"Get up the tree, Joyce," I whispered. "I"ll boost you."
So I did, shoving her up for all I was worth, and she hung on as high as she could reach, and there she stuck; even the best girls aren"t quite like boys.
"Swarm up it," I urged.
"I can"t," she said in an agonised voice, and I saw it was true, her petticoats were to blame, of course; any boy would have been up before you could say "knife."
Down she came again with a thud, and old Mr. Buffalo heard it and made for us like a fiend. We ran for the next tree and dodged him round it; it was a bit too exciting! He made rushes at us dead straight, and we tried always to keep the trunk of the tree between us and him as if it were the leader in Fox and Geese. When he came past like a bolt we ran the other side, but once or twice he nearly spiked us, and if he had knocked one of us down, or we had stumbled, it would have been all up with us. It was exhausting too. I was fearfully out of breath myself; being on a steamer a fellow can"t keep in training, and as for Joyce, she was panting so that she couldn"t speak.
Then I noticed that across the road was a jungly thicket; it was not open ground, as it was on the side we had come from, and I thought if we could reach that we might perhaps lose the gentleman, or he would lose us.
So I explained to Joyce in gasps that the next time he charged we must run behind his back and bolt across the road; she nodded and clutched my hand tighter than ever.
So we did it and were half-way over the road--it was very wide--before he found it out.
All the time, I must tell you, he had been making a funny little noise, a bit between a grunt and squeak, quite ridiculous for a huge black hairy beast like him; if I had had any breath to waste it would have made me laugh.
Now we heard that funny little noise--Uweekuweekuweek--just like that, coming over the road; we hadn"t time to look. Never did any road I ever crossed seem so long; it was like a bad dream. We slipped and stumbled and didn"t seem to make any headway, and every moment I expected to feel that great head in the flat of my back sending me sprawling ready to be spiked. At last we reached the line of bushes, and I gave Joyce a great pull with all my strength to pitch her to one side, for he was close on us then, and she went headlong and fell full length into the bushes, and I dropped on the top of her just as his majesty thundered past.
We lay there quiet as mice, though it was awfully uncomfortable; I was squashing Joyce to bits, and great thorns seemed running into me all over. Then a dreadful thought occurred to me--there were probably snakes there! Which was worst, snakes or the buffalo? And I asked cautiously--
"Have you been stung, Joyce?" and she answered so gravely, "Not yet,"
that I exploded, and, would you believe it, that old animal that had been rootling about in the bushes to find us, heard it and came at us again. We scrambled up and ran, tripping and tearing and crashing on into that wood, and I think he found some difficulty in following us, for after a while we couldn"t hear him any more.
We stopped and listened with all our ears, but it seemed as if we were safe, for he wasn"t a crafty animal and didn"t know enough to come along quietly and surprise us. It was very dark there in that jungle, and for the first time I thought of you and how anxious you and Joyce"s mother would be. So I said, "Come along home now," and pulled hold of Joyce.
But she resisted and said, "It"s not that way, silly; it"s just the opposite."
I was positive and so was she.
I tried to think of all the things one tells by: the stars, but there weren"t any, and I couldn"t have done much with them if there had been; the moss on the north side of the trees, but there didn"t seem to be any. I guess it"s different in Burma. However, there was just a yellowish glow still, and I knew that must be in the west, and as the river runs north and south, and we were on the left bank, I guessed the way I wanted to go was about right. When I had proved it to Joyce she gave in and said she had said it all the time, just as women always do!
So we walked and walked, but we never came to that old road again. Once I thought I"d found it, but it was only some open, flat, th.o.r.n.y ground.
It was very dark then, the dark comes on so fast here. Suddenly we both began to run as hard as we could, hand in hand; I don"t know why, something set us off and I felt just as if I must, and I suppose Joyce did too, and then--crash!--before we knew where we were--smash!--we were flying, slipping, tobogganing down through some bushes, with our feet shooting out under us, and at last we reached the bottom. It was a steep gully, a kind of nullah. When we did get down we arrived separately, for we had had to let go to save ourselves. I was awfully sore, I know, and I wondered what had happened to her, being a girl and so much softer.
But she didn"t seem to mind much, for when I sang out, she answered quite cheerfully, "I"m sitting in the middle of a bramble bush like a b.u.mble-bee. Do they sit in bushes, though? I think I"m getting a little mixed!"
A girl like that is a jolly good pal, I can tell you!
It was a snaky place and that is what I was afraid of. We trod carefully along the bottom and made noises to scare them off. Then I had a happy thought; I had a box of matches with me, and I kept on striking them till we found a handful of dry twigs which burnt up finely. It was so still there that they blazed straight and steady, and I used them as a torch and flourished them about low down as we walked.
I don"t know if we really did see any snakes. Joyce is quite positive she counted fourteen, sliding away in front of the light at different times; but then she sees things much quicker than I do.
[Ill.u.s.tration: WE HAD TO PLUNGE THROUGH MARSHY GROUND.]
It took us a long time to get out of that nullah, and we tried all sorts of different ways, but the sides were too steep. Often we had to stop to get more twigs, and once, just as I had got a handful, Joyce said, "Why, there are little plums growing on them." We ate quite a lot, and they were refreshing and bitter, but it didn"t mean much, for they were all skin and stone.
The nullah sloped up at the end, and after a good deal of hard work I hauled her up. It was jolly cold, I can tell you, and when we saw a light moving about ahead we made a bee-line for it. Joyce thought it was a will-o"-the-wisp; she had never seen one, but she had read of them, and she said they moved up and down just like that. We had to plunge through a lot of very marshy ground before we got to it, and sometimes we lost sight of it altogether; but it came again, and then it went out for good. We arrived at a high th.o.r.n.y hedge and I shouted, and then there was such a noise you would have thought the world was coming to an end,--dogs barking, c.o.c.ks crowing, people chattering, and at last a man with a lantern crept out from the hedge--it must have been his light we had seen--and he was followed by heaps of others, all Burmans, and they waved the light about; and when they saw who we were, and that we were alone, they were very kind and took us in through an opening in the hedge, and kicked the dogs away. We couldn"t see much inside, for the moon wasn"t up then, but they led us to a house, and made us go up a ladder on to a verandah and into a nice wooden room, where there was a civilised oil lamp on a bracket, and several women and children sitting and lying about on mats on the floor.
Joyce looked at me and I at her and we both knew what sights we were, all scratched and torn and muddy. Her dress had been white when we started, but you could hardly tell that now. I don"t know how she felt, but I was glad to drop down on to a mat they gave us. We tried to explain who we were, but no one understood any English. Then they brought us some water from a great jar in the corner; they handed it to us in half a coco-nut, but it smelt so that we couldn"t touch it, though we were awfully thirsty. So one of the men who had followed us in took up a round green thing with a smooth sh.e.l.l outside (I never knew coco-nuts looked like that before), and with his great knife made four cuts across the top in a neat square, and took out the piece as if it were a lid, and offered us the nut, making signs we were to drink it.
Joyce tried first and nodded with pleasure. "It"s good," she said, and it was! A sort of sickly sweet stuff came out like sugary water, and when you drank a lot of it it made you feel very full inside suddenly.
When I read about coco-nut milk in _Swiss Family Robinson_ I always thought it was really like milk.
Then they opened a great tubful of cooked rice and put some on two plates and gave it to us, and they put beside us two little bowls filled with smashed-up sardines, at least I thought it was that, but oh----You would have known it was there a mile off! I would have stood it, because I didn"t want to hurt their feelings, as they meant to be polite, but Joyce stuffed her skirt into her mouth and held her nose, and they all laughed and took it away quite easily. There were no forks or spoons, but we were very hungry, so we just fell to with our fingers on the rice and it wasn"t at all bad, I can tell you. When we had done they gave us some very good bananas--I could have done with more of them--and then they tried us with a lump of stuff that was simply a bit of wood; it came from the Jack-fruit tree. I saw one growing right out of the trunk on a little stalk by itself next day, but how anyone ever eats it I can"t imagine.
When we had finished they poured water over our fingers to clean them, a very unsatisfactory sort of wash it was, and the water ran away between the boards, quite convenient that!
When we were satisfied we began to take more notice of what the house was like. The walls were made of very coa.r.s.e mats, and there were no tables or chairs. There were a number of people; the father of the house, who had brought us in, had a kind shrewd face, so that you couldn"t help liking him, and the mother was a very thin, plain, little old woman, with twinkling eyes. Joyce thought first she was the cook, for she had no jewellery on at all and no fine clothes, while the two girls, the daughters, were quite smart. They were all ready to laugh and smile, but the two girls were the most friendly; they sat down by Joyce and fingered her skirt and examined her very dilapidated shoes. "I wish they wouldn"t, Jim," she said, trying to pull them up under her very short skirt, which was no use at all. At last she took them off because they were so wet, and one of the girls put her little brown toes into them, and then they all shrieked with laughter again. You couldn"t help laughing too, they were so jolly nice.
I put my finger on Joyce and said "Joyce," then on me and said "Jim,"
and then pointed at the two girls; they understood at once and said Mah Kway Yoh (Miss Dog"s Bone) and Mee Meht (Miss Affection). Then they pointed to a young man at the back and said Moung Poh Sin (Mr.
Grandfather Elephant).
I tried to make them understand we wanted to get back to the ship, but nothing would do it. "Draw it," suggested Joyce. She had a wee gold pencil on her gold bangle, but we had no paper and there was none there--there wasn"t anything, in fact, except a box. "On your cuff,"
Joyce suggested, but I hadn"t any cuffs, only a soft shirt.
