The Skeptical Romancer: Selected Travel Writing by W. Somerset Maugham

  When I was young I took much trouble to acquire a style; I used to go to the British Museum and note down the names of rare jewels so that I might give my prose magnificence, and I used to go to the Zoo and observe the way an eagle looked, or linger on a cab rank to see how a horse champed so that I might on occasion use a nice metaphor; I made lists of unusual adjectives so that I might put them in unexpected places. But it was not a bit of good. I found I had no bent for anything of the kind, we do not write as we want to but as we can; and though I have the greatest respect for those authors who are blessed with a happy gift of phrase I have long resigned myself to writing as plainly as I can. I have a very small vocabulary, and I manage to make do with it, I am afraid, only because I see things with no great subtlety. I think perhaps I see them with a certain passion, and it interests me to translate into words not the look of them but the emotion they have given me. But I am content if I can put this down as briefly and baldly as if I were writing a telegram.

  A LAST DAY IN ANGKOR

  I CAME TO the last day I could spend at Angkor. I was leaving it with a wrench, but I knew by now that it was the sort of place that, however long one stayed, it would always be a wrench to leave. I saw things that day that I had seen a dozen times, but never with such poignancy; and as I sauntered down those long grey passages and now and then caught sight of the forest through a doorway, all I saw had a new beauty. The still courtyards had a mystery that made me wish to linger in them a little longer, for I had a notion that I was on the verge of discovering some strange and subtle secret; it was as though a melody trembled in the air, but so low that the ears could just not catch it. Silence seemed to dwell in these courts like a presence that you could see if you turned round, and my last impression of Angkor was like my first, that of a great silence. And it gave me I know not what strange feeling to look at the living forest that surrounded this great grey pile so closely, the jungle luxuriant and gay in the sunlight, a sea of different greens; and to know that there all round me had once stood a multitudinous city.

  That night a troup of Cambodian dancers were dancing on the terrace of the temple. We were escorted along the causeway by boys carrying a hundred lighted torches. The resin of which they were made charged the air with an acrid, pleasant perfume. They formed a great circle of flame, flickering and uncertain, on the terrace, and in the middle of it the dancers trod their strange measure. Musicians, hidden by the darkness, played on pipes and drums and gongs, a vague and rhythmical music that troubled the nerves. My ears awaited with a sort of tremor the resolution of harmonies strange to me, but never attained it. The dancers wore tight-fitting dresses of richly glowing colours and on their heads high golden crowns. By day no doubt they would have looked trumpery, but in that unexpected light they had a gorgeousness and a mystery that you find with difficulty in the East. Their impassive faces were dead white with powder so that they looked like masks. No emotion, no fleeting thought was permitted to disturb the immobility of their expression. Their hands were beautiful, with small and tapering fingers, and in the progress of the dance their gestures, elaborate and complicated, pointed their elegance and emphasized their grace. Their hands were like rare and fantastic orchids. There was no abandon in their dance. Their attitudes were hieratic and their movements formal. They were like idols that had come to life but still were impregnated with divinity.

  And those gestures, those attitudes, were the same as those of the bayadères that the old sculptors had graven on the stone walls of the temples. They had not changed in a thousand years. Repeated endlessly on every wall in every temple, you will see the self-same elegant writhing of the delicate fingers, the self-same arching of the slender body, as delights your eye in the living dancer before you. No wonder they are grave under their gold crowns when they bear the weight of so long an ancestry.

  The dance ended, the torches were extinguished, and the little crowd shuffled away pell-mell into the night. I sat on a parapet taking a last look at the five towers of Angkor Wat.

