delighted when Dupont, giving a demonstration with his American light carbine, also missed.
There were no dogs at all at this village. They were all down at the poppy fields with their owners, the Meo said.
* * *
Luang Prabang lies at the end of a long, curling descent from the mountains and through smoking bamboo groves, on the banks of the Mekong. It is built into a tongue of land formed by the confluence with the river of a tributary; a small, somnolent and sanctified Manhattan Island. A main street has turnings down to the river on each side and a pagoda at every few yards, with a glittering roof and doors and pillars carved with a close pattern of gilded and painted designs. There is an infallible sense of colour, a blending of old gold and turquoise and of many greys; but the bonzes are continually at work, painting and carving and refurbishing, so that everything is just a little too new (an extraordinary complaint in Laos), too spruce, too odorous of freshly applied varnish. The roof finials glisten with newly applied glass and china mosaic. The ancient, blunted features of lions and dragons get regular scrubbings, have their teeth painted dead white and are refitted, as required, with new eyes of green glass. A year or two’s neglect might greatly improve Luang Prabang.
For all the briskness with which its holy places are maintained, the silence in Luang Prabang is only disturbed by the distant, classroom sounds of bonzes chanting in Pali, and the slow, mild booming of gongs. It is the hometown of the siesta and the Ultima Thule of all French escapists in the Far East. Europeans who come here to live soon acquire a certain, recognisable manner. They develop quiet voices, and gentle, rapt expressions. This is accompanied by the determined insouciance of the New Year’s reveller. It is an attitude which is looked for and is put on like a false nose or a carnival hat. Laosised Frenchmen are like the results of successful lobotomy operations – untroubled and mildly libidinous. They salt their conversation with Laotian phrases, all of which express a harmoniously negative outlook. Bo pen nhang, which is continually to be heard, means no more than, ‘It doesn’t matter’. But said in Laotian it takes on the emphasis of a declaration of faith. Single men instantly take to themselves Laotian wives, completing their bride’s happiness with the present of a superb bicycle, covered with mascots and pennants, and with chaplets of artificial flowers round the hub-caps, instead of the leather, dust-removing strap one sees in Europe. Several painters have retired here to escape the world, and to produce an occasional tranquil canvas, but Luang Prabang has not yet found a Gauguin.
On the day after our arrival I was invited home by Dupont to meet his wife, whose bicycle was still in pieces when he got back. They lived in a charming Mediterranean sort of house that had nestled down well among the pagodas. It was full of animals, including a large, handsome, domesticated goat that delighted to lurk behind furniture and charge unsuspecting guests.
Madame Dupont was pretty and gay, tall for a Laotian and evidently as nearly European in type as Dupont had been able to find. They seemed very attached to each other. Dupont assured me that jealousy was quite unknown in Laos, and that his wife not only expected him to have adulterous adventures while away from home, but actually advised him in the precautions to take. He did not know whether she allowed herself similar liberties, but thought it likely that she did. At all events he didn’t see how he could very well show himself less civilised about it than was she. I was sorry not to be able to understand anything his wife said, except the inevitable bo pen nhang which was repeated several times. In a polite effort to make me feel at home, Madame Dupont brought out the family snapshot album and we turned the pages together. There were one or two photographs, evidently taken by her husband, of not fully dressed ladies who were also not Madame. She drew my attention to these, giggling slightly.
After supper, an army officer came in with another Laotian lady. Speaking in an extraordinary whisper, he told me that she was a princess – a member of the royal family – and entitled to a parasol of five tiers. He admitted, quite frankly, that there was no shortage of princesses in Luang Prabang, and all genuine. They had been friends for fifteen years now, he whispered, although they had never troubled to marry … why, he couldn’t think. It was easy enough. Dupont agreed with him here, mentioning the case of a subordinate of his who had recently arrived. ‘At six o’clock,’ Dupont said, ‘he expressed the wish to get married. My wife went out to look for a suitable girl, and was back with one by six-thirty. At seven the bonzes came and performed a marriage ceremony which took half an hour. At seven-thirty we opened a bottle of champagne and drank to the health of the bride and bridegroom, and by eight they were already in bed.’
