Yissun told me that sometimes the fast-growing, very hard cane would rub against a soft-wooded jungle tree, and the heat of friction would start a blaze and—damp and sticky though the vegetation always was—it could blaze up and burn for hundreds of li in all directions. Only those inhabitants and denizens able to reach the river would survive the terrible fire, and they would likely fall victim to the ghariyals which always converged on any scene of disaster. The ghariyal was a tremendous and horrible river serpent which I took to be related to the dragon family. It had a knobby body as big as a cask, eyes like upstanding saucers, dragon jaws and tail, but no wings. The ghariyals were everywhere along the riverbanks, usually lurking in the mud like logs with glaring eyeballs, but they never molested us. Evidently they subsisted mostly on the monkeys which, in their antics, frequently fell shrieking into the river.
We were not molested by any of the other jungle creatures, either, although Yissun and the Mien villagers along the way warned us that the Dong Nat was the habitat of worse things than the nat and the ghariyal. Fifty different kinds of venomous snakes, they said, and tigers and pards and wild dogs and boars and elephants, and the wild ox called the seladang. I remarked lightly that I should not care to meet a wild ox; the domestic kind I saw in the villages looked vicious enough. It was as big as a yak, a sort of blue-gray in color, with flat horns swooping in a crescent backward from its brow. Like the serpent ghariyal, it liked to lie wallowing in a mudhole, with only its snout and eyes above the surface, and when the huge beast lumbered loose from the mud, there was a noise like huo-yao exploding.
“That animal is only the karbau,” Yissun said indifferently. “No more dangerous than a cow. The little children herd them. But a seladang stands higher at the shoulder than the top of your head, and even the tigers and elephants move out of its way when it walks through the jungle.”
We could always tell from afar when we were approaching a riverside village, because it always had what looked like a cloud of rusty-black smoke hovering over it. That was actually a canopy of crows—called by the Mien “the feathered weeds”—raucously rejoicing over the village’s rich litter of garbage. Besides the crows overhead and the swill underfoot, every village had also a span or two of the karbau draft oxen, and some scrawny black-feathered chickens running about, and a lot of those pigs with long bodies that sagged in the middle and dragged in the swill, and an incredible lot of naked children that very much resembled the pigs. Every village had also a span or two of tame cow elephants. That was because the jungle Mien’s only trade and craft was the taking of timber and other tree products out of this wilderness, and the elephants did most of the work.
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: