The jungle trees were not all ugly and useless, like the riverside draggles of mangrove, or pretty and useless, like the one called the peacock’s tail, a solid mass of flame-colored flowers. Some gave edible fruits and nuts, and others were hung with pepper vines, and the one called chaulmugra gave a sap which is the only medicine known for leprosy. Others yielded good hardwood lumber—the black abnus, the speckled kinam, the golden saka which, when the wood has seasoned to a rich, mottled brown, is known as teak. I might record that teakwood looks much more handsome in the form of a ship’s decking and planking than it does in its natural state. The teak trees were tall and as straight as ledger lines, but dingy gray of bark, with only scraggly branches and sparse and untidy leaves.

I might also remark that the Mien people were no adornment to the landscape, either. They were ugly, squat and dumpy, most of the men being a good two handspans shorter than myself, and the women a hand or so shorter than that. Even in their daily toil, as I said, the men put most of the labor onto their elephants, and at all other times the men were idle slovens and the women limp slatterns. In Ava’s tropical climate, they had no real need of clothes, but they could have contrived some costume more comely than they had done. Both sexes wore woven-fiber hats like large mushroom tops, but were otherwise bare from the waist up and the knees down, wearing a drab cloth wrapped around them like a skirt. The women, indifferent to their flapping dugs, did add one article for modesty’s sake. Each wore a sash with long ends, weighted with beads and hanging front and rear, so that it dangled to screen her private parts when she sat in a squat, which was her customary position. Both sexes would put cloth sleeves on their calves when they had to wade in the river, as protection against the leeches. But they always went barefoot, their feet having got so horny-hard that they were proof against any irritant. As I recall, I saw just two men in that whole region who owned shoes. They wore them slung on a string around their neck, for preservation of such rarities.

The men of the Mien were unlovely enough as they stood, but they had devised a means of making themselves even more so. They smirched their skin with colored pictures and patterns. I do not mean paint, but a coloring pricked into and under the skin, and ineradicable ever after. It was done with a sharp sliver of zhu-gan and the soot from burned sesame oil. The soot was black, but put under the skin it showed as blue dots and lines. There were so-called artists in that craft, who traveled from village to village, and were welcome everywhere, for a Mien man would be considered effeminate if he were not decorated like a qali carpet. The pricking was begun in boyhood and, with time off for rest between the painful sessions, was continued until he was latticed with blue patterns from knees to waist. Then, if he was really vain, and could afford the artist’s further ministrations, a man would have other designs done, in some kind of red pigment, in among the blue, and was considered handsome indeed.

That ugliness was reserved to the males, but they generously let the females share in another one: the unsightly habit of constantly chewing. Indeed, I believe the jungle Mien did their forestry work only so they could afford to purchase another tree product—a chewable one—that they could not grow, but had to import. It was the nut of a tree called the areca, which was found only in seacoast regions. The Mien bought those nuts, boiled them, sliced them and let them dry black in the sun. Whenever they felt like having a treat—which was all the time—they would take a slice of the areca nut, dab a little lime on it, roll it in a leaf of a vine called the betel, pop that wad into the mouth and chew it—or rather, chew a constant succession of wads—the whole day long. It was to the Mien what the cud is to cows: their only diversion, their only enjoyment, the only activity they engaged in that was not absolutely necessary to existence. A village full of Mien men, women and children was not pretty. It was not made prettier by the sight of all of them champing their jaws up and down and about.

Even that was not the extremity of their deliberate self-defilement. The chewing of a wad of areca and betel had the further effect of making the chewer’s saliva bright red. Since a Mien child began chewing as soon as it was off the teat, it grew up to have gums and lips as red as open sores, and teeth as dark and corrugated as teak bark. Just as the Mien accounted handsome a man who elaborated on his already awful body colors, they accounted beautiful a woman who put a coat of lacquer on her already teak-bark teeth and thereby colored them absolutely dead black. The first time a Mien beauty gave me a smile all tar-black and ulcer-red, I reeled backward in revulsion. When I recovered, I asked Yissun the motive for that ghastly disfigurement. He asked the woman, and relayed to me her haughty response:

“Why, white teeth are for dogs and monkeys!”

Speaking of whiteness, I would have expected those people to show some surprise or even fright at my approach—since I must have been the first white man ever seen in the Ava nation. But they evinced no emotion whatever. I might have been one of the less fearsome nat, and an inept one, which had chosen to appear in a defectively colorless human-body disguise. But neither did the Mien show any resentment, fear or loathing of Yissun and our boatmen, though they were all aware that the Mongols had recently conquered their country. When I remarked on their lackadaisical attitude, they only shrugged and repeated—and Yissun translated—what I took to be a Mien peasant proverb:

“When the karbau fight, it is the grass that gets trampled.”

And when I inquired if they were not dismayed because their king had fled into hiding, they only shrugged and repeated what they said was a traditional peasant prayer: “Spare us the five evils,” and then enumerated the five: “Flood, fire, thieves, enemies and kings.”

When I inquired of one village’s headman, who seemed a degree more intelligent than the village’s karbau oxen, what he could tell me of the history of his Mien people, this is what Yissun relayed to me:

“Ame, U Polo! Our great people once had a splendid history and a glorious heritage. It was all written down in books, in our poetic Mien language. But there came a great famine, and the books were boiled and sauced and eaten, so now we remember nothing of our history and know nothing of writing.”

He did not elucidate further, and neither can I, except to explain that “amè!” was the Mien’s favorite exclamation and expletive and profanity (though it meant nothing but “mother”) and “U Polo” was their way of addressing me respectfully. They entitled me “U” and Huisheng “Daw,” which was their equivalent of saying Messere e Madona Polo. As for the story of the history books’ having been “sauced and eaten,” I can verify at least this much. The Mien did have a sauce that was their favorite food—they used it as often as they uttered “amè!”—and it was a stinking, revolting, absolutely nauseous liquid condiment which they expressed from fermented fish. The sauce was called nuoc-mam, and they slathered it on their rice, their pork and chicken, their vegetables, on everything they ate. Since nuoc-mam made everything taste ghastlily like itself, and since the Mien would eat any ghastlily thing if it had nouc-mam poured on it, I did not for a moment disbelieve that they could have “sauced and eaten” all their historical archives.

We came one evening to a village where the inhabitants were, most unnaturally, not being phlegmatic and idle, but were leaping about in great excitement. They were all women and children, so I bade Yissun inquire what was happening and where all the men had gone to.