“Cazza beta!” I blurted. “Even the language is lazy!”
Until now, I had been blaming the Mien people’s lassitude and slovenliness on the Ava climate, which God knows was oppressive and enervating. But the friendly pongyi volunteered the real and astonishing and terrible truth about the Mien. They had taken that name, he said, when they first came to Champa and settled this country that was now the Ava nation—and that had happened, he said, only about four hundred years ago.
“Who were they originally?” I asked. “Where did they come from?”
He said, “From To-Bhot.”
Well, that explained the Mien! They were really nothing but a displaced overflow of To-Bhot’s wretched Bho. And if the Bho could be lethargic of both intellect and energy, up in the bracing clean air of their native highlands, it was no wonder that, down here in the vigor-sapping hot low country, they should have degenerated even further—to where their only willful exertion was a bovine chewing and their most strenuous profanity was a milk-mild “mother!” and even their king’s writing was limp.
In all charity, I have to say that not much ambition and vitality can rightly be expected of any people who live in a tropical climate and jungle conditions. It must take all their will just to exist at all. I myself was not usually a sluggard, but in Ava I felt always drained of strength and purpose, and even my usually pert and lively Hui-sheng got quite languid in her movements. I had known heat in other places, but never such a damp, heavy, dragging-down heat as I felt in Ava. I might as well have wrung a blanket in hot water, then flung it over my head so that I had both to wear it and try to breathe through it.
The cloacal climate would have been affliction enough, but it bred various other torments, chief among them the jungle vermin. During the daytimes, our barge went downriver in a thick accompanying cloud of mosquitoes. We could reach out and catch them by handfuls, and their massed buzzing was as loud as the snores of the ghariyal serpents on the mudbanks, and their biting was so continuous that it eventually and blessedly induced a sort of numb indifference. When any of our men stepped into the river shallows while beaching the barge at evening, he stepped out again with his legs and garments striped black and red, the black being long, slimy, clinging leeches that had fastened to him, right through the fabric of his clothes, sucking so avidly that they drooled streaks of his blood. Then, on land, we might be attacked either by enormous red ants or by darting oxflies, either insect’s bite so painful that, we were told, they could drive even elephants to mad rampage. Nighttime brought little respite, because all the ground was infested with a breed of fleas so tiny they could hardly be seen and never be caught, but whose bite raised an enormous welt. Hui-sheng’s incense smoke gave us some relief from the night-flying insects, and we did not care how many nat it might attract.
I do not know whether it was because of the heat, the humidity or the insects, or all those miseries, but many people in that jungle suffered from illnesses that seemed never to conclude either in death or recovery. (The people of Yun-nan referred to the whole of Champa as “the Valley of Fever.”) Two of our sturdy Mongol boatmen fell to one of those maladies, or maybe several, and Yissun and I had to take over their chores. The men’s gums bled almost as red as those of a Mien cud-chewer, and much of their hair fell out. Under their arms and between their legs the skin began to rot, getting green and crumbly, like cheese going bad. Some kind of fungus attacked their fingers and toes, so that their fingernails and toenails got soft and moist and painful, and often bled.
Yissun and I asked a Mien village headman for advice from his own experience, and he told us to rub pepper into the men’s sores. When I protested that that was bound to cause excruciating pain, he said, “Amè, of course, U Polo. But it will hurt the disease nat even worse, and the demon may depart.”
Our Mongols bore that treatment stoically enough, but so did the nat, and the men stayed ill and prostrate all the way downriver. At least they, and we other men, did not contract another jungle affliction I heard about. Numerous Mien men confided dolefully to us that they suffered from it, and always would. They called it koro, and they described its very terrible effect: a sudden and dramatic and irreversible shrinking of the virile organ, a retraction of it up into the body. I did not inquire for further details, but I could not help wondering if the jungle koro was related to the fly-borne kala-azar that had commenced my Uncle Mafìo’s pathetic dissolution.
For a time, Yissun and Hui-sheng and her Mongol maid and I took turns tending our two sick men. From our experience and observation so far, we had got the impression that the jungle’s diseases troubled only the male sex, and Yissun and I were not much inclined to worry about ourselves. But when the maidservant also started to show signs of illness, I made Hui-sheng leave off her nursing, and confine herself to the farthest end of the barge, and sleep well apart from the rest of us at night. Meanwhile, our best efforts did not improve the condition of the two men. They were still ill and flaccid and gaunt when we finally reached Pagan, and they had to be carried ashore to be put in the care of their army’s shamàn-physicians. I do not know what became of them after that, but at least they survived to get that far. Hui-sheng’s maid did not.
Her ailment had seemed identical to that of the men, but she had been much more troubled and dismayed by it. I suppose, being a female, she was naturally more frightened and embarrassed when she began to rot at her extremities and under her arms and between her legs. However, she also began to complain, which the men had not, of itching all over her body. Even inside it, she said, which we took to be delirium. But Yissun and I gently undressed her and found, here and there, what looked like grains of rice stuck to her skin. When we tried to pick them off, we discovered that they were only the protruding ends—heads or tails, we could not tell—of long, thin worms that had burrowed deep into her flesh. We tugged, and they came out reluctantly, and kept coming, span after span, as we might have unspooled a web-thread from the spinneret of a spider’s body.
The poor woman wept and shrieked and weakly writhed during most of the time we were doing that. Each worm was no thicker than a string, but easily as long as my leg, greenish-white in color, slick to our touch, hard to grasp and resisting our pull, and there were many of them, and even the hardened Mongol Yissun and I could not help retching violently while we did that hand-over-hand hauling out of the worms and throwing them overboard. When we had done, the woman was no longer squirming, but lay still in death. Perhaps the worms had been coiled around organs inside her, and our pulling had disarranged those parts and thereby killed her. But I am disposed to believe that she died from the sheer horror of the experience. Anyway, to spare her any further miseries—because we had heard that the funeral practices of the Mien were barbaric—we rowed ashore at a deserted spot, and buried her deep, well out of reach of the ghariyals or any other jungle predators.
2
I was glad to see the Orlok Bayan again. I was even glad to see his teeth. Their garish glare of porcelain and gold was far more sightly than the snaggled and blackened teeth of the Mien I had been seeing all the way down the Irawadi. Bayan was somewhat older than my father, and he had lost some hair and added some girth since our campaign together, but he was still as leathery and supple as his own old armor. He was also, at the moment, slightly drunk.