Chapter XV: Down-Stream to Luang Prabang

Having ended on Saturday instead of Wednesday afternoon the first stage of a journey that at best had seemed in the beginning hardly possible in the time available, I made a tight fit even tighter by spending Easter Sunday in Xieng Khuang. For the _commissaire_, so long absent from the world at large that time had come to be a mere academic expression to him, had done so much to make my stay agreeable that to have hurried away again next morning would have been to increase a common French impression that to Americans personal convenience is more important than courtesy. Visitors do not come often to Xieng Khuang; besides, there are things of interest there, and whatever is worth doing, be it only a journey, is worth doing well.

There was the _commissaire’s_ zoo, for instance, a score of pets ranging from some distant member of the leopard family to monkeys that looked like puffballs, fittingly domiciled in his garden, with or without chains to assure their allegiance to a master from whose hand the fiercest of them ate with murmurs of pleasure. There are said to be more species of animals in the forests and on the plains of Tran-ninh than in almost any other space of similar size on earth—tigers, panthers, bears, gaur, gibbons, monkeys, deer, pythons, boa-constrictors, and a host of lesser serpents; a cobra was chased out of the yard of one of the French residents that very day; and the museum maintained this quarter-century past by a tropic-emaciated Frenchman was easily proof that the province is an unspoiled paradise of the ornithologist and the collector of butterflies and insects.

I spent the morning in a hot walk about the scattered thatched town, climbing to jungle-guarded half-ruined old stupas on the rounded hills behind it. Priests of the yellow robe had again appeared, dawdling about their simple monasteries with the leisureliness of men who know that to step on an insect means to be set back that far on the long and difficult road to Nirvana. Speaking of insects, the people of Tran-ninh boast that they are never troubled by mosquitos, because, all their domestic animals being at home under their pole-legged houses, these pests are so busy down there that they never trouble to rise to human height. The custom of living over unconfined stables is further exonerated by the warmth the animals are reputed to give the householders above—for so thin-blooded a race needs its central heating-plant also, during the short tropical “winters.”

It was market day, and well fed, almost haughty women, with many brilliant reds and yellows in their dress, were squatted in the shade over their semi-tropical vegetables, and pottering homeward again in long broken files. They had almost nothing in common with the Annamese women, except their sex and the protection of the French. Their lustrous hair piled in great black glossy heaps on the top of the head in an intricate fashion, usually with a saffron, rose-yellow, or red cloth about it, and most of them with stomachers of similar gay colors, they were striking examples of the unrestricted portion of the human race. In complexion they were much like ourselves plus many layers of tan, but were noticeable for bad teeth. The Laosians do not enamel their teeth, but most of them chew betel-nut; and the women seem less unequal socially to the men than their Muong, even their Annamese and Chinese sisters.

In Xieng Khuang there stands a monument to six Frenchmen, five of them killed in France during the war, and one, like the dozen native soldiers whose names also appear on it, _tué par les Méos rebelles_. It seems there was a great Miao uprising in the Laos during the winter of 1918–19, the bloodiest battle of which took place at Nong-het, between the “rebels” and the French, more exactly the native soldiers of the French. It was no surprise to be told that German agents and money had fomented the rebellion, though saner French residents admit that the Miao had long wished to be ruled by their own rather than by Laosian chieftains. That was no unnatural demand, and by the terms of the peace now reigning between them and the French it has been granted. Nor does this change seem to put any great burden upon Miao justice, for in cases involving more than five piastres the contestants may appeal to the French authorities, whom they evidently trust more than they do their own chieftains. The end of the rebellion was typical of these stiff-necked mountaineers. The French issued an ultimatum that the Méo must submit by 9 P.M. on a certain day; and at 8:59 exactly, while the French commanders sat with their watches in their hands, the Miao chieftain strode in and capitulated. The puzzle still remains how a race without clocks managed to time themselves so dramatically. Now they seem quite friendly, though it is not they who put their palms together above their heads and come to the squat when a white man goes by.

