Page 18 - To Dragma March 1932

32 To DRAGMA
ball bearing necessitating our spending a night in a primitive thatched
Annamite roadside hut inhabited by several Annamite families, one of
which moved off of its community bed to free a single place to lie for all
of us, so that we might not be in danger of furnishing the tigers' din-
ner that evening. It took two days' time, the Resident Superior's car,
and a collection of all the spare ball-bearing parts in every community
within a radius of several towns before one that fit could be found and
the repair could be made in that little-traveled country. We spent much
time along our route in the territory of the Moi's, primitive, almost
naked savages as little touched by civilization as anything I saw in Cen-
tral Africa. In many places the Moi villagers came out to welcome us
with their symbols of hospitality—a basket of eggs and a bottle of
drink of not uncertain alcoholic content. Their popular form of saluta-
tion was to take our right hands as a Frenchman would to kiss it, and
instead merely to smell of and then drop it!—perhaps to sniff whether
we were friend or foe! We went to the Baie d'Along, one of the most
remarkable natural scenic wonders of the world, but a place so hidden
and little known in its corner of Tonking that in two years of travel
up and down the China Coast I had never even heard its name. Words
could never describe the strangeness and loveliness of that inland sea,
perhaps a hundred miles in area, its sparkling sunlit blue waters full of
upcropping gray rock jags from ten to several hundred feet high, rising
sheer from the sea, and ranging from almost needle-like points to great
cliff-rock islands, some bare, some covered with greenery, but almost all
full of grottos and caves and passages that furnished never-ending possi-
bilities for exploration and amazement, both for trips on foot or from the
boat in which we wound for hours on end among the jutting crags.
We saw fine modern cities like Hanoi and Saigon modeled after
Paris in their gay boulevard life; and in contrast quaint old ones like
Hue, the capital of Annam, on the banks of the River of Perfumes, so
reminiscent of all that is most charming in Peking, with its Palace
modeled after Peking's Forbidden City and its imperial tombs, not un-
like those of the Mings, set in lovely hillside parks in the outskirts of
the city. (We spent a fascinating few hours at one of these tombs with
the five surviving concubines of one of Annam's former emperors, Tu
Due—dear old withered cronies of ninety who lived in a temple build-
ing near his tomb, and kept his memory green.) We saw ancient Cham
and Khmer ruins, twelfth and thirteenth century temples remarkably
like the modern Siva temples in India; we stayed for five days at Dalat,
south French Indo-China's charming hill station—in short, we left al-
most nothing unseen or undone in Tonking, Laos, Annam, Cambodia or
Cochin-China (which are the four protectorates and one colony that make
up French Indo-China). The roads for the most part were excellent, even
in the most sparsely settled areas; our hotels varied from first-class
hostelries to the most primitive little resthouses for which not even food
or bedding were supplied. Everywhere we went, however, we were won-
derfully looked after, for my host was a member of the French Par-
liament, and an honored guest of the Colonial government. Official doors
M A R C H , 1932 33
7/
f
"In the lap of the Godsl" Lillian Sehoedler and an old stone Buddha strike up a
friendship in the rums at Angkor.
were opened on all sides, dinners were given at the Residencies, the
heads of the tourist bureaus were delegated as our special guides, etc.
It was a royal trip, as you can imagine—the more wonderful because
French Indo-China has not as yet been really opened up to tourist
travel. The northern and southern parts of the country aren't even yet
linked with a railroad, and until recently the attitude of the government
toward foreign visitors has been anything but one of welcome. Outside
contact is just beginning to be courted. To be able to go through the
whole of the country so thoroughly at a time when tourist travel is not
only in its very infancy and fairly difficult, but also most expensive,
and under the unusual conditions under which I made the trip, ab-
solutely as a guest of such wonderful hosts, was too marvelous for
words.
There was only one fly in the ointment during all of the time, and
that is that in the middle of January, at Hue, after almost two and a
half years of perfect health even in the heart of the tropics, a malaria
mosquito "got" me, and I found myself one day suddenly burning with
fever. Not wanting either to hold up the rest of the party, or, worse
still, to be left behind (1), I stayed in bed with it for only one day,
and then went on. The result of the long days' marches through the
thick jungle country which followed, with insufficient rest and not al-
ways the proper diet (for we were in the middle of the most primitive
part of Laos and had to take pretty much what we could get), was a
gorgeous attack of jaundice, which turned me into the color of a lemon.
Even the whites of my eyes were yellow. You never saw such a sight!
The result of that was a ten-day rest-halt for me with strenuous treat-
ment and diet at the Continental Hotel in Saigon, while my friends, be-