Chapter XIV: En Panne!

With the influence of the lieutenant I managed at last to get under way again, not without hope that we might reach somewhere before nightfall, since the sun was still almost directly overhead. At Muongsen there begins one of the greatest automobile climbs I have ever seen, up and up and forever up through the jungled ranges of the great Annamese chain, an ascension unforgettable both for its magnificence and its danger. We climbed abruptly to an elevation of fifteen hundred meters, a full mile above sea-level, without moving forward a mile on the map. The road, forever clawing itself a place in the flank of the mountain, constantly making great detours, looking always for an opening, a gap to slip through, writhed like a tortured snake, struggled fiercely upward, grew dizzy with effort, took breath again, and climbed valiantly onward. On the left, or, worse still, on the right, the abyss always yawned. Our wheels touched the edge of space and flung stones off down sheer wooded slopes into _le vide_—emptiness; in many places there were curves so sharp that we had just room between the jagged mountain wall and the bottomless pit to make the turn by backing and filling where the slightest miscalculation might have meant destruction. Even then we barely got by without striking a lamp on the recently blasted mountain-side or dropping a hind wheel over the edge. I began to understand why a man, particularly an aging half-caste, whose lot in life required him to drive even now and then up or down this fly-footed route, might easily become too nervous ever to speed again and might grow to have the downcast view of life in general of this crawling imitation of a chauffeur.

Between the trees of every size there were glimpses here and there for an instant of the great Annamese chain we were struggling to surmount. The narrow little boats fighting their way up the rapids of the river we had crossed again at the beginning of the climb had long since disappeared; the river itself was gone. Giant ferns, valleys full of banana-plants, perfect tenement clothes-line mazes of jungle vines, range after blue range of the densest forest-jungle sank beneath us, and still the climbing continued, steadily, inexorably, forever. It was like duplicating by automobile my wild journey through the jungles of the upper Malay Peninsula, now two decades ago. Sometimes, when the road was completely exhausted, it went a little way on the level, but only long enough to catch its breath, as quickly as do the barrel-chested Indians of the Andes, before digging its toes into the mountain-side again. The air became fresher; the humid scent of the tropics disappeared; with every wheel-turn it was more pleasure to breathe. Behind and below us lay an ocean of branches, a vegetation so compact that it filled the vast ravine of the visible world to its very edges, like an overflowing bowl of greens, an immense panorama of verdure dotted with densely black patches of shade that looked like the mouths of caves.

There were many long thatch-roofed bridges, some of them curved, some with sharp angles, bridges of timbers and rough-hewn planks evidently cut on the spot, some covered with woven bamboo splints, bridges supported only by the upright trunks of trees along the sides of them, so that even the least nervous of travelers could not but have wondered whether they would always hold the weight our heavy car suddenly put upon them. Many similar bridges had been abandoned and left to disintegrate into the jungle again, because the road had been cut farther back into the hillsides. When this new road gets officially opened and there are cars in both directions—many cars, the French hope and believe—there should be magnificent possibilities of accident, for rarely indeed can one see five yards ahead, and often fog half or fully fills and conceals mighty ravines into which a false twist of the chauffeur’s wrist would have sent us crashing among the jungle tree-tops hundreds of feet below. I looked anxiously askance at the graying fellow at my side on whom my life depended, and was startled suddenly to discover that after all he was a mere savage in loin-cloth and bare feet, however much his half-French features and his wholly French garb might strive to conceal it.

It was an expensive luxury for the one or two automobiles a week that traveled over it, this road up the face of the mountains, costing seven hundred piastres a kilometer, about seven hundred dollars a mile, even in this continent of low wages. The workmen were paid only thirty-five piastre-cents a day, and must furnish their own food; hence one could scarcely blame them if they did not hurt themselves with work. Piles of stone, broken or to be broken, lay in long carefully slope-sided heaps at frequent intervals along the way, recalling France and its _cantonniers_; but the road was built rather in “American style,” according to a French engineer I met later, especially on the curves, because the famous old highways of France were not designed for speeding automobiles. We passed scores of Annamese men, nearly all of them gaunt and sickly looking, thin, lemon-yellow, feverish pictures of misery, squatting in miserable grass huts that had been thrown up for the road-building, or dawdling along the way. Always with the air of being half scared to death at sight of a white man, they were pitifully obsequious, all snatching off their hats and most of them even the rag they wore about the head under it, at the same time backing against the mountain wall or to the extreme edge of the precipice and bowing low with the palms of the hands together. I have seldom seen human beings as sad looking as these Annamese road-builders. There was no gaiety, no life at all compared with the harder working and more miserably living Chinese, though one was still constantly puzzled to know whether this related race was merely suppressed, depressed by French treatment, or naturally gifted with solemnity. At any rate we rode frequently through bowing ranks of bareheaded coolies in rusty clothes and with fever-stricken faces, who could not have greeted me more obsequiously had I been the governor-general himself. In fact more deference was shown me on this trip into Laos than is received by most European sovereigns of to-day.

