I kept the emotion with which Keng Tung filled me well under control. It was a village, larger than those I had passed on the way, but a village notwithstanding, of wooden houses, spacious, with wide dirt streets, and I was put to it to find objects of interest to visit. On other than market days it was empty. In the main street you saw nothing but a few gaunt pariah dogs. In one or two shops a woman, smoking a cheroot, sat idly on the floor; she had no thought that on such a day there would ever be a customer; in another four Chinamen crouched on their heels were gambling. Silence. The dusty road had great ruts in it, and the sun beat down on it from a clear blue sky. Three little women suddenly appeared in monstrous, diverting hats and passed along in single file; they had a couple of baskets suspended by a bamboo over the shoulder and they walked with bent knew, speedily, as though if they went more slowly they would sink under their burdens. And against the emptiness of the street they made a quick and evanescent pattern.
And there was silence too in the monasteries. There are perhaps a dozen of them in Keng Tung and their high roofs stand out when you look at the town from the little hill on which is the circuit-house. Each one stands in its compound and in the compound are a number of crumbling pagodas. The great hall in which the Buddha, enormous, sits in his hieratic attitude, surrounded by others, eight or ten, hardly smaller, is like a barn, but its roof is supported by huge columns of teak, gilt or lacquered, and the wooden walls and the rafters are gilt or lacquered too. Rude paintings of scenes in the Master's life hang from the eaves. It is dark and solemn, but the Buddhas sit on their great lotus leaves in the gloaming like gods who have had their day, and now neglected, but indifferent to neglect, in their decaying grandeur of gilt and mosaic continue to reflect on suffering and the end of suffering, transitoriness and the eightfold path. Their aloofness is almost terrifying. You tread on tiptoe in order not to disturb their meditations and when you close behind you the carved and gilded doors and come out once more into the friendly day it is with a sigh of relief. You feel like a man who had gone by accident to a party at the wrong house and on realising his mistake makes his escape quickly and hopes that no one has noticed him.
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