Dragon Apparent, page 8
The Moïs went trotting off and reappeared with the rifles, carried smartly at the trail. Suéry took each gun, opened the breech mechanism, inspected it and looked along the barrels. He seemed pleased.
‘Ask them how many rounds of ammunition they have between them.’
Nha translated this and the Moïs shook their heads. They had none.
‘My God,’ Suéry said, ‘well what have they got to defend themselves with?’ The Moïs said they had a crossbow apiece. ‘Any arrows?’ Suéry wanted to know, with sarcasm. The Moïs said, yes, they had arrows and also coupe-coupes. ‘Very well,’ Suéry said. ‘Tell them to go and bring the coupe-coupes.’ The Moïs came trooping back with the coupe-coupes over their shoulders. They had heavy, curved blades, as sharp as razors, about eighteen inches long and could be used as knives or axes. ‘Good,’ Suéry said. ‘Now tell them they are to set out for Dak-Song immediately; get there as quickly as they can and bring help. I’ll give them a note for the Chef de la Poste.’
While Nha was trying to put this into their language you could see the Moïs’ faces cloud over. They just said they didn’t understand. This was the line they took and they stuck to it. The simple, polished bronze faces, until now good-natured and rather bewildered, suddenly emptied of expression. The light of comprehension went out, or rather, was switched off.
Suéry accepted defeat. He knew that nothing in the world would get those Moïs to walk along that jungle track in the dark. He asked Nha if he would go with one of the Moïs and Nha, looking slightly sick, said yes. But when the proposition was put to the Moïs they prepared a second line of retreat by saying that their sergeant had ordered them to stay there until he came back. And where was the sergeant? He was wounded and had gone away, where, they didn’t know. It was days, perhaps weeks since it happened, but he had told them to stay where they were, and stay they would. Did they not realise, said Nha becoming indignant, that a lieutenant was more important than a sergeant and that his orders would override any they had received? Once again the Moïs did not understand.
The lieutenant got up and said he would sleep in the hut.
The idea of spending the night in a Moï hut filled Nha with revulsion, as he told me as soon as the lieutenant was out of hearing. A hut that had been occupied by savages – imagine the smell. Well – I would soon see for myself. And there was another angle that had to be considered. Supposing bandits – or pirates as they were invariably called – happened to find the wrecked car. This would be the first place they would think of to look for us. Didn’t I realise that the lieutenant had been thinking of pirates when he decided against sleeping in the car? Only a few hours away there were several villages and the junction of various cross-country routes. Just the kind of place, in fact, where pirates could always be expected to hang about. He wasn’t thinking so much of the Viet-Minh as of pirates vulgaires mixed up with Japanese deserters. That’s what the Moï guards were there for. Naturally the pirates didn’t bother about such small fry; but if they knew we were here – oh malheureux! These dolorous exclamations of Nha’s were always accompanied by a bright smile. I’m sure that he wasn’t particularly impressed by the hazards to which we were exposed, but enjoyed, as people do, making the most of them. The next peril he produced was tigers, remarking with a gay conviction that, ‘les tigres vont causer avec nous ce soir’. I pointed out that the Moïs were still alive. He said that although the Moïs were disgusting savages they knew how to deal with tigers and we didn’t. Nha had all the distaste of the conservative, plains-dwelling Vietnamese for everything that had to do with forests or mountains and their inhabitants. The Vietnamese, like the Chinese, prefer their landscapes to possess the comfort of the familiar rather than the mystery of the unknown. Nha was already sickening for the ditches and rice-fields of Cochin-China.
Nha’s prejudices were, of course, unjustified. The Moï hut was spotless and contained no odours of any kind. It had been made in sections of plaited-bamboo, tied with lianas over a framework. Inside it felt very insecure. At every pace you felt as though your foot were going through the floor. The whole structure creaked and swayed. A large, circular, earthenware tray on the floor served as a hearth and Suéry wanted to light a fire to keep off the mosquitoes. Nha asked him if he thought we should advertise our presence. Suéry said it was either that or being eaten alive by the mosquitoes, and this was a bad area for malaria. They had a rare kind of mosquito up here that bred in running water, the anopheles minimus. There was none deadlier.
