SPEEDING SOUTHWARD
From the capital of Luang Prabang I again broke all existing records by
making the trip overland to Vientiane, the French capital of Laos, in
five days. Normally this takes twelve, or at the very least ten, and
every articulate person in the metropolis of the upper Mekong insisted
that it would, or at any rate should, be quite impossible to accomplish
this journey within the time I chanced to have at my disposal.
Fortunately my ideal host of Luang Prabang, and a few others who had
also seen our army in France, though neither he nor they had ever been
in the Western Hemisphere, admitted that perhaps an American could do
it, especially an American who had made the trip from Xieng Khuang to
Luang Prabang capital in three days and a couple of hours. At any rate
the _commissaire_ and the king he served offered to do all they could to
help in what they considered a very dubious undertaking.
Once again I loudly disclaim any desire to hurry; there is nothing I
dislike more. Yet as between the misery of rushing and that of missing
some important part of a country through which I am permitted to pass
once in an existence I prefer to hurry. If only I had been born
believing in the delightful doctrine of the transmigration of souls,
with the assurance that there would be plenty of other lives after this
one in which to roam through every corner of this interesting if often
disillusioning old footstool of ours, no doubt I could be as phlegmatic
and time-impervious as any Oriental backwoodsman.
This time I had to hurry because the fortnightly steamer from Vientiane
was to leave on the following Thursday morning, the first day of May,
and it was already midnight on Friday when I finished my packing, got my
bamboo-protected diploma of decoration safely tucked away and a few
supplies bought, and turned from a final social evening with the
_commissaire_ family into the last soft wide bed in some days to come.
It was doubly too bad that I had not arrived _quinze jours plus tôt_—a
fortnight earlier, for then I should not only have seen the ceremony of
the _petit serment_ but I might have avoided the hardships both of
hurrying and of the overland trip. Perhaps I am getting lazy in my old
age, or it may have been the climate, and the recent exertions of swift
travel and royal excitement; at any rate I should have preferred to go
down the Mekong with a floating village that had been prepared for a
party of Frenchmen, and women, who had left just before I arrived. But
for the automobile disaster on the way to Xieng Khuang I might have
joined them; though I might not have reached Vientiane in time for the
steamer, for with the water as low as it was then those floating
villages sometimes take two weeks for the trip.
More exactly they are floating furnished houses, a combination of raft
and boats surmounted by three or four rooms and servant quarters, two
small windows on each side of the superstructure, and all those
refinements one expects among such a comfort-loving people as the
French. At high water these house-rafts can go down the Mekong in fewer
days than are required for the overland trip through the jungle, though
by no means so fast as I proposed to make it; and at all times this way
of leaving Luang Prabang is so usual that rarely does a Frenchman in the
colonial service go by land. In fact most of those bound for the capital
come up the river also, though that is a hard and tedious job—for the
native boatmen. An official salary continues unabated irrespective of
speed. Upon due reflection, no doubt, an income forever dragging at the
heels of my personal exertions has much more to do with my weakness for
hurrying than have any impressions on the transmigration of souls. This
trip down the river is not only comfortable, but interesting and
sometimes exciting, if not dangerous. The _piroguiers_ say prayers and
throw food into the air, or place it, as well as flowers, on the bow of
the boat before passing bad rapids, that the unseen spirits may be
propitiated. But on board, all the amenities of French civilization
prevail, from whist to the three-cornered drama, and romance has
culminated and domestic disaster befallen during these long and too
restful journeys.
By trail Luang Prabang is 347 kilometers from Vientiane, nearly 225
miles, which was quite a distance to be divided among five days, even
with a slope of several hundred meters in my favor. Luckily those
twenty-seven kilometers of “automobilable” road at the Luang Prabang end
would again be useful, and there were about a hundred, with a growing
tendency, stretching northward from Vientiane, leaving me something like
a hundred miles of mountainous trail to cover on foot and horseback. To
make matters worse it rained most of that Friday night, so that when I
set off before the crack of dawn in the _commissaire’s_ Ford, the
Annamese chauffeur did not promise to make record speed. This soft dirt
road gets very slimy on the least provocation, and there were slopes
enough during that mildly up-and-down ride through the forest to provide
many a skidding place. By seven, however, we were back at the village of
Don-mo, and if the local Frenchman had not been so slow in breaking away
from his _congaïe_-shared breakfast in his thatched hut I should have
been off again at once instead of half an hour later. Here I found three
good horses, the _commissaire’s_ own mounts, with comfortable French
cavalry-saddles. One was bestridden by a Laosian sergeant who had won
two decorations in France, and one by another prince, _Chao_ Thong Souk.
