Dragon apparent, p.14
Dragon Apparent, page 14
CHAPTER 10
The Vanishing Tribes
BAN MÉTHUOT was dull enough after the Dak Lac. I was promptly reinstalled by Doustin among the silent splendours of the Residence, and told, once again, to ‘pousser un grand coup de gueule’ out of the window if I wanted anything. Doustin thought that there was little hope of leaving Ban Méthuot yet awhile, in any direction, and mentioned that the convoy which had left Ban Méthuot, following mine, had been badly shot up. However, one would see – one would see, and smiling secretly he withdrew, to the crashing of the sentries’ salute. I felt that he had something up his sleeve.
* * *
In the cool of the later afternoon I visited the local missionaries. Having heard something of their activities in the Dak Lac area, I was curious to see these people who taught their Moï converts to sing in harmony from Sankey and Moody and distributed woollen berets, as a sign of grace, to their children.
Mr Jones, the missionary, was a spare, bearded American, who looked like a New England farmer out of a picture by Grant Wood. His expression was one of severe beatitude, and his wife, too, gave the impression of being the happy possessor of a simple formula which had relieved her from doubts and misgivings of any kind. I do not believe that either of the Joneses had ever wrestled with an angel, nor would they have seen any point in the pessimistic attitude of most of the prophets. The practice and propagation of their religion was to them a pleasant and satisfying activity, offering, moreover, plenty of scope for self-expression. They lived in the best villa in Ban Méthuot, and were aided in their tasks by two cars and a plane.
The pastors of the American Evangelical Mission do not agree with a diet of locusts and wild honey. It is normal for them to arrive in a country, I was told, with several tons of canned foodstuffs, calculated to last the length of the stay. Referring to the luxurious appointments of his villa, Mr Jones went out of his way to assure me that they were normal by French Colonial standards. Moreover, he said, he and his wife often slept in the bush. He went on to say that they both liked and admired the French immensely and did their best to cooperate with them in every possible way. They were in better odour, in fact, than the French Roman Catholic Mission, which had been banned from some areas for its political activities. By this the pastor supposed they had taken some sort of interest in the natives apart from their spiritual welfare – a thing the American Evangelical Mission never did. I waited in vain for the quotation beginning, ‘Render unto Caesar’, and refrained from telling the pastor that the missionaries are universally thought by the French authorities (I believe them to be wrong) to be political agents of Washington. In this the French show a lack of understanding of the American mind, arguing with Latin simplicity that as the missionaries make few converts – in the Buddhist parts of the country, none at all – why, otherwise, keep them there?
In reply to my enquiry after the progress of his labours the pastor said that they were making some headway against unbelievable difficulties. To take the language problem alone. Like most of these Far-Eastern languages, it was barren in abstractions, which provided the most appalling difficulties when it came to translating the Holy Writ. To give just one example, he cited the text, ‘God is Love’. In Rhadés there was no word for God. In fact these people didn’t get the idea at all without a great deal of explanation. Also there was no word for love. So the text came out in translation, ‘The Great Spirit is not angry’. It got over that way, he supposed, but not as he would have liked it.
You could imagine, he said, the kind of effort that went into the preparation of his address when he visited a new village for the first time. ‘Before starting in on them, we had to build a prayer-house of our own. We told them that we wouldn’t go into any of their houses that had been tainted with the blood of heathen sacrifices. After we got the place built, and it cost us plenty – in commodities like salt, I mean – we went right in there and endeavoured to preach the Christ crucified and risen, to all that attended.’ The pastor said that they always took pictures of the crucifixion to give away, having learned that the natives were interested in the technique of any new blood-sacrifice. Some of the natives used to turn up expecting a ceremony with what the pastor called ‘that damnable alcohol of theirs’, and when they didn’t see any jars about the place they went away again. ‘However we didn’t give up the fight. There was nothing so sweet to my ears as to have one of these poor, ignorant, deluded souls we had struggled and prayed for, come to us and say, “When I die you will plant a cross on my grave and not a buffalo skull.” That was victory indeed,’ said the pastor, and for a moment there was a true pioneering gleam in his eyes.
