The Gentleman in the Parlour – XVIII

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I rode down to the market on my little Shan pony. It was held on a great flat space in which were four rows of open booths and here the people jostled one another in a serried throng. I had wandered so long through country almost uninhabited that I was dazzled by the variety and the colour of the crowd. The sun shone brightly. In the wayside villages the peasants were dressed in sombre hues, in blue or maroon, and often in black, but here the colours were brilliant. The women were neat and small and pretty, with flattened faces, and sallow rather than swarthy, but their hands were beautiful, as delicate as the flowers they wore in their hair, and finely attached to their slender wrists. They were dressed in a sort of skirt, called a lungyi, a long strip of silk wound round and tucked in at the waist, the upper part of which was in stripes of gay colours and the lower part pale green, maroon or black, and they wore a little white bodice, very neat and modest, and over this a padded jacket, pale green or pink or black, like a Spanish bolero, with tight sleeves and little wings on the shoulders which suggested that at any moment they might fly smilingly away. The men wore coloured lungyis too or baggy Shan trousers. And a great many wore huge hats of finely plaited straw, like candle extinguishers, with enormous curved brims, and they perched uneasily on the abundant hair and handkerchiefs of men and women. These extravagant hats, hundreds of them, swaying, bobbing up and down, with the restless movements of their wearers, were so fantastic that you could not persuade yourself that these people were busy with the serious affairs of life, but rather, engaged in a frolic, were having an enormous joke with one another.

As is usual in the East the seller of the same things congregated together. The stalls were merely tiled roofs on posts, speaking well for the clemency of the climate, and the floor was either the trodden earth of a very low wooden platform. The selling was done for the most part by women; there were generally three or four of them in each stall, and they sat smoking long green cheroots. But in the medicine stalls the vendors were very old men, with wrinkled faces and blood-shot eyes, who looked like wizards. I observed their wares with consternation. There were piles of dried herbs and large boxes of powders of various colours, blue, yellow, red and green, and I could not but think he must be a brave man who ventured upon them. In my childhood I have been beguiled into taking a dose of salts under the impression that as a reward for virtue I was being treated to a spoonful of plum jam (and have never been able to stomach plum jam since), but I cannot imagine how a fond Shan mother would conceal from her little Shan boy that she was administering to him a large handful of a gritty emerald powder. There were pills so large that I asked myself what throat was ever so capacious as to be able to wash them down with a drink of water. There were small dried animals that looked like the roots of plants that had been dug out of the ground and left to rot, and there were roots of plants that looked like small dried animals. But the aged apothecaries suffered from no lack of custom. Trade was brisk that morning, and they were kept busy weighing out drugs, not with the flaky weights we use at home but with large pieces of lead cast in the form of the Buddha. At last my patience was rewarded, and having seen a man buy a dozen pills as large as bantam's eggs, I watched him take one in finger and thumb, open his mouth, drop it in and swallow. There was a struggle, for a moment his face bore a strained look, then he gave himself a jerk, and the pill was gone. The apothecary watched him with rheumy eyes.

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I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI XVII XVIII XIX XX XXI XXII	XXIII XXIV XXV XXVI XXVII XXVIII XXIX XXX XXXI XXXII XXXIII XXXIV XXXV XXXVI XXXVII XXXVIII XXXIX XL XLI XLII XLIII XLIV