It astonishes us from the temperate zone of the West that the Annamese or Tonkinese prefer the malarial and overcrowded rice-lands of their coastal plains to the rich upper regions of their country. But the most wretched of them have a horror of the hills, even though their ancestors seem to have been highland men; so that it is always a difficult job, often requiring actual governmental force, to get even a few hundred coolies from the plains, where they are often half starved, to come up and help build these roads; and the few French exploiters of highland plantations look almost in vain for workmen. Criminals sentenced to hard labor are sometimes used in such enterprises, and often the _corvée_, calling for forced contributions of labor on the roads, has had to be invoked. In the cities it is no uncommon sight to meet a column of these miserable fellows, wretched already, though perhaps only the recruits of a labor agency, marching to a train under command of a half-breed, like a file of condemned exiles. When moving from one camp to another almost all these downcast fellows carried a cloth-tied bundle in their hands or at the end of a bamboo over one shoulder, so that they resembled a tropical imitation of a procession of American hobos “hitting the ties.”

There seemed to be no women in these road-building camps, which perhaps accounted for half the appearance of misery, the great susceptibility of these plain-dwelling descendants of hardy highlanders to disease in the hills furnishing the rest of it. But it seems to be psychological more than physical, according to the French; ancient superstitions make the mere thought of living in the mountains sickening to them.

Higher up there were two or three villages that seemed to have inhabitants of both sexes and all ages, some of whom we now and then met making their way along the winding, perpetually climbing road. The sound of our horn drove them mad. The more fearful tried their best to climb the sheer earth or rock wall of the blasted mountain-side; the others, as if imploring us to be merciful and realize that they would run away if they could, snatched themselves bareheaded and, placing their hats against their stomachs, tried to break their spines in kowtowing to me as they might to a long dead emperor suddenly returned to earth. A few, less obsequious, or less quick-witted, watched us pass with open mouths and stupefied expressions, bawling children scurrying in and out between their legs. Near the top of the climb there suddenly appeared horses and other pack-animals, and the panic we created among these unusual carriers in Indo-China could not easily be described. We passed not a few traveling pigs along the way too, for wherever there is Chinese culture there must also be pork. Though they are credited with infinite patience, the Chinese will not drive pigs to market. But the Annamese, more afraid of work perhaps, rather than more patient, usually try to, with a cord tied to each porker’s leg. This may possibly be easier than the Chinese way of bodily carrying them, two on a one-man shoulder-pole or one between two men, so that carrier and carried, bound to market in this undignified manner, seem fellows in misery. In Hanoï and the larger towns of Annam this more certain form of transportation may also now and then be seen. But the Annamese pig is ordinarily driven, which is hard on motorists. For most of the pigs we met were too strong for the holder, and yet not quite strong enough to get away entirely and dash themselves over the mountain-side. Therefore, as they seemed bent on suicide in any form—and who could blame them?—the car always had to wait while the would-be pig-driver and several of his fellows united in one mighty tug of war that dragged the squealing animal out from under our wheels. For the most foolhardy of Annamese chauffeurs, however disdainful of the pig-driving populace, would scarcely have risked running over one of these porcine obstructions on this pathway along the bottomless pit.