The evening was rounded off by a routine visit to the local opium den, which, probably by design, was as decrepit and sinister as a waxworks exhibit. We stayed only a few minutes in this green-lit, melodramatic establishment, but it was clear that the unprofitable puff at the pipe was not to be avoided. One had to make some show of going to the devil.
I was lodged in the minor palace of the Conseiller de la République, the senior French official in Northern Laos, a Monsieur Leveau. The Conseiller was a man whose shyness and slight reserve of manner failed to mask a quite extraordinary hospitality. He never, for instance, issued a formal invitation to a meal, preferring with an air of casual assumption to say something like: ‘Of course, you’ll be dining at home tonight.’ Monsieur Leveau was married to a Laotian wife, to whom I was not presented, and the huge official building always seemed strangely empty. We dined facing each other across a darkly gleaming wasteland of ambassadorial table. Sometimes a Laotian servant stole into the room carrying dishes; trailing behind him the distant sounds of a domestic interior. These were immediately sealed off by the closing of the door, leaving us to the vault-like silences of the huge room. As we sat there the light bulbs gave out in various parts of the room and were swiftly replaced. In Luang Prabang the electric current was switched on at the same time as the water was turned off – at seven-thirty. But the result was no more than a feeble striving of the filament, and the lamp in my bedroom produced a light considerably less than that of one candle. Monsieur Leveau partly got over this difficulty by enormously over-running lamps intended for a much lower voltage, but they did not last long.
After dinner, when the Conseiller relaxed for an hour, he could sometimes be persuaded to talk about some of his problems. These were the chronic worries of the Issarak and the Viet-Minh. To the west of Luang Prabang the frontier with Burma started, and Burmese irregulars crossed it from time to time. Chinese opium smugglers conducted a regular trade with the Meos, and turned pirate when business was bad. But now that the communists had taken over in Yunnan there were some signs of this traffic slackening. And then the Meos themselves. They were passing like a blight through the mountains. Leveau’s ambition was to change their agricultural habits. If they could be persuaded to come down to 1000 feet he could give them irrigated rice-fields to cultivate, and had offered to provide the buffaloes to do the work.
I brought up the question of the Khas. The Khas are the aboriginals of Laos and are, in fact, Moï tribes under another name. Several hundred years ago they were conquered and enslaved by the Laotian nation, and now Khas were to be seen hanging about the market places of Laotian towns and villages, utterly broken and degenerate; as helpless as the pathetic remnants of once powerful Indian tribes in North America. I asked if it was true that Laotians still possessed Kha slaves. Leveau smiled in his tolerant and sceptical Laotian way and said that it all depended what you meant by slavery. The slavery of the old West Indian plantation kind was unknown in the Far East. For superstitious if for no other reasons, the peoples of Indo-China always trod very gently when it came to oppression of others. The spirits of their ancestors had to be reckoned with, and they themselves if pushed too far might be forced to revenge themselves by the efficient, occult methods strangers were always imagined to possess. He cited the well-known fact of a collective bad- conscience on the part of the Vietnamese, who conduct special sacrifices and offer symbolical rent to the spirits of the unknown aboriginal possessors of the land they now occupy. Leveau believed that slavery did occasionally exist, but that it took more the form of a racial aristocracy maintaining a subject people in a condition of moral inferiority. The fact that a labourer happened to receive no money for his services hardly entered into the question, since we were not dealing with a money society and no one in Laos worked for more than his keep.