  My thoughts went back to a temple that I had visited a day or two before. It is called Bayon. It surprised me because it had not the uniformity of the other temples I had seen. It consists of a multitude of towers one above the other, symmetrically arranged, and each tower is a four-faced, gigantic head of Siva the Destroyer. They stand in circles one within the other and the four faces of the god are surmounted by a decorated crown. In the middle is a great tower with face rising above face till the apex is reached. It is all battered by time and weather, creepers and parasitic shrubs grow all about, so that at a first glance you see only a shapeless mass and it is only when you look a little more closely that these silent, heavy, impassive faces loom out at you from the rugged stone. Then they are all round you. They face you, they are at your side, they are behind you, and you are watched by a thousand unseeing eyes. They seem to look at you from the remote distance of primeval time, and all about you the jungle grows fiercely. You cannot wonder that the peasants when they pass should break into loud song in order to frighten away the spirits; for towards evening the silence is unearthly, and the effect of all those serene and yet malevolent faces is eerie. When the night falls the faces sink away into the stones and you have nothing but a strange, shrouded collection of oddly shaped turrets.

  But it is not on account of the temple itself that I have described it – I have, albeit with a halting pen, already described more than enough – it is for the sake of the bas-reliefs that line one of its corridors. They are not very well done, and the sculptors had but too obviously little sense of form or line, but they have notwithstanding an interest which at this moment called them up vividly to my memory. For they represent scenes in the common life of the day in which they were done: the preparation of rice for the pot, the cooking of food, the catching of fish and the snaring of birds, the buying and selling at the village shop, the visit to the doctor: in short, the various activities of a simple people. It was startling to discover how little in a thousand years this life of theirs had changed. They still do the same things with the same utensils. The rice is pounded or husked in the self-same way, and the village shopkeeper offers for sale the same bananas and the same sugar cane on the same tray. These patient, industrious folk carry on the same yokes the same burdens as their ancestors carried so many generations back. The centuries have passed leaving no trace upon them, and some sleeper of the Tenth Century, awakening now in one of these Cambodian villages, would find himself at home in the artless round of daily life.

  Then it seemed to me that in these countries of the East the most impressive, the most awe-inspiring monument of antiquity is neither temple, nor citadel, nor great wall, but man. The peasant with his immemorial usages belongs to an age far more ancient than Angkor Wat, the Great Wall of China, or the Pyramids of Egypt.

  SAIGON AND TOURANE

  AT THE MOUTH of the little river I got once more into the flat-bottomed steamer and crossed the wide, shallow lake, changed into another boat, and went down another river. Finally I reached Saigon.

  Notwithstanding the Chinese city that has grown up since the French occupied the country, and notwithstanding the natives who saunter along the pavements or, in wide straw hats like extinguishers, pull rickshaws, Saigon has all the air of a little provincial town in the South of France. It is laid out with broad streets, shaded with handsome trees, and there is a bustle in them that is quite unlike the bustle of an Eastern town in an English colony. It is a blithe and smiling little place. It has an opera house, white and shining, built in the flamboyant style of the Third Republic, which faces a broad avenue; and it has a Hôtel de Ville which is very grand, new, and ornate. Outside the hotels are terraces, and at the hour of the apéritif they are crowded with bearded, gesticulating Frenchmen, drinking the sweet and sickly beverages, Vermouth Casis, Byrrh, and Quinquina Dubonnet, which they drink in France, and they talk nineteen to the dozen in the rolling accent of the Midi. Gay little ladies who have something to do with the local
theatre are dressed in smart clothes and with their pencilled eyebrows and rouged cheeks bring a cheerful air of sophistication to this far distant spot. In the shops you will find Paris dresses from Marseilles and London hats from Lille. Victorias drawn by two little ponies gallop past, and motor cars toot their horns. The sun beats down from a cloudless sky, and the shade is heavy with the heat and solid.

  Saigon is a pleasant enough place to idle in for a few days; life is made easy for the casual traveller; and it is very agreeable to sit under the awning on the terrace of the Hôtel Continental, an electric fan just above your head, and with an innocent drink before you to read in the local paper heated controversies upon the affairs of the Colony and the faits divers of the neighbourhood. It is charming to be able to read steadily through the advertisements without an uneasy feeling that you are wasting your time and it must be a dull mind that in such a perusal does not find here and there occasion for a pleasant gallop on a hobby horse through the realms of time and space. But I only stayed long enough to catch my boat for Huë.