It would never do to quote to our own prudish-tongued land all the conversation that passed between perfectly respectable members of the little French colony of Xieng Khuang over the _apéritifs_ and the Parisian repasts in the _commissaire’s_ big living-room. For it turned largely on matters of sex, even when, perhaps even more so when, any or all of the three or four French wives of the little official group were present; and those who have lived with them know that the French can bring a blush to the cheek of a New England spinster without having the least notion that they are skirting the precipitous edge of frankness. One wife, I recall, was vehement in her denunciation of the Germans because they have so many children to the family, implying that as the French are unable to compete in that line with their enemies over the Rhine, her beloved native land was sure to be the loser in the end. Yet she and her husband, an officer in the colonial gendarmerie, had been married nearly fifteen years and showed every outward evidence of being able to add to the decreasing population against which she fulminated. But I did not ask the obvious question. It was amusing, when it was not pathetic, to observe how all these groups of French colonials seem to consider it axiomatic that they should not be expected to produce children. Their very manner voiced their conviction that in consenting to “exile” to the colony which they helped to rule they had done enough for _la patrie_; and those who contributed a child or two in addition were rather pitied, and pitied themselves, as the victims of an unkind fate or a deplorable accident. In this community of Xieng Khuang, for instance, the ten or more French residents, most of them married, had one child—that is, legitimate white child—a baby girl.

The huge _commissaire_, now half invalid but still a great force in his province, and beloved apparently by all classes of its residents, was a survival of the earlier colonial days, when a man in his present position was virtually king of all he surveyed. His half-dozen pure-blooded dogs all wore stout canvas pants to assure their offspring against mixture with the local mongrel breed. But some officials had not taken the same precautions with themselves, and had several brown-complexioned children at school in Hanoï, though they were bachelors. I am sure they would not look upon mention of this as unkind criticism, any more than it is meant as such. It is all in the point of view. Neither they nor any of the French wives and husbands composing the official community of Xieng Khuang saw anything wrong in this situation. Had some prudish member of the English-speaking races opened a discussion on the subject with them, he would not have got beyond being assured that it would have been inhumane of the _commissaire_ to expect a French wife to share with him the hardships of his productive years, when Tran-ninh was a houseless and an iceless wilderness, and that he was therefore compelled to vent his affections upon the native women.

The _commissaire_ could still, with assistance, hoist himself into the back seat of a topless automobile, and that afternoon we drove out to see the archæological puzzle of Xieng Khuang Plain. It did not need the assurance of my immense companion, or of his antithesis, the Midi-tongued vice-commissary, whose Berliet was still the only available vehicle in Tran-ninh, to see that this great plateau should have a great future, in the modern Western sense of the word. Its climate is as delightful as its soil is fertile. One French colonist had already covered a bit of it with splendid fields of wheat and corn, while his pineapples were almost worthy of Hawaii. Yet somehow I caught myself hoping that it would never serve the exploiting portion of the human race as anything more than the excellent airplane landing it was already. Its present pristine glory was too infinitely removed from the horrible picture that sprang up in my mind as I listened half-heartedly to the enthusiasm of the two _commissaires_, of such plains in my own land debauched into cheese-box cities by real-estate “developers.” Humanity is scarcely so precious that it must be fed or housed at the loss of such glorious spaces as this one across which we rolled toward _les jarres_.

Far out on the great plain, some miles from Xieng Khuang, are scores of immense stone jars, the mystery of which no man has yet solved. They are made of what the French call _grès_, a natural composite not unlike sandstone, yet quite hard; and they are so large that those I climbed into reached to my armpits and gave me almost room to squat. Many have fallen, some only partly, but the majority are still upright, for all the centuries that have rolled over them. Stone covers, some of them broken, lie on the ground among the jars, many of which are decorated with little clay Buddhas set up on them by the pious modern inhabitants. There are five hundred or more of these jars, in two groups a few miles apart; and the French, after their manner, though there is no money to be made out of them, have built what they call an “automobilable” road to both clusters. But even they have not been able to solve either the origin or the purpose of the jars. Made by some race lost in the prehistoric mists—for recorded history found them already here, much as they are to-day—they are the more puzzling in a region where there is no natural stone of this kind whatever. Amateur archæologists of Tran-ninh contend that they must have been brought on rafts across the lake that probably existed then where the plain is now, and set up on little islands that have become the knolls on which they still stand a bit above the general level. Were they used for storing food, as hiding-places of bootleg liquor, or were they places of burial? So far as appearances go they might have been either coffins or granaries. There are no signs of bones in them, however, no broken bottles or food-remnants either. But then, even bones would have had time completely to disintegrate during the unknown centuries since the stone age in which the jars may have been made, as they certainly were long before the pyramids, and probably before the monuments of Stonehenge. There remains the further mystery of how that prehistoric people, of which there are still found stone hammers, knives, and what seem to have been arrow-heads, fashioned these great hard-stone receptables.