Related to the king and to my former emissary, _Chao_ Duong Chan, he was
an equally delightful and helpful companion, a bit younger and, I
gathered, unmarried, a youth of most pleasant manners and disposition,
speaking excellent French. He had left the capital the morning before,
with the horses, the sergeant, and half a dozen coolies carrying some
supplies and all but the nightly indispensable portion of my modest
baggage; now he and the coolies sped on ahead, leaving the sergeant with
me as guide and body-guard, while I passed the unavoidable courtesies
with the Frenchman in native garb.
That over, we were off by a trail that had been cut more or less
directly through the jungle-choked forest, first across the flat, then
up a hill so steep that sweat ran even on horseback. Up this we had
quite a job coaxing along the Laosian, or Pwun, coolies, who wished to
stop and eat even before we overtook the prince and the others. When we
did join them, it carried me back to my old care-free vagabond days to
hear again the cry of “Kin kow!”—the Siamese equivalent to the “Come and
get it!” of our army cooks—like the voice of a friend of long ago and
far away. For the language of Luang Prabang is almost that of Siam, the
writing quite the same. We ate and drank and pushed on again; one secret
of breaking cross-country records is to give less than French attention
to the delights of the table. It looked strange to see men wearing only
a loin-cloth, and a dagger in a scabbard woven like a basket and held by
a fiber band across the chest, putting up telegraph-poles; but the
French insist on being able to talk to one another anywhere in
Indo-China, and government ownership of telegraph lines has at least one
advantage over the high-cost private system of the United States and
China.
No wonder the Chinese drove out the Tai! Two Laosian carriers bore
between them about half the load of one Chinese coolie; they made much
less speed, not to mention their many complaints along the way, and at
that they had to be relieved every few hours, or at least at the end of
a day. For a load I had often seen one Chinese jog along under day after
day of from ninety to a hundred _li_ we had eight men; the cot or the
valise that a Chinese coolie would carry at one end of his
shoulder-pole, with as much at the other, and any odds and ends on top,
these tropical fellows put in the middle of two long bamboos between two
men.
Do not misunderstand me as blaming them; as between the two I should act
like the Laosians. But the difference indicated how great is the
adaptability of the human frame, for these men were if anything larger,
sturdier, certainly more visibly muscular than Chinese carriers. They
were like those muscle marvels one sees in gymnasiums and in physical
culture magazines, no good at all beside the wiry little shrimp when it
comes to real sustained hardships. Unless hunger or the white man drives
them, the Laosians do little work; they are so happy-go-lucky in their
tropical fairy-land that their rulers even have trouble making them keep
their communal granaries filled against possible famines. For that
matter, neither do the Chinese work unless driven, of course; but they
have been incessantly just one jump ahead of starvation for so many
centuries that they do not remember, cannot imagine, anything else,
until their frames have grown to endure, on far less food, what would
kill a plump muscular Laosian.
Up and down we went, through cool forests and over red-hot mountain
ridges where too much good shade had been cut away for the telegraph
line, with one hard river to cross. In this I lost the precious army
canteen that had served me all through China, the sergeant having tied
it to my saddle with a piece of vine. I might have known that there was
no real string in such a land and been less careless about seeing my
orders carried out. It was the most serious mishap of the trip, for
without water always within reach even riding becomes a hardship in
tropical jungle where streams are often hours apart.
While prince, sergeant, and I looked in vain for the rushing stream to
cast up the canteen, the coolies went bathing. They were all of the
“black paunch” tribe, as distinguished from the “white paunch,” or
untattooed ones, though it is not really the paunch that is decorated.
The man of this branch of the Laosian or Tai race is never without his
pants, even when he is stark naked. Nearly all of them are solidly
tattooed in blue—invisible alas to the ordinary camera—from the waist to
the knees, a wide tattooed belt with lacy ends about the floating ribs
and a lacy effect like ruffles just below the bend of the knees. The
design of this hip and thigh covering is always “lions” within squares
with rounded corners, all touching one another, either as a protection
against or to give the wearer the bravery of the lion. With the figures
are mingled sacred texts, said to be Pali in Laosian or Siamese script.
The priests especially are covered with these sacred writings, it is
said, but one can never really know what is under the yellow robe. Women
seldom if ever wear these tattooed substitutes for the Scotchman’s kilt,
say those who should know, perhaps because they are in no danger from
evil spirits, or cannot be saved anyway. Some of the men also had red
tattooing on the upper part of the body, red squares on the chest, all
sorts of things on the back, though none of them obscene nor as crude as
the tattooing on some of our sailors. One of my men was overrun with red
lizards; some were whole picture-books or comic supplements or intricate
signs of the zodiac. There was one fellow whose whole back was covered
with a lesson in arithmetic or geometry, even trigonometry for all I
know, as if a small brother or a schoolmaster had used him as a slate.