Leveau mentioned, as I had already heard, that there is evidence that the Khas before they were overrun possessed great artistic ability. He showed me as a proof a large bronze drum he possessed. This was identical with one in possession of the Musée de L’Homme which is described as being used by the Karens of Burma in the ritual conjuration of rain. A similar one illustrated in Maurice Collis’s book The First Holy One, is represented as a Chinese War Drum of the Han Dynasty. The drum, which was cast by the cire perdue method, is decorated with an almost chaotic richness of design sometimes found in Chinese metal mirrors. It depicts in the greatest detail the activities of a primitive people, living by hunting, fishing and rice-growing. There are processions led by dancers with castanets and accompanied by musicians playing the Kène. Their long-houses are depicted as are crescent-shaped boats full of warriors in feathered head-dresses, carrying bows, javelins and axes. Birds and animals are shown in profusion, and the species are recognisable. According to the information of Monsieur Victor Goloubew of the École Française d’Extrème-Orient, these drums were found in large quantities in a burial ground in Tonkin and date from the period of Chinese domination, about two thousand years ago. The same authority affirms that the art in question is related to that of the Dyaks, and of the Bataks of Sumatra, while the technique of the workmanship is Chinese. This suggests that these people together with the Moïs, the Khas and the Karens may all once have been united in a homogeneous bronze-age culture – strongly influenced by the Chinese – which was probably at a far higher level than their present ones.
It remains to be said that such drums as have come into the ownership of citizens of Luang Prabang, in sad and symbolical descent from their original high function, now serve as cocktail tables.
It was fitting that at Luang Prabang the impetus of travel should have spent itself. Not even convoys ever came as far as this. Groups of unfortunate men occasionally set off on foot and walked for as long as three weeks through jungle trails to relieve isolated posts. Other arrivals and departures were by a weekly DC3 plying between Luang Prabang and Vientiane. It was booked up well ahead.
Down at the riverside the story was much the same as at Vientiane. There were pirogues which supposedly made regular journeys, but no one was prepared to commit himself to positive information about them. One authority went so far as to say that it was out of the question to hope to travel north by pirogue because the river was too low at this time of the year. I had just thanked him when the engine of what looked like a totally abandoned hulk, lying in an oily pool not far away, suddenly burst into wheezy activity. One of the crew of two said that they would be leaving in half an hour. Bound for where? – Vientiane? No … Xieng Khong – for the unnavigable north, of course. All the space had been reserved for a body of ex-pirates who had changed sides and had now, it was said, demanded to be sent back to fight their former allies.
While I was slowly piecing together this jigsaw of information in pidgin-French, the brand-new patriots arrived for embarkation; a most apathetic looking body of men. In their ill-fitting uniforms they were standardised; deprived of individuality by a common factor of misery, an ingrained habit of expressionless stoicism. Silently they filed up the gangplank and filled the dim interior of the pirogue. It was difficult to believe that the fire of conviction burned in any of these breasts, and I felt sorry for the French NCO who was being sent back in charge.
But Monsieur Leveau said that there would also be a pirogue going south one day, and to save me from being victimised by Chinese cat-and-mouse tactics he sent for the owner and asked him when the boat would leave. With gentle satisfaction the Chinese immediately replied that the engine had broken down. Monsieur Leveau had been as ready for this as I had been, and said that he would send a mechanic down to inspect the engine. To this the Chinese replied that the repair was already in hand, and would be done by tomorrow – approximately. (The latter word, with which the Chinese protect their flanks in argument, corresponds to an equivalent in their own language – Ch’a pu to – and is never out of their mouths.) And after that? the Conseiller asked. The Chinese thought and said that he would have to give the boat a trial. This would take another day – approximately. And then? Well, then he would have to see about getting some cargo, which, after all, depended upon other people, and not on him. Shaking his head sadly, Leveau sent him away. There was something indomitable about this clearcut determination to have no truck with Western ideas about time and organisation. Leveau told him to report every day as to the progress that was being made. But each day, the news of a difficulty resolved was accompanied by another protective imponderable, and then the trump card was slyly produced: the reported lowness of the water through the rapids which might make it impossible to go as far as Vientiane. It was quite clear that nothing short of the direct action of a War Lord or a Commissar could have compelled this man to go against his national tradition and commit himself to a definite promise.
