Chapter XIII: Over the Mountains to Laos

Early April found me back in Hanoï, this time as a family of five rather than a foot-loose individual. It was not the place I had left two months before. Constantly heavy skies gave it a gloomy oppressive atmosphere not at all like those brilliant days of late January. Almost perpetual rain, even though it was not always heavy, made the life of the city less chic, less lively. With even the big wide streets covered with a light _couche_ of mud and water, the large French community seemed to dress in its older clothes rather than in its Parisian best. In a hundred ways the change in weather made other things different. But the natives, especially the toiling masses, were evidently used to a season that had befallen them yearly for who knows how many centuries; for, covered with big pancake hats and palm-leaf rain-coats, they splashed about in their bare feet almost as happily as in the brilliant month of January.

Luckily Sunday managed to be fine long enough to confirm my reports on the zoo and _guignol_ and the band-concert in the governor-general’s park, and convince all three generations of my family that a month in the little Paris of the East would be the great contrast to life in China which my first glimpse of it had promised. It was still brilliant too, and already hot, when I took the train next morning for Vinh, through a land everywhere lush green now, to be met at the station that evening and carried home by the _résident_ in person. For though I had not known it until a day or two before, the journey through Laos, Indo-China’s largest, most distant, and least known division, could only be made more or less officially, with the willingness and connivance, sometimes the actual help, of the French authorities. That part of it which I proposed to visit could hardly be reached even on foot without government permission and aid, and only those whom the governor-general considers _personæ gratæ_ may expect either. The time will soon come when that great region northeast of Siam will be made the commonplace stamping-ground of tourists, but so far the roads were only started and the hotels not yet begun even on paper. Still, the French were not averse to begin to let the outside world from which tourists eventually come know what will some day be in store for them.

The _résident_ did me the honor of driving his big Peugeot next day himself, though to save face he took along his native chauffeur, as well as a “boy” to act as general servant. We turned back north for thirty-five kilometers along the railway by which I had come, then swung sharply west from the macadam road upon a gravel one that was by no means poor. At the first village officially recognized by the French the army turned out—a score of Annamese soldiers in white knickerbocker uniforms and red wrap-leggings, with the familiar brass-tipped mushroom hats, all of them barefoot except the sergeant, whose heavy high shoes on the ends of his thin legs gave him a resemblance to a diver about to descend to the bottom of the sea. With stiff leather cartridge-boxes in the pits of their stomachs, their French rifles with the long sharp bayonets, usually carried sidewise high on their shoulders but now held stiffly perpendicular before them, and as spick and span as only native troops under European command can be, they stood at rifle-salute behind their young French officer with raised sword, the very personification of the East under Western training, while the _résident_ leisurely got out and inspected them as deliberately as if it were a pleasure to stand motionless in full dress beneath a tropical sun. Once these formalities were over, however, and arms had been grounded, the two Frenchmen shook hands and fraternized like exiled brothers.

While they are hardly a military people, any more than the Chinese, the Annamese had compulsory military service for all men between the ages of eighteen and sixty long before the French came. In fact they were so often called to arms that the field-work was largely left to their wives, which is perhaps why the women seem even to-day more at home in the fields than the men. Nor has the country lost its militaristic aspect under the French. Besides the white conscripts from overseas to be seen at important points, native soldiers are constantly in evidence. Astonishingly well groomed and set up compared to the armed ragamuffins of China, they commonly salute all Europeans with a gravity that further distinguishes them from the saucy, leering uniformed coolies of the soldier-ridden land to the north.

Naturally, most of these _linh_ are Annamese, though each of the four protectorates has its own soldiers, nominally under command of its king or emperor—“semi-volunteers” they are usually called, and quite properly. For even to-day it is no business of the king or emperor, much less of the French, whether or not they are volunteers in the true sense of the word. Mandarins or other officials tell each commune how many recruits it is required to furnish, and they are duly furnished, without embarrassing questions. The notables of each village choose those who shall leave it for eighteen months of service, at the ratio of one recruit to every six adult males, and naturally they do not include their own sons among them. Their training over, the youths may return to their homes, but are subject to call until the age of sixty. Many prefer to remain under arms longer than is required, and with this system France—or the native sovereign—has a reserve of very respectable size, some of whom have served five, ten, and even fifteen years. The French assert that conscription is hardly necessary, that most of the soldiers of Annam are real volunteers, that all the men of Annam wanted to go to France at the time of the war to fight for the “mother-land.” If so, this indicates a patriotism, or at least a wanderlust, not in keeping with the manner of most of them, though it is true that a visible pride shines forth in the brown faces of those few native soldiers, usually noncommissioned officers, who display two or three French medals across their breasts.