Others had only one leg tattooed, generally the left, or both of them
only on the buttocks, or simply the fronts of the thighs, or merely
spots here and there, all according to personal caprice, taste, swank,
or an attack of cowardliness before the job was finished. Unlike most
tribal decorations of the sort this tattooing may be put on at any age,
whenever courage is ripe.
I thought several times that afternoon that the men were going to give
up entirely. They lay down in the road as if completely exhausted,
something I had never seen a Chinese carrier do in all my two years of
wandering in China; but finally we coaxed them at dark into a scattered
little thatched town in the jungle on the edge of the clear rushing
river that had made off with my canteen. The place was named Ban-long,
with a waterfall to lull me to sleep in the basket-weave _sala_ where I
soon stretched out on my cot, for we had to start very early again.
There was difficulty in getting men in time, and without the prince I
should not have been able to get them at all. But he, working most of
the night through the obsequious village head-man, collected twelve
substitutes for our eight lazy Pwun or Nuong carriers, and we were off
in the soft, black tropical night between two and three in the morning.
Two of the new men had gathered some sections of dried bamboo six or
eight feet long to be used as torches, which made it to some extent
harder than ever to see the way through the steep gullies cut deeply
into the soil of the densest possible jungle and forest. Particularly
was it hard going after the torches had gone out, much worse than if we
had never had them, and for more than an hour we struggled in utter
darkness over a devilish trail. It was one of those damnable trails that
are always wading a stream, always the same stream at that, like a
chatterer who can think of nothing original to say, and now and again
climbing steeply up and down the bank of it. Daylight showed the dense
vegetation deeply green, a land as far from China as if we were on
another continent, and disclosed our dozen carriers to be Kha wild from
the mountains, picturesque figures even in a land as out of the ordinary
as Laos.
Instead of tattooed pants or cloth _sampots_ these primitive fellows
wore short cloth breeches like running-pants, and some of them had more
or less of an upper garment also. They showed no tattooing, or at least
very little, but rattled with bracelets of glass and other cheap
materials, and had large earrings of all shapes, preferably not mates
and if possible utterly unlike on the two sides of the same head. The
few who did not have earrings put flowers or vine strings or leaves in
the holes in their ears to keep them ready for more prosperous times.
They had the eyes and the ways of the real wild man; yet, being former
slaves, they were more docile than the Laosians or Pwun.
Of the aboriginal tribes driven into the mountains by the Tai invasion
of nearly two thousand years ago, it is estimated that there are still a
hundred thousand of these Kha and other more or less indigenous stock.
Thus there is a great mixture of races under King Sisavang Vong Somdet
Prah, besides the “black paunch” and “white paunch” Laosians of his own
race. At Muongsing, chief town of the military territory, administered
by Luang Prabang, in a far corner of Laos, a French official counted
thirty-two races, each in its own costumes and with its own customs, at
the weekly market day. The Kha are a hill people who made complete
submission to the former rulers of Luang Prabang, admitting themselves
slaves, and now they accept the present monarch as king and are loyal to
him, lending help of this kind upon royal demand, though one could not
hire them as carriers in the ordinary way. These fellows carried a slim
ration of glutinous rice in little round baskets with a telescope cover,
and some uncooked rice in a cloth at the back of the waist, just as do
some South American Indians. At their sides hung a kind of machete, in a
sheath made of half a bamboo with wooden strips across it, much the sort
of thing a Boy Scout turned loose in the woods might contrive. They were
as small as upper grammar-school boys, and though they looked hardier
than almost any tame people, they were really even less useful as
carriers than the Pwun. They prefer to carry by a band across the
forehead, but as my baggage was not arranged for that method most of
them were forced to endure one end of the stiff whole-bamboo that takes
the place of the wiser springy split-bamboo or hickory carrying-poles of
the Chinese—because one of them alone cannot carry a real load. Yet on
the whole the long file of silent, rather anemic fellows made better
time, thanks perhaps to their lighter loads, than those of the day
before.
Unlike the talkative Laosians and in great contrast to the chattering
Chinese these aboriginal mountaineers made hardly a sound as they
plodded along. The language of Laos or Luang Prabang is less noisy than
the guttural up-and-down Annamese. The men of the first day had spoken
with an almost English intonation; Kha speech seemed a bit more Chinese,
with much rolling of the _r_. Some of them spoke Laosian, but with what
my prince called a “malabar” accent.
