Mr B finds Pamela writing: Thou, Burma, art fair and beauteous to see (2)

Part II - 1000 Piece Jigsaw Puzzles

“But it’s the wrong season”. It’s the first thing that crosses my mind once we have left Yangon and see the countryside of Upper Burma. Cherry trees blossom under an eternal blue sky, yet other deciduous trees are bare and stark still, though the crab apple is in full leaf. Decaying bamboo groves cover the hills with fluffy drifts of pale yellow. Tomatoes and cucumbers grow in open ground. Potatoes like round, small marbles are harvested. Sun worshipping sunflowers eagerly erect their giant, top-heavy heads. Apples blush next to fat, lush, succulent mango, bananas, papaya, pineapple, gourds. Fragrant flowers abound. Willows swept by the waters unfurl their delicate vernal foliage. Along the roads shimmering sesame, waving sugar cane, golden fields ripe with wheat, or shorn and strewn with sheaves and old-fashioned haystacks that I recognise from 19^th century and earlier paintings. In January, which is the middle of Burmese winter.

This, I think, for I have been reading Lawrence Norfolk’s 'John Saturnall’s Feast' in the evenings, must be Saturnus’s first Garden, Eden, Farmland Paradise, where every green Thing grows like in the ancient Plantation. Palm trees give Dates - and palm sugar - and Honey flows from the Hives. Grapes swell on the Vine and every Creature thrives. Here the first Men and Women sat in Amity and no Man was Master or Slave.

How well Norfolk’s words suit my enchantment with the wonder of this newfound paradise that we first set our eyes on.

Winter in Burma lasts from November to February and is dry, cool and sunny with mild temperatures and lower humidity. It is, so tells our guide, the growing and harvest season. Summer, when everything‘s scorched, starts in March and goes from hot to hotter to insufferably hottest by the end of May. From June to October the monsoon brings cloudy, hot, humid weather with torrential flooding rains.

Maugham must have visited Burma in or near the end of the latter season, since he mentions “A light rain was falling and the sky was dark with heavy clouds when I reached Pagan [=Bagan]”.

Naturally, I double-check. A William Somerset Maugham Encyclopedia, by Samuel J. Rogal, 1971, Chronology XV: “1922 - In February, WSM meets Sinclair Lewis; in October, WSM and Gerald Haxton depart on a nine-month tour of Burma, Siam and Indochina; publication of On a Chinese Screen (a collection of travel; narratives), The Unattainable (play, presented in 1916 under the title Caroline), Caesar’s Wife (play) and East of Suez (play).”

This ferocious Summer is everywhere. I can feel it linger like a dormant serpent in the nooks and crannies of the landscape, in the dust, in the wind, and in the majestic omnipresent Sun itself. The Burmese think their Winter cold; they wear coats, gloves, hats and socks in their slippers, and look upon short-sleeved us in disbelief.

So is the treacherous but life-giving monsoon. Watermarks grin on the shores, baring their formidable teeth that span a difference between lowest and highest from 2 up to 6 and more meters. From June to October, the almighty Irrawady overflows its banks, inundating hundreds of square kilometres of land and covering the soil with a new layer of fertilising, alluvial clay. It is Burma’s life artery, its Nile, its cradle of civilisation. A broad, imposing river whose sinuous trajectory we have followed, tracing it from Mandalay to Bagan to Pyay to Mount Akauk to Yangon, where it meets the sea.

Inle Lake, the most enchanting idyll of entire Burma and this arresting first Eden we set eyes on, lies about 420 km northeast of Yangon within Nyaung Shwe township in the southern Shan State of Myanmar, at an elevation of 900 meters above sea level. In winter there can be night frost at Inle. The Hu Pin hotel in Nyaung Shwe serves breakfast on its verandah, even when it is 4 degrees at eight in the morning, to its shivering guests who are lucky to have brought a fleece jacket. Personnel wears gloves and hats while baking your omelette.

