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Updated: May 20, 2025
"I'm afraid not; I'm going straight up to Mandalay, but I shall be down later, and meanwhile I'll do my best to settle you in that chummery. I'll send a line to FitzGerald of my service; he lives there; a rattling Irishman, with lots of brains in his handsome head, and a good sort; there's also Roscoe, a clever oddity, and MacNab of the Irrawaddy Flotilla a wonderful golfer.
There was the Sawbwa of Keng-tung, forty days' journey from his capital east and south of Mandalay, and north of Siam; the Sawbwa of Yawnghwe; the Sawbwa of Lawksak; and the Myosa of this state, and the Myosa of that, and their wives.
Possibly it is the stephanotis and the wood-smoke combined that makes me think of spring spring in Paris; but more probably Paris is brought to my mind this morning by the interview we had yesterday with M. Ava about our berths on the cargo boat down to Mandalay; he is the Bhamo Agent for the Flotilla Company.
Mandalay is largely Chinese, and on the outskirts of the city there is a handsome temple which bears the charming inscription, so characteristic of the Chinese, "enlightenment finds its way even among the outer barbarians." There is a military hospital with two nursing sisters, highly trained ladies from Bart.'s.
"Petrie, a certain M. Sokoloff, a Russian gentleman whose acquaintance I made in Mandalay, related to me an episode that took place at the house of the mandarin Ki-Ming in Canton. It actually occurrd in the presence of M. Sokoloff, and therefore is worthy of your close attention.
From Mandalay, after a few days' halt, the explorers fared to farther and less trodden fields, visited the ruby mines, and the wonderful remains of Pagan; occasionally they found the accommodation at zayats, or rest houses, a little rough, but this was handsomely discounted by novel sights and experiences, a full view of the Burman at home, and the easy joys of village life.
There was exquisite silver work and brass, gold, and amber carvings, dahs or swords in silver and velvet sheaths with ivory handles, long shaped books of papyrus with the heavy black print on lacquered gilded leaves, and Buddhas in gold and marble, and a little Chinese box carved in root amber, which I coveted it suggested a picture by Monticelli besides wonders of Burmese carvings in wood and ivory: then music, and good voices, and the piano sounding so well in the large teak drawing-room and home again, rattling in the gharry over the hard macadam and the soft ups and downs and ruts along the sand, as here depicted in black and white, to our new quarters on the shores of Mandalay where the big mosquitoes play and sing us to sleep "only a temporary plague," they say here, and we hope so!
At any rate the Mandalay mistook her bearings, and managed to get into the very heart of the Goodwin Sands. In the darkness she probably sailed into what is called the Ramsgate Man's Bight, though this is only a conjecture. This bight is a swatchway of deep water, and the Mandalay then struck the Sands on the eastern jaw of another channel into the Goodwins.
From the summit of this Mandalay Hill, another pagoda, almost as famous, is to be seen. I mean the Kuthodaw, in the plain below. This is four hundred and fifty pagodas in one, all but one of them little edifices, each with a small sitting statue of Buddha within it.
Wires were already active; the 29th Punjaub Infantry had been ordered from Mandalay; guests pressed round, eagerly snatching at scraps of information; Germans and British glanced curiously at one another, and presently the gathering dissolved to talk, to write, and to cable.
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