The Gentleman in the Parlour – IX

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Though not an indomitable sight-seer I went to Amarapura, once the capital of Burma, but now a straggling village, where the tamarind trees grow lofty on each side of the road and in their shade the silk-weavers play their trade. The tamarind is a noble tree. Its trunk is rough and gnarled, pale like the teak logs that have been floating down the river, and its roots are like great serpents that writhe upon the earth with a convulsive violence; but its foliage is lacy and fern-like, so thick that notwithstanding the delicacy of the leaves it yields a dense shade. It is like an old farmer's wife, full of years, but rugged and hale, who is clothed incongruously in fleecy muslins. Green pigeons roost in its branches. Men and women sit outside their little houses, spinning or winding the silk on bobbins, and they have soft friendly eyes. Children play about them and pariah dogs lie sleeping in the middle of the road. It is a gently industrious, happy and peaceful life that they seem to lead, and the thought crosses your mind that here are people who have found at least one solution to the mystery of existence.

Then I went to see the great bell at Mengon. Here is a Buddhist convent and as I stood looking a group of nuns surrounded me. They wore robes of the same shape and size as the monks', but instead of the monks' fine yellow of a grimy dun. Little old toothless women, their heads shaven but covered with an iche of thin grey stubble, and their little old faces deeply lined and wrinkled. They held out skinny hands for money and gabbled with bare pale gums. Their dark eyes were alert with covetousness and their smiles were mischievous. They were very old and they had no human ties or affections. They seemed to look upon the world with a humorous cynicism. They had lived through every kind of illusion and held existence in a malicious and laughing contempt. They had no tolerance for the follies of men and no indulgence for their weakness. There was something vaguely frightening in their entire lack of attachment to human things. They had done with love, they had finished with the anguish of separation, death had no terrors for them, they had nothing left now but laughter. They struck the great bell so that I might hear tis tone; boom, boom, it went, a long low note that travelled in slow reverberations down the river, a solemn sound that seemed to call the soul from its tenement of clay and reminded it that though all created things were illusion, in the illusion was also beauty; and the nuns, following the sound, burst into ribald cackles of laughter, hi, hi, hi, that mocked the call of the great bell. Dupes, their laughter said, dupes and fools. Laughter is the only reality.

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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