LITMIR.BIZ

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usually better to follow the bank of the Noa Dehing than hack away at the jungle.

      So Millar and Leyden walked along the stones at the water’s edge – when there was an edge to the water – as opposed to a vertical wall of red mud. Some of these stones, Millar wrote, were about the size and shape of a cricket ball, and threatened to twist your ankle. Others were about the size and shape of a small house, so Millar and Leyden would climb up, across and down, often descending into deep pools, so that the leather of their boots began to rot. When the vertical mud wall was the only option, they proceeded monkey-like, holding onto the roots of trees or stout bamboos. It is unlikely that they talked much as they climbed. Their voices would have been drowned out by the crashing past of the river; and a malnourished man finds it hard to talk. It becomes a labour to formulate the thoughts and pronounce the words.

      The rain made it hard to light the fires they needed at night to boil up their rice. They had to search the undergrowth for dry bamboo, which they cut into slivers to make kindling. This they then tried to ignite, but the Lion Safety Matches of India and Burma were considered by many of their users all too safe: the sulphur tended to drop off the end when they were struck, or they would break in half.

      When bamboo does burn, it makes a mellow bubbling, popping sound. Every night after they’d eaten their rice, Millar and Leyden made tea: Assam leaves swirling in a brew tin full of river water. G. D. L. Millar was a tea planter from Assam – manager of the Kacharigaon Tea Company – and never let it be said of the British tea planters of India that they did not consume their own product.

      On one those early evenings by the fire, Leyden took a photograph of Millar; it shows a tough forty-two-year-old, unshaven, standing in front of a bamboo fire. The porters crouch around him Burmese-style, like close fielders around a batsman; he wears loose fatigues and the manner in which he holds his cigarette is slightly rakish. Millar was christened Guy Daisy. In the Edwardian days of his birth, Daisy could be a boy’s name; it might be further explained in Millar’s case by the fact that he was born on a farm in Cornwall. Daisy means nothing more incriminating than ‘the day’s eye’ and you might think it would suit an outdoorsman. But Millar made that ‘D’ stand for Denny.

      He was on a three-month release from the Kacharigaon Tea Company in order to do ‘government work’ in Upper Burma (and we shall come to the question of what that had involved) in the company of Goal Miri and a cranky sixty-four-year-old botanist called Frank Kingdon-Ward.

      Before coming to Millar’s companion, Leyden, a word about that cigarette of Millar’s. How had he kept it dry when crossing all these rivers in monsoon rains? There will be a lot of cigarettes in this story, a lot of rivers and a lot of rain, so it is a question worth asking.

      The cigarettes of the day usually came in cylindrical tins about two and a half inches in diameter. The tins were sealed below the lid. A small, levered blade was set into the lid; you pressed it down and rotated the lid in order to break the seal. Until then, the tin was entirely waterproof, and it was still fairly waterproof afterwards. The tins, which contained fifty cigarettes, were too big to put in a normal pocket, so most people decanted them into a slim cigarette case – but cigarette cases were for the drawing room, and in the jungle Millar smoked his straight from the tin.

      Millar’s travelling companion, John Leyden, was a civil servant of British Burma, a colonial administrator. He could be loosely referred to as a DC, or Deputy Commissioner. More correctly, he was a sub-divisional officer of the North Burmese district of Myitkyina where, according to Thacker’s Indian Directory, the languages spoken included Burmese, Kachin, Hindustani, Lisu, Gurkhali and Chinese. Myitkyina was the last decent-sized town in Burma; the railway ended there, but a dusty mule track snaked north from the town, through a mosquito-infested jungle and scrub unfrequented by Europeans apart from the odd orchid collector. The path winds towards a small settlement of green and red houses perched on top of a treeless green hill, like a place in a fairy story. This was Sumprabum, the centre of Leyden’s particular sub-division. (And while we are in this remote vicinity, let us note an even narrower track winding down the hill and meandering still further north to an even smaller, even more malarial settlement called Putao.)

      John Lamb Leyden was born into a distinguished Scottish family, and was a descendant of another orientalist, John Leyden (1775–1811), poet, physician and antiquary, who ran the Madras General Hospital and held various official posts in Calcutta. Ominously for John Lamb Leyden, his ancestor died of fever on an expedition to Java.

      We have a photograph of John Lamb Leyden on his trek – probably taken by Millar after Leyden had taken his. It shows a cerebral looking man with swept-back, receding hair. At thirty-eight, Leyden was younger than Millar, but looked older. Next to him, a bamboo fire smoulders thickly. He and Millar would light these at every camp, hoping the smoke would attract the planes that periodically flew overhead, but as Millar wrote, ‘… on each occasion failure to observe us was apparent’. They had no tents, so every evening they spent a couple of hours building a hut of the type known locally as a basha.

      How do you build a basha?

      In a lecture entitled ‘Keeping Fit in the Jungle’, given to the Bengal Club of Calcutta in early 1943, Captain Alastair Tainsh explained:

      The way to keep fit in the jungle is exactly the same as anywhere else. All one needs is sound sleep, clean water, a reasonable diet, and a liberal use of soap and water. But how is sound sleep to be obtained? Well, one must learn how to make oneself comfortable in the worst conditions. It is not being tough or clever to sit in the open all night … The easiest form of shelter to build is made by fixing two upright poles in the ground eight or nine feet apart. To the top of these is bound a long bamboo making a frame like goal posts. The roof is made by leaning a number of poles against the top bar forming an angle of about 45 degrees with the ground. A number of parallel bamboos are tied to the sloping poles and into this framework banana or junput leaves are thatched.

      Then you had to build a chung, or sleeping platform, to keep the leeches off, and sometimes Millar and Leyden couldn’t be bothered to do any of this, so they’d sleep in the crooks of trees. They always kept a fire burning in case a tiger should turn up, although as Millar wrote, about a week into their trek: ‘… this stretch of country is uninhabited for over a hundred miles. Not only is there not a trace of man, but mammal and even bird life is conspicuous by its absence; truly a forgotten world, where solitude reigns supreme.’

      Here, too, we can invoke the voice of reason himself, Captain Tainsh:

      Nearly everyone is a little frightened when they hear they must work and live in the jungle. The word ‘jungle’ conjures up in their minds a place literally swarming with lions, tigers, elephants and snakes. Nothing could be further from the truth, because wild animals and even snakes need food, and such wild animals as there are, live on the edge of cultivation, and are seldom seen in the thicker parts of the forest.

      The larger animals are particularly scarce in the monsoon, when they retreat to the margins of the jungle, to avoid the leeches and mosquitoes that proliferate in the rains. Against these torments, Millar and Leyden slept with their heads wrapped in blankets but still Millar wrote, ‘Of the leeches, blister flies and sandflies I cannot give adequate description, sufficient it is to say that we were getting into a mess.’ For most of the nights, they didn’t sleep at all, but just listened to the sound of rain drumming on palms or bamboo. In the morning, the rising heat of the day made clouds of steam rise up from the muddy jungle floor like smoke from a bonfire.

      By 26 May, with nine of their fourteen days of food gone, there was no sign of the Dapha river, and Millar and Leyden were down to one cigarette tin of rice per man per day.

      Why had these men entered the Chaukan Pass?

      To escape something worse coming from behind.

       The Languorous Dream

      On the morning of 7 December 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor and entered the Second World War. They wanted ‘Asia for the Asiatics’, and for the

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