“ […] Floating gardens were introduced in the early 1960s after the military government took power. Before that time, most agriculture was practiced in the wetlands around the lake and on the lower hillslopes. [There, I did not know]. Floating gardens consist of large blocks of organic-rich soils of low bulk density (i.e., less than water) that are excavated from wetlands around the lake. Dense thickets of kaing grass grow in these swampy areas, allowing organic materials to accumulate. Blocks of these organic soils about 2 · 40 m are cut and transported into places along the lake margin where they are staked by bamboo poles. The organic blocks are typically 1m deep, with the upper surface extending 10–20 cm bove the water. Major crops grown in ﬂoating gardens inlude tomatoes, potatoes, beans, garlic, and ﬂowers.

The ﬂoating gardens are now popular tourist attractions. To maintain the productivity of the gardens, pesticides, fertilizer and fungicides are applied; given the hydroponic nature of the cultivation these chemicals easily ﬁnd their way into the lake. A common practice is to ‘transport’ the ﬂoating gardens to the perimeter of the lake once their fertility is exhausted; normally this is about a 3-year period. Thus, this practice contributes to the apparent disappearance of the lake surface."

(http://www.environmental-expert.com/Files/6063/articles/15030/art5.pdf)

It is silting up in other words, our guide told us. But the government also advocates ecological awareness, as witnessed by big banners on poles along the canals.

I lost my heart in Inle, on its waters, in its creeks, up its canals, on its banks, up its hillslopes that dragged my eyes to them incessantly. Wrapped in a chequered, handwoven blanket that vaguely smelled of mothballs I have never been happier than when our longtail boat set out on the waters just after breakfast. The Chinese diesel motor’s pok pok pok sounded as reassuring as a mother’s heartbeat does to her unborn child, while a nebulous spray tickled my face held high in sun salutation. With every intake of breath the smell of water filled my lungs and a feeling so rapt stole over me that I would risk being called delirious with lyrical twaddle if I tried to describe it. I had found and deciphered the secret of life right then, right there. It was all that mattered.

From there our journey went to Kalaw by railroad, which deserves a separate chapter; thence to magical Mandalay, where we join Maugham again.

“First of all Mandalay is a name”, Maugham writes. “For there are places whose names from some ancient history or happy association have an independent magic and perhaps the wise man would never visit them, for the expectations they arouse can hardly be realised. […] The very name of the Irrawaddy informs the sensitive fancy with its fast and turbid flow. The streets of Mandalay, dusty, crowded and drenched in garish sun, are broad and straight. Tram-cars lumber down them with a rout of passengers; they fill the seats and gangways and cling thickly to the footboard like flies clustered upon an over-ripe mango. The houses, with their balconies and verandas, have the slatternly look of the houses in the Main Street of a Western town that has fallen upon evil days. Here are no narrow alleys nor devious ways down which the imagination may wander in search of the unimaginable. It does not matter: Mandalay has its name; the falling cadence of the lovely word has gathered about itself the chiaroscuro of romance.”

Very true, very apt. Mandalay, motor-cycle city, can hardly realise the expectation raised by Kipling’s magic, who, incidentally, never visited Mandalay. There is no magic clinging about Mandalay. It has a formidable fort. “The wall is made of huge sun-baked bricks and the colour of it is old rose". Though its immense dimension only shows from the top of Mandalay Hill. There, the view finally comes close to sewing the tiny seeds of the magical. “In the broad water of the moat, the rosy wall and thick foliage of the trees and the Burmese in their bright cloths, are sharply reflected. The water is still, but not stagnant, and peace rests upon it like a swan with a golden crown. Its colours, in the early morning and towards sunset, have the soft, fatigued tenderness of pastel; they have the translucency without the stubborn definiteness of oils. It is though light were a prestidigitator and in play laid on colours that he had just created and were about with a careless hand to wash them out again. You hold your breath for you cannot believe that such an effect can be anything but evanescent. You watch it with the same expectancy with which you read a poem in some complicated metre when your ear awaits the long delayed rhyme that will fulfil the harmony. But at sunset when the clouds in the west are red and splendid so that the wall, the trees and the moat are drenched in radiance; and at night under the full moon when the white gateways drip with silver and the belvederes above them are shot with silhouetted glimpses of the sky, the assault on your senses is shattering. You try to guard yourself by saying it is not real. This is not a beauty that steals upon you unawares, that flatters and soothes your bruised spirit, this is not a beauty that you can hold in your hand and call your own and put in its place among familiar beauties that you know; it is a beauty that batters you and stuns you and leaves you breathless, there is no calmness in it nor control, it is like a fire that on a sudden consumes you and you are left shaken and bare and yet by a strange miracle alive.”

Breathless Mandalay. Like Maugham, we went to “Amarapura, once the capital of

Burma

but now a straggling village, where the tamarind trees grow lofty on each side of the road and in their shade the silk-weavers ply their trade. The tamarind is a noble tree. Its trunk is rough and gnarled, pale like the teak logs that have been floating down the river, and its roots are like giant serpents that writhe upon the earth with a convulsive violence; but its foliage is lacy and fern-like, so thick that notwithstanding the delicacy of the leaves it yields a dense shade. It is like an old farmer’s wife, full of years, but ragged and hale, who is clothed incongruously in fleecy muslins. Green pigeons roost in its branches. Men and women sit outside their little houses, spinning or winding the silk on bobbins, and they have soft, friendly eyes. Children play about them and pariah dogs lie sleeping in the middle of the road. It is a gently industrious, happy and peaceful life that they seem to lead, and the thought crosses your mind that here are people who have found at least one solution to the mystery of existence.”

The same thought crosses my mind more than once. It makes me smile.

As far as I can gather, Maugham did not venture out to Inwa. He does not mention this manmade island created in the 13th century which served for 400 years as the imperial capital of successive Burmese kingdoms and was ultimately destroyed by a series of earthquakes in 1839. It is an idyllic spot of land on the confluence of the Irrawaddy and Myitnge rivers, with dirt-tracks for roads, so it is motorcycle, and springless ox- and mule-cart for transport. What remains of this once imperial city are parts of the outer walls and a sagging watchtower. Sic transit gloria mundi. An enchanting, silvery, languorous tranquillity hovers over the island where time seems to stand still. That is, if you happen to be there before the great wash of tourists sets on the island. But if you do, and you step out of your mule-cart before the robust, rotund teak pillars that carry Bagaya monastery, the monastic college where the royals once were educated, you risk being transfixed and are in danger of having found paradise with capital P. There is just this one monk left, who teaches a handful of young novices in this once capital monastery. It exudes something that is priceless and intangible in our fast-paced lives.

Two or three locals try to sell some trinkets or cold drinks. “Please buy me”, they are saying to me laughingly. I know because I asked our guide to translate what they were saying.

Please buy me. I could ask them the same. If it weren’t for the insufferable summers and the ferocious monsoon.

Like Maugham, we travel by river to Mingun and to Bagan. “The river was broad and muddy, and its banks were flat. Now and then one saw a pagoda, sometimes spick and span and white, but more often crumbling to pieces; and now and then one came to a riverside village nestling amiable among great green trees. On the landing-stage was a dense throng of noisy, gesticulating people in bright dresses and they looked like flowers on a stall in a market-place; there was a turmoil and a confusion, shouting, a hurry and scurry as a mass of little people, laden with their belongings, got off boats, and another mass of little people, laden too, got on. River travelling is monotonous and soothing. In whatever part of the world you are it is the same. No responsibility rests on your shoulders. Life is easy. The long day is divided into neat parts by the meals and you very soon acquire a sense that you have no longer an individuality.”

This is what Maugham writes on arriving in Bagan: “In the distance I saw the pagodas for which it is renowned. They loomed, huge, remote and mysterious, out of the mist of the early morning like the vague recollections of a fantastic dream. The river steamer set me down at a bedraggled village some miles from my destination, and I waited in the drizzle while my servant found an ox-wagon to take me on my way. It was a springless cart on solid wooden wheels, covered with a coconut matting, Inside, it was hot and breathless, but the rain had increased to a steady downpour and I was thankful for its shelter. The oxen went at a snail’s pace, with cautious steps, and I was shaken jolted as they ploughed their way through the tracks made by the carts that had gone before, and every now and then I was given a terrific jerk as the cart passed over a great stone. When I reached the circuit-house I felt as though I had been beaten and pummelled.

The circuit-house stood on the river bank, quite close to the water, and all round it were great trees, tamarinds, banyans and wild gooseberries.