In the mountains of Luang Prabang kingdom, high over several of which I
passed on my overland trip, especially on this Sunday, one of the
longest days of my life, the Kha live in as primitive conditions as in
the days of Alexander the Great. The Kha villages I saw were the lowest
type of human dwelling; filth and stupidity seemed to be the prevailing
characteristics. All our romantic yarns about the simple life of savages
leave us with the false impression that they are hardier than civilized
people, and the writers rarely mention the dirty, the truly animal
conditions in which they live. The Kha are as innocent of any idea of
cleanliness as the lowest class of Chinese, in great contrast to the Tai
about them, and it is not strange that they have more smallpox than the
rest of the population. Some were so timid that I had to drive them out
of their reed and grass huts into the light necessary for photography,
just as one might drive some wild animal out of its warm but dirty lair,
so timid that I had to manhandle a group of both sexes that came along
the trail one day, before they gave up their temptation to run away
without posing for my dreaded camera. In most of the huts grandmother
and even skinnier grandfather were tending the third generation while
the intermediate one was out in the hills in quest of a livelihood. Some
of the villages had their basket-like thatched-top huts raised above the
ground, like those of the other people of Laos; the commoner custom was
to squat on the ground itself in a thatch structure like a flat wigwam.
The women, and for that matter the men, were all naked to the waist, a
disgusting custom in the case of the old women, whose breasts were as
shrunken as if they were about to dry up and drop off. They gave one an
unhappy reminder of how brief is the span of human existence. Old men
and women alike had holes in their ears large enough to hold a cigar.
All day we climbed over great hills, one veritable mountain range. Most
of these were densely wooded; yet in places there was little real
forest, but mainly _brousse_, especially the swift-growing bamboo,
because they had so often been burned off. Here and there patches of
hillsides, even of mountain-sides, were being or had recently been
cleared in this primitive way and were now more or less velvety-brown
and strewn with fallen charred trees. For like the Miao the Kha still
burn a new strip of forest whenever they wish to plant, cutting down
mammoth trees just to clear the way, and leaving them to rot. What the
coffin-makers of China would not have given for some of them! But I saw
nothing planted, perhaps because the end of April is too early in these
highlands, as in the grass-grown rice-fields we came upon lower down.
Every now and then a tiny hut as bright as if it had been made of new
straw stood forth in the middle of a recent clearing, the sleeping-place
evidently of a pioneer husbandman too far from home to commute. Upland
rice, needing no flooding, and other jungle products are grown by the
Kha and the other hill people, and sometimes carried to Luang Prabang
itself, though most of them merely grow enough to feed themselves.
The little clusters of very simple huts of the Kha were not near even
this rarely traveled trail, but in places half inaccessible—and for many
people wholly so—beyond valleys or great gullies across which they can
look and see in miniature the very thin trickle of traffic and consider
themselves in the world but not of it. One fancied they would not enjoy
an apartment at the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street. These
hardly accessible places were often so far apart that it would take
hours of climbing to call on the nearest neighbor. No wonder, when the
cluster of huts of the nearest girl is across three chasms and two
ridges, that the swain knocks her on the head and brings her home
without further formality, to save himself the labor of courting under
such onerous conditions.
In contrast to China, the only visible evidences of religious belief in
these wilder parts of Luang Prabang kingdom are bamboo arrows and bits
of woven wicker squares and the like, beside the trail here and there.
These, the prince told me, were warnings, either that a trap of arrows
had been set for wild animals somewhere on the path leading off into the
_brousse_, or that a Kha village was engaged in formalities to which
strangers were not invited. Docile as they are, the Kha have been known
to kill even Frenchmen who have overlooked or persisted in disobeying
these warnings. Hence little is known of the religion of this primitive
tribe, except that it acknowledges innumerable genii, good and bad, and
that there are many things the visitor must not do, many things taboo
not only for the Kha themselves but for any one who enters their
villages, because to do them would be to stir up the evil spirits to
wreak vengeance on the villagers themselves.
