EN PANNE!
With the influence of the lieutenant I managed at last to get under way
again, not without hope that we might reach somewhere before nightfall,
since the sun was still almost directly overhead. At Muongsen there
begins one of the greatest automobile climbs I have ever seen, up and up
and forever up through the jungled ranges of the great Annamese chain,
an ascension unforgettable both for its magnificence and its danger. We
climbed abruptly to an elevation of fifteen hundred meters, a full mile
above sea-level, without moving forward a mile on the map. The road,
forever clawing itself a place in the flank of the mountain, constantly
making great detours, looking always for an opening, a gap to slip
through, writhed like a tortured snake, struggled fiercely upward, grew
dizzy with effort, took breath again, and climbed valiantly onward. On
the left, or, worse still, on the right, the abyss always yawned. Our
wheels touched the edge of space and flung stones off down sheer wooded
slopes into _le vide_—emptiness; in many places there were curves so
sharp that we had just room between the jagged mountain wall and the
bottomless pit to make the turn by backing and filling where the
slightest miscalculation might have meant destruction. Even then we
barely got by without striking a lamp on the recently blasted
mountain-side or dropping a hind wheel over the edge. I began to
understand why a man, particularly an aging half-caste, whose lot in
life required him to drive even now and then up or down this fly-footed
route, might easily become too nervous ever to speed again and might
grow to have the downcast view of life in general of this crawling
imitation of a chauffeur.
Between the trees of every size there were glimpses here and there for
an instant of the great Annamese chain we were struggling to surmount.
The narrow little boats fighting their way up the rapids of the river we
had crossed again at the beginning of the climb had long since
disappeared; the river itself was gone. Giant ferns, valleys full of
banana-plants, perfect tenement clothes-line mazes of jungle vines,
range after blue range of the densest forest-jungle sank beneath us, and
still the climbing continued, steadily, inexorably, forever. It was like
duplicating by automobile my wild journey through the jungles of the
upper Malay Peninsula, now two decades ago. Sometimes, when the road was
completely exhausted, it went a little way on the level, but only long
enough to catch its breath, as quickly as do the barrel-chested Indians
of the Andes, before digging its toes into the mountain-side again. The
air became fresher; the humid scent of the tropics disappeared; with
every wheel-turn it was more pleasure to breathe. Behind and below us
lay an ocean of branches, a vegetation so compact that it filled the
vast ravine of the visible world to its very edges, like an overflowing
bowl of greens, an immense panorama of verdure dotted with densely black
patches of shade that looked like the mouths of caves.
There were many long thatch-roofed bridges, some of them curved, some
with sharp angles, bridges of timbers and rough-hewn planks evidently
cut on the spot, some covered with woven bamboo splints, bridges
supported only by the upright trunks of trees along the sides of them,
so that even the least nervous of travelers could not but have wondered
whether they would always hold the weight our heavy car suddenly put
upon them. Many similar bridges had been abandoned and left to
disintegrate into the jungle again, because the road had been cut
farther back into the hillsides. When this new road gets officially
opened and there are cars in both directions—many cars, the French hope
and believe—there should be magnificent possibilities of accident, for
rarely indeed can one see five yards ahead, and often fog half or fully
fills and conceals mighty ravines into which a false twist of the
chauffeur’s wrist would have sent us crashing among the jungle tree-tops
hundreds of feet below. I looked anxiously askance at the graying fellow
at my side on whom my life depended, and was startled suddenly to
discover that after all he was a mere savage in loin-cloth and bare
feet, however much his half-French features and his wholly French garb
might strive to conceal it.
