Travels on the Mekong

by Louis De Carné as translated from French

An excerpt originally published in Voyage en Indo-Chine et dans l'Empire Chinois, 1872, Paris, traveling today on the Mekong really is not much different from 123 years ago. This excerpt covers the Mekong from Pak Lay to Luang Prabang.

Magnificent forests closely hemmed in the village of Pak Lay; streams of quick-flowing water ran under the trees; the birds were not contended, as in Cambodia and Lower Laos, with showing-off their bright plumage, but had turned musical, and began to sing. They seemed by their concerts to link themselves with the rejoicing which the festival of spring brings back each year at that season.

When the time of celebration comes, the girls saturate their hair with an extra quantity of hog's lard and castor-oil, and walk about in gala dresses, with fragrant flowers in their hands, and a red scarf of their bosoms, intended less to hide their breasts than to set off the yellow saffron tint with which they dye their skin.

Such manifestations were needed to remind us that it was spring, because in those regions, so dear to the sun, growth is so rapid, that there is no hint of the months from the slow advance of vegetation, which in our temperate climate raises the sap in the trees by unperceived advances, and gives such a charm to spring. It is a sort of magic, which one enjoys with the eye, but in which the rest of his nature has no part. The earth elsewhere seems to be conscious of the transformation; it takes off its winding-sheet of hoarfrost, and makes a visible effort to escape from its tomb.

Here, on the contrary, it seems to yield passively to secret influences. It is not a Lazarus raised from the dead, coming from darkness to live again in the light, and feeling the new life with a double intensity; it is an odalisque, who awakes, turns herself gently toward her mirror, and puts flowers in her hair.

At Pak Lay the river is calm, and pretty broad, and is bedded between two straight banks of rock like the sides of a canal. But for its depth, it might seem dug out by human hands; at least, this is the impression it makes on a traveler who sees it in April, the last month of the dry season, for its appearance changes completely during the rains. The bed, filled by the river when it is at its height, is fringed with white sand, and is on a level with the trees of the forest; that which contents it when it is low--that is, sixteen or nineteen meters beneath the high-water mark--is through rock, and is largely strewn with huge stones. At a little distance from the village are the ruins of a large fishery establishment, looking like the wreck of a great town that had been built of bamboos.

Beside the sources of wealth on its banks, the river contains in its slimy waters many kinds of fish, which form a large part of the food of the Laotians, who, averse to industriousness, prefer fishing to farming, and leave their rice-ground when evening comes, to visit the nets set in the morning in favorable places, or cast lines, which the current carries along at the same rate as it bears on their boats. We bought for a tikal--a Siamese coin worth a little more than three francs--a fish a meter and a half long, and as fat as a fed pig, with flesh of the color and consistency of beef. The capture of one of these monsters is a piece of good fortune for a family. It is cut into strips and smoked, and supports them for long.

We left Pak Lay, on the 19th of April, for the capital of the kingdom of Luang Prabang, to which that poor village belongs. The hills grow higher, come nearer, and hem-in the river, from which a belt of gray and rugged rocks separates them, and they are covered with fine vegetation. The white trunks of some kinds of huge trees stand out from the green, like marble pillars. A sharp bend of the river shut it in before us like a lake; and at the back of the picture a high mountain showed its steep outlines through a veil of blue vapors, which seem to shiver in the cold.

The great charm of scenes of this kind is the brightness of the light. The memory carries away from these regions, which are characterized by a kind of monotonous grandeur more than by anything else, only a recollection of so many landscapes flooded with light, a corner of the forest, or the peak of a mountain. When you get back to northern regions, you have only to shut your eyes to bring back the dazzling and luminous perspectives; so wondrously do the tropics fill one with their beams. The whole external world, so little varied, so calm, so full of transparency and grandeur, influenced me without my knowing it. It slighted enjoyments which dulled my faculties. My sensations destroyed the power of reflecting, and I felt myself on the slope which leads up gifted souls to a state of dreamy contemplation, but leads others to the verge of idiocy.

I hardly know to which of these two results these fatal moods would have urged me, had they continued long enough; but I am very grateful today to the Laotians of my canoe, who were never very long in recalling me to reality. They were in the habit of piling up their inevitable sacks into a barrier far from fragrant, between me and the landscape. These bags contained an extra langouti, a little basket of rice, a box with the various elements of their quids, not to speak of the rotten fish and other ingredients, which, joined to the odor of the natives themselves, would have moved the most callous heart.

