Dragon apparent, p.7
Dragon Apparent, page 7
‘At five o’clock.’
‘Will you require breakfast before leaving?’
‘Well – if it won’t be too early –’
‘Yes, it will be too early.’
While waiting for my luggage to be taken up I saw one of the most amazing sartorial sights I have ever seen. An American car drove up and in came a party of wealthy Chinese. The girls were dressed in rolled-up tartan trousers and cardigans. With them was what seemed to be a Vietnamese mandarin in a flowered silk gown, but wearing a flat tweed cap. A foretaste of the mysterious East to come!
My room was furnished with the cheapest of modernistic furniture, there was a smelly lavatory and an empty water bottle. The pageboy refused five piastres (1s. 8d.) and demanded ten. Huge lethargic mosquitoes floated about the room, but they were so slow in flight that I picked them all out of the air in five minutes. I was glad that my stay in Dalat would be limited to one night.
Awaiting sleep I considered the matter of the extraordinary accessibility of the oriental potentates of our times. Having with me Crawford’s Journal of An Embassy to Cochin China, which gives a fascinating account of the country at the time of his visit, in 1822, I turned up the passage referring to his vain attempts to be received in audience by the Emperor of Annam – an ancestor of the present sovereign. Crawford, who was kept kicking his heels for two months, never achieved his purpose because it was objected that the Embassy was undertaken on behalf of the Governor-General of India and not of the King of England himself. His experiences throughout show a marked similarity to those of envoys sent in various abortive attempts to establish diplomatic relations with the Emperor of China.
Crawford soon found that although the Cochin-Chinese were hospitable, cheerful, scrupulously polite and entirely lacking in the rapacity of the Siamese, they were ‘extremely ceremonious and partial to display and parade in little matters to the extent of ostentation’. In his preliminary conference with a deputation of mandarins of Saigon, eight hours were spent in consideration of the wording of the letter he carried from the Governor-General to the Emperor. While agreeing that the intentions were probably respectful, the mandarins pointed out that it would be contrary to the laws of the country to present it in its original, barbarous form.
For example, the sentence ‘His excellency sends certain presents in token of his profound respect and esteem for His Majesty the Emperor of Cochin-China.’ ‘This was not to be endured, because, as the matter was explained to us, profound respect and esteem must be considered as a matter of course from anyone that addressed His Majesty of Cochin China.’
At the suggestion of the mandarins, the passage was rendered as follows, ‘I send your Majesty certain presents because you are a great King.’ Exception was also taken to His Majesty being addressed as ‘Sovereign of Laos and Cambodia’, in recognition of the fact, as Crawford says, ‘that he had just conquered a great part of these two countries.’ ‘The mandarins informed me that it was no honour for the King of Cochin China to be styled “a King of slaves”.’
At Hué, the capital, the Chinese translation of the amended document came in for further criticism. The mandarins were horrified by the crudity of the Governor-General’s reference to the death of the late Emperor, who ‘ought to have been represented as not dead, but merely gone to Heaven’. ‘This tedious matter’ (the further alterations) ‘occupied from ten in the morning until five in the evening….’
But it was all to no purpose. The Cochin Chinese continued to be infallibly polite and most sympathetic.
‘“It is natural enough,” said the mandarin with a smile, “that you should employ every expedient in your power to attain the honour of being presented to so great a king.”’
A hint was dropped of certain indiscretions committed by a predecessor, a Mr Roberts, who on the occasion of his mission in 1805 had included in the customary presents ‘a series of prints representing the capture of Seringapatam, and the death of Tippoo Sultan’. A Chinese merchant sent them word that in his belief the Court ‘desired no intercourse whatever with them … the Cochin Chinese looked upon the men with red hair and white teeth – that is to say Europeans – to be as naturally prone to war and depredations as tigers’.
Crawford struggled on with his losing battle, but there was nothing to be done. He was entertained and banqueted, noting in one instance that they were served with three bowls of eggs on which hens had been put to sit ten to twelve days previously. By way of consolation he was told at the time of his dismissal that five years before a similar mission from the French king had met with the same rebuff and that the Emperor had refused to accept the presents accompanying it.