Notwithstanding the time I had lost I decided to go on with the trip as planned, trusting to my own speed and my ability to induce speed in others to bring me through in the time available. So I was off once more before daylight, the _vice-commissaire_ doing me the honor not only to lend me his Berliet and his Annamese chauffeur again, but rising to accompany me in person across the plateau and on into magnificent pine-forests. The road, planned to be continued some day across the next province to the borders of Siam, died out about seven in the morning at a hut or two called Muongsuoi. Within an hour the alleged horses that had been sent there days before to wait for me were ready, and I was off on the next stage of the journey. Two Laosian men chosen by the _commissaire_ himself did their utmost to accompany me, as I hurried on all day by a trail through abrupt mountains covered with mighty forests along which it would have been a delight to saunter for weeks. Now and again a tropical rain did its best to delay me—first, as a warning, some isolated drops, astonishingly large and heavy, then suddenly a general tambourining on the leaves, quickly followed by torrents of water beating down in mad fury, the light lowering until it seemed to be growing dusk at midday. But I could not afford to be delayed merely to save myself and the men behind me a drenching, and except for the briefest noonday halt for cold fare washed down with red wine I raced incessantly on, into the evening, darkness, the blackest of nights. The little horses had long since lost all ability to carry me at anything like the pace I could make on foot, even had it been possible to ride them in the stumble-footed tunnel beneath the forest where it was impossible to see an obstacle even at the moment of sprawling over it. The last hour or more was down what felt like a great trough in the earth, set at a sharp angle, and in this I slid down to the Nam-khan River at 9:30, establishing a new record; for never before or since, many a French colonial and native ruler has assured me, has any human being gone from Xieng Khuang to Muongyu in a single day. I admit it sadly rather than boastfully, however, for though fate seems always driving me on at top speed, the record I would prefer through such scenery and bucolic delights as lay behind me would be that of the sloth family.

Out in the far outskirts of the earth one who at home is but a mere human insect among our wealthy and political great, our nobility of prize-fighters, football and movie stars, had been mistaken for a real personage, and the king of Luang Prabang himself had sent his own son-in-law to bring me to his capital. He was to be the fourth or fifth king I had ever seen, the second or third with whom I had spoken or exchanged the hand-clasp of greeting, and the only one, perhaps forever, who was so glad to make my acquaintance that he had sent to fetch me. The kindly reader, I am sure, will pardon my emotion. For I suspect that even he would boast of such extraordinary honors, equal in their Oriental way to being commanded to present one’s self at court in Windsor—with a foot-note as to Queen Mary’s sartorial requirements!

The plain facts of the case were that _Chao_ Duong Chan—the “Chao” meaning prince in the language of this region—seemed to look upon me, even in the incredibly mud-bespattered state in which I burst forth from the jungle night, as his social superior. At first, evidently, he refused to believe I was I, not because of the bedraggled rags to which the day had reduced what no longer ago than that morning had been a costume fit to be seen at a _commissaire’s_ table, but because a telegram had apprised him of my departure, and every one in Laos knew that I could not reach Muongyu that same evening, whatever the evidence of the five senses. But in time the impossible was admitted accomplished, and the rest-house to which I had retired became a place of pilgrimage. We were down in the realm of woven bamboo splints again, and they were used for everything—walls, floors, rafters, granaries, fences, beds—though not for boats, as in Annam. The building to which I had climbed well above the damp and snaky ground was therefore so soft underfoot that there was really no need to open my cot, though nothing in the form of furnishings was to be seen. Gradually a murmur in the night became the sound of muffled voices; torches flashed here and there in the darkness, and at length there crept silently up the very slanting ladder masquerading as a stairway one barefooted smiling Laosian man after another, each bringing me a bouquet of heavy jungle-flowers in a banana-leaf cone, the traditional greeting to honored visitors to the kingdom, as the flower necklace is in Hawaii. Behind these village authorities, after a fitting lapse of time, came the prince himself, manfully erect, who presented a document from the government of Luang Prabang setting forth his rank and explaining the errand on which he had been sent. He was a slender young man of aristocratic features, this _gendre du roi_—son-in-law of the king, to translate one of the two languages on the paper he had laid before me—a prince in his own right many generations before he had married one of the royal daughters. He wore a reddish _sampot_, the adult diaper of Siam, Laos, and Cambodia, and a white jacket of French military cut, starched and spotless, as did also the chief local authority. He spoke excellent French; had in fact, unless my memory fails me, been at school in France, and all in all was a man whom any one might have thanked a king for offering as a companion on such a journey as lay before me.