It was in many ways a delightful trip, doubly so because one knew even without being told that very few travelers had ever made it. But good things often come to a violent end, though to tell the truth I had felt it in my bones that trouble lay in wait for us. I claim no prizes as an automobile driver, but I certainly could have given that mixture of races in French garb several pointers on how not to drive up a high mountain. Again it was overcaution rather than recklessness that worked his undoing. Never would he let the car get a reasonable start, with the result that it had to pump its heart out to make a snail’s pace. I carried no driver’s license for Indo-China, and should not have considered it courteous to my host ahead to practise with his new Italian-minded car on such a road if I had; hence I was totally at the mercy of this mingled son of caution. A dozen times we snorted to a halt before the maltreated engine quit entirely, fairly near the top. The chauffeur’s mental reaction to this emergency seemed to be to sit where he sat until the Goddess of Mercy or some one else came to help him out, with the probability about a week off of another car passing. When at last I prevailed upon him to get out and look at his engine, at least out of curiosity, all he knew was to lift the hood, when he fell into contemplation before the motor, mute with stupor, as if he had discovered this strange machine for the first time, until I expected him to bow down and kowtow in the dust before it. He seemed to know as much about the workings of automobile engines as of the gods in his temples, and to have the same dread of looking into the secrets of their power. But then, when I came to think of it, even I, effete product of a garage and repair-shop on every corner, knew no more about it than he did, so that after all he had been right, and there was really nothing to be done except what he had started to do—calmly to sit and wait for help.

That was no easy task for a man whose hair is habitually ragged of edge because he cannot endure to hold the penitents’ seat in a barber-shop, and when we had been broken down long enough to prove that neither of us could do anything useful about it, I walked on. Gusts of rain had fallen during our climb, pedestrians each lopping off a banana-leaf as an umbrella and dropping it where the shower ceased. But the second-hand one I picked up at the next emergency proved that as an umbrella a banana-leaf is waterproof, at least to the tropically inexperienced, only when one sits down under it. Luckily the showers were short and not very intense, and within an hour or so I was striding over the summit and down upon a few simple buildings. It was a military post named Nong-het, which turned out to be the station of the Bavarian-born lieutenant and his mixed lady-love, who had indeed invited me to stay with them on my return, should it happen that the rains made impossible the itinerary I had planned. Much good that did me now, with the hospitable pair still down at Muongsen.

The Annamese sergeant in charge massacred a few words of French, beating them out between his black teeth in a clogged stream from his betel-nut bloody lips, and there was no great difficulty in getting enough of his confidence to seat myself in the faded cloth easy-chair under the thatch roof of the lieutenant’s earth-floored porch. In fact it was not long before I could have coaxed his cook to cook me something, if we had been able to find anything to cook. Obviously I could not broach any stores there might have been inside the lieutenant’s thatched house, though it was locked with a piece of jungle twine, even had I been sure that the sergeant would permit it. In the long thatched barracks across the smooth earth parade-ground there were different kitchens and “beds” for the Annamese and the Laosian soldiers who made up the garrison, the former sleeping on wooden platforms, Chinese style, and the Laosians on soft springs of woven bamboo; and there were similar differences in cuisine and other customs. But that made it all the more difficult to convince the sergeant that surely there must be something native that could be made edible for “ung Flançais,” as he persisted in calling me. Plainly the lieutenant or his protective companion had taught the sergeant the solemnity with which the rites of the table should be treated, and the sacrilege of mixing culinary breeds.

Finally, thanks to my well known persistence and persuasiveness, there appeared some rice and the toughest chicken for its tender age that I have ever met in all my travels, nay, on Broadway itself. This trial over, and a path worn in the parade-ground while we discussed beneath a sardonically grinning moon the propriety of my continued presence in the post, the sergeant at last consented to have collected for me in an outhouse a bundle of straw and a ragged blanket which I was just as well pleased not to have seen by day—or even by torch-light; and just as I was dozing off there came the choral shrieks, growing slowly louder, of a great gang of coolies whom the chauffeur had requisitioned to push the car over the summit to Nong-het. The suspicions of the sergeant and his post having been allayed by the chauffeur’s acknowledging me, I found somewhat better quarters, now that my cot had come, out in the half-finished stone garages into which the Fiat had been coolie-handled. The chauffeur being hopeful, for some reason, of making the wop contrivance go on again in the morning by gasoline rather than by coolie-power, we turned in, he, somewhat less downhearted, curled up on the back seat of the car. Perhaps he thought whatever injuries the car had suffered would heal during the night.

