To Run Across the Sea (24 page)

The Emperor Charles V spent two of his last years in Jarandilla’s castle, and just as largely apocryphal stories of royal doings of old still circulate in villages of the home counties exposed to the occasional excursions of the Tudor or Stewart monarchs, the presence of the Emperor is still felt here. By this time, at the age of 56, he was already a bespectacled old man, unable to stand and having to be carried in a litter like an oversized pram through the village on his occasional sorties to watch his subjects at work or play. He was simple and genial; the most human ruler of his day, who kept parrots, and had once liked to garden, his health fatally undermined by an addiction to spiced Spanish food which had left him crippled by gout. The Emperor loved to commune with nature and, as revealed in his letters, to listen to the song of the nightingale. He chose Gredos because it offered him these things and also because he believed that in the high mountains a man was nearer to God.

As soon as it could be done, a monastery was got ready for his retirement at Yuste, 12 kilometres away, and to this he withdrew to end his days. His apartments are dark and austere, furnished in the lugubrious style associated with piety in the minds of the Spanish of those days. A chair of a rustic kind with iron leg supports was made for him locally, and in this he spent most of the day on his veranda. He was seated here when overcome by his fatal stroke, and his last view, according to the position in which he had been placed, would have been of the peaks he so much admired, or perhaps of the lush valley of La Vera with its strange villages, which, as painted by the Flemish artist, would have appeared very much as they do now.

I
N THAILAND PEOPLE SET
out with the determination that everything should go well on New Year’s Day, which establishes the pattern and style of the twelve months to come. The average active and hopefully minded citizen bounds out of bed at dawn, puts on a new suit with nothing less than 1000-baht notes in its pockets, resolves to renew failing friendships and to forgive his enemies. Next he collects the up-market car, such as a convertible Mercedes, that he has hired for the day and drives over to the nearest temple to join in the pleasant ceremony of washing the Buddha image. On this day, men of cool-headed decision, like bankers and stock-market manipulators, discover untapped reserves of superstition in their personalities. For once all their endeavours are tempered with caution. Above all they must be sure not to put a foot wrong until the sun rises again, twenty-four hours later.

Amorin Surin, who lived by selling beautiful and often rare butterflies to tourists in the night market of Chiang Mai, took me in his mini-van to the renowned temple festival at Wat Prathat Haripoonchai in Lumphan, a town profoundly asleep in the past as a result of being by-passed by the main Bangkok highway 16 miles below the northern capital. Surin was a dedicated hunter and therefore in the top category of those addicted to superstition of every kind. All the hunters in the area made a point of a New Year’s visit to the Wat, favoured by them for its proximity to Doi Khun Tan National Park. Although debarred by zealous wardens from entry into the park itself in pursuit of the splendid game harboured in its forests, there was no law to prevent them lying in ambush along the perimeter for animals crossing the frontier between relative security and danger. Even on less auspicious days, many of them made a point of calling in at the Wat to ask the Buddha’s blessing when any such enterprise was contemplated.

Wat Hari Poonchai is one of the most venerable temples of the kingdom. It houses innumerable Buddha images and holy relics, possesses a 50 metres’ high spire, and a number of buildings over 1,000 years old. To the average, uninstructed and only moderately devout visitor, its principal feature is the two colossal lions that guard the entrance. The mere sight of these animals, resembling enormous chocolate dogs, puts a Thai in a good humour. The ferocious snarl intended by the sculptor of old has turned out to be hardly more alarming than a Disneyland grin. It is all very relaxed. The visitors come here to worship but also to have a good time.

By the time we arrived, the festival was in full swing with yellow-robed monks bustling among the well-dressed visitors whom they were helping to park their cars. Two trestle tables had been set up under the benevolent scrutiny of the lions outside the compound. Merriment in Thailand is interwoven with formality. This was an occasion when ladies were expected to wear hats. One table bore a selection offered for hire, and the ladies were trying them on. At the other, their husbands were lined up to be served with half-tumblers of hot
mekong
whisky, downed in a couple of gulps before entering the sacred precincts.