Now and again there was a mighty granite mountain with the sheer sides
of the sky-scrapers it dwarfed in size, clothed with as much vegetation
as can get foothold, vegetation made wilder and more hardy by the
struggles of its ancestors in such places. But for long distances there
were no signs of man, except the twelve carriers snaking along through
the tall grass, touches of red in their old and often ragged and always
weather-faded garments contrasting with their brown bodies and their
black heads bobbing above the vegetation. We went for hours along a
mountain ridge in a path all but obliterated by a wild grass often
horseman high, with many splendid tiger-lairs. Great bamboos or trees
had here and there fallen across it, so that there was sometimes just
room for a horse to pass without its rider. These ridges opened out
great green vistas of scrub and forest on either hand, and of the
striking peaks of the long range over which we climbed most of that
arduous Sunday, to end in rain and slippery going through ever hotter
jungle. For at the end we went down miles of trail steeper than any
stairway, into shaded jungle lanes, with rivers to cross incessantly,
the raging rivers of another watershed. Down, down, down to what in
season would again be flat rice-fields with earth borders set like trays
one above the other. On the swift slope we passed an old man and a boy
with a crossbow and some pencil-like arrows, who were evidently stalking
birds, for all the rain. One of the pleasant things about simple “wild”
people is the companionship between old men and boys—and, I suppose,
between old women and girls when they are off by themselves—so much
closer and more congenial than among civilized people, where the old
have usually been educated entirely out of the naïve childhood point of
view and cannot forget how much more they fancy they know than the child
knows.
Unlike the Chinese the Kha coolies were not afraid of the rain—or at
least they were less afraid of it than of the prince. They slashed down
banana-leaves as umbrellas and kept right on going. Yet a little rain
makes a jungle journey quite different. The slopes become toboggans, the
trails impetuous streams or quagmires, rivers rise until they cannot be
forded, all vegetation wets whom and whatever it touches, leeches sally
forth to seek whom they may devour—so that we were glad indeed when the
rain let up a little and insects began again to chirp and birds to
whistle rather than sing their gladness.
We came down at length into the valley of Ban-napha, with a splendid
sky-line of mountains behind it, and finally brought up, rather weary,
at a _sala_, just long enough before dark so that we could hope to make
preparations for another early start in the morning. Village chiefs bent
low before the emissary of the king, putting their hands on their knees,
for evidently this prince was not close enough to royalty to be worthy
of the complete squat; or the people here may have been more
independent. In turn the head-man of a village is a real boss—provided
he has a very commanding way. This one of Ban-namon, otherwise known as
Muong Kassy—_ban_ seems to mean town, and a _muong_ is a division
something like the commune of France—did not have much head-man
personality, or he had less respect or fear for princely orders than his
attitude suggested; so that when I went for my daily conversation with
my family I had also to wire back to the _commissaire_ and insist on
fresh horses, for none had been provided, the strict orders of the king
and the French notwithstanding. I did not wish to abuse the stout
animals of my good host of Luang Prabang, and two days over such trails
was a good week’s work for any horse, though I walked as much as I rode.
But the threat to go on with them served excellently as a lever to move
the prince to force the head-man to have other horses available in the
morning. We knew they could be had, for we had seen not a few well fed
ones in the fat wet fields of the little valley, along with
water-buffaloes taking their ease in their beloved mud-holes.
I found my way back from the telegraph hut through the densely dark and
humid night to a two-room _sala_ with the usual springy floor of
woven-bamboo splints, set in a wide grassy yard beside the trail. The
sergeant, for whom this forced march was hard work, since he seemed to
have brought back tuberculosis as well as a decoration or two from his
war days in France, was worn out; and even the prince admitted that he
was tired, though at his age one never really is. The Kha should have
been most weary of us all, but they crawled obsequiously in on their
hands and knees to bring me water in a section of bamboo or to hand me
anything I asked or the prince sent them for. They ate jungle food that
had very little in common with ours, out on the soft floor of the raised
porch on which they slept. Somehow I was sorry to lose these simple
picturesque fellows when we left Ban-namon.
We were off again at daylight, with poor native horses, as if the
head-man had picked, or had imposed upon him, the leanest in town, and
with somewhat less “wild” coolies. We had marched in the rain for barely
two hours when the cavalcade all halted at another town, with an humble
_sala_, for a lunch all around and to change coolies again, though those
from Ban-namon had hardly gone five miles. Probably that was all the
weak head-man could get them to agree to do; or it may be that certain
towns are definitely stations on this overland trail. The prince had
only to order the village chief, or the inhabitants themselves, to
furnish new carriers, however, and they were soon there, though from
then on we changed as often as we came to a village, sometimes two or
three times a day. The coolies still seemed to be Kha, but they were men
who had come into more contact with the outside world than those who had
been with me all that strenuous Sunday, and they had lost some of the
ornaments, simplicity, and politeness. Perhaps they were not Kha at all,
for they had all sorts of tattooing, and some of them had raised welts,
like the bush negroes of Dutch Guiana. Each man according to his fancy
wore a kind of kilt that was really a mere strip of cloth wound about
him from waist to knees. Now and then we passed a woman on a journey, in
a costume in which she would not have been unnoticed on Broadway,
wearing earrings, neck-rings, two bracelets on each arm, and a
barrel-shaped strip of cloth from nipples to knees, and carrying her bed
and belongings, consisting of a sack hanging down from her forehead and
on her back a rolled-up grass or reed mat on which to spend her virtuous
nights.