We were off down the small river about seven next morning. To have started earlier, with a heavy fog filling the whole valley of a stream bristling with rocks and rapids, would have been dangerous. The king’s son-in-law and I each had a boat, though I should have liked better to have had him with me, for the sake of information as well as companionship. The craft were what the French call _pirogues_, long and narrow, as slim and long in proportion as a lead-pencil, sharpened at both ends, and just about as easily turned over. They were frailly made of boards barely an inch thick, tied together with vines, with a prairie-schooner top of banana-leaves held in shape by a network of bamboo splints, and movable back and forth as sun, wind, rain, or lack thereof suggested; and mine had a raised platform with a mat in honor of my super-princely rank. It was of about the size, and the comfort, or its antithesis, of the mule-litter of northern China, which it strangely resembled in its jerky overbalanced gait, teetering so incessantly that I could not even write rough notes in it. I had four boatmen, two at each of the slightly raised, distant, pencil-like ends of the craft, all wearing tattooed breeches but not much else. Sitting cross-legged and half pretending to paddle, these typical _piroguiers_ of Luang Prabang seemed the personification of laziness, until one saw them in the rapids, the rock gorges, the genuine waterfalls they dare to shoot.

The prince in another pirogue always followed me as a sign of my high rank, not, I am sure, because he wished me to risk the countless rapids first. Each time I was certain the frail craft, writhing beneath me like a living being, would be dashed to pieces on the rocks that bristled everywhere and on which it scraped its bottom ominously at every drop. I was astonished, astounded as often as we emerged safely from another of these racing foaming perils. Yet though they worked like demons in the rapids, these boatmen of the Nam-khan, compared with the Chinese, with the Indians of the Amazon when they shovel water, were lazy after all, dabbing their narrow paddles into the stream and pulling them out again like playing children, and most of the time resting completely from that exertion. Again I disclaim any desire to criticize; had theirs been my lot in life I should certainly have worked as they did, rather than at the beast-like pace of labor that prevails in China. It was natural, since they can always pole their way up-stream, that they had never learned to toil like their South American prototypes, except in short spurts in the rapids.

Now and again the prince and I got out and walked ahead, while the boatmen stopped to study a maze of rocks that we were quite satisfied to let them try alone. Every few hours a cluster of jungle houses stood out in a tiny half-clearing on the high bank of the river, and most of these we visited. At each village the chief and the other men of importance, usually including several yellow-robed priests, came to pay their respects. Instead of snatching off hats or head-cloths, and performing an antic between a courtesy and an exaggerated bow, the form of salute in Luang Prabang is to come to a complete squat. Obsequious as this looked, it was evidently merely a gesture of politeness, for even the men of highest rank who had any intercourse with the prince, representative of the king in person, dropped to their haunches, and rose to human stature again only when the interview ended. In making any request of him, or in receiving anything from him, even the boatmen squatted, holding both hands, palms together, above the head. The village notables wore _sampots_ of many colors—purple, pink, grass-green—topped by khaki coats of uniform cut, which they evidently donned in our honor. Always they brought us leaf-wrapped cones of flowers, usually on banana-leaf platters. A supply of these bouquets of greeting, one concluded, must be kept on hand for emergencies.

