Chapter XVIII: Vientiane and Back to Hanoï

We were off again soon after dawn, by a road instead of a trail, a wide road that is by this time no doubt “automobilable,” though a car could hardly have gone over it then even if one could have reached it, an execrable new road of five hours of incessant _montagnes russes_, constant ups and downs, and sadly in need of the shading tree-tops of the narrow trail. The prince and I left the coolies far behind before this torture was ended. The French are gradually pushing a highway from Vientiane to Luang Prabang, and the last few miles of this unfinished portion still had high earth pillars left in the cuttings to show how much was due the contractors whose coolies had excavated them with handbaskets. I lunched with the Frenchman in charge of the road-building, whose Annamese companion had recently given him another hostage to fortune, in a house on a hilltop overlooking a great vista, that in some ways resembled a South American hacienda. Here I took leave of the prince, who had changed his mind and decided not to go on to Vientiane. It was plain that he would have given much to do so, but evidently either the French or the king, or both, had him under strict discipline. A miserable Ford, that had been waiting for me since the day before in order that my hurried trip should be crowned with success, cranked up, and at two we chugged away in great heat over the last 106 kilometers to Vientiane.

There was nothing of interest to me on this last ride, though there would have been for one who had not made the delightful overland trip. The people were much less attractive nearer what we are pleased to call civilization, especially the road-gangs. Half-way in we met the big automobile of the chief ruler of Laos, sent to find what had become of me, thanks to a strong but unwarranted suspicion that the Ford had broken down. Thereafter the view of the surrounding landscape was as from an airplane, and I reached Vientiane in time for a glimpse of it before dark, and dinner with the cream of the large French colony—with children as scarce as elsewhere.

Vieng-chan, which under the French has become Vientiane, is a place of former glory and power of the Tai race, capital of another of those kingdoms of earlier days. Its last great period of prosperity was between 1628 and 1652, after which civil wars dispersed its power and Luang Prabang declared its independence, though even in the eighteenth century it was still powerful. Then, in 1828, the Siamese destroyed the city, carried off and dispersed the people, and it has never been rebuilt. In 1893, when a treaty with Siam gave all Laos, all the land east of the Mekong and some west of it, to France, Vieng-chan became the French capital of Laos, as Luang Prabang is the chief native center.

Formerly Vientiane had a hundred and twenty magnificent temples, so well built that, in addition to many ruins lost in the bush, some still remain symmetrical and perfect in general form, though their beams have rotted away and the masonry has been exposed to tropical sun and rain for a century. There are some striking doors giving entrance to roofless ruins; within the falling shell of a temple near the _Résidence_, in which I was lord of all I surveyed because of the absence of the “résuper,” two big Buddhas sit in the infinitely patient attitude of the East, though the rains fall and the sun beats down upon their coiled-serpent-covered heads, while the vegetation piously strives to clothe and hold them together as the mud and stone of which they are made crumble bit by bit away.

Perhaps there is really nothing incongruous about Buddhist priests in bright-yellow robes riding the latest style of bicycle, or even about women who, wearing only a kind of skirt, with at most a thin gay scarf thrown hastily over the breasts, indulge in the same frivolous form of locomotion. But these things are likely to catch the attention of the visitor to Vientiane, at least during his first day there. Though the French have brought a few automobiles, the humped-ox cart—a curious cart with a movable axle and huge wheels higher than a man—is still the more common type of conveyance. Vientiane has an avenue of flamboyants of which it is justly proud, and a lot of good French residences, with a pleasant woodsy atmosphere out of keeping with the solemn air of French officialdom.

Siam lies just across the river, and here the same race lives on both sides of the Mekong, though the Laosians on the other bank rarely come over to work for the French. From Muongyu onward all the men had worn their hair pompadour; at about the place the last Ford picked me up even the women, no doubt influenced by their Siamese sisters across the river, rather than by any world-wide movement to do away with the chief glory of the sex, took to cutting their hair man-fashion. At Vientiane the women on both sides of the Mekong have these absurd Siamese hair-cuts, each hair standing on end as if the eyes beneath it had seen a whole flock of ghosts, and as they also chew betel-nut to make themselves still more repulsive it does not matter that one can rarely tell the two sexes apart.

The steamer of the Messageries Fluviales got stuck on a sand-bank just as its picturesque Corsican captain was moving up to take on his passengers, so that I not only had the residence of the chief ruler of Laos entirely to myself for nearly twenty-four hours, but was able to take in all the sights and meet nearly all the hospitable French residents. The boat got away at 2:30 and was off down the river, leaving me behind after all my strenuous exertion to overtake it. But that did not matter, for the thoughtful French had planned it that way, so that their distinguished guest might finish his siesta and spend no more time than necessary on the uncomfortable craft. About four some of them leisurely set out with me by automobile and put me on board at a stop made for my especial benefit as far down-stream as the road then reached beyond Vientiane.

