Dragon apparent, p.9
Dragon Apparent, page 9
This was the general attitude of the lesser French officials I met. They had no use whatever for the plantation owners and would not lend their authority, unless they were compelled to, to the support of any abuse.
Sometime in the early evening a breakdown truck arrived from Ban Méthuot in response to the radio SOS that had been sent. Suéry went off in it and, as it had been arranged that I should continue my journey on the convoy that was coming through later that evening, we said goodbye. I was sorry to part company with Suéry. He was the only Frenchman I ever saw a Vietnamese treat with affectionate respect, so that there must have been something exceptional about him. Suéry thought more of Nha’s comfort than he did of his own and he told me that the thing that upset him most about wrecking the car was that it might maroon them both in Ban Méthuot and thus prevent Nha from going back to Saigon to spend the New Year with his people – a terrible misfortune for any Vietnamese. He was most anxious to relieve Nha before nightfall and to be able to take him a good meal.
The Chef de la Poste had been on tenterhooks ever since the night before about the convoy’s non-appearance. It was now twenty hours late and, as the telephone lines had been cut, they had no news. Soon after Suéry left a message came through to say that it had been attacked. The first few trucks that arrived knew that there had been an attack but could give no account of what had taken place. The drivers sat stiffly in their seats, dazed with fatigue and mantled with yellow dust. The Chef said he would put me on the first of them that had a seat to spare, but in each case the passengers were crammed so tightly in the driver’s cabin that it was difficult to see how he could twist the steering wheel or change gear. The backs of the lorries were jammed with merchandise.
After five or six of them had passed through the checkpoint in this way the Chef decided that he had found a lorry with a hole in the cargo large enough for a human being to crawl into. He made one of the cabin passengers get down from the front and climb into this crevice, telling me to take his place. I did not like the idea of doing this, and said so, but the Chef waved aside such objections saying that I had better take the chance while I could, because if the convoy had been badly shot-up there wouldn’t be many more lorries to come. I therefore swallowed my scruples, put my bag in the back and climbed in, although feeling most uncomfortable about the whole affair. The lorry started off, bucking and crashing over the most appalling road I have ever travelled on. It was extremely difficult to stay in one’s seat. The vehicles in front had raised a pall of yellow dust which, as it grew dark, the headlights were quite unable to penetrate. Shutting the windows hardly reduced the density of the cloud that swirled into the cabin but was quite effective to hold in the terrible heat generated by the engine roaring in low gear. I felt my presence keenly resented. So much so that I spoke to the driver intending to offer to change places with the man who had been sent to ride in the back, but I got no reply. He looked in fact so grim that I began to feel a little nervous, catching, incidentally, several venomous, sidelong glances from my fellow passengers. After a while the driver took to muttering to the man who was sitting next to him, crushed in between him and the door. A suggestion seemed to have been made and the man nodded in agreement. He opened the door and swung outside, peering back, evidently to see if another vehicle was in sight. Looking, as I thought, intently in my direction he made a sign to the driver who put the gear lever in neutral and pulled the lorry up. I thought that the chances were no better than one in four that they were going to throw me out. However, the driver’s friend jumped down and went to the back of the lorry, after which he came back, got in and we went on as before.
At about eleven o’clock we got into Ban Méthuot. The driver suddenly asked me in good French where I wanted to go. I told him the Mairie. He said: ‘We’ve passed it. I’ll go back.’ I told him not to trouble, that I could easily walk, but he put the lorry in reverse and backed down the street till we came to the Mairie. I asked him how much I owed him, getting out a one-hundred-piastre note; he said ‘nothing’ and pushed the money away. Thanking him I held my hand out and felt much relieved when he took it, smiled and said, ‘au revoir’.
I stood there for a moment looking after the lorry as it lurched away up the street. There were one or two street lamps and as it passed under them the curved canopy painted over with Chinese characters reminded me of an old-fashioned Chinese lantern.
CHAPTER 6
Ban Méthuot
MONSIEUR DOUSTIN, chief representative, in the temporary absence of the Resident, of the French civil authority in the province, accepted the time and manner of my arrival with the imperturbability of a true diplomat. To judge from his manner nothing could have been more normal than my appearance at his door filthy and dishevelled, about thirty hours after I had been expected. When, shortly afterwards, seated before a meal of great complication, my plans were discussed and I mentioned my hope of getting across country to Paksé, there was no exasperated raising of the eyes. In the presence of such lunatic hopes Monsieur Doustin allowed himself only the faintest of sardonic smiles. The trouble with the people at Saigon, of course, was that they just didn’t know what was happening; which, said Doustin severely, was a little surprising considering that they were the official source of information. Ban Méthuot to Paksé! The sardonic smile deepened a little. No one had done the trip for a year or two. It wasn’t even known whether the track was practicable, or whether it had vanished into the jungle by now. In any case, nothing whatever was known about the state of security of the region. These people that stuck to their offices in Saigon were carried away by their imaginations. There wasn’t much traffic leaving Ban Méthuot in any direction, and unless one had a positive mission it was just as well to be philosophical and go wherever the first moyen de fortune happened to be going. Even that might mean quite a few days cooling one’s heels. And why not? There were few more interesting areas in Indo-China, or the Far East, if it came to that. An anthropologist’s paradise, Doustin said. And one that was passing away before your very eyes. I had arrived, in fact, just in time.
There was another important point to remember, the Chef de cabinet said. In the Darlac province, he personally would guarantee my safety; but once I passed beyond the frontiers of his jurisdiction, ah, that was another matter. Pirates everywhere. People who called themselves nationalists, or freedom fighters, but who really took to piracy just as their ancestors before them had done, because it was the easiest way of making a living. This brought up the convoy attack and Doustin said that he had heard that eight vehicles had been destroyed out of the thirty-odd that made up the convoy. The conversation turned to the tranquillity of life in our respective home countries. Doustin had memories of service in England with the Free French, spent in what I had always thought of as drab provincial towns, but where, according to him, all the problems of existence had been solved. I was continually being invited by French officials to share a nostalgia for such unlikely places as Birkenhead or Dover – Peterborough was Doustin’s choice – seen now across the years of fierce, sunny exile as congeries of quaint pubs, full of tenderly acquiescent maidens and wrapped in a Turner sunset. It is extraordinary, too, the experiences that people can succeed in remembering with affection. Doustin had even come to believe that he had liked Naafi tea.
A room had been prepared for me in the Résidence. It was not a large building, but conceived in the grand manner, with a wide ambassadorial entrance and a flight of steps worthy of an Italian customs house. Sentries ensconced in the bougainvillaea woke up and slapped their rifle-stocks furiously at our approach. As soon as we entered the house white-clad Moï domestics with tamed, empty faces flitted at our heels.
‘Tomorrow morning,’ announced Doustin with the voice of decision, ‘you will be tired. Very well, breakfast at eight o’clock. An English breakfast, naturally, with an omelette. You don’t take beer before eleven, do you? Ah, the English light ale!’
And now came the moment of efficient unbending – efficient, because Doustin could not be otherwise. ‘If you want anything don’t stand on ceremony. Just stand at the window and holler. Poussez un grand coup de gueule.’ A light, saloon-bar slap on the back and I was dismissed for the night. The quick, confident footsteps receding down the marble corridor. The yelp of the guard-commander. The sharp acceleration of a car being driven competently, dashingly, away. I put out the light and opened the windows. My cheeks, ears, chin were brushed by soft, disgusting contacts. Hundreds of moths were coming in.
As I was not to see Doustin before ten in the morning, I spent an hour or two before that looking round the town. There was not much to see. Before 1946 there had been a native town, but it had been burned down in the trouble with the Viet-Minh. Now there were a few French villas on each side of a dust road, a sluttish-looking hotel built of wood and green-painted, and a Vietnamese market with a few shack-lined alleys leading off it.