An hour or more later we crossed a river by a _bac_ and raced comfortably on along grass-grown roads for the rest of the morning. The rice-fields had given way to brush and forests, the plain to ridges and ravines, to a semi-wilderness in which the scarcity of people was in great contrast to the endless files of cinnamon-clad coolies of both sexes jogging under their shoulder-pole burdens, the files of wheelbarrows carrying produce to market, pack-animals among which our snorting conveyance created a panic reminiscent of the early days of the automobile, and to the crowded hat-roofed markets themselves, close beside and even in the road, on what might be called the Annamese side of the river. For though we were still geographically in Annam, almost no country in the world is so narrow as this one in the vicinity of Vinh, and almost nowhere do conditions change more quickly, once the crowded, rich, flat coast-land between the Gulf of Tonkin and the Annamese chain has been left behind. Already we began to meet tribespeople very different from the Annamese. Barely two hours from the railroad there appeared women dressed from just above the nipples barely to the knees, in primitive skirts wrapped about the lower waist, carrying heavy loads of wood, with a forehead-strap similar to that of our Indians. They were Muong, that is, “wild people,” though their wildness showed mainly in their timidity as they slipped off into the jungle below the raised road. We had not merely changed regions at the _bac_; we had entered a new world, stepped back several centuries.

We raced incessantly westward, for all the grass in the road, along which a path meandered as constantly as if forever dodging the evil spirits that can only move in a straight line, like a rifle-bullet, never encountering another vehicle—except once, when we missed by inches meeting head on at a brush-hidden turn the only automobile of the day. Toward noon we stopped at a Muong village, where we picked up a French colonist with holdings scattered among the foot-hills of the Annamese chain. The two Frenchmen of course were already acquainted, and there was the usual _apéritif_ before we sat down to a surprisingly good _déjeuner_ in a more or less public rest-house. More exactly it was no longer surprising to find good meals provided even in the wilderness, for your Frenchman will not endure gastronomic hardships; and since good meals are always more important to him than arriving, nearly three hours had slipped away before there was any indication that we were to move on again.

Meanwhile, on the heels of our arrival, the Muong chief of the village, closely followed by three or four retainers in bare feet, loose white panties, and more or less picturesque regalia, had come to welcome my high-rank companion. The chief wore a blue suit, instead of the usual black or cinnamon brown of the Annamese, and in honor of the occasion and of his own standing he had a blue cloth wound turban-fashion about his head. Also a volumnious cloak of mosquito-netting or cheese-cloth with huge sleeves, in which he clasped his hands together in a manner that increased his resemblance to a Chinese Buddhist priest, covered him to the bare ankles. He and his satellites brought us, as the city fathers of Muong villages do all important visitors, according to the _résident_, a basket of eggs and several bottles of what looked like water. Knowing that such a beverage would be an insult to a Frenchman, I made inquiry and found that the bottles were filled with a native liquor of such deadly voltage that even my wine-loving companions did not venture to sample it. While the chief acted out his respects, the most lowly of the attendants laid out the ten eggs on a brass platter and set it with two of the bottles of rice-alcohol on the earth floor before the seated _résident_. Only then did the chief speak, accompanying his greetings with many low bows, showing none of the friendly half-gaiety of the Chinese, but rather an air of being inwardly frightened. The _résident_ replied, somewhat carelessly, with a bit of the native tongue that was at least fairly fluent. Then the chief and his attendants withdrew, and the eggs and the bottle stood where they had been placed until we departed, when they were either retrieved by the chief or fell to the lot of the rest-house servants.

The colonist went on with us to the night’s halt by a road now crawling along the edge of a precipice, now across serried ranks of what my companions called _montagnes russes_, sharp ridges over which we incessantly bounced, alternating with constant drops to low filled-in runways in place of bridges, a wilderness all about us. But after all, tropical jungle has less of interest, at least after the first visit, to any one except the trained naturalist, than the seemingly greater variety of flora in the temperate zone. There was still something left of the afternoon, for all our generous midday halt, when we reached the military post of Cuarao, across the river from the highway and a mud and reed garage offering tropical accommodations to a car or two. One of its several white buildings of an official character, which looked so imposing against the background of Muong houses and jungle, had rooms for the three of us, opening off the soldier-trodden compound and roughly comfortable except for the heat.