By this time I had fourteen coolies for what one Chinese would have, and
often had, carried—except that the prince and the sergeant had a few
things. With every change we seemed to get more carriers, as if they
were bent on dividing the task until no one had anything much to carry;
and at that they dawdled along, using every possible excuse to halt.
Fancy me traveling with three horses and fourteen men, and most of my
things in Hanoï at that! It was almost like a _safari_ in central
Africa, such as my wealthy fellow-wanderers can afford. Certainly the
passive resistance of which we have been hearing so much of late is no
new doctrine in the East; your Oriental carriers or servants were past
masters at it long before Gandhi was born.
[Illustration: A Kha home in the mountains of Luang Prabang]
[Illustration: Grandfather and grandmother of the primitive Khas tend
the children while the intermediate generation seeks the family
livelihood in the hills]
[Illustration: Wherever his habitat, the water-buffalo is happiest when
immersed to the nostrils in a mud-hole]
[Illustration: One group of the many Laosian carriers who bore my few
belongings across Luang Prabang]
Or perhaps the fellows were spreading out my baggage as much as possible
in order to give me more honor; for in Laos the importance of a traveler
depends upon the amount of baggage he carries, the amount of trouble he
puts the country to in getting him through it, even as in many other
lands. The king never travels without an enormous retinue and tons of
baggage, whether he needs it or not; and if he gets separated from it he
withdraws into incognito. One reason the coolies of Laos cannot carry
more is that each of them has a _musette_ containing his personal
belongings and food, a knife in a wooden scabbard, and increasing odds
and ends, until by this time they had nearly as much baggage as we, in
sharp contrast to the Chinese, who, in a land of strong and constant
competition, carry almost nothing of their own. On this third afternoon
two men carried nothing but the loads of the others, and they seemed to
be getting weaker as their own loads grew ever bigger. If this kept up I
should have to have two men for every one who was actually carrying for
me and my escort.
Rocky mountain scenery increased, with great sheer cliffs, filtered
sunshine on wet vegetation and brown. Here banana blossoms were a
beautiful pink instead of the usual beautiful purple; there were giant
ferns in great clusters, one leaf easily twenty feet long, a tree so
covered with vines that it looked like an old ruined pagoda, cathedral
aisles of damp and deeply shaded path. We crossed many streams; and—who
says “wild” men do not know enough to invent speedy measures?—found on
either side of them several of the two or three section pieces of bamboo
which the people of this region use as water-pails. The men caught them
up on one side of the stream, scooped them full of water as they
crossed, drank as they walked, and threw them away again, to be picked
up once more by the next comer from the opposite direction. All that
third afternoon we went down with a small river through a narrow
corridor of magnificent cliffs, everywhere wooded except on the sheerest
faces—spires, turrets, pinnacles, stalactites and stalagmites, whole
Milan cathedrals of jagged rocky peaks, scenery which, were it within
two hundred miles of New York, would have a hundred thousand visitors
every Sunday; yet here no one but a rare roving foreigner ever gives it
a passing glance. Lost in the _brousse_ and unnoticed, it was like many
an unknown thing, deed, person, in the self-styled civilized world—far
greater than others many times better known because they happen to have
won publicity.
This region is noted for its leeches, especially during the rainy season
that was now descending upon us. On that rainy Sunday afternoon the feet
of my Kha were all bleeding, and were covered with the scars of what
were evidently old leech-bites. These pests snatch upon the passer-by
from the bushes overhanging the narrow trails, particularly after a
shower; they get in somehow, even though one is not barefooted, soak the
traveler’s legs and socks in blood before he knows they are there, and
he may be all day or all night in getting the flow stopped. In the
middle of this third afternoon, chancing to pass a hand over an ankle, I
felt a disgustingly soft lump under one of my high socks. Suddenly
feeling the other leg with misgiving, I found it had two such unwelcome
guests. Not far beyond we halted at a lonely little rest-house in the
bush, and while the men rested and washed their feet, some of them put
lumps of tobacco, such as they used in their long slim pipes, and other
jungle leaves, on the three wounds; but at least one of them did not
entirely stop bleeding until the next day. In the shade of the
rest-house sat an aged priest in trail-worn yellow robe, who was making
his way slowly northward, though he was old enough to be done with
earthly traveling, at least in his present body. If that lasted, he
hoped—or perhaps we should say expected, for he looked like too true a
disciple of Gautama to be still burdened with the earthy desire we call
hope—to reach Luang Prabang toward the end of the next month.