When we lit the fire we nearly choked ourselves with the smoke, but the Moïs rearranged the logs and the smoke died down leaving a faint odour of incense in the room. I went out and stood by the door. It was not quite dark. There was a huge owl flapping backwards and forwards across the clearing and nearby, in the undergrowth, a bird sang with a powerful nightingale-like song. I pulled the door across the opening, tied it in position with a length of liana and went to lie down.
Suéry had told Nha to have the Moïs take turns at a watch; but once again comprehension lapsed. No sooner had we stretched ourselves out by the fire than they stole past us and went into a partitioned-off section of the hut, and we saw them no more. I was sure they were thoroughly miserable at our presence, which was probably most offensive to the tutelary spirit of the hut, whom they lacked the means to placate by sacrifice.
Lying as close as I could get to the fire I was hot down one side and chilly on the other. The cool, night air came up through the bamboo floor and, however I lay, projections in the bamboo stuck into my back. Finally I began to doze lightly but was continually awakened, sometimes by somebody getting up and setting the hut asway; sometimes I was not sure by what. But then as I lay trying to collect my wits I would hear animal sounds, not loud and menacing, but casual, confident and none the less sinister; a cough, a sigh, or a soft, restless whining.
I came to painfully, somewhere about dawn, realising that I had been listening through increasing degrees of consciousness to what I had dreamily accepted as the noise of a shipyard at work. There was a regular industrial crash, made, as I had supposed, by a piledriver or a riveting machine. With consciousness fully returned and with it the realisation of where I was, it seemed unreasonable that this clamour should not stop. Nha was already awake. It was a bird, he said. I thought of a hornbill with the habits of a woodpecker. But no, Nha said, this was the cry of a bird and not the concussion of a gigantic bill against a hollow tree. It was a mystery I was never able to solve, as, however the sound was caused, I never heard it again. Familiar, though, from that time on was another form of salutation of the dawn, a huge demoniacal, whistling howl that started in first one and then another corner of the jungle until the air resounded with the rising and falling scream of sirens. These were screaming monkeys. They kept up the lunatic chorus for half an hour each morning.
* * *
We washed in some greenish water from a nearby stream. There was nothing to eat or drink; no evidence, in fact, to suggest the Moïs bothered about regular meals. Nha raised the question and one of the Moïs offered to go and shoot a monkey with his crossbow. We thanked him and prepared to leave. Suéry told Nha to stay with the car while he and I walked to Dak-Song. Owing to Nha’s perpetual grin, I could not see that he was not pleased with the prospect of being left behind, but Suéry knew him well enough to be able to tell. He asked Nha if he was afraid to stay by himself and Nha said, no, not if he didn’t have to stay the night. If he had to stay the night, well then – Oh malheureux! Suéry promised that whatever happened he would see to it that he was relieved by nightfall. Nha then asked Suéry if he would like to take the rifle – ‘in case you see any boars’. Suéry refused this very gallant offer and having presented the Moïs with a few cigarettes to cut up for their pipes, we started out.
I was glad of this opportunity to walk to Dak-Song, having felt that I wanted to form a closer contact with this unspoiled and unexplored forest than was possible in a closed-in car. It was like a splendid May morning in England, a little cool at first in the shade of the trees, but I knew that once the sun was high enough to shine on the road it would be very different.
The forest was as full of tender greens as an English woodland in early spring. It was temperate in its forms, placid almost, with occasional exuberances that, unsated by excess, one was able to appreciate. The air resounded with the morning songs of birds which were quite unlike any I had heard before. In the gardens of Saigon one was haunted by a monotonous piping. Here the birds produced more complicated melodies than the warblers of the West, impressing me not so much as in the case of our blackbird or nightingale, by the quality of a limited repertoire of notes, as by the variety and range of the melody, which in some cases could have easily been fitted into a formal, musical composition. It was as though a collection of mockingbirds had been taught European music by a Vietnamese artist on a bamboo flute. And besides these musical performers there were many more producing sheer noise; the rattling of a stick along iron railings, the escape of steam from a boiler, the squealing of brakes, a single, muted stroke on a gong. I never heard these bird sounds and songs again. Elsewhere in Indo-China great destruction is done to wildlife by indiscriminate burning of the forests by the tribes, and birds are, of course, hunted for food. It is possible that in this supposedly unpopulated area, marked on French maps as Région Inconnue, birds and animals exist which are not to be found elsewhere.