The comparison with my own subsequent experiences gives some measure of the decline in the prestige of the Indo-Chinese kingdoms.
CHAPTER 5
Région Inconnue
HAVING BEEN WARNED of the Lieutenant’s liking for punctuality I was waiting, shivering slightly, in the hotel’s grandiose drive soon after half-past four. The trouble in the Hauts Plateaux of Indo-China is that while the temperature may reach ninety in the shade soon after the sun rises, it usually feels like a mild December day in England just before dawn. Above the creaking of cicadas I could hear the occasional bark of a stag. On the stroke of five came the distant rattling of a car and the jerky reflection of headlights among the trees. The Citroen came juddering up the road and Lieutenant Suéry got out and introduced himself. He was in his forties, a Provençal with a fine melancholy face; one of those Southerners who contradict the accepted Mediterranean pattern with their coolness of manner, their reserve and their taciturnity. Suéry had a worried look and I suspected him of suffering from stomach ulcers. Only his rapid, singsong speech, which I found almost impossible to understand, gave a clue to his origin.
The car rattled badly. No car could stand up for long to these terrible roads. The chauffeur was a Vietnamese corporal called Nha – pronounced nya. He was the first genial member of his race I had met and he smiled continually. Suéry sat beside him in front and criticised his driving and I was in the back seat surrounded by the luggage. It was still quite dark and after a while a short circuit developed causing the lights to bump on and off. Suéry nagged at the chauffeur about this and after a while Nha told him cheerily that he couldn’t find the short in the dark and in any case he wasn’t an electrician. I could understand every word Nha said but had great difficulty with Suéry’s high-pitched, buzzing replies. Suéry asked me if I had a gun in my baggage, and I said, ‘No, why?’ Suéry said it would be an extraordinary thing if we did not see at least one tiger or leopard on the track. Viet-Minh patrols? – no, not a chance. We were thirty miles from the regular frontier of their territory, and where we were going it was real no-man’s land. No-man’s land in the sense that, so far as anybody knew, there was no population at all. Two hundred miles of unexplored jungle without a single village, it was believed. You didn’t find the Viet-Minh wandering about in that kind of place. They couldn’t live on air any more than anybody else. Anyway the corporal had a rifle and if we came across a tiger we would take a pot at it, just for luck. Of course he couldn’t countenance hunting on a duty tour, but we would call that self-defence.
We reached Djiring in a chilly dawn. It was nothing more than a line of shacks on each side of the road. This was where I had been hoping to find a place to get some coffee. But it was too early. A few Moïs were wandering about the street pulling on their long, silver pipes. They were wrapped in blankets worn with toga-like dignity, a fold flung over the left shoulder. The blankets were woven at the hems with some fine, intricate pattern.
We were on the jungle track when the sun came up. It showed a path hardly wide enough in most places for two cars to pass, with an earth surface varying in colour from orange to brick-red. We were passing through unexplored country; a succession of low mountain ranges with peaks reaching a maximum of 3500 feet. Our world was clothed in frothy vegetation, which, on the more distant mountains, looked as close-textured as moss. Lit up by the bland morning sun it was a cheerful, springlike aspect. As we plunged down into the valleys the landscape closed in on us, till at the lowest levels we practically tunnelled through the bamboos, which seemed to have choked to death all other forms of growth. At slightly higher altitudes we passed between evenly spaced ranks of trees. Their absolutely smooth trunks went straight up without any projection to the roof of the forest, where they put out a parasol of branches. From their bases to the height of perhaps twenty feet the trunks were bastioned with thin strengthening-vanes. There was no way that any of the hundred forms of parasitic growth could take hold. Each tree, it seemed, laid claim to a certain area for its growth, and I saw one with its trunk wrapped almost completely round an intruder of a different species.