It was an expensive luxury for the one or two automobiles a week that
traveled over it, this road up the face of the mountains, costing seven
hundred piastres a kilometer, about seven hundred dollars a mile, even
in this continent of low wages. The workmen were paid only thirty-five
piastre-cents a day, and must furnish their own food; hence one could
scarcely blame them if they did not hurt themselves with work. Piles of
stone, broken or to be broken, lay in long carefully slope-sided heaps
at frequent intervals along the way, recalling France and its
_cantonniers_; but the road was built rather in “American style,”
according to a French engineer I met later, especially on the curves,
because the famous old highways of France were not designed for speeding
automobiles. We passed scores of Annamese men, nearly all of them gaunt
and sickly looking, thin, lemon-yellow, feverish pictures of misery,
squatting in miserable grass huts that had been thrown up for the
road-building, or dawdling along the way. Always with the air of being
half scared to death at sight of a white man, they were pitifully
obsequious, all snatching off their hats and most of them even the rag
they wore about the head under it, at the same time backing against the
mountain wall or to the extreme edge of the precipice and bowing low
with the palms of the hands together. I have seldom seen human beings as
sad looking as these Annamese road-builders. There was no gaiety, no
life at all compared with the harder working and more miserably living
Chinese, though one was still constantly puzzled to know whether this
related race was merely suppressed, depressed by French treatment, or
naturally gifted with solemnity. At any rate we rode frequently through
bowing ranks of bareheaded coolies in rusty clothes and with
fever-stricken faces, who could not have greeted me more obsequiously
had I been the governor-general himself. In fact more deference was
shown me on this trip into Laos than is received by most European
sovereigns of to-day.
It astonishes us from the temperate zone of the West that the Annamese
or Tonkinese prefer the malarial and overcrowded rice-lands of their
coastal plains to the rich upper regions of their country. But the most
wretched of them have a horror of the hills, even though their ancestors
seem to have been highland men; so that it is always a difficult job,
often requiring actual governmental force, to get even a few hundred
coolies from the plains, where they are often half starved, to come up
and help build these roads; and the few French exploiters of highland
plantations look almost in vain for workmen. Criminals sentenced to hard
labor are sometimes used in such enterprises, and often the _corvée_,
calling for forced contributions of labor on the roads, has had to be
invoked. In the cities it is no uncommon sight to meet a column of these
miserable fellows, wretched already, though perhaps only the recruits of
a labor agency, marching to a train under command of a half-breed, like
a file of condemned exiles. When moving from one camp to another almost
all these downcast fellows carried a cloth-tied bundle in their hands or
at the end of a bamboo over one shoulder, so that they resembled a
tropical imitation of a procession of American hobos “hitting the ties.”
There seemed to be no women in these road-building camps, which perhaps
accounted for half the appearance of misery, the great susceptibility of
these plain-dwelling descendants of hardy highlanders to disease in the
hills furnishing the rest of it. But it seems to be psychological more
than physical, according to the French; ancient superstitions make the
mere thought of living in the mountains sickening to them.
Higher up there were two or three villages that seemed to have
inhabitants of both sexes and all ages, some of whom we now and then met
making their way along the winding, perpetually climbing road. The sound
of our horn drove them mad. The more fearful tried their best to climb
the sheer earth or rock wall of the blasted mountain-side; the others,
as if imploring us to be merciful and realize that they would run away
if they could, snatched themselves bareheaded and, placing their hats
against their stomachs, tried to break their spines in kowtowing to me
as they might to a long dead emperor suddenly returned to earth. A few,
less obsequious, or less quick-witted, watched us pass with open mouths
and stupefied expressions, bawling children scurrying in and out between
their legs. Near the top of the climb there suddenly appeared horses and
other pack-animals, and the panic we created among these unusual
carriers in Indo-China could not easily be described. We passed not a
few traveling pigs along the way too, for wherever there is Chinese
culture there must also be pork. Though they are credited with infinite
patience, the Chinese will not drive pigs to market. But the Annamese,
more afraid of work perhaps, rather than more patient, usually try to,
with a cord tied to each porker’s leg. This may possibly be easier than
the Chinese way of bodily carrying them, two on a one-man shoulder-pole
or one between two men, so that carrier and carried, bound to market in
this undignified manner, seem fellows in misery. In Hanoï and the larger
towns of Annam this more certain form of transportation may also now and
then be seen. But the Annamese pig is ordinarily driven, which is hard
on motorists. For most of the pigs we met were too strong for the
holder, and yet not quite strong enough to get away entirely and dash
themselves over the mountain-side. Therefore, as they seemed bent on
suicide in any form—and who could blame them?—the car always had to wait
while the would-be pig-driver and several of his fellows united in one
mighty tug of war that dragged the squealing animal out from under our
wheels. For the most foolhardy of Annamese chauffeurs, however
disdainful of the pig-driving populace, would scarcely have risked
running over one of these porcine obstructions on this pathway along the
bottomless pit.
It was in many ways a delightful trip, doubly so because one knew even
without being told that very few travelers had ever made it. But good
things often come to a violent end, though to tell the truth I had felt
it in my bones that trouble lay in wait for us. I claim no prizes as an
automobile driver, but I certainly could have given that mixture of
races in French garb several pointers on how not to drive up a high
mountain. Again it was overcaution rather than recklessness that worked
his undoing. Never would he let the car get a reasonable start, with the
result that it had to pump its heart out to make a snail’s pace. I
carried no driver’s license for Indo-China, and should not have
considered it courteous to my host ahead to practise with his new
Italian-minded car on such a road if I had; hence I was totally at the
mercy of this mingled son of caution. A dozen times we snorted to a halt
before the maltreated engine quit entirely, fairly near the top. The
chauffeur’s mental reaction to this emergency seemed to be to sit where
he sat until the Goddess of Mercy or some one else came to help him out,
with the probability about a week off of another car passing. When at
last I prevailed upon him to get out and look at his engine, at least
out of curiosity, all he knew was to lift the hood, when he fell into
contemplation before the motor, mute with stupor, as if he had
discovered this strange machine for the first time, until I expected him
to bow down and kowtow in the dust before it. He seemed to know as much
about the workings of automobile engines as of the gods in his temples,
and to have the same dread of looking into the secrets of their power.
But then, when I came to think of it, even I, effete product of a garage
and repair-shop on every corner, knew no more about it than he did, so
that after all he had been right, and there was really nothing to be
done except what he had started to do—calmly to sit and wait for help.
That was no easy task for a man whose hair is habitually ragged of edge
because he cannot endure to hold the penitents’ seat in a barber-shop,
and when we had been broken down long enough to prove that neither of us
could do anything useful about it, I walked on. Gusts of rain had fallen
during our climb, pedestrians each lopping off a banana-leaf as an
umbrella and dropping it where the shower ceased. But the second-hand
one I picked up at the next emergency proved that as an umbrella a
banana-leaf is waterproof, at least to the tropically inexperienced,
only when one sits down under it. Luckily the showers were short and not
very intense, and within an hour or so I was striding over the summit
and down upon a few simple buildings. It was a military post named
Nong-het, which turned out to be the station of the Bavarian-born
lieutenant and his mixed lady-love, who had indeed invited me to stay
with them on my return, should it happen that the rains made impossible
the itinerary I had planned. Much good that did me now, with the
hospitable pair still down at Muongsen.
The Annamese sergeant in charge massacred a few words of French, beating
them out between his black teeth in a clogged stream from his betel-nut
bloody lips, and there was no great difficulty in getting enough of his
confidence to seat myself in the faded cloth easy-chair under the thatch
roof of the lieutenant’s earth-floored porch. In fact it was not long
before I could have coaxed his cook to cook me something, if we had been
able to find anything to cook. Obviously I could not broach any stores
there might have been inside the lieutenant’s thatched house, though it
was locked with a piece of jungle twine, even had I been sure that the
sergeant would permit it. In the long thatched barracks across the
smooth earth parade-ground there were different kitchens and “beds” for
the Annamese and the Laosian soldiers who made up the garrison, the
former sleeping on wooden platforms, Chinese style, and the Laosians on
soft springs of woven bamboo; and there were similar differences in
cuisine and other customs. But that made it all the more difficult to
convince the sergeant that surely there must be something native that
could be made edible for “ung Flançais,” as he persisted in calling me.