The last half of that day was bright with sunshine, through ever lower
jungle between mountain ridges, until we put up on the broad springy
floor of a _bonzerie_ in a place called Ban-phatang. The sergeant and
his helpers from among the carrier coolies did our cooking out on the
covered porch, some of the village round about languidly looking on; but
the priests who occupied with us the building and porch showed little
curiosity indeed. I had time for a shave, to the surprise of the
beardless natives, then for a bath in the clear little river that raced
past the town. Down this shot now and then a man with only a loin-cloth
over his tattooed thighs, riding a little green bamboo raft, the only
part of the craft above water being a raised place for a bundle of a few
clothes and other belongings, and a jackfruit for possible hunger.
Simple travel indeed! It made one long to be a care-free youth on the
road again. Women were bathing children and themselves here also,
especially now toward sunset, but no one came to stare at me, though in
China there would have been a regular circus audience. Nor was this for
lack of energy, for on the whole these were a well built, muscular, and
very healthy-looking people, with few if any signs of a social disease
so common in Annam and China and with almost none of the filth diseases.
Though the women all showed their breasts and thought nothing of it, one
never saw even a bathing man completely naked. So-called barbarian
peoples, though they commonly wear only a loin-cloth or its feminine
equivalent, are usually as exacting about having that in place as we are
with our own clothing.
The uncrowded, simple, but commodious houses of these Laosian villages
are always set well apart and high above the ground, back among
palm-trees, banana-plants, and the like. They do not have to crowd
together and save all the arable land for rice to feed too numerous
mouths, for here a gentle Buddhism takes the place of an
ancestor-worship so ardent that offspring must be had at any effort and
cost. Most families have round or square granaries like huge covered
baskets made of wide woven splints and covered by a big thatch roof, all
raised off the ground out of reach of rats. The simple houses themselves
were of similar materials, a ladder of half a dozen bamboo or pole rungs
leading up to the big porch at one end, and close to the floor, a tiny
window or two that can be pushed open to one side. Such a village is a
thousand per cent more pleasant than a Chinese town, even when there is
no public stopping-place except in the same room with slightly
supercilious priests who sometimes break sound sleep with their
devotions. There is an incredible amount of bathing and great quiet
compared to densely packed Chinese existence. Such a village is like a
country home in its atmosphere, while those of China resemble
tenement-living on the worst of East Sides.
The half-naked women had little objection to posing for their pictures,
though they were fully as modest as their sisters anywhere else. Some of
them would not have commanded princessly salaries in a New York
extravaganza, unless they could have worn masks; others were distinctly
attractive even in features. Yet all this South Sea talk about the ease
of life in such tropical Edens is largely nonsense. They take life more
tranquilly, it is true, but they have a lot of hard work to do for all
that, much more hard work than do the citified people of our own land
who rave about this idyllic life on the sweat-band of Mother Earth, many
things which they would in fact be quite unable to do; and there seems
to be just as much force of public opinion, the same politicians and
similar nuisances to make life miserable. If there are no coal strikes
or gasoline despots, on the other hand there are leeches in a more
literal form; though there are no trolley or motor cars, in compensation
spring chickens sell at a nickel and really fresh eggs at two or three
cents a dozen. A gentle unspoiled people, too obsequious by our
standards, on the whole they lead a visibly happier life than do our own
serious and hurried people of the West.
These Laosian villagers grow their own cotton, and the women spin this
and the kapok of their great tropical trees on a crude wheel without a
felly, then weave it on hand-looms into the garment they wear as skirt
or wrapper. Beneath many a house, or under the projecting porch roof at
the end of it, may be seen the lady of the family, in the usual
comfortable and economical upper garment of nothing at all, leisurely
engaged at her household tasks, while others, some of them far from
ugly, sit in the shade beneath their pile-raised dwellings weaving their
simple wardrobes, in rather striking patterns and of excellent wearing
qualities, on the crudest of looms, with a stick shuttle that is thrown
back and forth by hand. They hull their rice as it is needed, by
stepping on the end of a long pole ending in a big wooden pestle, which
falls monotonously into a wooden mortar, a hollowed section of large
tree-trunk. These seem to be the chief occupations, but there are many
others, as the traveler with time to watch their goings and comings
during a few evenings will discover. As in southern China, the
pan-basket in which rice is screened and prepared for cooking is made of
bamboo splints, but they use clean water rather than any filth in which
to wash it. The most hurried Laosian journey is a great relief from the
putrescence, the crowding curiosity, the debauching superstitions of
China. I thought I liked the Chinese, but I was less sure of it after
this trip among the Laosians of gentle Buddhist faith.