I asked if he had ever found the tribes intolerant of his preaching, and the pastor said, no, on the contrary. The trouble was that the natives were only too ready to accept any message but wanted to be allowed to fit in the new revelation among their own idolatries. He just couldn’t make them understand that God was a jealous god. That was another term that they didn’t have in their language, and he had to spend hours explaining to them. A typical attitude after hearing the gospel was to offer to include the new spirit in their Pantheon along with the spirits of earth, water, thunder and rice. This usually went with the suggestion of a big ceremony, to be provided by the pastor, at which a number of buffaloes and jars would be sacrificed and the new spirit would be invited to be present. ‘We just can’t get them to see how foolish and wicked these sacrifices are. Why only today we saw some natives drinking in a field and when they saw us in the car they came running over to offer us alcohol. Can you imagine that? We actually recognised people we had already given instruction in their own language out of a little manual we produced.’ The pastor put a book in my hand. It contained, said the title-page, thirty hymns, a section on prayer, an explanation of twenty-six religious terms, a short summary of the Old and New Testaments and a Church manual, with duties of preachers, elders, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, dedication, the marriage service and the Apostles’ Creed. And all this was written in the Rhadés language with its lack of such words as God, love, hate, jealousy. A formidable accomplishment indeed!
Bringing up the matter of the plantations and their effect upon his endeavours – since coolies working thirteen hours a day and seven days a week would obviously be unable to attend Divine Worship – the pastor drew in his horns immediately. He was concerned only with the natives’ spiritual welfare, and their material conditions were no interest of his whatever. One thing could be said in favour of the plantations, in fact, and that was that a man working there was at least put out of the way of temptation. His view was that it didn’t really matter what happened to a man in this world so long as he had acquired the priceless treasure of Faith. When Jesus said that ‘He that believeth in me shall be saved’ he was not referring to this life. Naturally, if one of his Christians got into trouble he would try to come through for him, so long as it didn’t annoy the French. I realised quite sharply that the pastor was totally uninterested in the natives as a whole, but only in ‘our Christians (we love them like children)’. He collected souls with the not very fierce pleasure that others collect stamps.
It is curious that a twentieth-century evangelist should join hands in this belief in the unique and exclusive value of faith with his first missionary predecessor, the seventeenth-century Jesuit, Borri. Borri was scandalised and depressed at a display of most of the Christian virtues on the part of a people who had not benefited by conversion. ‘… others profess Poverty, living upon Alms; others exercise the Works of Mercy, minist’ring to the Sick … without receiving any Reward, others undertaking some pious Work, as building of Bridges, or other such thing for the Publick Good, or erecting of Temples … There are also some Omsaiis (priests) who profess the Farrier’s Trade, and compassionately cure Elephants, Oxen and Horses, without asking any Reward, being satisfy’d with anything that is freely given them … insomuch that if any Man came newly into that Country, he might easily be persuaded that there had been Christians there in former times; so near has the Devil endeavour’d to imitate us.’
There was, however, a remedy for this distressing state of affairs, for ‘… This is that part of the Earth call’d Cochin-China, which wants nothing to make it a part of Heaven, but that God should send thither a great many of His Angels, so S. John Chrysostom calls Apostolical Men, and Preachers of the Gospel. How easily would the Faith be spread abroad in this Kingdom … for there is no need here of being disguis’d or conceal’d, these People admitting of all Strangers in their Kingdom, and being well pleas’d that every one should live in his own Religion … nor do they shun Strangers, as is practis’d in other Eastern Nations, but make much of them, affect their Persons, prize their Commodities, and commend their Doctrine.’
Borri had his wish. The Angels, Apostolical Men and Preachers of the Gospel arrived in great numbers, and it was under the pretext of protecting them from Annamese oppression that the French conquest of the country was undertaken.