My attention was, moreover, at times drawn off to the difficulties of the navigation. This becomes once more dangerous at a short distance from Pak Lay. Sharp rocks rise in the waters like needles, and we had to get past them by a method already familiar to us--hauling ourselves on by a rattan cable. We entered a gorge where mountains, softly lighted, rose in a second row behind the hills, reproducing their tossed and tumbled shapes as if they had been their magnified shadows. The colors of the sky all at once changed, the tints became deeper, the water turned a strange hue like withered leaves, the wind blew hard through the defile, the thunder echoed, and the hail came down furiously.

The hailstones, which were as large as musket-bullets, rattled against our leaf roofs; the Laotian crew sheltered itself as it best could; and our Annamites, to whom this phenomenon was quite new, thought it was raining pebbles on their heads. The wild elephants, frightened, marched at random through the forest on the river-bank, crashing the bamboos under their feet, with a noise like that of bursting petards. The sky, the earth, and water were alike full of noise, and Nature seemed to me more beautiful in these sudden outbreaks than in her gloomy tranquillity.

We chose for our resting-place, that day, a little village covering in a fold of soil between two mountains. A river rolls its limpid waters, now swollen by the storm, by its side over a bed of flints. It is of recent erections, as may be seen from the age of the valuable trees, which the Laotians take care always to plant even before building their dwellings.

The poor people had been stripped bare of almost everything by the escort of the Dutch geographer we had met. The Siamese mandarin who commanded it had plundered all along his route, in accordance with the hateful custom which raises spoliation to a principle, and transforms the functionaires of the court of Bangkok into brigands. They are not authorized, it is true, to exact more than some specified things and services gratuitously, and these they can only demand so far as they are needful for their traveling requirements; but they know that they need fear no censure, and they hide under a kind of seventy-fifth article--a legislative arrangement by which Eastern mandarinism puts everything to rights for itself.

I was thankful that the terms of our passport, in compliance with our personal wish, obliged us to pay for men, boats, and provisions. It caused us to be less thought of; but it will be a pleasant recollection in connection with us, and when favorable circumstances come, it may bear good fruit.

For some time we met no more great affluent, but numerous streams, and many brooks or torrents which fall from the mountains. We had finally left the plains, and henceforth sailed through the midst of hills and bluffs. Our canoes coasted along enormous rocks. We one day came upon corpses in rush mats, at the turning of a promontory. They were in a cleft, where the water had, perhaps, landed them, to bear them off after a time, or, perhaps, they were put there by the hands of the living.

However fine such a tomb may be, it is sad, when one feels oneself dying, not to be able to reckon on a little earth near the hut where one has lived. Of the three elements to which man commits his remains, water, always changing and oblivious by its nature, seems the least worthy of this mournful trust. The earth grows green again above us, the fire leaves ashes for our family to venerate. Though they surround mortal agony and burial with a crowd of noisy ceremonies, the Laotians do not look on death as we do. That grand mystery terrifies them; but that which they dread, above all, is lest the ghost should revisit them. This danger seems less if they annihilate or banish the body.

Masses of black shining rocks, which seemed as if they had been varnished, encumbered the river once more so much, as to leave it only a narrow passage, through which it darted, writhing. We had, therefore, once more to unload our canoes, taking off even the light rounded roofs, which it would not have been safe to have left on them. In spite of these precautions, one of them filled while they were dragging it along, and we saw nothing but the captain erect and impassive, notwithstanding the danger, his paddle in his hand, and seeming to walk on the waves.

When the specially dangerous spots were thus passed, the flotilla resumed its way. It needed all the strength and dexterity of our boatmen not to be swept away in doubling some points, where they had nothing by which to hold on, and a terrible current bore down on them, with a smooth wall over their head and an abyss at their feet. As they knew there were responsible for our lives, they threw a ardor into their task, demanded for their self-preservation. They could not drown such great mandarins as we with impunity.

From Nong Khai the villages are thinly scattered, but the country grows more populous as you approach Luang Prabang--a town famous through all Laos, but whose size, in contradiction to the laws of perspective, grows less as we get near it. The Mekong is clear at last, for some time, of the rocks which till then obstruct it: the outlines of the mountains lose their rigidity, the hills are covered with a rich and more varied vegetation, and the river flows round them in soft bends. Free from obstacles, it spreads out into a broader bed, and forms a vast sheet of calm water before the town.

Luang Prabang makes itself known by the top of a gilt pyramid rising from amidst the trees, as our towns in Europe are announced from a distance by the steeples of churches. Boats are drawn up on the bank; nets by the hundred, hung from stakes, dry in the sun; immense rafts are being put together; others, smaller, in great numbers, float at anchor from long cables. We saw them at once in this unpretentious town, which lives by the river, signs of activity; a sight so new to us, that we stopped to enjoy it.

Travels on the Mekong is distributed by White Lotus Co., Ltd., GPO Box 1141, Bangkok, Thailand 10501, a specialist in scholarly books on Asia, rare books, maps and prints.

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