Hot whisky drinking, introduced as part of the modernisation campaign in the early fifties, has remained in the eyes of the Thais a cultural exercise borrowed from the West, and its occasional effects on the drinker’s conduct in no way exposes him to censure. As ever on such occasions, the scene within the compound was a lively one. The Army, taking a willing hand in the arrangements, had proposed to entertain the visitors by setting up a battlefield in miniature. The menfolk, some of them a little unsteady by now, were genially urged to try their hand with machine-guns and half-charge grenades in an attack on remote-controlled miniature tanks careering about at the bottom of a shooting-range. Many of them did so. Grenades exploded with a stunning crack, and ricocheting bullets whined away like bees. One tank, successfully blasted, went out of control and came in a zigzagging rush at the crowd who stampeded away with cries of pretended fear. An ambulance had been parked at the entrance to the orchid display, and by it immaculately uniformed nurses stood to attention to await casualties. On a background dais a dancing couple capered round each other, twirling their arms. Everyone smiled; the dancers, the smartly turned-out overseers correcting the ragged aim of the men at the machine-guns, the wives adjusting the angle of rented hats, the well-starched nurses. The scene was scented by cordite mixed with the odour of the fleshy white blooms on the compound tress. Rock music came across in disconnected blasts, only momentarily stifling the nasal outcry of a monk locked in a cage to preach in incomprehensible Pali against the pleasures of the flesh.

It was all good fun, but not what the serious-minded Surin was here for. Dominating this earthly confusion the great golden spire of the Wat soared up to spread its faint sheen into sallow summer sky. This was Surin’s objective. Elsewhere, the Buddha images were washed in person on this day, but so great is the veneration in which the Buddha of Hari Poonchai is held that in this case it is enough simply to wash the temple spire. We turned our backs on the pious jollifications, made our way round the back of the crowd to the spire and took our place in the queue waiting to gain merit in this act of devotion. Surin’s turn came. A monk passed him a bucket attached to a rope containing a jugful of water blessed by the abbot. Surin hauled on the rope to hoist the bucket to the top of the spire, then jerked a second rope to splash its contents down the golden slope. Next, to nudge the celebrant forward a pace or two along the path to Nirvana, birds had to be released from captivity. A hundred or two, having been netted overnight, and now confined in pairs in tiny wicker cages, awaited release. We bought a pair apiece, and set them free from their wicker prisons, thus completing the ritual. For Surin, this was a moment of tension. If in subsequent flight the birds kept close together—which they usually did—it was a good omen. If they separated, each going its own way, there was nothing much to be hoped for in the coming year. Our birds could hardly have been closer. Surin clasped his hands together in prayerful relief. The first hurdle had been cleared. Now the encounter with Khun Tan had to be faced.

Khun Tan was a powerful spirit, overlord of the region he ruled from the 4,000-foot mountain peak rising from the Doi Khun Tan Park to the east of the Chiang Mai-Bangkok road some 10 miles before reaching the town of Lampang. In theory, Surin admitted, Buddha, who was not a god, had nothing to do with good or bad luck. People washed his image as part of the New Year celebrations to show their respect for his revelation of the five-fold way to enlightenment and release from the bondage of desire. Nevertheless, there was nothing to be lost in praying to him as to any other god. And who knew?—it might help. With Khun Tan the case was different. He was a powerful spirit who had once been a man, and assumed to have retained a fair share of human weakness. Although invisible, he remained within reach, bribable, susceptible to flattery, frequently sympathetic to a supplicant’s prayer—in this instance, able and willing if approached in the right way to steer game within gunshot. Like so many of the national spirits he had ended his spell on earth in a tragic fashion. He had led, as Surin thought, a revolt against the Burmese who had overrun the area, been captured and torn apart by elephants. Thus here as elsewhere the memory of the Robin Hood persists while the name of the king is forgotten.