* * *
That evening I went mistakenly to a restaurant that masqueraded under a European name. I believe it was the Restaurant something or other. In this part of the world one is always at the mercy of the Far-Eastern peoples’ broad-mindedness and ingenuity in matters of food, and consequently there sometimes arises a craving for something simple, definite and nameable. The Restaurant fell badly between two stools. Although a jukebox groaned gustily in a corner, the screen that only partially excluded the kitchen details was ominously decorated with dragons, and the remnants of a meal that had been eaten with chopsticks were snatched from my table as I sat down. Without my being given a chance to express my preference, a moody Vietnamese waiter now arrived with a plate of eggs, which might have been laid by thrushes. They looked like highly coloured and greatly magnified frog spawn and were bathed in green oil. This was followed by the plat du jour for Europeans, described as a Chateaubriand maison, a huge slab of blueish-grey meat, undoubtedly cut from the haunches of some rare, ass-like animal that had been shot in the local forest. ‘… Et des pommes Lyonnaises,’ said the sombre-faced waiter arriving again, and releasing over the plate a scoopful of fried, sliced manioc. This was accompanied by a bottle of perfumed beer.
Since it was an odd day of the month, and therefore lucky, my neighbour, a French soldier, following the example of several other patrons, decided to play for his dinner. The system favoured was Tai-Xiu, in which three dice are used and the house wins when the score is under ten, besides taking as its percentage any bet when triple threes come up. None of the players seemed to realise that the luck of odd days is universal and not one-sided. Chanting most dolefully, the waiter shook the dice in the bowl and threw them on the table. My neighbour lost and paid double his bill. The house soothsayer now arrived and took his hand, informing him after a brief study of its lines and for a small payment, that he had offended a minor demon and that the time was unpropitious for him to travel by elephant, to build a house or begin clearing a rice field.
For the further diversion of its patrons this restaurant had fixed to its wall a large, glass-fronted box, housing white rats. A brain sharpened by a study of the problem of perpetual motion had devised a system of miniature treadmills which kept the rats continually on the move. Only rarely was one allowed to perch for a few seconds on a narrow ledge before being dislodged and plunged into hectic activity again by the arrival of one of its companions. It was an hypnotic spectacle and one felt sure, especially in the throes of digestion of one’s ass-steak, that somewhere arising out of this was to be drawn a cruelly Buddhist moral.
* * *
I strolled back to the Residence in the failing light, hoping that it was not too dark to see a tiger before it saw me. Green fireflies were pulsating in the shrubberies. Owls had taken up positions on garden gateposts, not so much as budging as I passed them, and occasionally as a breeze stirred I caught the fine-drawn wailing of a distant gramophone or the brief spate of notes of some strong-throated Eastern nightingale. As I turned into the garden of the Residence a Moï guard materialised, like Herne the Hunter, against a tree-trunk, pushed a bayonet towards me and shouted a challenge; a whiplash of monosyllables in some unknown language. This was a recurrent embarrassment. There was nothing to be done but to stand there, with occasional blossoms drifting between us, and say anything in English that came into my head. After a few moments, embarrassment touched the Moï, too, the bayonet drooped, there was a slurred-over drill movement and he sank back; his face screened in aerial roots.
Within a few minutes of my return Doustin was tapping at my door, smiling his controlled smile, and mildly triumphant. It appeared that an important politician, a French Deputy, had just arrived and would be leaving at three o’clock in the morning for Pleiku, which was about two hundred miles to the north. Did I want to go? I did.
* * *
The Deputy, who was an ex-Governor of Cochin-China, was travelling with his secretary and a chauffeur, and the whole party, as usual, was armed to the teeth. Outside the towns in the central plateaux of Annam it is really no man’s land, and Viet-Minh patrols probably use the roads as much as isolated French cars. It was always assumed that the Viet-Minh were regular in their habits and did not travel at night. The Deputy was going to make the best of this night journey by shooting game, if he saw any. He had a splendid new gun, a five-shot repeater, and both the Deputy and his secretary said that they would be very surprised if they didn’t get at least one leopard.