The women were usually the first to see us, for they were constantly bathing themselves and their naked urchins in the stream; and they were clever at getting into or out of their barrel-like single garment without unduly exposing themselves. I saw more bathing on that journey down the Nam-khan than during my two years in China, and less uncleanliness in all Laos than in the smallest Chinese village. The women of Luang Prabang, especially along the rivers, are no burden to their fathers and husbands so far as clothing is concerned. In every village we visited they were naked to the waist, and did not know it; at least they did not seem to be conscious that in other, often less modest lands, such a costume might be frowned upon. They wore a single piece of cloth, spun from cotton grown on the spot, and woven on hand-looms under their long-legged houses. Colored in the thread with dyes made from nuts and vegetable growths of the region, this strip is simply wrapped about the waist. Or, in the case of a few of the youngest, which in that backward land still means the more modest women, the unmarried perhaps, or at least those who had not yet borne a child, it is wrapped about the lower two thirds of the breasts, with correspondingly more of the legs showing. Thus one recognized the girls of flapper age by their shapely brown legs and the matrons by their resemblance in costume to the Venus of Milo. Once a child has arrived, the exposure incident to suckling it seems to overcome virginal modesty; or in the absence of offspring pride no doubt soon joins carelessness in casting out the habits of maidenhood, so that there were displayed the scrawny pendent udders of the sterile as well as the withered rags of old age. The sight of a white man appeared to move some of the women to cover their breasts, a mere matter of deftly raising the garment. Whether this gesture was a recognition of the susceptibility of the French—who surely could not have issued non-exposure decrees!—or a mere matter of politeness, like the male squat, there was no means of knowing.

Though they did not thrust themselves forward, the women of this region were not so retiring as those of most of the Orient. Some of them were distinctly good-looking, well formed, their skin of an almost golden color, enhanced by the frequent bathing of most tropical peoples; and at least one of these village maidens would not have looked at all out of place in a famous Broadway review—except that she was far too modest both in dress and demeanor for such company. With the conversation at Muongsen still in mind, I took care not to touch these fair damsels in getting photographs of them, though with difficulty, since it has become almost second nature during two decades of wandering among camera-shy peoples to arrange by hand my subjects to the camera’s liking. It would have been a sad ending to so officially attested a trip to have been charged with one of the most serious crimes in the Laosian code!

The people of Laos struck me as the most pleasing unspoiled race with which I came in contact in all my Far-Eastern wanderings, though I might have formed a less favorable opinion if I had tried to make my way among them without being sponsored by king and princes. We brought up at the end of the first day at Sop June—at least so it sounded—in time to photograph most of the inhabitants before concocting a dinner from our supplies over a beach fire. There was barely room in my narrow boat at the foot of the village bank to set up my cot, but with China and its crowded, filthy, noisy waterfronts in mind this was a haven of rest indeed. Next morning two big fat otter came out to gaze upon us from the foot of the often precipitous shore, looking in their wet coats, shining in the slanting rays of the rising sun, as large as seals. To my satisfaction, since I have none of the hunter in my soul, they disappeared in the water again before my royal companion could get his rifle ready, much less aimed. Something convinced me that he, too, was just as well pleased, that the Buddhist within him really condemned this aping of ruthless Western ways, with the added Oriental risk of losing face if he had shot without bringing down the quarry. Birds in comic-opera costumes flitted singly and in groups across the faces of the inclosing forest walls, a flock of parrakeets, screeching like a dismissed chorus, sometimes flying clear across the river. Big fish now and then jumped well out of the water, as if to take a look at us or at the scenery. Or they may have been reconnoitering, for curious wigwam-shaped fish-traps, held down by heaps of stones on a platform part way up them, are placed at the heads of rapids on the Nam-khan. Then there were weirs, draining into jug-shaped baskets with small entrances which forked prongs made almost impossible as exits, with a single opening in them just wide enough for the narrow pirogues to slip through; and even these were made impassable to the fish by a row of bamboos, one end of each held down in the river and the upper floating one pointing down-stream.