Plainly the lieutenant or his protective companion had taught the
sergeant the solemnity with which the rites of the table should be
treated, and the sacrilege of mixing culinary breeds.
Finally, thanks to my well known persistence and persuasiveness, there
appeared some rice and the toughest chicken for its tender age that I
have ever met in all my travels, nay, on Broadway itself. This trial
over, and a path worn in the parade-ground while we discussed beneath a
sardonically grinning moon the propriety of my continued presence in the
post, the sergeant at last consented to have collected for me in an
outhouse a bundle of straw and a ragged blanket which I was just as well
pleased not to have seen by day—or even by torch-light; and just as I
was dozing off there came the choral shrieks, growing slowly louder, of
a great gang of coolies whom the chauffeur had requisitioned to push the
car over the summit to Nong-het. The suspicions of the sergeant and his
post having been allayed by the chauffeur’s acknowledging me, I found
somewhat better quarters, now that my cot had come, out in the
half-finished stone garages into which the Fiat had been coolie-handled.
The chauffeur being hopeful, for some reason, of making the wop
contrivance go on again in the morning by gasoline rather than by
coolie-power, we turned in, he, somewhat less downhearted, curled up on
the back seat of the car. Perhaps he thought whatever injuries the car
had suffered would heal during the night.
He actually did get the thing under way again, long after sunrise, on
three or five or seven of its four, six, or eight cylinders, as the case
may be, and we covered twenty-seven kilometers along a now merely hilly
road. Early during that feat we met and paused to chat with a French
lieutenant driving back to Muongsen the Citroen _chenille_ that had
carried the general-in-chief to Xieng Khuang, the same in fact that had
crossed the Sahara the year before; and but for that fatal optimism of
motorists so long as their wheels are turning we might easily have had
him repair whatever damage had been done us. Apparently neither of us
thought even to mention our difficulties of a few miles back, yet almost
as soon as the “caterpillar” was out of sight my substitute for a
chauffeur halted before another cluster of huts, called Sala Nam-lien,
and refused even to try to go farther, saying that something disastrous
would happen to us if we attempted to proceed. As nearly as I could make
out from his ignorance of his father-tongue, the car was certain to
explode and strew itself and us all over the Annamese chain if he
annoyed it any longer. Possibly Italian cars do succumb to such fits of
Latin temperament; at any rate I was in no position effectively to argue
the matter, and assassination is regarded as more or less reprehensible
even thus far from the haunts of civilization.
Though I only suspected it then, I was destined to know Nam-lien better
than I know my own birthplace, nay, than Paris or Rio de Janeiro. It
consisted of a dozen thatched huts with earth floor and wattled walls on
either side of the wide space that served as road, one of them the
_sala_ or rest-house for French travelers. Two bare woven-bamboo cots
and a rough wooden table comprised the furnishings of this, unless one
also counted the soft layer of dust on the earth floor as a rug. A few
things such as eggs were purchasable about the village—though I should
have been in hard luck indeed if I had not taken official advice and
brought a few canned supplies with me—and a native was available to boil
water and do the simplest form of cooking.