He actually did get the thing under way again, long after sunrise, on three or five or seven of its four, six, or eight cylinders, as the case may be, and we covered twenty-seven kilometers along a now merely hilly road. Early during that feat we met and paused to chat with a French lieutenant driving back to Muongsen the Citroen _chenille_ that had carried the general-in-chief to Xieng Khuang, the same in fact that had crossed the Sahara the year before; and but for that fatal optimism of motorists so long as their wheels are turning we might easily have had him repair whatever damage had been done us. Apparently neither of us thought even to mention our difficulties of a few miles back, yet almost as soon as the “caterpillar” was out of sight my substitute for a chauffeur halted before another cluster of huts, called Sala Nam-lien, and refused even to try to go farther, saying that something disastrous would happen to us if we attempted to proceed. As nearly as I could make out from his ignorance of his father-tongue, the car was certain to explode and strew itself and us all over the Annamese chain if he annoyed it any longer. Possibly Italian cars do succumb to such fits of Latin temperament; at any rate I was in no position effectively to argue the matter, and assassination is regarded as more or less reprehensible even thus far from the haunts of civilization.

Though I only suspected it then, I was destined to know Nam-lien better than I know my own birthplace, nay, than Paris or Rio de Janeiro. It consisted of a dozen thatched huts with earth floor and wattled walls on either side of the wide space that served as road, one of them the _sala_ or rest-house for French travelers. Two bare woven-bamboo cots and a rough wooden table comprised the furnishings of this, unless one also counted the soft layer of dust on the earth floor as a rug. A few things such as eggs were purchasable about the village—though I should have been in hard luck indeed if I had not taken official advice and brought a few canned supplies with me—and a native was available to boil water and do the simplest form of cooking.

There I spent the rest of the day, sitting in the automobile, the only really comfortable place in the vicinity, reading, with a walk for exercise’ sake thrown in. During that time I had much intercourse, in so far as that is possible without a common speech, with one of the principal tribes of the region. I had known the Miao, or, as the French call them, the Méo, in southwestern China, though there my acquaintance had been mainly with the “Flowery Miao” in their extravagantly colorful dress. These were “Black Miao,” a much more independent tribe, and with almost no color in their black or dark-blue garments, sometimes set off by a dull red or purplish wine-colored scarf about the waist. Both men and women, often riding on horses, were a wilder tawnier type than their flowery relatives, their sturdy independence as plainly to be seen as their bare feet; for none of them, of either sex, had ever tortured their feet with shoes. Their sunburned hair and eyes were more nearly brown than black, and both sexes wore the hair long. Most of the men had carelessly wound turbans of dark cloth, a few of them wore Chinese skullcaps and dressed their hair Chinese fashion, old Chinese fashion, more exactly, for the majority still had queues, often hanging unbraided loosely about their shoulders. Another custom among these sturdy mountaineers is the wearing about their necks of heavy silver rings of all shapes. These are evidently concerned with their tribal superstitions as well as being their idea of combining adornment with safe banking. All silver money that falls into their hands is turned into rings; men, women, even the children, all wear them, large and small, from mere twisted silver wire to veritable horse-collars, some with open ends, some fastened with silver padlocks. Sometimes there are as many as half a dozen on a single neck, even of men on their way to work in the jungle. The richest of them clanked like perambulating pawnshops whenever they moved.

A critical observer might have wondered why they do not spend for shirting some of the silver dollars they turn into neck-rings. For the men wear a shirt or jacket that covers everything except what a shirt is most expected to cover, leaving bare a foot or more of the waist, with the navel as its central point of departure. But to every race its own ideas. The girls are not prudish, yet not at all forward. For their jackets, open almost to the navel and giving frequent half-glimpses of the breasts, were plainly designed for comfort rather than coquetry, as were their plaid skirts reaching hardly to their bare knees. The women walk with a powerful yet not ungraceful swing of the hips and a saucy flirting of their short pleated skirts, of which they are perhaps quite unconscious. Some of the men wear the tattooed blue panties ending in ruffles just below the knees that are common in Laos and the Shan States, but this is evidently due to extratribal influence, just as are the flowered silk gowns a few of the well-to-do among them wear after the fashion of the Chinese. The men, and sometimes the women, carry crude daggers in home-made sheaths; some had a long slender rifle, a few of them crossbows of a simple form, and most of them smoked or carried in their sashes pipes of sometimes elaborately tortured shapes. They use pack-oxen as well as little horses, but most of them, of both sexes, carry in a basket on their backs, though Chinese influence perhaps has led some to fasten two baskets at the ends of a short, stiff whole bamboo over a shoulder, thereby losing all the advantage of the long and supple shoulder-pole of China and Annam.