"On the floor," she said then.
I tried, but of course the lead broke. They all gathered round, much interested, pushing their shiny black heads close together. It"s funny that they all have just the same sort of hair, isn"t it? They followed everything I did with the deepest interest, and then went into fits of laughter, and so did we.
Just then a boy came in, not much older than me. He had on very few clothes, and his legs looked as if they were stained dark blue. When he came near to me and saw me looking at them with very much interest he showed them to us. They were tattooed all over like a pair of breeches, and the pictures on them were very well done; there were tigers and a kind of dragon, like those we saw at the paG.o.da steps, and many other animals, and each one was in a kind of scrollwork which made a little frame. He spoke a few words of English and pointed at the two men and said, "Them too," then, "All Burmans." It is odd they should go through all that pain; what"s the use of it?
[Ill.u.s.tration: THEY WERE TATTOOED ALL OVER LIKE A PAIR OF BREECHES.]
I tried to explain to him about the ship. I called it "ship," "steamer,"
"vessel," "craft," and everything else I could think of, but he shook his head. At last Joyce suggested "big boat," and then he understood, and got quite excited and told the others. Partly by gestures he made us understand that we were a very long way off, and that no one could take us back that night, but that we could go early in the morning. I wanted to know why not now, but he waved his arms and said, "Nats, beloos," and looked quickly over his shoulder.
"Nats are spirits," said Joyce. "I know all about it. The Burmese are frightened of them, and put little bits of rag at the top of the posts in the houses for them to live in, so that they won"t come inside.
Mother read that to me out of a book."
We looked for the little rags, but couldn"t see them, though I expect they were there. Joyce knows a lot for a girl.
Well, we couldn"t go home by ourselves, so presently we lay down on our mats and went fast asleep, and I suppose everyone else did too. Anyway, it was morning when I woke. Perfectly glorious it was! I shall never forget that morning. Joyce was out on the verandah already, and I went and stood beside her. The moon was there still, but every moment growing paler and paler. The air was full of that burnt-wood smell which is clean and rather nice. The sun seemed simply to rush up, and in five minutes from a world of black shadows and no colours it turned to a world of green and blue and yellow. The houses were all like ours, built on legs with thatched roofs, and there were great shady mango trees and plantains growing beside them. The dogs were everywhere, and the people were squatting in the sun to warm their backs. We ate more rice and drank more coco-nut milk, and then we shook hands all round and thanked the people, and went away with the boy to guide us. His name was Moung Ohn (Mr. Coco-Nut) he told us. We made him write down his own and his sisters" names on a piece of paper in Burmese on the ship afterwards, so that we could always keep them.
It was quite a long way, as he had said, but it was so beautiful we wanted to dance and jump all the time. Moung Ohn scolded off the beastly pariah dogs and led us out of the hole in the great stockade and through a grove of palms. He pointed to two different sorts, one was the usual kind, feathery, and coco-nuts grew on that. He pointed to himself and grinned, but we didn"t understand till afterwards that his name was "Coco-Nut." The other sort of palm had leaves like the great fans people sometimes have in drawing-rooms, at least Joyce said they were. A man was walking down the long, straight stem of one, and I could see, as Moung Ohn had said, that his legs were tattooed too. He just walked down. He had a band round his waist and round the tree, so he leaned against it and pressed the soles of his feet against the tree. I longed to try, but Joyce was wanting to get back to her mother. When the man came down he had a little iron pot filled with juice, and he offered it to me to drink, but when I looked in and saw dead flies and insects by the dozen I declined politely. He had hung up other little pots on the tree near the stalks of the great leaves in which he had cut gashes, so the juice dripped out into them. I found out this makes a strong drink called toddy.
We pa.s.sed over rice fields, where many of the people were at work already, and then, after going a good distance, we got on to the road, but it was not the same part where we were the day before. I"m beginning now not to be quite so sure that my direction was right after all, but don"t say so before Joyce.
Just then we heard a most awful noise like a hundred demons groaning and shrieking together.
"Nats!" exclaimed Joyce, standing stockstill. Moung Ohn laughed and shook his head. Then there came into sight a slow lumbering bullock-cart with the wheels screaming enough to give you toothache. Why on earth don"t they grease them?
"Perhaps they prefer them like that," said Joyce, and I expect she is right.
It wasn"t long before we reached the steamer, and then what a scene!
When I saw how Joyce was smothered I was glad men don"t kiss. You just shook hands with me and told me I was an object to scare crows with!
When we offered Moung Ohn some money for his trouble he refused to take it, and went away saying good-bye so gracefully, bowing and touching his forehead with his hand.
[Ill.u.s.tration: SAMPANS.]