There I spent the rest of the day, sitting in the automobile, the only
really comfortable place in the vicinity, reading, with a walk for
exercise’ sake thrown in. During that time I had much intercourse, in so
far as that is possible without a common speech, with one of the
principal tribes of the region. I had known the Miao, or, as the French
call them, the Méo, in southwestern China, though there my acquaintance
had been mainly with the “Flowery Miao” in their extravagantly colorful
dress. These were “Black Miao,” a much more independent tribe, and with
almost no color in their black or dark-blue garments, sometimes set off
by a dull red or purplish wine-colored scarf about the waist. Both men
and women, often riding on horses, were a wilder tawnier type than their
flowery relatives, their sturdy independence as plainly to be seen as
their bare feet; for none of them, of either sex, had ever tortured
their feet with shoes. Their sunburned hair and eyes were more nearly
brown than black, and both sexes wore the hair long. Most of the men had
carelessly wound turbans of dark cloth, a few of them wore Chinese
skullcaps and dressed their hair Chinese fashion, old Chinese fashion,
more exactly, for the majority still had queues, often hanging unbraided
loosely about their shoulders. Another custom among these sturdy
mountaineers is the wearing about their necks of heavy silver rings of
all shapes. These are evidently concerned with their tribal
superstitions as well as being their idea of combining adornment with
safe banking. All silver money that falls into their hands is turned
into rings; men, women, even the children, all wear them, large and
small, from mere twisted silver wire to veritable horse-collars, some
with open ends, some fastened with silver padlocks. Sometimes there are
as many as half a dozen on a single neck, even of men on their way to
work in the jungle. The richest of them clanked like perambulating
pawnshops whenever they moved.
A critical observer might have wondered why they do not spend for
shirting some of the silver dollars they turn into neck-rings. For the
men wear a shirt or jacket that covers everything except what a shirt is
most expected to cover, leaving bare a foot or more of the waist, with
the navel as its central point of departure. But to every race its own
ideas. The girls are not prudish, yet not at all forward. For their
jackets, open almost to the navel and giving frequent half-glimpses of
the breasts, were plainly designed for comfort rather than coquetry, as
were their plaid skirts reaching hardly to their bare knees. The women
walk with a powerful yet not ungraceful swing of the hips and a saucy
flirting of their short pleated skirts, of which they are perhaps quite
unconscious. Some of the men wear the tattooed blue panties ending in
ruffles just below the knees that are common in Laos and the Shan
States, but this is evidently due to extratribal influence, just as are
the flowered silk gowns a few of the well-to-do among them wear after
the fashion of the Chinese. The men, and sometimes the women, carry
crude daggers in home-made sheaths; some had a long slender rifle, a few
of them crossbows of a simple form, and most of them smoked or carried
in their sashes pipes of sometimes elaborately tortured shapes. They use
pack-oxen as well as little horses, but most of them, of both sexes,
carry in a basket on their backs, though Chinese influence perhaps has
led some to fasten two baskets at the ends of a short, stiff whole
bamboo over a shoulder, thereby losing all the advantage of the long and
supple shoulder-pole of China and Annam.
Some consider the Miao merely Chinese who in centuries gone by drifted
down from the north, with a history similar to the Hakkas, but it is
probably a better guess that they are of a more nearly aboriginal tribe
than the Celestials. Sturdy enough in their natural habitat, they must
live at least three thousand feet above sea-level to be either happy or
healthy, just as the Annamese must stick to their miasmic rice-plains;
and they never descend below that altitude if there is any way out of
it. Of all the races of Indo-China the Miao are probably the most
self-sufficient. In common with some other mountain tribes of Laos they
burn off steep hillsides, normally every nine years, for their
cultivation. When they need new fields to plant, they fell the biggest
trees and set afire great patches of the jungle-forest, destroying wood
and lumber enough to supply a large city for years to come. This burning
is partly to drive off the blackleg fever and partly to give room for
grass for their cattle; and as cinders make good fertilizer for a few
years, their crops are abundant until it comes time to burn off another
mountain-side. As this burning by patches has probably been going on for
centuries, much of Laos is not so forested as one expected it to be, but
often covered with those half-grown forests which the French call
_brousse_. Yet with all the uneven growth there are many magnificent
panoramas of densely forested ranges.