That afternoon we touched Siam and finally tied up at a place called Ban-along, where I slept well only because there happened to be room to set up my cot on deck, until we pushed off again at three in the morning. All day we steamed down the Mekong between Indo-China and Siamese jungles, now and then stopping at the French or at the farther bank. After the manner of the aggressive West, the French claim all the Mekong and allow no Siamese steamers on it. For centuries the Siamese and Chinese had most of the trade with Laos, which came and went by way of Siam; now the French are gradually diverting it, illustrating another of the advantages of protecting backward countries. No small amount of smuggling still goes on, especially in opium, and mainly engineered by the wily Chinese. Once some Laosian opium-smugglers who had tied up for the night at the Siamese bank were arrested by the Siamese police. The French, in keeping with their claim to the entire stream, made this a serious “diplomatic incident,” and to-day the Siamese can do nothing against smugglers and similar lawbreakers until they actually step ashore with their loot.

A fierce storm at dark on the second day drove us up against the Siamese bank again, at a place that seemed to be called Ban-naqué, but we were off once more at daylight and pulled into Thakek while it was sitting down to its midday meal. There an automobile that had been sent over the mountains from Vinh was ready to carry me off at once, but there was time to spare and interest enough in this frontier post so that I decided to stay out the day. The chief French official was languid with fever and bored with life. The head of the police, on the other hand, with a still larger native family, seemed to enjoy this placid tropical existence, and when the sun began to show an appreciable decline he called a queer-looking official craft and took me across the river to Lakhone in Siam, the first time I had actually set foot in that progressive land in nearly twenty years. As far at least as this frontier village was concerned there did not seem to be any great change. The natives were of the same race and similar customs as those of Thakek, but had an air about them of saying inwardly, “Well, at least we are not subject to French nagging.” The difference between them and their cousins across the river must be much like that between a bachelor and a henpecked husband—and their communal housekeeping bore out the same analogy. Leg-irons seemed to be no detriment to prisoners who wished to run after us and beg money to buy opium, neither of which things would be permitted their fellows in French territory, at least within sight of Europeans. On the other hand there is less active unkindness to prisoners on the French side.

There were a few games of tennis in Thakek when the sun was low, with even two or three white women among the players, and next morning comfortably after six I was off for Annam. A native secretary of the ruler-in-chief of Laos diffidently shared the back seat of the big open car with me, and the Annamese chauffeur of course had his assistant, confidant, and water-boy, for your Oriental driver will not go without company, be it only to have some one as a receptacle for his conversation. It had rained and there was much skidding between Thakek and Nakai; in fact at that time of year automobiles usually cannot get through, and ours was the last one that did before that season’s rains settled down in earnest. I had never been sure of getting back to Annam by this route—until I got there. Had it become impassable as early as usual I might have gone on down the Mekong by the incommodious Messageries Fluviales clear to Pnom Penh in Cambodia, with a bit of railway about some falls, and made all the journey from Saïgon to Hanoï over again, unless I could have crossed the mountains from Savannakhet, by a road still less likely to be “automobilable” in the rainy season.

We turned up in time for lunch at a mountain shack in dense forest in which the “résuper” of Laos and his wife, about the most delightful people I met in Indo-China, were roughing it for a few days with their small son. I trust that the reader has not confounded Laos with Luang Prabang, which is merely the largest and most western division of it, its lone king decidedly subordinate to this lean and competent Frenchman whose palatial _Résidence_ I had occupied in Vientiane. Besides Luang Prabang and the 5^{me} Territoire that goes with it, and spacious Tran-ninh of Xieng Khuang, there are half a dozen other divisions in this sparsely settled territory ruled over by my _déjeuner_ host across the plain board camp-table.

The secretary and even the extra chauffeur remained at the camp, as I should have done for the rest of that Sunday myself had I suspected how good the road still was from there on. Besides, an elephant-hunt was at its height near-by, an unusually large herd having been discovered almost within shouting-distance of where we sat. In Siam it is forbidden to kill elephants, because they all belong to the king. So they do in theory also in Laos, or at least in Luang Prabang, but with the French ruling over it and the Chinese ready to pay high prices for tusks, the sacredness of the king’s protégés is limited. In Canton we wondered where the carvers of myriad ornaments got all their ivory, rather suspecting them of relations with the local slaughter-house; in Laos one wonders where the hunters find sale for so many tusks. I heard much concerning the life of this region during that convivial _déjeuner_. Elands abound, and there are great herds of gaur, that wild cattle-like survivor from an earlier age which seems to be found nowhere else, a red-brown beast weighing on the average two thousand kilograms. There were at the camp half a dozen heads of this animal, shot within the past day or two, the foreheads unnaturally high, the female horns closer together than those of the male. The birds of these parts build no nests in the trees, because the monkeys, especially the black long-armed gibbons, steal their eggs. On the other hand partridge and quail, after building their nests in holes in the ground, roost in the trees as a protection against serpents.

I thought often of that _résident_ of a Cambodian province who broke five ribs by running into a deer, as we raced on eastward by a forest-walled road as unpeopled as if it had been built for my especial use, bounding every little while over bridges held by vine and woven-bamboo cables, the bridges themselves merely a larger form of wickerwork or basketry. To my astonishment and, I am sure, to that of the chauffeur also, we had no difficulty in making the entire run from Thakek to Vinh in a single day, though it had not been certain that we could even make it in two, and a day later we might not have been able to make it at all. But even nature seemed to take an interest in my record-breaking trip, and we were agreeably surprised to find astonishingly dry parts of the road which should have been sloughs of despondency. It was still only a little after noon when we halted at the village _sala_ that had been officially chosen as my night’s stopping-place, just long enough to tell the servants that their guest was flying onward.

