And so we set out. I took the young man’s place at the left side of the piano, and doing so, sensed a certain relief among my friends as I suspected that superstition held this to be a cursed position. By my reckoning, if we continued at our previous pace, it would be four days before we reached Mae Lwin, and the body’s stench would be horrific. In my mind, I made the decision that we would walk through the night, but did not tell my comrades, as I sensed their spirits were already flagging following the death of their friend. And so I joined the trichrome photograph, and we marched on, our friend with arms stretched over the piano, the horse now tied behind, where it walked at a leisurely pace and nibbled on the trees.
What can I share about the following hours but that they were some of the most terrible of my life? We tripped and struggled beneath the load of the piano. The litter dug into our shoulders. I tried to protect myself by removing my shirt and rolling it up to place on my shoulder, but it did little to lessen the scrapings of the boards, and my skin was soon torn and bleeding. I felt pity for my friends, as they had not once asked for something to soften their loads, and I saw their skin was raw. The trail grew worse. One of the front bearers was forced to carry a sword in his free hand to try to clear our path. The piano caught on creepers and branches. Several times we nearly fell. On the piano’s back, the young man’s body had begun to stiffen with rigor mortis, so that when he shifted on the piano, his arms seemed to pull up at their tethers, giving the fleeting impression that he was trying to escape, until one looked once again at the open, empty eyes.
Late that evening, I told the men that we would walk through the night. It was a difficult decision, as I felt as if I could hardly raise my legs. But they did not protest; perhaps they were equally concerned about the body. And so, after a short break for supper, we loaded the piano back onto our shoulders. We were fortunate that it was the dry season, the sky was clear, and we had a half-moon to partially light our trail. But in the deeper parts of the jungle, we fell into darkness, stumbling. I had one small lantern, and this I lit and hung from the cloth that bound one of his legs, illuminating the underbelly of the piano so it must have seemed as if it was floating.
We marched for two full days. Finally, one evening, the front man shouted with tired glee that he could see the bank of the Salween through the trees. The news itself unburdened our load, and we began to walk faster. At the edge of the river, we shouted to the guard on the other side, who was so surprised to see us that he took off running up the trail and into camp. We set the piano down on the muddy bank and collapsed.
It wasn’t long before a group of men had gathered on the other end of the bank, piled into a dugout, and rowed across. The shock over the dead body was mitigated only by their relief that all of us had not suffered the same fate. They had long feared us dead. After much discussion, two men rowed back across the river and returned with another dugout. This we lashed to the first, and on top placed the piano and the young man. In this manner, the piano crossed the Salween. There was space on the raft for only two men, so I watched it from the bank. It was a strange sight indeed—the piano floating in midstream, with two men squatting below it, and the body of a third stretched out above. As they lowered the piano onto the beach, the lines of the body reminded me of van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross, an image which will be permanently fixed in my memory.
And so our journey ended. A funeral was held for the young man, and then, two days later, a festival to celebrate the arrival of the piano. There I had my first opportunity to play it for the village, but only briefly, for sadly it is already quite out of tune, a problem that I will attempt to correct myself. The piano was temporarily stored in the grain room, and we made hasty arrangements to begin construction of a separate music room. But this is a story for another correspondence.
Edgar blew out the candle and lay back. It was cool in the room. On the roof, branches scratched against the thatch. He tried to sleep, but found himself thinking of the story, of his own journey to camp, of the burned fields and the steep jungles, of the dacoit attack, of how long it had been since he left. At last he opened his eyes and sat up. The room was dark, its features blurred by the mosquito net.
He lit the candle and looked back at the letter. The light of the flame cast his shadow against the inside of the net, and he began to read it again, thinking, Perhaps I will send it to Katherine with my next letter home. He promised himself this would be soon.
Somewhere in the course of the Erard’s journey onto the Plateau, the candle flickered out.
He awoke with the letter still resting on his chest.
He didn’t bother to shave or wash, but dressed quickly and walked straight to the piano room. At the door, he reconsidered, and decided it would be proper to say good morning to the Doctor, and ran back down the stairs to the river. Halfway down, he met Nok Lek.
“Is the Doctor taking breakfast by the river?”
“No, sir, not this morning. This morning the Doctor is away.”
“Away? And where did he go?”
“I don’t know.”
Edgar scratched his head. “That’s odd. He didn’t tell you?”
“No, Mr. Drake.”
“Is he often away like this?”
“Yes, he is. Very often. He is important. Like a prince.”
“A prince…” Edgar paused. “And when do you expect him back?”
“I don’t know. He doesn’t tell me.”
“Well then…did he have any messages for me?”
“No, sir.”
“Strange…I would have thought—”
“He said you will tune the piano all day, Mr. Drake.”
“Of course.” Edgar paused. “Well then, I will be off to work.”
“Shall I bring breakfast to your room, Mr. Drake?”
“Thank you, that would be very kind.”
He began the day’s work by voicing the hammers, repairing damaged felt so that the hammer strike would produce a good clean tone. Back in England, he often waited until fine-tuning was complete before voicing, but he had been bothered by the tone: it was either too hard and tinny or too dull and soft. He needled the harder felt to soften it and pressed the softer felt with the voicing iron to harden it, reshaping the hammerheads so that they presented an even-angled surface to the strings. He tested the voicing by running through each octave chromatically, in broken arpeggios, and finally by pounding individual keys, so that the hardness deep within the felt would be noticed.
Finally he was ready to fine-tune the piano. He began an octave below the string that had been shattered by the bullet. He inserted lever wedges to mute off the side strings of each note in the octave, so that when the key was struck, only the middle string would vibrate. He struck the key, reached into the body of the piano, and turned the tuning pin. When the middle string was tuned he moved to the side strings, and when this note was in tune, he moved one octave lower– as a builder would first lay the foundations of a house, he always told his apprentices—falling into the familiar pattern, twisting the tuning pins, testing them, key pin key, a rhythm only broken by absent-minded slaps at mosquitoes.
With the octave spanned, he then turned to the notes that lay in between, to set them in equal temperament, so that the notes were all equally spaced along the octave. It was a concept many apprentices often found difficult to understand. Each note produces a sound at a particular frequency, he would explain, Strings in tune with one another can harmonize, while out-of-tune strings produce frequencies which overlap to produce a rhythmic pulse, known as a beat, a synchrony of slightly discordant sounds. On a piano tuned perfectly in a particular key, there should be no beats when correct intervals are played. But then it is impossible to play the piano in any other key. Equal temperament was an innovation that allowed for more than one key to be played on a single instrument, the sacrifice being that no key would be in perfect tune. To tune in equal temperament meant deliberately creating beats, adjusting the strings finely so that only a well-trained ear could discern that they were slightly, if necessarily, out of tune.