There are three crops of Indian corn a year in this region; and among the small craft of various sizes on the river below were many narrow little boats full of ripe husked ears that gave the scene flashes of color. The Muong prefer rice, according to the _résident_, but the land left them is so hilly that the toil of raising it is more than they will endure. Wild-looking Muong mail-carriers, each with a small bag, hung about the rowboat ferry between the garage and our quarters as if they were in no hurry whatever to cross and be off on their fifteen kilometers of the Postes et Télégraphes relay. It was a reminder that the mail service of Indo-China under the French is by no means the equal, in proportion to the difficulties involved, of that of China under international tutelage. But on the other hand one can telegraph anywhere within the colony, from almost any hut, at a cent a word, in English, French, or the native tongues, and be sure of prompt and accurate delivery. The traveler long inured to the unreliable, expensive, often hopeless telegraph system of China, unfortunately not under foreign management, could forgive the French almost anything for this boon. During all my journey through Laos I never took the trouble to write letters to my family in Hanoï, with the probability of reaching there again before they did, but spent a few cents each evening for a telegram, and kept as closely in touch with them as if I had gone home each evening; for never once was I more than two hours in receiving a reply.

I have spoken before of the complete security of Europeans almost anywhere within France’s Indo-Chinese empire, whatever the complaints of the natives. No doubt it was to make us feel doubly safe that soldiers beat a hubbub on bamboo sections all night long about the post as a proof that they were awake and on guard. But there are dangers, according to some of the tales with which my companions whiled away the evening. The _résident_ of one of these wilder provinces, for instance, had broken five ribs when his automobile ran into a deer unfamiliar with modern traffic rules. A French soldier stationed on the Tonkin border was attacked by a tiger, an animal reputed always to take its victim by the back of the neck; and as this man chanced to be carrying a blanket-roll across his shoulders, he killed the beast with his knife—or his bayonet, for he himself was never clear on that detail—without getting a scratch. Tiger stories are legion in Indo-China, and many of them are as free from doubt as this one, which is fully authenticated—or documented, as my fellow-travelers put it.

The _résident_ drove me a few miles farther in the morning, halting at the edge of another river, where we had made telegraphic rendezvous with the authorities of the next province. Here and there a path went off up into the woods to clusters of Muong houses; now and again we met a file of these jungle people sidling along the edge of the road. The men did not look greatly different from the Annamese. Their eyes were a little less oblique, their faces at close range shaped more like our own; there was a bit more wildness, naïveté, timidity, or something countrified about them; but the surest way of telling apart the males of the two races was the manner in which they carry their burdens—the Annamese on the shoulder-pole, the Muong in baskets on their wives’ backs. The men themselves sometimes carry in baskets also, and even larger loads, but only when the available supply of females makes it necessary. The women who trail behind them could not possibly be mistaken for those of Annam. They were much less independent, each hiding behind her husband at sight of us, following close on his heels as they hurried silently on. They wore little above the waist except the loads they carried on their backs, secured by a band across their foreheads. A cloth about their heads and another barely covering their plump breasts were evidently concessions to the prudish world of the highway, for at home in the bush a blue-embroidered skirt from the waist to the lower thighs seems to be all that Muong public opinion requires. A long bodkin protruded from a queerly arranged knot of hair worn somewhat to the side of the head. The long round basket on the bare back drew taut the supporting cord across the forehead, a small board with two holes in it keeping the two strands apart. Each woman wore at her left side a section of bamboo as a pocket, and carried by another cord over one shoulder a canteen in the form of another piece of bamboo, several feet long, and filled with river-water with which to quench the thirst of her lord and master. Some of the brick-colored male savages bore a lance over one shoulder, and most of them had a long tobacco pipe of tiny bowl thrust like the bodkins of the women through their knot of hair, or worn in the belt like a cutlass. There was some evidence of tattooing, but the naïveté of their faces and manner and the attitude of the half-naked women were the most typical features. Between the men and the women there seemed to be a deep social gulf, something like that between servants and masters among the wealthy of other lands.

Here and there within sight along the road were a few Muong houses, all standing man-high on piles, a kind of gang-plank with cleats forming an outside stairway to a rounded veranda under a low overhanging thatch roof at one end. Men squatting over their long pipes and children at play evidently monopolized this portico, which the women only approached with the obsequious manner of those who feel themselves intruders. A smaller veranda at the other, always the southern and sun-baked end, served them as kitchen and place of recreation. Most Muong hamlets are far from the grass-grown highway, and one can scarcely blame them for preferring solitude and simplicity, though their roosters and cur-dogs probably make the nights as hideous there as the soldiers with their bamboo drums had ours at the post of Cuarao. The _résident_ whiled away the time with stories of this “wild” timid race, one of which concerned a great chief of the Muong who had always gone about as naked as his forefathers of pre-French days, until, having been decorated with the medal of the Legion of Honor, he went to Vinh and bought himself a magnificent jacket to pin his decoration on. Since then he had never been seen without the jacket, and his brother was always following him with envious eyes, though whether he envied him the medal or the jacket was not clear.