Unfortunately there was little to be seen. A few small honey-sucking birds fluttered about the lavender willowherb and we frequently saw a species rather smaller than a lark, black in colour and with a tail which looked like a single feather at the end of an eighteen-inch-long hair. It was difficult to understand as we watched it threading in and out the thick jungle foliage, how its evolution could have been assisted by this unhandy appendage. Once only we saw a hornbill, sombrely splendid in black and yellow, launch itself from a tree top and go swooping through a glade in a dashing, easy flight. On the wing there was nothing incongruous about its immense bill.
We were about five miles from Dak-Song when we had a very bad moment. For hours under the sun’s nearly vertical rays the jungle had become tamed and silent. Plodding through the red, shadeless dust, we were dirty and sweat-soaked. Suéry’s shirt was spattered with brown bloodstains. I had a bad thirst but still not bad enough to risk a drink out of a stream. Just ahead the track turned sharply to the left to avoid a small, low hill that was very densely wooded. From this as we approached there suddenly came a huge, shattering, calamitous sound. It seemed in some way incongruous, improper to this tranquil atmosphere of an overgrown corner of an English wood on an afternoon in a heat-wave. I judged the sound to be produced by two tigers quarrelling, perhaps, over a kill. The snarling intake of breath followed by the furious, coughing roars was unmistakable. Suéry looked as if he wanted to pretend that he had heard nothing. That was half the trouble, there was something ridiculous, as well as alarming, about the situation. Either of us alone might have retreated up the road as quickly as we could, but together we were obliged to go on. It would have been no more seemly to show alarm than at the casual approach of a bull while crossing a field in either of our native lands. As we strode on I began to calculate the number of steps (thirty) that it would take us to reach the point of maximum danger and the number (two hundred) before we could start to breathe easily again.
But now a distressing complication awaited us. We reached the corner and turned left, but the track instead of going on straight ahead, curved immediately to the right. The chilling sounds broke out again, very close now, and it was quite evident that my two hundred yards, instead of taking us to safety would be fully employed in skirting the base of the hillock and that during that time we should be at roughly an even distance from the tigers. And this was how it turned out. We walked on round the hairpin bend expecting at every moment to see the animals come bounding down into the road in front of us. Every few seconds there was another outburst of roars. Our preoccupied silence was the only indication that we realised that anything unusual was happening. Glancing from side to side for a possible way of escape, I confirmed what I already knew, that the trees were as un-climbable as the columns of a Gothic cathedral. Perhaps half a mile further on Suéry broke the silence. ‘They never attack in daytime,’ he said.
This, it seemed, was one of the accepted fallacies of bush-life in Indo-China. The republican guard at Dak-Song when we arrived said the same thing. ‘I hardly ever drive along the track without seeing one. Shot some beauties. They never attack you in daylight. Rarely attack human beings at all.’
The latter assertion is probably correct but I was only allowed two days in which to delude myself with the former. At Ban Méthuot one of the first French officials I met had been mauled by a tiger while coming out of his garden in the town at midday. The tiger was probably old and decrepit as it only ripped up the man’s thigh in a desultory fashion before making off down the main street in the direction of the municipal offices and the church.