The Vietnamese shops sold a great collection of improbable rubbish; celluloid dolls and soapboxes, plastic belts, calendars with pictures of Chinese girls playing hockey, spurious rhinoceros horn used as an aphrodisiac and fake tigers’ teeth as a medicine. There were dried and salted flatfish no bigger than five-shilling pieces. Thousands of them. They were strewn about on counters mixed up with haberdashery and bottles of blood-coloured lemonade. There were innumerable hideous Ali-Baba jars, brown and green and with a glaze like toffee. These are made by the Vietnamese and sold to the Moïs for use in their drinking ceremonies. The most popular personal ornament on sale was an enamel brooch depicting a Flying Fortress. For the house one could buy a picture of Sun-Yat-Sen in a mother-of-pearl-studded frame, a landscape decorated with artificial flowers and grass, or a mirror painted with planets with aeroplanes encircling them. The most popular utensil, and undoubtedly the one of greatest utility in the East, was the jerrycan. Bicycle repairing was the most popular industry represented in the market. After that came portrait photography; particularly booths which offered a large number of different poses – photomaton style – for a fixed sum. The Vietnamese trotted in and out of them continually. Few Moïs were to be seen but I saw one ultra-civilised Moï woman, probably a convert of some kind, wearing nothing above the waist but a ridiculously inadequate brassiere, and carrying a blue plastic handbag.
Frangipani trees grew in the market place. They were leafless with polished, swollen-looking branches, and bore sprays of white, thick-petalled flowers. Hundreds of house-sparrows perched in them.
* * *
At exactly ten o’clock I was shown into Monsieur Doustin’s office. He awaited me poised beneath a wall map, ready to organise my movements in the period immediately ahead. I was harangued briefly on the military situation, which was presented, as far as I could see, with complete frankness. Doustin was too subtle to indulge in crude propaganda. He would have considered this inefficient, preferring to expose some of the weaknesses as well as all the strength of his side. The Viet-Minh were devils incarnate and the French, well, sometimes they lost patience – went a bit too far. What could you expect with men fighting in these terrible conditions. A couple of years out in the bush and always seeing the same half a dozen faces. How would you like it yourself? Doustin also thought that there was far too much loose, anti-colonial talk about. In this part of the world France had nothing to be ashamed of. They were doing good work and he wanted me to see some of it for myself. So, as there was not much chance of being able to get away from Ban Méthuot for a week or two, he was going to arrange a side-trip for me through the most interesting part of the Moï country. It was all arranged. I was to start tomorrow, and a young administrator and an inspector of schools would be going with me.
Although there was an ominous suggestion of the conducted tour in this, it did not, in fact, work out that way. Whether at heart Doustin was really as confident of being on the side of the powers of light as he seemed, I don’t know. My opinion is that whatever his doubts he cast them out, counting them as weakness. He was almost the last of his kind that I met among the French. The rule thereafter was an ability to see two sides to any question, leading to a Hamlet-like infirmity of purpose and sometimes to the darkest of pessimism.
* * *
Doustin produced a final suggestion. Before visiting the Moï country he thought I should see a Doctor Jouin, who had lived among the tribes for many years and was considered the leading living authority on their customs. Doctor Jouin was the head of the medical services of that nebulous enclave in Vietnam of undiluted French authority: Les Populations Montagnardes du Sud Indochinois, and the author of several weighty anthropological works, published under the dignified auspices of the Musée de L’Homme.
I found him at a table cluttered with the charts and mathematical figures that seem to enter so much these days into what one would have thought the least mathematical of sciences. He was white-haired and gentle, his face permanently illuminated with the Buddhistic peace generated by complete absorption in an urgent and valuable task. From the inside information available to him in his official position, the doctor informed me, he had decided ten years ago that this engaging race was doomed in quite a short time to disappear from the earth. He had therefore set to work to learn what he could of their attractive if primitive civilisation before it was too late. In the beginning the task had seemed simple enough and, in any case, he had not intended to probe too deeply. But then he had made exciting discoveries and had been lured on into an unknown country where the horizons constantly receded. Every attempt to clear up some limited aspect of his subject had uncovered endless others. And now he found himself in a trap. He had committed himself to labours which could never be finished. And time and the conditions of the country were against him. It needed a dozen workers like himself to occupy themselves with the still enormous volume of material available which, however, was melting away and which in a few years would be lost for ever.