We had waited nearly an hour when there appeared on the other side of the not very large stream a sumptuous Fiat strangely out of keeping with the wilderness about us and a startling contrast in transportation to the leaky old _bac_ by which I crossed to it amid the blessings of the _résident_ of Vinh. It was to have been there at daylight, but it soon became evident that even a high-priced Italian car cannot move faster than the chauffeur that drives it. We were off as soon as my modest baggage had been stowed away, along a still grassy road cut between the steep mountain-side and the stream, the scars of the evidently recent road-building already almost completely obliterated by the impulsive tropical vegetation. Here and there a path meandered along the road, and on it passed picturesque Muong women in scanty garments, all of them carrying baskets and some of them suckling babies as they walked, climbing the rocks as high as possible whenever they caught sight or sound of us. Birds of rich colors flitting in and out of the jungle gave us as hasty glimpses of themselves as did the Muong women who sought refuge in the thick underbrush on the stream side of the road. There were flapper birds, too gaily dressed to be useful or even virtuous members of ornithological society. One of them had a brilliant blue back, tail, and wings, red feet, and a velvety-brown throat above a snow-white breast that gave it the appearance of wearing either a low-necked evening-gown or the white shirt of a dinner-jacket. Its fantastic Semitic beak and cardinal-red head was topped by a purple hat adorned with a single aigret. There were matronly birds in black, with wings of the rich brown of Tonkinese clothing, actress birds in exaggerated, even indecent costumes, birds that changed appearance entirely, as if they had suddenly put on a disguise, when they opened their wings and showed the under side of them; there were birds that were mere streaks of white, flashes of fire in the sunshine, birds with tails longer than themselves, birds that made a noise like the pounding of a section of bamboo with which Chinese watchmen make nights miserable, or Buddhist bonzes call upon the charitably minded. Yet they sang less than did the crickets or katydids, less than the queer members of the lizard family sunning themselves on the rocks, confirming a memory that the whistle or call of jungle birds is often monotonous but rarely musical. Once I caught sight in the stream below of a ridiculous member of the duck family, swimming and strutting about among his modest female mates in a costume so gaudy and incredible that he must have designed it himself. We were so closely flanked by the prolific vegetation that this part of the trip was like taking a journey through the heart of the jungle in an easy-chair, or on the magic carpet of Arabic legend. Memories of the tiger stories I had heard the evening before, and elsewhere, crowded upon me. There were panthers in these forests too, and herds of gaur, a wild cattle like the aurochs, two meters high, of little trouble to the people but very dangerous to the hunter. Yet the only visible peril was the constant tendency of the road to make hair-pin turns on the sheer edge of great gorges.

The chauffeur, dressed in full European style even to his tropical helmet, seemed to be a mixture of French and of several Indo-Chinese bloods. Instead of driving like the madman that most chauffeurs of Indo-China resemble, making every turn an attempt at suicide, every downward slope an effort to hang up a new speed-record, he was so overcautious that I no longer wondered at his failure to be on time at the rendezvous. While I am not one of those who like to fly along the brinks of precipices, I rather prefer that to crawling like an ox-cart when a stretch of straight wide road lies in clear view ahead. Twenty kilometers from the _bac_ he halted where we should have been three hours before, at a village which seemed to be named Muongsen, and announced that he could not reach our destination that day. It happened that my trip through Laos was absolutely set in cement, since I had to be somewhere else at a definite date, and this fellow and his chief, the _commissaire_ of Xieng Khuang, had been advised of that fact by urgent telegrams from the governor-generalate itself. But the Caucasian part of him seemed to have exhausted itself in his appearance without touching his character. Or perhaps he had once run into a water-buffalo or spilled himself down a mountain-side.