I spent that night in the _sala_, and when, late next morning, it was
still evident that the substitute for a chauffeur did not propose to do
anything about it except to settle down there in the vain hope that some
day some one might come along who might do something to help us out, I
set out to walk. It was still about fifty miles to Xieng Khuang, but
certainly there was more prospect of reaching there on foot than of
having help turn up within the same length of time. Moreover my supplies
were distinctly limited, even if the loss of time could be made up by
abandoning the best part of the trip and returning as I had come.
Besides, I am far better at walking than at waiting, and nothing after
all is more delightful than walking, especially on so splendid a route
for it—high enough not to be too warm, the great jungle-forest opening
new vistas, springing new surprises at every turn, at every rise of
ground, so few of the tiresome human race as hardly to bother at all,
and at every corner the chance of an adventure. So I swung off almost
light-heartedly, even if to the mingled worry and disgruntlement of the
worthless chauffeur, who evidently lost face with the village by this
flaunting of his services and protection.
I had walked about ten alluring miles, or perhaps merely kilometers,
when to my vast astonishment a big automobile came suddenly down out of
the west upon me. In the capacious back seat, the top stowed away behind
them, rode the general-in-chief of the French forces in Indo-China and a
colonel aide. Having waited in vain for the conveyance that was to have
brought me to Xieng Khuang in time for them to return by it, they had
been forced to drain the province of its last thing on wheels, the
Berliet—one car of each make seemed to be the rule here; once the road
was officially opened they should know which performed best—of the
_vice-commissaire_. Never have I been more pleasantly treated by a
chance passer-by on the road. If the general’s importance weighed
heavily upon him he was an expert at concealing his burdens. To be sure,
the fact that he also had been the guest of the ruler of Xieng Khuang
whose hospitality I had been—enjoying? no, let us say suffering—since
stepping into the Fiat of distressing memory, and that, having expected
me two nights before, they had about come to the conclusion that I had
been eaten by a tiger, may have had something to do with his geniality.
For it seemed that the donkey masquerading as a chauffeur who had been
sent for me had not disclosed to the harassed head of the province an
inkling as to our plight, though one can telegraph in Indo-China from
almost any tree-top.
The general was strongly of the impression that I should come along with
them rather than continue my walk until the returning car overtook me,
and the semi-guest of a government does not flout the opinions of its
chief military officer. In fact the general had an insistent way about
him, though it had on the surface none of that big-stick gruffness of
too many of our own army officers. The change from walking to riding
left me somewhat chilly; the general insisted that I put on his coat,
which had been lying in the seat beside him. I protested that the
insignia of such high rank did not become me, that he himself might need
the garment. His reply was typical of an old campaigner in many lands,
of one who had served France in almost all of her colonies:
“_Je n’ai jamais froid, jamais soif, jamais faim, jamais chaud._ When
any of these things threaten me, _je fume une pipe_, and they disappear
in a puff of smoke”—and suiting the action to the word he lighted up
again.
We were soon back at the _sala_, where there remained enough of my
meager supplies so that I could do my share toward providing a luncheon.
While we ate, the fellow who had been sent to fetch me told the general
some badly pronounced tale of why it was dangerous to try to go on,
lifting the hood to prove it. Again it seemed to be something to the
effect that he could make the car go all right, but that if he did so
the engine might blow up at any moment. He seemed to convince the
general, who was probably no automobile expert, and naturally the
colonel always agreed with a superior of such high rank; hence there was
nothing left but for me to agree also. I might have stayed on at Sala
Nam-lien and, if the Berliet and its Annamese driver had the luck that
had been denied the Fiat under the inexpert ministrations of the son of
caution, have been picked up by it sometime next day on the way back
from turning the general over to other transportation in Muongsen. But
the general insisted that I give them the pleasure of my company as long
as possible, and on second thoughts it was better not to trust myself to
spend another night within reach of that mixed-breed chauffeur.