There were other trees which had not adapted themselves to the social environment of the jungle and they were loaded with parasitic ferns that had established themselves in the crevices of the rough bark, while lianas, orchids and creepers cascaded from their branches. There was a curious regularity of shape to be observed about some of these parasites, particularly in the case of a chaplet of fleshy leaves fastened about vertical branches, from which there spilled, as from an overfilled basket, green, fretted patterns, repetitive in design as the torn newspaper of the cinema-queue busker. At this season, in early February, there were no flowering orchids, but sometimes in the valley-bottoms, half-extinguished among the bamboos, we caught a glimpse of the fiery smoke of flamboyant trees. A flower, too, grew abundantly by the roadside which looked like willow herb, but was lavender in colour. These were visited by butterflies of rather sombre magnificence – typical, I suppose, of dim forest interiors. Usually they were black with splashes of green or blue iridescence. They did not settle, but hovered poised like fruit-sucking birds, probing with probosces at the blooms. They fluttered in their thousands above the many streams and once, passing through a savannah, we came across what proved on investigation to be the mountainous excretion of an elephant. At first nothing could be seen of it but the glinting of the dark, splendid wings of the butterflies that had settled upon it.
I was intrigued by the process by which some day the jungle would probably reclaim the track – a digestive action which had already begun. Since most of the trees were without low-level branches, there was little lateral pressure; no remorseless closing-in of the walls of vegetation on both sides. What had happened was that plants had seeded themselves in the track itself and had already reached the stage when they could have been potted-out for the embellishment of all the boarding houses of England. There were many aspidistra- and laurel-like varieties, throwing out new leaves that were often curiously veined, hairy, mottled or lacquered. Some bore small, orange-blossom-like flowers and spiders had increased the nuptial illusion by draping them with gauzy, bridal veils. I saw several familiar birds including bee-eaters, kingfishers and shrikes, and we once passed a peregrine falcon perched most uncomfortably on a slender swaying bamboo. The lieutenant was mortified that no tiger had appeared and said that now the sun was well up it was unlikely that we would see one. However, a troop of gibbons dropped from the trees into our path, awaiting our oncoming in petrified astonishment. At the last moment, when the chauffeur was already braking hard, they departed with fine acrobatic flourishes. Jungle-fowl frequently appeared ahead. They were as small as bantams and nearly as sprightly on the wing as blackbirds. It seems that the polygamous habit of the farmyard exists in the wild state – though on a lesser scale – since a cock was never without his two or three hens. The chauffeur Nha groaned in horror at these wasted opportunities but the lieutenant would not relax discipline even when we saw a huge boar in the track, at right angles to us, lethargic and indifferent, its head hanging down and snout practically touching the ground. It remained a perfect, unmissable target, until we were within a few yards of it, when, without looking up or making any preliminary movement it seemed suddenly to vanish, as if de-materialised.
By the afternoon we had left the jungle and entered a region of forêt-clairière – patches of woodland alternating with coarse-grass savannahs. This phenomenon might have been caused by extreme variations in the natural fertility of the soil, or by the destructive cultivation of the region in the past by primitive tribes. There would be a few miles of grassland, followed, as the soil improved, by clumps of fern, bushes trimmed sedately with what looked like wild roses, and then, finally, the jungle again, a bulging explosion of verdure. The lieutenant said that these parts swarmed with all kinds of game, particularly elephants, tigers and gaurs – a large species of buffalo of legendary ferocity in Indo-China, which provides all local hunters with their most hair-raising escape stories. We saw none of them.
For several hours, it seemed to me, the lieutenant had been showing signs of irritation. This took the form of constant criticism of the chauffeur’s driving. It was no mean feat to drive a car along this track, with its ever-loose surface, its acute bends, its gradients, the patches of freshly grown vegetation through which we were obliged to crash implacably. I thought that Nha was doing very well. We had had no nasty turns, so far. I was well content to relax and look at the scenery. Not so the lieutenant. He began to indulge in the most acute form of back-seat driving, which included a regular flow of instructions. It went something like this:
‘All right now – gently out of the bend. Now accelerate hard – all you’ve got. No, don’t change up. Why change up when you’ll have to change down again straight away? Keep your foot on the throttle, now swing her across – bottom gear – there you are, you left it too late: stall the engine that way. Never change down after a corner like that, change before. Now give her full throttle – hey, slow down! What on earth are you doing? My God, you’ll have us over the top before we know where we are. There you go now – I told you you’d stall the engine.’
