A woman walked alone under a parasol, heading somewhere unseen.
The soldiers had told Edgar that the ship would stop “for sightseeing” at the ruins of Pagan, the ancient capital of a kingdom that had ruled Burma for centuries. At last, after nearly an hour of steaming past rows of fallen monuments, as the river began its slow turn to the west, they stopped at a nondescript quay and a number of passengers disembarked. Edgar followed the Italian couple over a narrow plank.
They walked with a soldier who led them up a dusty road. More pagodas soon became visible, structures that had been obscured by the scattered foliage or the rise of the bank. The sun was setting rapidly. A pair of bats flapped through the air. Soon they reached the base of a large pyramid. “Let’s climb here,” said the soldier. “The finest view in all of Pagan.”
The steps were steep. At the top of the stairs, a wide platform circled the central spire. If they had arrived ten minutes later, they would have missed the sun as it cast its rays over the vast field of pagodas that stretched away from the river to the distant mountains, floating in the dust and smoke of burning rice fields.
“What are those mountains?” Edgar asked the soldier.
“The Shan Hills, Mr. Drake. Finally we can see them.”
“The Shan Hills,” Edgar repeated. He stared past the temples that stood like soldiers in formation, to the mountains that rose abruptly from the plain and seemed to hover in the sky. He thought of a river that ran through those hills, and how somewhere, hidden in the darkness, waited a man who perhaps stared out at the same sky, but who had yet to know his name.
The sun set. The mantle of night crept across the plain, enveloping each pagoda one by one, until at last the soldier turned, and the travelers followed him back to the ship.
Nyaung-U, Pakokku, and then it was day again. Kanma, and the confluence of the Chindwin River, Myingyan, and Yandabo, and then it was night, and as the Sagaing Hills rose to the west, the passengers went to sleep knowing that during the night the steamship, plowing upstream, would pass the old capital of Amarapura, which means City of the Immortals. Before the sun rose, they would arrive in Mandalay.
9
The following morning, Edgar was awakened by the sudden arrival of silence. The steamboat, after groaning relentlessly for seven days, cut her engines and drifted. New sounds slipped into the cabin: a faint sloshing, the whispered shriek of metal on metal as a kerosene lamp swung on its chain, the shouts of men, and the distant yet unmistakable clamor of a bazaar. Edgar rose and dressed without washing, left his room, and walked the length of the corridor toward the spiral stairs that climbed to the deck, conscious of the creaking of the floorboards beneath his bare feet. At the top of the stairs, he almost collided with one of the young deckhands, who swung down the banister like a langur. Mandalay, said the boy, grinning, and swept his arm toward the shore.
They were floating past a market. Or into it; the boat seemed to be descending, the bank and its inhabitants swirling to overflow from the quayside and onto the deck. The market pressed in on either side, hustling shapes and voices shouting, the floating outlines of tha-naka in the shade of broad bamboo hats, the silhouettes of traders rising from the backs of elephants. A group of children laughed and leaped over the rail and onto the boat, chasing each other, weaving through the piles of coiled rope, the stacks of chain, and now bags of spices, carried forward by a row of vendors who swept over the deck of the ship. Edgar heard singing behind him and turned. A roti-wallah stood on the deck, grinning a toothless smile, his dough spinning on his fist. The sun, he sang, and raised his lips to point at the sky, The sun. His dough spun faster and he hurled it skyward.
Edgar looked back toward the steamer, but he could no longer see the ship, it was all the bazaar. Spices spilled from the bags onto the deck. A line of monks wound past, chanting for alms, circling him as he watched their bare feet track patterns in scattered dust the color of their robes. A woman shouted at him in Burmese, chewing betel, her tongue the color of plums, her laughter turning into the pattering of footsteps. The children again ran past. Then laughter again. Edgar turned to look back to the roti-wallah, and then up at the spinning dough. The man sang and reached up and picked the sun from the sky. It was dark and Edgar stared into the darkness of his cabin.
The engines had indeed stopped. For a brief moment he wondered if he was still dreaming, but his window was open and no light poured in. Outside he heard voices, and at first he dismissed them as those of the crew. But the sounds seemed to be coming from farther away. He climbed to the deck. The moon was nearly full, casting blue shadows on the men who swiftly rolled barrels toward the gangplank. The bank was lined with shacks. For the second time that night, Edgar Drake arrived in Mandalay.
They were met onshore by Captain Trevor Nash-Burnham, who had originally intended to meet Edgar in Rangoon, and whom Edgar knew as the author of several of the reports he had read on Surgeon-Major Carroll. The reports were rich with descriptions of Mandalay, of the river, of the winding trails to Carroll’s camp. Edgar had secretly longed to meet Nash-Burnham, as he had been unimpressed by most of the bureaucrats he met following the hunt, whose dullness in the presence of such color astounded him. Standing on the bank, he now recalled how in Rangoon, in the administrative frenzy after the shooting, he had been walking home from a briefing with a member of the Department of Village Administration. They had passed a crowd of people trying to move the body of an opium addict who had fallen asleep under a wagon and been crushed when the horses pulled the cart forward. The man was crying, a low, stuporous wail, as a group of merchants alternately tried to coax the horses forward or back the wagon up. Edgar had been sickened, but the functionary hadn’t even stopped talking about the teak tallies collected from the various districts of the colony. When Edgar asked where they could find help, the man shocked him not by answering “Why?”—which would have been predictably insensitive—but “For whom?” And this answer he could scarcely hear over the man’s screams.
Standing on the banks of the city, he shifted awkwardly. As the Captain read a letter from the War Office, a detailed notice about supplies and timetables, Edgar scrutinized his face for the man who had written of the Irrawaddy as “this shimmering serpent who carries off our dreams, only to bring fresh ones from the jeweled hills.” He was a squat man, with a broad forehead, who wheezed when he talked too fast, a striking contrast to the youth and fitness of Captain Dalton. It was an odd moment for an official briefing. Edgar looked at his pocket watch, a gift from Katherine before his departure. It was four, and only then did he remember that the watch had rusted to a halt only three days after he had arrived in Rangoon, and now, as he had jokingly written to Katherine, was correct only twice a day, although he kept it “to preserve appearances.” He now thought with some amusement of the London advertisement, This Christmas day, when church bells chime, Give yourself the gift of time—Robinson’s quality watches…
The river was beginning to come to life, and a stream of vendors could be seen making their way down the road to the water. The men boarded a carriage and drove into town. The center of Mandalay, as Edgar would note in his next letter home, was about two miles from the Irrawaddy; when the capital had been moved from Amarapura, on the river, the kings wanted a site far from the noise of the foreigners’ steamships.
The road was dark and rutted. Edgar watched shapes pass outside the window until it became opaque with condensation. Nash-Burnham reached up and wiped it clean with a handkerchief.
By the time the carriage entered town, the sun had begun to rise. Outside, the roads were filling with people. They approached a bazaar. Hands pressed against the window, faces peered in. A porter carrying two bags of spices on a pole dodged out of the path of the carriage, swinging his bags so that one of them touched lightly against the window, dusting it with curry powder, which caught the rising sunlight and stained the glass gold.
As they moved through the street, Edgar tried to picture himself on one of the maps of Mandalay he had studied on the steamship. But he was lost, and allowed himself to be caught up in the momentum of his arrival, the wonder and speculation that accompanies a new home.