[…] I do not know how many pagodas there are at Pagan; when you stand on an eminence they surround you as far as the eye can reach. They are almost as thickly strewn as the tombstones in a cemetery. They are of all sizes and in all states of preservation. Their solidity and size and magnificence are the more striking by reason of their surroundings, for they alone remain to show that here a vast and populous city once flourished. Today there is only a straggling village with broad untidy roads lined with great trees, a pleasant enough little place with matting houses, neat and trim, in which live the workers in lacquer; for this is the industry on which Pagan, forgetful of its ancient greatness, now modestly thrives.

[…] It was impressive to reflect that it had stood for so many centuries and looked down impassively on the smiling bend of the Irrawaddy. The birds were singing noisily in the trees; the crickets chirped and the frogs croaked, croaked, croaked. Somewhere a boy was whistling a melancholy tune on a rude pipe and in the compound the natives were chattering loudly. There is no silence in the East.”

Magnificent piece. There is indeed no silence in the East. Apart from the use of the words ‘natives’ that I would certainly not use for the Burmese people, Maugham’s description of Bagan is timeless. In 1998 the government forcibly relocated the inhabitants of the ‘straggling village’ from old to new Bagan, which difference is only marked by a few more miles of road to cover, where the lacquer workers are now modestly thriving.

A megalomaniac temple-like building in the distance, which wasn’t there in Maugham’s days, may be towering over the forest of spires. Hot air balloons may drift over the plains early morning. The ox cart is still very present alongside an abundance of tourist coaches. In essence it has not, yet, I should write, spoiled the kind of majesty Bagan still has. The majesty there is, Maugham writes, in the solitude in which the pagodas stand.

We had lunch on a verandah overlooking the river bank. The birds were singing noisily; the crickets chirped and the frogs croaked, croaked, croaked. Somewhere a boy was whistling a melancholy tune and in the compound the tourists, the cooks and the Chinese were chattering loudly.

Below a series of pictures entitled 1000 Piece Jigsaw Puzzles. By clicking the pictures, they open up in a gallery.

Inle Lake near Nyuang Shwe, northern Burma

Inle Lake

Inpawkhon village, Inle Lake

Inle Lake

Indein, Inle lake

Indein, Inle Lake

floating gardens, Inle Lake

Inle Lake

floating gardens, Inle Lake

Nga Hpe Chaung monastery, Inle Lake

floating gardens, Inle Lake

Inle Lake

store room Hu Pin Hotel, Nyaung Shwe, Inle Lake

unfurling willows, Inle Lake

along the railway track Heho-Kalaw

along the railway track Heho-Kalaw

Kalaw, Shan State

Kalaw

cherry blossom, Kalaw

Kalaw

road to Pindaya, Shan State

road to Pindaya, Kalaw region, Shan State

road to Pindaya, Kalaw region

crab appple trees on the road to Pindaya, Kalaw region

road to Pindaya, Kalaw region

U Bein bridge, Amarapura, Mandalay region

U Bein Bridge, Amarapura, Mandalay region

Inwa (Ava), bank of the Myitnge river, Mandalay region

paddy fields, Inwa, Mandalay region

Inwa, Mandalay region

Watch tower, Ava Palace site, Inwa

Bagaya monstery, Inwa

Mingun,- an hour boat's ride away from Mandalay

Mingun, Mandalay region

Mingun Pagoda

Mingun Pagoda, Mingun

view from Hsinbyume Pagoda, Mingun

Sagaing Hill, Sagaing, Upper Burma

view from Sagaing Hill, Sagaing

Caves of Pho Win Taung, Monywa region, Upper Burma

Irrawaddy river near Bagan

Bagan

Mount Popa (1516 m), Mount Popa National Park - one hour drive from Bagan, “following acute and often dangerous hairpin curves, the road led over heights and through deep valleys, pine forests yielding to bamboo groves and to tropical jungles out of which reared the feathery crowns of tree ferns and the slender stems of betel palms.” I am using a description by Walter Kahler in '

Burma

trails' with some artistic licence for dramatic effect. The acute and dangerous hairpin curves only appear in the last stretch to reach the Mount Popa plateau, from which the ancient volcano looms up like fantasy Lemony Snicket scenery.