Some consider the Miao merely Chinese who in centuries gone by drifted down from the north, with a history similar to the Hakkas, but it is probably a better guess that they are of a more nearly aboriginal tribe than the Celestials. Sturdy enough in their natural habitat, they must live at least three thousand feet above sea-level to be either happy or healthy, just as the Annamese must stick to their miasmic rice-plains; and they never descend below that altitude if there is any way out of it. Of all the races of Indo-China the Miao are probably the most self-sufficient. In common with some other mountain tribes of Laos they burn off steep hillsides, normally every nine years, for their cultivation. When they need new fields to plant, they fell the biggest trees and set afire great patches of the jungle-forest, destroying wood and lumber enough to supply a large city for years to come. This burning is partly to drive off the blackleg fever and partly to give room for grass for their cattle; and as cinders make good fertilizer for a few years, their crops are abundant until it comes time to burn off another mountain-side. As this burning by patches has probably been going on for centuries, much of Laos is not so forested as one expected it to be, but often covered with those half-grown forests which the French call _brousse_. Yet with all the uneven growth there are many magnificent panoramas of densely forested ranges.

I spent that night in the _sala_, and when, late next morning, it was still evident that the substitute for a chauffeur did not propose to do anything about it except to settle down there in the vain hope that some day some one might come along who might do something to help us out, I set out to walk. It was still about fifty miles to Xieng Khuang, but certainly there was more prospect of reaching there on foot than of having help turn up within the same length of time. Moreover my supplies were distinctly limited, even if the loss of time could be made up by abandoning the best part of the trip and returning as I had come. Besides, I am far better at walking than at waiting, and nothing after all is more delightful than walking, especially on so splendid a route for it—high enough not to be too warm, the great jungle-forest opening new vistas, springing new surprises at every turn, at every rise of ground, so few of the tiresome human race as hardly to bother at all, and at every corner the chance of an adventure. So I swung off almost light-heartedly, even if to the mingled worry and disgruntlement of the worthless chauffeur, who evidently lost face with the village by this flaunting of his services and protection.

I had walked about ten alluring miles, or perhaps merely kilometers, when to my vast astonishment a big automobile came suddenly down out of the west upon me. In the capacious back seat, the top stowed away behind them, rode the general-in-chief of the French forces in Indo-China and a colonel aide. Having waited in vain for the conveyance that was to have brought me to Xieng Khuang in time for them to return by it, they had been forced to drain the province of its last thing on wheels, the Berliet—one car of each make seemed to be the rule here; once the road was officially opened they should know which performed best—of the _vice-commissaire_. Never have I been more pleasantly treated by a chance passer-by on the road. If the general’s importance weighed heavily upon him he was an expert at concealing his burdens. To be sure, the fact that he also had been the guest of the ruler of Xieng Khuang whose hospitality I had been—enjoying? no, let us say suffering—since stepping into the Fiat of distressing memory, and that, having expected me two nights before, they had about come to the conclusion that I had been eaten by a tiger, may have had something to do with his geniality. For it seemed that the donkey masquerading as a chauffeur who had been sent for me had not disclosed to the harassed head of the province an inkling as to our plight, though one can telegraph in Indo-China from almost any tree-top.

The general was strongly of the impression that I should come along with them rather than continue my walk until the returning car overtook me, and the semi-guest of a government does not flout the opinions of its chief military officer. In fact the general had an insistent way about him, though it had on the surface none of that big-stick gruffness of too many of our own army officers. The change from walking to riding left me somewhat chilly; the general insisted that I put on his coat, which had been lying in the seat beside him. I protested that the insignia of such high rank did not become me, that he himself might need the garment. His reply was typical of an old campaigner in many lands, of one who had served France in almost all of her colonies:

“_Je n’ai jamais froid, jamais soif, jamais faim, jamais chaud._ When any of these things threaten me, _je fume une pipe_, and they disappear in a puff of smoke”—and suiting the action to the word he lighted up again.