The smallest village has a few Buddhist priests, the support of whom by
giving them food seems to be almost the only religious practice of the
lay inhabitants. The younger bonzes make the rounds each morning with
their begging-bowls before the sun is high, and now and then a man or
woman kneels on the ground as a priest pauses to perform for a moment or
two some hocus-pocus in reward for the charity, and then turns abruptly
away, as if to imply that the giver has had his money’s worth. Begging
is not looked upon as in the West, but as something perfectly natural,
so that neither giver nor receiver seems to feel he is doing anything
out of the ordinary. If I may judge by my two princely companions, all
Laosian Buddhists say their prayers before going to bed as religiously
as any Christian, nay, as any true Mohammedan. But they were more like
people thanking a kindly benefactor with unforced gratitude than like
men praying out of dread of a punishing God, and the true Laosians at
least showed little if any of the fear of demonology rampant among the
super-superstitious Chinese. No doubt nature is so gentle with them that
the religion of fear, the dread and consequent attempts at propitiation
of innumerable evil forces always waiting to do them harm, does not grow
up within them.
On the other hand these naïve jungle-dwellers do not lack physical fear.
They crouched at the trail-side raising palmed hands to me; in the more
settled districts farther south long rows of them crowded against the
wall of the mountain road, even turning their faces away, as if fearing
a blow, which seemed to speak badly for their rulers, whether the old
ones or the present French—or were they merely dazzled by my
magnificence? When our pace grew too slow to be borne, I could always
drive the coolies on by galloping after them shouting, whereupon they
actually ran. But soon they settled down to an almost lazy stroll again,
covering hardly half the ground of the incessant dog-trot of the
indefatigable Chinese; nor were there by any means as many smiles and
childish pleasantries as among those far harder workers and sufferers of
many times greater hardships.
There were good horses at Ban-phatang, and no difficulty, at least so
far as I was concerned, in getting three excellent ones for another
daylight start. We rode on down a fertile but narrow valley, closely
walled on either side by high mountain ridges that gave us the sensation
of descending a corridor of mountains all that fourth day. But as in
China there was no place purposely provided for a road; we were
constantly climbing rice-field dikes and making our way haphazard across
what would soon again be flooded trays of pale-green paddy. There was
one very striking wooded precipice—which would have been still more
striking if some of the myriad rocks that seemed ready to fall at any
moment had done so just as we were passing beneath them. Little huts on
stilts everywhere awaited the coming of laborers to the fields, lying
fallow in grass now, but planted in July and harvested in November.
There is no water for flooding at other times, because it does not rain
enough, though with the industry and ingenuity of the Chinese they could
easily harness the rivers that run away toil-less to the distant sea.
But there is no need to do so, because there is no such crowding and
consequent hunger as in China and its slender little offspring, Annam.
In many parts of those ardently ancestor-worshiping lands, particularly
in Annam, there are three harvests a year, as there might be here if
this people went in as strongly for children.
On that fourth day I was riding well ahead of my party when I passed
near a great jungle fire far up on a high hillside, probably set to dear
off ground for new planting. Great masses of red flames, and brown,
almost reddish swirls and columns of smoke, licked at the sky, and there
was a great roaring miles off. At a mile it was like a battle on the
Western Front, a constant irregular musketry that was evidently the
bursting of the chambers of the bamboo and louder cannon-shots that were
probably great trees falling.
Had it been in China or South America, this important trail between the
two principal capitals of Laos would be impassable, in spots at least,
which is the same thing so far as an overland trip is concerned, during
the rainy season that was now upon us. Thanks to the few French
overlords, however, mile after mile was welded together by many
woven-bamboo bridges that sagged like bed-springs under our weight.
Birds sang; a gentle air and people made the trip a constant delight in
spite of the perpetual necessity of forever hurrying on. The French hope
to colonize the Laos, but I hope that they fail; it would be a pity not
to have any such virgin lands and simple peoples left for our children
and our children’s children to see.
Then the country grew tamer, the people more independent, perhaps
because we were now outside Luang Prabang kingdom, where the prince,
having only French backing to his commands, was recognized as the
servant of an alien king. We lunched at Vang-vieng, where a lone
Frenchman in jungle-torn sun-scorched garb, who was doing some sort of
work there with a band of coolies, probably in connection with the
telegraph lines, insisted on loading me down with a bottle of wine. The
little I had brought had given out, and he was sure I could never
complete my hurried journey alive without that prime necessity. We
changed coolies there, and again, with more trouble and a longer wait
than we had ever had before, at another village well outside the old
kingdom, and brought up by sunset at a jungle _sala_ in the wilderness,
kept by a family sent there for that purpose by the French rulers.