We drove down the Bangkok road to the crest of a low hill where the peak of Doi Khun Tan came into view among the distant trees. Here along the verge was ranged one of the greatest collections of spirit-shrines in South East Asia: possibly a thousand of them in ten to fifteen ranks, each shrine about one yard from the next along a hundred yards of the road. They were like bird-tables of an elaborate kind having tiny spirit-houses on their platforms. Some of the newer shrines were of the sort on offer in supermarkets, put together cheaply from low-quality materials; but the older shrines in the back ranks were often of well carved teak. Every one of these contained offerings to the potent spirit of Khun Tan, an assortment of vitamin tablets, cough syrup, slimming remedies, amphetamines, miniature liquor bottles, sun-specs, and playing-cards, mixed in with spurious jewellery and toys of every kind—all of those things of which in their spiritual essence a powerful Thai spirit might stand in need. Surin deposited his contribution—a packet of Camels—and we made to leave.

Here we ran into difficulty. Hundreds of truck-drivers passed this way each day on the country’s main north-south run. It was their normal custom to salute the invisible, though watchful, presence of Khun Tan in passing by a toot on the horn. On this occasion many had thought fit to stop, and to elbow their way through a steadily thickening crowd for a prayer at the nearest shrine. In the minutes since our arrival a traffic-jam had built up. We were badly parked, and Surin’s efforts to extricate the mini-van provoked cries of protest from nearby drivers.

The incident left him momentarily depressed. He had hoped that the promising behaviour of the birds at Hari Poonchai would be capped by a good omen at the Khun Tan shrine. It was well known that sometimes at the moment of making an offering the spirit would appear in a vision to the supplicant, traditionally on a white horse, but in recent years at the wheel of a German car. Surin had never experienced this sign of Khun Tan’s favour, granted to several of his friends, and now he was alarmed less the trouble with the truck-drivers might have dimmed our prospects for the night hunt, and in consequence for the year itself.

We drove on down the slow descent to the animal market of Lampang, which takes the form of a temporary village of thatched huts build by the roadside about five miles short of the town itself. Hunters by the hundred use the market as a starting point for their night excursions into the forest, and bring back to it whatever surplus meat they may have for sale. It is a place to which non-hunting citizens take their families in pursuit of
Sanuk
which may be described as innocent fun—provided in this case by the inspection of unfamiliar animals in cages, or tied by a leg to a stake, awaiting those in search of an unusual pet or simply meat on the hoof. Families picnic here, let off fireworks, dance the
Ramwong
and dress up as ghosts. It is possible to find basic accommodation for the night, and a rough sort of country restaurant can throw a meal together on request. Depending as it does largely on exotic materials it can provide the bold with an outstanding culinary adventure.

The reality of the market disappointed. There was said to be no better place to study the wildlife of Thailand, albeit in captivity or death. Surin made frequent trips down from Chiang Mai to buy spiders the size of a child’s fist, six-inch-long scorpions and monstrous stag beetles for arrangement with his butterflies in framed pictures for sale to foreign tourists. There was something about the climate of the moist, deciduous monsoon forest that attracted a huge variety of animals, luring them eventually to the nets and guns of the hunters who gathered here to await them.

The display of animal wares on this occasion was meagre largely because a horde of day-trippers had bought up everything worth having by the time we arrived. A hopeful quest for uncommon specimens led to dead ends. Snakes were brought in quantity to the market, where they were sold for their blood, accepted as a powerful tonic when mixed with an equal amount of whisky. Of these a single example hardly more impressive than a large worm remained. The ‘tiger’ we were summoned to view turned out to be the kitten of a jungle cat, that sat in its cage imperturbably grooming itself. The only wild boar to be found was small and unpleasantly blotched by skin disease. The last of the deer had been divided down the middle between two eager buyers an hour before our arrival. A selection of squirrels, rabbits and huge blunt-faced forest rats had found no takers. Any of them, said the crestfallen merchant offering them, could be turned into a reasonable stew, but at holiday times people were on the lookout for something with more prestige.

We were at the market for a meeting with a local guide whose services had to be regarded as a luxury since he charged double the value of the game his customers were likely to bag. He guaranteed results, which was all that mattered at a time like this. The arrangement was that he would come up from Lampang to collect us shortly before nightfall, then drive us in his Land-Rover by side roads and jungle tracks to an area near Ban Tung where the frontiers of the park were ill-defined and, by common consent, little respected. We were to hunt with jack-lights. In most countries, including Thailand, this all too easy method of animal massacre is outlawed, but in the whole of the Far East hardly any other kind of hunting is commonly practised.