  Huë is the capital of Annam, and I was bound there in order to see the festivities for the Chinese New Year which were to be held at the Emperor’s court. But Huë is situated on a river, and the port for it is Tourane. It was there then that the Messageries boat – a clean white comfortable craft, properly arranged for travel in hot latitudes with plenty of space and plenty of air and cold drinks – set me down at two one morning. She anchored in the bay, seven or eight kilometres from the wharf, and I got into a sampan. The crew consisted of two women, a man, and a small boy. The bay was calm, and the stars were shining thick overhead. We rowed out into the night, and the lights on the quay seemed immensely far away. The boat was heavy with water, and every now and then one of the women stopped rowing and baled it out with an empty kerosene tin. There was the shadow of a breeze, and presently they put up a great square sail of bamboo matting, but it was too light a wind to help us much, and the journey looked as though it would last till daybreak. So far as I was concerned it might have lasted forever; I lay on bamboo mats, smoking a pipe and now and then falling into a light doze, and when I awoke and relighted my pipe the match showed me for a moment the brown fat faces of the two women squatting by the mast. The man at the tiller made a short remark and one of the women answered him. Then again the silence was complete but for the faint swish of the water under the boards on which I lay. The night was so warm that with nothing on but a shirt and a pair of khaki trousers I did not feel cold, and the air was as soft as the feel of flowers. We made a long tack into the night and then going about found our slow way to the mouth of the river. We passed fishing boats lying at anchor and others silently creeping out into the stream. The banks of the river were dark and mysterious. On a word from the man the two women lowered the clumsy sail and began once more to row. We came to the quay, and the water was so shallow that I had to be carried ashore on the back of a coolie. It is a proceeding that has always seemed to me both terrifying and undignified, and I clung to the coolie’s neck in a manner that I well knew ill became me. The hotel was just across the road, and coolies shouldered my luggage. But it was barely five and still very dark and no one was awake in the hotel. The coolies hammered on the door, and at last a sleepy servant opened it. The rest of them were lying about, fast asleep, on the billiard table and on the floor. I asked for a room and coffee. The fresh bread was just ready, and my café au lait with rolls hot from the oven, very welcome after that long journey across the bay, made a meal such as I have not often had the good luck to eat. I was shown a dirty, sordid little room, with a mosquito net grimy and torn, and I do not know how many commercial travellers and officials of the French government had passed through the sheets on the bed since last they were washed. I did not care. It seemed to me that I had never arrived anywhere in such romantic style, and I could not but think that this must be the preface to an experience that would be memorable.

  But there are places of which the only point is the arrival; they promise the most fantastic adventures of the spirit and give you no more than three meals a day and last year’s films. They are like a face, full of character that intrigues and excites you, but that on close acquaintance you discover is merely the mask of a vulgar soul. Such is Tourane.

  I spent one morning there in order to visit the museum in which there is a collection of Khmer sculpture. The reader may possibly remember that when I wrote of Phnom-Penh I became strangely eloquent (for a person who does not much like others to gush and is shy of superlatives) about a statue to be seen there. This was a Khmer work, and now I may remind him (or tell him if, like me till I went to Indo-China, he never knew that Khmers or their sculpture existed) that this was a mighty nation, the offspring of the aboriginal tribes of Indo-China and an invading race from the plateaux of Central Asia, who founded a far-flung and powerful empire. Immigrants from Eastern India brought them the Sanskrit language, Brahmanism, and the culture of their native land; but the Khmers were vigorous people, and they had a creative instinct that enabled them to make their own use of the knowledge the strangers brought them. They built magnificent temples and adorned them with sculptures, founded, it is true, on the art of India, but which have at their best an energy, a boldness of execution, a fertility, and a brilliant fancy to be found nowhere else in the East. The statue of Harihara* at Phnom-Penh testifies to the greatness of their genius. It is a miracle of grace. It calls to mind the archaic statuary of Greece and the Mayan sculpture of Mexico; but it has a character all its own. Those early Greek works have the dewy freshness of the morning, but their beauty is a trifle vacant; the Mayan statues have something primeval in them, they excite awe rather than admiration, for they have in them still the touch of early man who drew in the dark recesses of his caverns magic pictures to cast a spell on the beasts he feared or hunted; but in the Harihara you have a singular and enigmatic union of the archaic and the sophisticated. It has the candour of the primitive quickened by the complexity of the civilized. The Khmer brought a long inheritance of thought to the craft which had so suddenly captivated his fancy. It is as though to the England of the Elizabethan age had come, a bolt from the blue, the art of painting in oil; and the artists, their souls charged with the plays of Shakespeare, the conflict of religions at the Reformation, and the Armada, had begun to paint with the hand of Cimabue. Something like this must have been the state of mind of the sculptor who made the statue in Phnom-Penh. It has power and simplicity and an exquisite line, but it has also a spiritual quality that is infinitely moving. It has not only beauty, but intelligence.