Soon afterward we picked up a Chinese merchant from Yünnanfu, whose mandarin was nearly enough like that of Peking so that I astonished him by managing a meager conversation in his own tongue. He had two bullock-carts loaded with tigers—everything except the flesh—and many deer-horns, all valuable in the medicine-shops of his native land, especially the tiger-claws, to be powdered and drunk in wine by the faint-hearted, if I fully understood him. At the pace his native Jehus were making he would have been from ten days to a fortnight in reaching Vinh. I am notably softhearted, so when he and the chauffeur joined in coaxing me to let the Celestial go along with us, it seemed so much like making a man a present of ten days of life, more precious than money, that I succumbed—and for my pains was cramped for the rest of the trip into the off front seat, the left of course, usually occupied by the assistant chauffeur. The Chinese showed all signs of glee, even though he was of a race to whom ten days is no more than five hours, and paying off his simple Laosian bullock-drivers, he began loading his moth-eaten trophies into the car. I had miscalculated the loads, or fancied he would throw most of the worthless stuff away in order to ride with us; but no, indeed—I began to wonder whether he was even going to try to tuck the bullock-carts away in our maltreated conveyance. Of course the chauffeur got a nice little thing out of it—in fact he as much as said so in his hybrid Annamese-French, with a subtle hint that for this favor he did not expect me to tip him at the end of the run—and I have no doubt that all this had been cooked up between them when bullock-carts and automobile met two days before a few miles farther west. That would explain the extraordinary occurrence of leaving the assistant chauffeur behind; probably he eventually got his share of the grateful Yünnanese’s gratuity, for walking back to Vinh during the rainy season.

There were some coffee plantations, among corn and rubber-trees, that afternoon, the largest of them belonging to the man whom I had met at Cuarao on the outward trip; but he was not at home—this home, at least. We had already begun dropping down out of the great Annamese chain, the road in places a serpentine succession of descending curves magnificently framed in vine-clothed forest and precipices, and by three we were back in Annam again, another world, with its groves of slender _aréquiers_ climbed by betel-vines, its many villages surrounded by high thick bamboo hedges, its water-buffaloes of elephant and albino colors, its tombs and grave-mounds, its _bacs_ and rice-fields, its joss-houses and red-saliva-splotched roads, its myriad people in parasol-hats, diamond-shaped breast-covers, necklaces of grains of gold, black cheese-cloth overcoats, gowns of the color of tobacco-juice, its endless files of pole-carrying coolies of both sexes and all ages; in thinly populated Laos the battle with hunger is not so keen that children need to begin their labors so early.

The Chinese and his tigers got off in the outskirts of Vinh, lest the government hear of the misuse of its official transportation, and the air was still more reminiscent of afternoon than of evening when I entered the same room of the French-Spanish hotel I had occupied when I first came northward along the Mandarin Road three months before. The chauffeur had protested that his orders were to drive me to the _Résidence_, but I felt that I had been overdoing French colonial hospitality, now that it was possible to provide for myself. Yet I was forced to dine with the _résident_ who had driven me away toward Xieng Khuang twenty days back, and he and his wife succeeded in convincing me that they were really disappointed because I had not come to occupy the palatial room they had once more prepared for me. For one can have no secrets in Indo-China. The incessant telegraph keeps one’s doings more in the public, or at least the official, eye than does the most flagrant of our yellow journals, and barely had I passed the village _sala_ that had been officially chosen as my stopping-place that night than a telegram had warned the _résident_ that the wild American was again breaking records.

In early May the Vinh-to-Hanoï landscape is a sea of ripening rice from which those great black-gray rock hills of strange form and varied strata stand forth like fantastic islands. I cannot remember ever having endured a hotter day than that train-ride. This was the hottest time of the year, just before the summer rains, utterly cloudless and often without the slightest breeze. With June come torrential downpours and cooler weather. There was a wind that day, but it happened to be blowing in the same direction in which I was traveling. Going south would probably have been pleasant riding; going north was intermittent torture. When we stopped, as fortunately we did often and sometimes for fairly long periods, the breeze from the south made life quite agreeable; but as long as the train was moving, sweat poured forth as from a fountain. Even when it blew to advantage the wind was as if it came off a red-hot stove, and all day long there was not a fleck of cloud in the sky to temper the wicked sunshine. Cattle lolled in groups under the trees; water-buffaloes, if they were to be seen at all, squatted in their mud-holes; but though “citadels” were waffle-irons and the highway a burning strand, men and women in their broad hats and coppery-brown garments still trotted in endless files along it and the by-roads that were mere thin lines drawn in a vast expanse of greenery; for rice must be had for hungry mouths no matter what the weather.

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

● Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained. ● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_. ● The caret (^) is used to indicate superscript, whether applied to a single character (as in 2^d) or to an entire expression (as in 1^{st}).