It was evident that Nha was getting rattled. After he had followed Suéry’s instructions as best he could, thereby twice stalling the engine on a hill, Suéry asked him if he was tired and would like a rest. Nha got out without a word and came round to the other side and Suéry took the wheel. Suéry’s driving was dynamic. We roared up gradients on full throttle in each gear, snaking gently on the soft surface. Bends were taken in grand-prix style. It was quite exciting.
After about ten minutes of this we happened to be coming down a hill with an easy gradient. There was a drop of about a hundred feet into a ravine on the left and a bank on the right. The road had widened out and Suéry thought he could take the bend at forty. I had a glimpse of a flock of small, green parakeets leaving the top of a tree growing in the ravine, but was unable to follow their flight owing to the swinging away of the landscape. One moment I was looking at the birds flying up from the top of the tree, then the landscape shifted round and I saw the road – also slipping away – and a steep bank coming up at us. I heard Suéry say ‘Mon Dieu’ three times very quickly and I wedged my feet up against the seat in front and pushed away hard. There was a crash and something hit me on top of the head and we seemed to bounce up into the air and go backwards. We did fifteen yards back-first down the road in the direction we were going, with all the car doors open. I fell out first and I saw Nha and Suéry fall out on opposite sides. Nha sat in the road with his head in his hands and Suéry got up and walked backwards a few steps. His face was covered with blood which was already dripping down his shirt. There was a ringing in my ears but I knew that I was not badly hurt. Nha got up and sat on the running board and said, ‘Oh malheureux,’ as well as something in Vietnamese. He then grinned and we both went over to look after Suéry. Suéry had a deep, ragged wound over his eye and a lot of small cuts on his face and arms. He had broken the steering wheel with his chest. I wiped the worst of the blood off him with a clean handkerchief and got some plastic skin out of my bag and squeezed it over his cuts.
In half an hour everybody was feeling well enough to look at the car. It was a wreck, one of the front wheels folded half underneath the chassis. By the best possible luck we had covered all but about thirty kilometres of the distance to the first military post, but it was going to be dark in two hours’ time. Suéry seemed to think that it wouldn’t be a good thing to spend the night in the car and Nha explained why, later. We had our second piece of good luck when Nha remembered the existence of a hut used by the Moï guard, which, he thought, couldn’t be more than a mile or two from where we were. Taking what we could easily carry, we set out and in about half an hour came to a shallow clearing in the jungle with a plaited bamboo hut raised on piles. Two young Moïs in army tunics and loincloths peered out at us through the door-opening. They seemed as pleased to see us as if we had been disreputable relations. A brief, dubious scrutiny, and they both turned away, hoping that by ignoring our existence we might be persuaded to leave them in peace. Nha called and one of them came and stood at the top of the stepladder. Nha beckoned to him and he turned away as if to appeal to the other. Finally the pair of them with the clearest possible reluctance came slowly down the ladder. Suéry gave Nha fussy details of what he was to say to them and Nha, who said he only knew a few words of the language, started, as best he could, with the interpreting, while the Moïs stood there, fidgeting and unhappy. They were gentle, girlish-looking lads of about twenty years of age. Following local custom they had had their front teeth knocked out and wore their hair in a bun. They had a few narrow brass bracelets round their wrists, and a silver churchwarden pipe protruded from the pocket of each army tunic. Nha first explained that Suéry was an officer and they must consider themselves under his orders. Did they realise that? There was a doubtful assent.
‘Very well,’ Suéry said, ‘ask them what arms they have.’
The Moïs said they had two rifles.
‘Tell them to go and get them,’ Suéry said, looking a trifle relieved.