  These great works of the Khmers gain a peculiar poignancy when you reflect that a few ruined temples strewn about the jungle and a few mutilated statues scattered here and there in museums are all that remains of this mighty empire and this restless people. Their power was broken, they were dispersed, becoming drawers of water and hewers of wood, they died out; and now, the rest of them assimilated by their conquerors, their name endures only in the art they so lavishly produced.

  * I am somewhat puzzled by the name given by the French authorities to the deity represented in this statue. I always thought that Hari and Hara were the names under which were commonly known Siva and Vishnu, and to call a god Harihara looks very much like calling a single respectable person Crosseandblackwell. But since I suppose the experts know better than I, I have referred to this statue throughout by the name they give it.

  HUË

  HUË is a pleasant little town with something of the leisurely air of a cathedral city in the West of England, and though the capital of an empire it is not imposing. It is built on both sides of a wide river, crossed by a bridge, and the hotel is one of the worst in the world. It is extremely dirty, and the food is dreadful; but it is also a general store in which everything is provided that the colonist may want from camp equipment and guns, women’s hats and men’s reach-me-downs, to sardines, pâté de foie gras, and Worcester sauce; so that the hungry traveller can make up with tin
ned goods for the inadequacy of the bill of fare. Here the inhabitants of the town come to drink their coffee and fine in the evening and the soldiers of the garrison to play billiards. The French have built themselves solid, rather showy houses without much regard for the climate or the environment; they look like the villas of retired grocers in the suburbs of Paris.

  The French carry France to their colonies just as the English carry England to theirs, and the English, reproached for their insularity, can justly reply that in this matter they are no more singular than their neighbours. But not even the most superficial observer can fail to notice that there is a great difference in the manner in which these two nations behave towards the natives of the countries of which they have gained possession. The Frenchman has deep down in him a persuasion that all men are equal and that mankind is a brotherhood. He is slightly ashamed of it, and in case you should laugh at him makes haste to laugh at himself, but there it is, he cannot help it, he cannot prevent himself from feeling that the native, black, brown, or yellow, is of the same clay as himself, with the same loves, hates, pleasures and pains, and he cannot bring himself to treat him as though he belonged to a different species. Though he will brook no encroachment on his authority and deals firmly with any attempt the native may make to lighten his yoke, in the ordinary affairs of life he is friendly with him without condescension and benevolent without superiority. He inculcates in him his peculiar prejudices; Paris is the centre of the world, and the ambition of every young Annamite is to see it at least once in his life; you will hardly meet one who is not convinced that outside France there is neither art, literature, nor science. But the Frenchman will sit with the Annamite, eat with him, drink with him, and play with him. In the market place you will see the thrifty Frenchwoman with her basket on her arm jostling the Annamite housekeeper and bargaining just as fiercely. No one likes having another take possession of his house, even though he conducts it more efficiently and keeps it in better repair that ever he could himself; he does not want to live in the attics even though his master has installed a lift for him to reach them; and I do not suppose the Annamites like it any more than the Burmese that strangers hold their country. But I should say that whereas the Burmese only respect the English, the Annamites admire the French. When in course of time these peoples inevitably regain their freedom it will be curious to see which of these emotions has borne the better fruit.