The villages were as much alike, once one had seen a few of them, as our own stereotyped cities: from half a dozen to a score of woven-bamboo-and-leaf shacks, light as big baskets, raised on posts, in a little clearing overrun with children, curs, pigs, and chickens—four forms of life all but universal the world over—and little else except the surrounding jungle. Chickens of both sexes, perhaps I should have specified, for in this one matter the people seemed to believe in monogamy and to have as many roosters as hens. It was in one of these villages of the Upper Nam-khan that I saw the first of still another race, the Kha, which some consider the real aborigines of these forested mountains of the ancient kingdom, as they are indubitably the oldest remaining inhabitants. They were wild but harmless-looking men, wearing earrings, their women adorned with still larger ones. A Kha woman down from the mountains—for like the Miao they are a highland people—had tattooed arms and, at least while the prince and I were there, was completely clothed from neck to calves, in derided contrast to the river-village women. In another village several dirty Chinese peddlers, plainly not much liked by the natives, sat almost insolently on the soft bamboo-splint floor of the clean _sala_ maintained for more cleanly visitors. It was in this same village that our boatmen knelt before the assembled authorities and asked that new boats, or new boatmen, be provided, as they were tired or homesick or something. To any one accustomed to seeing the boatmen of China toil many times harder, often day after day for weeks at a time, than these tropical fellows had for little more than a day, there was something childish about them. The petition was promptly refused, and in due time we took our leave and went on down the ever wider and gradually less swift rapid-bristling river.

Finally, in the middle of the second day, we were forced to grant the boatmen’s request, for there came a rapid so Niagara-like that no boats can navigate it. All our baggage and supplies were turned over to coolies, behind whom we walked in blazing noonday sunshine and deep sand around the falls to another pair of pirogues, waiting for us ever since the prince had passed here on the slow up-stream trip to meet me, and were off again down an increasing river until well after dark. The new crew were twin brothers of the old, and the change of boats had made little change in the endless series of rapids, for rarely was there not at least one roaring in our ears—until, toward evening, they came farther and farther apart as the river spread out into a wide and almost placid stream. Palisades and precipices had marked the place of changing boats; farther down there were rock cliffs again, the ever larger river cutting circles among them, mighty rocks that seemed to have tumbled down from them jutting forth from the edge of the stream. The current was still swift, yet after a long afternoon of racing down-stream there was the same jagged heap of mountains just behind us, turning reddish lilac and purple from the setting sun ahead. Bamboo rafts, with little houses on them, made their way more slowly down the stream, so placid now that it mirrored the ever-lower hills densely covered with jungle-forest, networks of lianas, some trees completely shrouded in vines, whole hillsides of huge banana-plumes, flashes of birds across them. Women wearing nothing but skirts were getting water from the river; others, especially at sundown, were bathing themselves and their naked children. Bonzes in dirty yellow robes, loafing, or horse-playing to use up the energy their calling does not permit them to waste in work or domestic happiness, showed themselves here and there along the way. The people seemed darker, burned to an almost Madrasi color.

We landed well after dark, climbing a long flight of steps cut steeply in the earth bank, to find ourselves in a considerable town, as towns go in Laos, with a big, almost a palatial rest-house for distinguished travelers, and a military commander in khaki to greet us. To my astonishment—and to that of many others, it transpired—I found that my boat trip was ended. From just over there in the woods, it seemed, an “automobilable” road ran to the royal capital, and a Ford would come for us in the morning. Royally done indeed! Usually it takes nearly a week for this journey down the Nam-khan, but the high waters of spring had favored us beyond all precedent.

Next morning we strolled a couple of kilometers through splendid forests, to ride twenty-seven more in America’s most plebeian conveyance along a fair dirt road that the jungle had already covered with grass in places, through incessant forest. Kapok falling from huge vegetable-cotton trees whitened the ground in large patches. Some of the tribes of Indo-China weave it into cloth. There were trees so covered with white flowers that they looked incongruously like those of our northern clime shrouded with the wet snow of spring.

I reached Luang Prabang town before the sun was high, being delivered at the door of another hospitable _commissaire_, this time still young and energetic and with a French wife equally devoted to her official duties and to their two small children. All the little French colony was still breathless with the news the telegraph had brought them the evening before, that I had accomplished the journey from Xieng Khuang to their very doors, as it were, in three days. There were hints that they credited this partly to American black magic. For in this wilderness land of perfect telegraphic service I had not only exchanged greetings with my family in Hanoï every evening except the one on the river, but the authorities at Xieng Khuang, Luang Prabang, Vientiane, even Hanoï, Paris itself for all I know, had been instantly advised of every step of my journey.