* * *
Dak-Song was a sun-scorched forest-clearing; a few Polynesian huts, and a pile-raised long-house used by Moï conscripts as a barracks. A strange face in such a place is an extraordinary event and Moï children ran screaming to their parents at our approach. The republican guards in charge of the post lived dismally in the huts. There were no amenities of any kind, no shop, canteen or bar. At more or less weekly intervals the convoy to Ban Méthuot passed through, and the checking of vehicles and passes, occupying perhaps one hour, was their only routine activity. They had endless time to devote to the sad reflections that are the occupational disease of colonial soldiering. The staleness of existence couldn’t be imagined the Chef de la Poste said. The only thing you could do was to go out and shoot a tiger or a gaur, or something like that. Even then you couldn’t call it sport. They were too tame. They came and gave themselves up. Committed suicide. The other day he had seen a herd of gaur in a clearing nearby. He had just driven up to them in his jeep, picked out the biggest one and shot it like that. The Chef sighed, thinking perhaps of weekend partridge shooting in France.
Our host apologised for a splendid lunch of wild poultry, the flesh of which was very white and sweet and Suéry said that he would try to let him have some tinned stew next time he came through. The drinks were, of course, warm. It always surprised me that the Frenchman in the tropics lacking ice never made an attempt to cool liquids by keeping them, as the Spanish do, in porous vessels.
There was a sawmill at the post and the manager came over for coffee. He had the gentle, humorous cynicism of a man who, having started out with a fund of ideals, has found them not quite sufficient to cover all life’s opportunities. Since heart-burnings were the order at the guards’ table the manager contributed to the tale of frustration by a description of some of his difficulties. The forest was full of Sao, a quite remarkable wood, impervious as he put it, to destructive agents, and favoured by the Chinese of old for the manufacture of their war-junks. There the wood was, enough to make one’s fortune ten times over and yet there was no way of getting it down to Saigon. ‘A hundred logs,’ said the manager, ‘and I’d leave you fellows to rot where you are and clear off back to France.’ One of the guards said that it only meant waiting a short time now, ‘till the roads are open again’. After that he could ship all the wood in Dak-Song. But the manager laughed. It would be no good at all if the roads were open. That would bring prices right down, only spoil things. What he wanted to find was some way to get the wood down there with the roads closed – like they did with the rice round Saigon. He’d have to find a smart Chinese that could take care of it for him with the Viet-Minh.
After lunch the Chef de la Poste showed us round and we happened to be there when a party of unusually handsome Moïs arrived. Instead of being dressed as those of Dak-Song were, in tattered European shirts, these were splendid in tasselled loin cloths, earplugs and necklaces of beads and teeth. They had with them a pretty girl of about sixteen, with small, sharp breasts and the everted top lip of a child. One of the guards made discreet inquiries about her, but on learning that she was married, lost interest. They were members of a local tribe called M’nongs, a mysterious people the Chef said, who had only made their submission in 1939 since when they had assassinated eight administrators who had gone to live among them. Why? The Chef shrugged his shoulders. Nobody seemed to know. The M’nongs were quiet, well-behaved people but it was easy to upset them in some way or other without realising it. You did the wrong thing and you disappeared. For an administrator it must have been a bit like living in one of those police states, except that there was no clue as to what was expected of you. You would be getting on like a house on fire, a tribal blood-brother; you might even, as he had heard some of them did, marry two or three native wives. And then you slipped up in some way and nobody ever saw you again. By the way, the Chef added, they had one custom here it might interest us to hear about. The men were considered the property of the women, so that a mother bought a husband for her daughter from a woman who had a son to sell. The price in these days, the Chef said, was about 800 piastres, so that in the case of a woman with a dozen sons, ‘Elle reçoit du fric – n’est ce pas?’
If the Vietnamese had been indifferent, these M’nongs were oblivious. They did their business, which seemed to consist of paying a tax in rice, through one of the tame Dak-Song Moïs. We walked round them looking at their ornaments but none of them so much as glanced at us. We might have been transparent. It was a coincidence that after this first encounter with the noble savage of Indo-China as he is when practically untouched by Western influence, only ten minutes should pass before I was given the opportunity of seeing the other side of the medal. The native guards brought in a half-crazed creature in rags who had escaped from one of the plantations. After having been severely beaten by one of the overseers he had run away and had made a journey through the jungle of three days and three nights to get here. The Frenchmen treated the man kindly and told the Moïs to give him food and shelter. I gathered that it was part of their duty to see that he was sent back, but they said that they had no intention of doing so.