We started talking about the Moïs in the early afternoon and it was evening before I left the doctor’s villa, carrying with me various monographs as well as the manuscript of a work in progress. From these and from our conversation much of the following information has been extracted.
CHAPTER 7
The Moïs
IN THE EARLY PART of the last century the Moïs seem to have been regarded as articulate animals rather than human beings. European traders did their best, but without success, to acquire specimens for zoological collections in Europe. In 1819, Captain Rey of Bordeaux, who carried a cargo of firearms to the Emperor of Annam, was assured by no less a dignitary than the Mandarin of the Strangers, of the existence of ‘Moys, or wild men’. The Mandarin had seen many of them when commanding a corps of elephants in the interior. They had tails, he said, and he had managed to capture one and bring it back with him to the capital as a present for the Emperor. Rey was interested enough to take this up with the French mandarins at the court, when he visited them, and they confirmed all he had been told, beyond possibility of doubt. ‘My respectable friends … had never seen these extraordinary creatures; but they had so often heard their existence affirmed by men of character and probity, that they knew not how to disbelieve the report. The tail was said to be in length about eight inches and a half. Although endowed with speech as well as with the human figure, the mandarins seemed, I thought, to conceive them to be only irrational animals.’ With the foregoing exception, Rey said, concluding his report of the fauna of Cochin-China, all its abundant variety of animals could be found in the adjoining countries.
Before the end of the century, these opinions had to be modified. The explorer Mouhot – discoverer of Angkor Vat – had published an account of his visit to the Stieng tribe. The Moïs were officially conceded souls and some theorists even began to raise the matter of the lost tribes of Israel. However, until the Colonial era with its census-taking, and head-taxes, these newly promoted human beings remained inaccessible, and still fairly mysterious, in their forests.
The Moïs, it seems, are well aware of the unsatisfactory state of the technical side of their civilisation and usually seek to excuse themselves to strangers who allude to it by citing one of their self-deprecatory legends. A favourite one describes the tactical disadvantages suffered at the creation, when the Moïs were last to crawl out of the holes in the ground and found everything worth having already appropriated. Then again, the matter of illiteracy, they say. What could you expect? When the Great Spirit told all the nations to bring writing materials, on which their alphabets would be inscribed, the Moïs with typical improvidence, instead of providing tablets of stone or even wood, turned up with a piece of deerskin, which later, complete with alphabet, was eaten by the dogs.
There are supposed to be about a million Moïs distributed over the mountainous areas of Indo-China. The exact number is unknown, as a few remote valleys have not even made their official submission. But whatever it is, it is dwindling rapidly, as in the districts most affected by Western penetration some villages have lost half their number in a single generation. They are a handsome, bronze-skinned people, of Malayo-Polynesian stock, related to the Dyaks of Borneo, the Igoroths and Aétas of the Philippines and to the various tribes inhabiting the hinterlands of such widely separated parts as Madagascar and Hainan Island, off the coast of China. They hunt with the crossbow, being particularly noted for their skill in the capture and taming of elephants, which they sell as far afield as Burma. A clue to the extent of their culture’s diffusion is given by their use of the sap of the Ipoh tree for poisoning their arrow-tips. The utilisation of this poison, although the Ipoh tree grows in many other areas, is limited to Malaysia, Indo-China, a small easterly strip of Thailand and Burma, Borneo and Timor. The poison’s effect is intensified, as necessary, according to the size of the game, by adding to it a strychnine-containing decoction from broial root and extracts of the fangs of snakes and scorpions’ stings. A scratch from a weapon dipped in this appalling concoction – the use of which is hedged about with many semi-religious prohibitions – produces death in the case of human beings in a few minutes.