We were held up for some time on the outskirts of Ban Méthuot through taking the wrong track. The big, soft American car nosed its way through the bamboo thickets, its headlight beams trapped, as if in a thick fog, a few yards ahead of the car. At night the sameness of the forest was immeasurably intensified. In the end the driver found the right track and we plunged forward confidently into the tunnel of bleached vegetation. The Deputy and his secretary, wrapped as if for grouse-shooting on the moors, sat with tense gun-barrels poking through the windows on each side. There was a single moment of excitement when we saw, swinging before us, a cluster of pale lamps. The driver braked and doors were half-opened but it was only the tossing eyes of a herd of domestic buffalo, which now, fully revealed in the headlights, turned their hindquarters to charge from us, plunging noisily through the solid walls of bamboo.
In the early dawn we had still shot nothing and the Deputy with failing eyesight, but unimpaired enthusiasm, had to be restrained from opening fire on more buffaloes, a group of Moïs on the horizon, and finally upon piles of elephant droppings in the road. Our final and profitless exploit was a great advance through thorny bush after the will-o’-the-wisp sound of screaming peacocks, which could always be heard in the trees fifty yards ahead. After this rifles were put aside and the shooting members of the party relapsed into a gloomy coma as we climbed out of the hunting country into the pleasant, sunlit plateau of Pleiku.
It was a wide, Mexican-looking landscape, a great, rolling panorama of whitened elephant grass with the worn-down and partly wooded craters of ancient volcanoes in the middle distance, and a blue ribbon of peaks curled along the horizon. Elegant white hawks with black wing-tips circled above us. Occasionally we saw a few Moïs of the handsome Jarai tribe, marching in single file and in correct family order; the young men first, carrying their lances, then the women and finally an old man – the head of the family. Before reaching a village this little procession would halt to allow the old man to take his ceremonial place at its head. The Jarais carried their household goods in wicker baskets of excellent workmanship, slung on their backs. They smoked silver-ornamented churchwarden pipes and wore necklaces of linked silver spirals.
Pleiku was an authentic frontier town, with military notices on all sides. Pine trees grew in the bright red earth, but there was no grass – only the red soil and the pines. The smart, Mediterranean-looking villas were set back from the road and surrounded by spiked palisades. A few cars with armoured wind-shields were running about, and civilians as well as the soldiers carried rifles. We passed a strong-point at the crossroads and I was charmed to see that warning was given by beating a gong. Hairy, long-snouted pigs, indistinguishable from wild boars, dashed about the streets. I noticed that the urbanised Jarais had discarded their fine wicker baskets and jars, replacing them with jerry-cans. All Pleiku resounded with the same powerful nightingale song which I had heard, only in rare bursts, in Ban Méthuot.
* * *
The cross-country journey into Laos, which at Saigon had sounded so simple and reasonable, and at Ban Méthuot had taken on a more problematical colour, was now at Pleiku beginning to look like a hopeless proposition. Laos, as one approached it, seemed to exert a powerful anti-magnetic repulsion. At Saigon there were vague memories of many cross-country trips, dating perhaps from pre-war days. In Ban Méthuot professional hunters were thought to have sometimes made the journey. But in Pleiku the information was uncompromisingly definite. No one went there at all, said Monsieur Préau, the Resident, and the most he could promise to do, in the most favourable circumstances, would be to get me to Bo-Kheo, about half way to Stung Treng, in Laos, and after that it would be up to me.
But even the Pleiku to Bo-Kheo section of the journey would call for careful organising, because it was a year or two since anyone had done it, and therefore the bridges might be down. From Bo-Kheo to Stung Treng, Préau said, there used to be a regular lorry service run by the Chinese. Regular, but on what days? It was important to be in possession of all the facts, because there were no Europeans in Bo-Kheo, and nowhere to stay; therefore one’s arrival had more or less to coincide with the lorry’s departure. And, said Monsieur Préau, he would have to see me quite definitely on the lorry and the lorry in motion, before turning back, because Chinese lorries had a habit of breaking down and sometimes it took several weeks to get spare parts – several months in Bo-Kheo perhaps, since how were they to get there?