[Illustration: The chief sport of the mountain-dwelling Miao of Laos is
the making of assorted neck-rings of silver dollars that might better be
spent for shirting]
[Illustration: The Miao women of Laos take no back seat for their men]
[Illustration: A Kha woman of the semi-wild tribe that is said to be the
aboriginal race of mountainous Laos]
Besides, it was a pleasure to travel over that great mountain-side road
once more, even though I might be less successful in climbing back to
the plateau, and although the platform-bed in the rest-house of Muongsen
was several times harder than the cot I had left over the mountains. The
lieutenant of the Citroen “caterpillar” had the Guadeloupe-driven car
ready for action again, and in spite of all the decorating Muongsen had
done for him the general insisted on continuing eastward toward
nightfall, leaving me alone in the riverside _sala_ like the janitor of
a ball-room amid the embellishments of an abandoned banquet.
I set out once more next morning before daylight upon that great climb
from Muongsen to the plateau of Laos. This time fogs all but hid the
world about us and made the road-gangs along the way seem more miserable
than ever. But this Annamese chauffeur knew his trade and his car much
better than did his predecessor in my affections, and while a man not so
disgusted with a continual run of bad luck as to be willing to take some
risk for a change might have complained at the speed he made on the
brinks of bottomless precipices, we were soon at Nong-het over the
summit again, then back at Sala Nam-lien, still adorned with the stalled
Fiat, in time for a skimpy lunch. From there on, the Annamese let no
grass grow under his wheels. In fact I wonder if any ever grew again in
some of the spots they touched in our semi-aërial dash across the
eastern half of Tran-ninh. It was startling to be able to race what
seemed hundreds of miles along an excellent, even though grassy,
automobile road through so primeval a region.
There was some more climbing, though it was by no means so strenuous as
the ascent up the face of the Annamese chain, and at length, beyond a
waterfall that came down the mountain side within hand-shake of the road
in a beautiful cascade of many strands of silver among jungle and forest
choked rocks and, dashing under the highway, dropped far down below to
form a reunited stream, we came out of the great forest that had
surrounded me ever since the first afternoon out of Vinh. Here, a
hundred kilometers from the border of Annam, amid a plateau growth of
scattered oak-like scrubs, there was much open country, of reddish
rich-looking soil, though few inhabitants. In fact all Laos, largest of
the five divisions of Indo-China, being about the size of Italy and not
unlike it in shape, has, if the recent census was accurate, only 818,755
people, of whom 280 are French and eight—count them, eight!—are
“foreigners.” About us lay vast rolling meadows of great beauty, as
virgin as a world in which animal life had not yet been created. The
general-in-chief, who had seen most of them, thought this great plateau
of Xieng Khuang the finest region in the French colonies. There were
some cactus-trees of striking forms; then the mountains closed in again
on a narrow valley that seemed once to have been broken up into
rice-fields, though this may have been an illusion. Small villages
appeared once more, this time of the real Laosians, villages of thatched
houses raised on poles well above snakes and possible floods, with a bit
of cultivation about them. Each house had rounded gable walls at either
end, one a kind of family veranda all but covered with a curving roof of
thatch, where visitors are received and the family does its gossiping,
the other a granary and store-room, where the cooking also seemed to be
done. The walls of the houses, everything possible, in fact, were made
of strips of narrow palm-leaves folded over a stick, forming panels
overlapped like shingles. Many small but stout horses dotted the
landscape here and there. I had not seen a grave for days; the Laosians
dispose of their dead like real Buddhists; the Miao pile heaps of stone
over their corpses.
This time fortune showed me unusual favor and we made the whole trip
from Muongsen, including the stop at Sala Nam-lien, in a single day, as
we might have done three days before but for the overcautious chauffeur.
In fact we turned up at Xieng Khuang toward the end of the daily siesta,
and I spent the rest of the afternoon in French formalities with the
colonial officials of that distant but little known Garden of Eden.