I was protesting against halting for the day while it was still fully an hour short of noon, when a white man unexpectedly turned up. He was a tall, good-looking, splendidly built fellow, with the appearance of a big blond Frenchman who had lived all his life in the open; and he wore the blue uniform of a French colonial officer. Yet he was no Frenchman for all that, but a native of Bavaria, who had lived as a boy in New York—at Sixty-fourth Street and Second Avenue, he still remembered. Now he could speak only French—besides Annamese and several tribal tongues of Indo-China—and was as Gallic in temperament as he was blond. Having entered the Foreign Legion when he was fourteen, he had been with the French ever since, and was now a second lieutenant in command of a village station higher up on the plateau ahead. With him was a French-Annamese woman of possessive manner, though no startling beauty, who called him husband.

Hospitable as he was handsome, he insisted that at least I could not go on until we had performed the Frenchman’s midday rites. We had to prolong the _apéritifs_ an hour or more before we could sit down to a several-course lunch in a hut grocery of very respectful serving manners and a not total ignorance of French cooking. For according to the lieutenant and his no less hospitable companion, it would have been a great breach of bush etiquette not to wait for the other “European” in the village. He was the chauffeur of the general-in-chief of all Indo-China, and had been left behind with his car _en panne_ while the general had climbed on into the mountains in a Citroen “caterpillar” that had been serving him as baggage-trailer.

This other “European” turned up at last and proved to be a Guadeloupe mulatto, who lost little time in claiming that his grandmother had once been a great personage in Bordeaux—which, after the way of French ladies, was not at all impossible—and who either had never heard of American conventions where negroes are concerned or judged from my hand-shake that I had outgrown any such prejudice. Simple and naïve, yet with all those amusing little idiosyncrasies of courtesy and their opposite common to the French, he was a bit bashful at first, until convinced by my manner that I accepted him as a social equal. His misgivings had plainly nothing to do with color but with the natural gulf between a mere corporal turned general’s chauffeur and a traveler sponsored by the governor-general himself. Thereafter he was at his ease, and his big eyes rolled like those of a minstrel-show end-man whenever he heard anything even mildly surprising, and he became convulsed with gaiety at the slightest suggestion of anything humorous. The lieutenant thought I might get more willing service out of my chauffeur if we invited him also to sit down with us; and what with the Muong and the Laosian servants who waited upon us, the mixture of races about the rough but well garnished table at which we finally gathered could hardly have been increased without going in search of other individuals.

The conversation hovered chiefly about the women of Laos. The lieutenant asserted, and was borne out by his wilderness companion of the sex under discussion, that to touch the hair or breasts of a Laosian woman is a more serious crime than actual violation. In fact Laosian law prescribes a much more serious penalty for the former than for the latter indiscretion, and the lieutenant in his judicial capacity had often been called upon to try cases under this strange code. Naturally, he explained, again abetted by his lady-love, what the Western world considers the lesser of the two crimes might be committed entirely against the will of the victim, while the other.... In brief, here was an example of Oriental wisdom to which the other side of the earth has not yet attained.

In a case of what, in the language we were then using, is called _tromper le mari_, the Laosians again outdid us in their sense of justice. By their law the lover is punished for the first offense, the woman for the second, and the husband for the third! For, as the lieutenant said, and his domestic partner again agreed, the woman who is party to such an act a second time must have some of the guilt; and the husband who is so inattentive as to be _trompé_ three times is either a fool or is knowingly permitting it, and deserves punishment in either case.

The gentleman of color from Guadeloupe confirmed all these statements and added the information that when the husband, or the “man,” is a soldier, like himself and the lieutenant, or is for any other reason away from home for six months or so at a time, it is impossible for him to avoid betraying his wife, or she him. This recalled to the lieutenant that the code of Laos allows the woman a divorce without contest if the husband stays away from her longer than the length of time he said he would when he left. What an importation this would be in our civilized West! One might fancy that it would make the men of Laos more punctual, more aware of the value of time, than the subway victims of our great metropolis. Yet it is not so, far from so. The lieutenant contended that this is a very just law, for the suffering of the woman from long absence, whetted by the uncertainty of the return, is obviously more than she can stand, more than she should be expected to stand. His own darling feebly denied this, but the men agreed with many sage shakings of the head. It is as bad as expecting a man to live six months without a woman, they went on, with extravagant gestures, as if trying to clinch the argument with the most ridiculous analogy they could hit upon. Gradually the tone of the conversation drifted to the other side of the shield, the subject of parents. Both men asserted that they had loved their mothers but not their fathers. “A man’s mother can only be one person; there can be no doubt about her,” the mulatto argued, with all the gravity of a chief justice, “but his father may be any one of thirty-six.” Whereupon there were general roars of laughter and agreement, while the typically French dinner came to its end with demi-tasses as naturally as a sentence does with a period.