We were soon back at the _sala_, where there remained enough of my meager supplies so that I could do my share toward providing a luncheon. While we ate, the fellow who had been sent to fetch me told the general some badly pronounced tale of why it was dangerous to try to go on, lifting the hood to prove it. Again it seemed to be something to the effect that he could make the car go all right, but that if he did so the engine might blow up at any moment. He seemed to convince the general, who was probably no automobile expert, and naturally the colonel always agreed with a superior of such high rank; hence there was nothing left but for me to agree also. I might have stayed on at Sala Nam-lien and, if the Berliet and its Annamese driver had the luck that had been denied the Fiat under the inexpert ministrations of the son of caution, have been picked up by it sometime next day on the way back from turning the general over to other transportation in Muongsen. But the general insisted that I give them the pleasure of my company as long as possible, and on second thoughts it was better not to trust myself to spend another night within reach of that mixed-breed chauffeur.

Besides, it was a pleasure to travel over that great mountain-side road once more, even though I might be less successful in climbing back to the plateau, and although the platform-bed in the rest-house of Muongsen was several times harder than the cot I had left over the mountains. The lieutenant of the Citroen “caterpillar” had the Guadeloupe-driven car ready for action again, and in spite of all the decorating Muongsen had done for him the general insisted on continuing eastward toward nightfall, leaving me alone in the riverside _sala_ like the janitor of a ball-room amid the embellishments of an abandoned banquet.

I set out once more next morning before daylight upon that great climb from Muongsen to the plateau of Laos. This time fogs all but hid the world about us and made the road-gangs along the way seem more miserable than ever. But this Annamese chauffeur knew his trade and his car much better than did his predecessor in my affections, and while a man not so disgusted with a continual run of bad luck as to be willing to take some risk for a change might have complained at the speed he made on the brinks of bottomless precipices, we were soon at Nong-het over the summit again, then back at Sala Nam-lien, still adorned with the stalled Fiat, in time for a skimpy lunch. From there on, the Annamese let no grass grow under his wheels. In fact I wonder if any ever grew again in some of the spots they touched in our semi-aërial dash across the eastern half of Tran-ninh. It was startling to be able to race what seemed hundreds of miles along an excellent, even though grassy, automobile road through so primeval a region.

There was some more climbing, though it was by no means so strenuous as the ascent up the face of the Annamese chain, and at length, beyond a waterfall that came down the mountain side within hand-shake of the road in a beautiful cascade of many strands of silver among jungle and forest choked rocks and, dashing under the highway, dropped far down below to form a reunited stream, we came out of the great forest that had surrounded me ever since the first afternoon out of Vinh. Here, a hundred kilometers from the border of Annam, amid a plateau growth of scattered oak-like scrubs, there was much open country, of reddish rich-looking soil, though few inhabitants. In fact all Laos, largest of the five divisions of Indo-China, being about the size of Italy and not unlike it in shape, has, if the recent census was accurate, only 818,755 people, of whom 280 are French and eight—count them, eight!—are “foreigners.” About us lay vast rolling meadows of great beauty, as virgin as a world in which animal life had not yet been created. The general-in-chief, who had seen most of them, thought this great plateau of Xieng Khuang the finest region in the French colonies. There were some cactus-trees of striking forms; then the mountains closed in again on a narrow valley that seemed once to have been broken up into rice-fields, though this may have been an illusion. Small villages appeared once more, this time of the real Laosians, villages of thatched houses raised on poles well above snakes and possible floods, with a bit of cultivation about them. Each house had rounded gable walls at either end, one a kind of family veranda all but covered with a curving roof of thatch, where visitors are received and the family does its gossiping, the other a granary and store-room, where the cooking also seemed to be done. The walls of the houses, everything possible, in fact, were made of strips of narrow palm-leaves folded over a stick, forming panels overlapped like shingles. Many small but stout horses dotted the landscape here and there. I had not seen a grave for days; the Laosians dispose of their dead like real Buddhists; the Miao pile heaps of stone over their corpses.

This time fortune showed me unusual favor and we made the whole trip from Muongsen, including the stop at Sala Nam-lien, in a single day, as we might have done three days before but for the overcautious chauffeur. In fact we turned up at Xieng Khuang toward the end of the daily siesta, and I spent the rest of the afternoon in French formalities with the colonial officials of that distant but little known Garden of Eden.