CHAPTER XVI

BOAT RACING AND PWÉS

THE joy with which we gazed upon green Burma made one realise afresh for how many weeks we had looked at nothing that was not parched and brown. Not that Burma showed any recent acquaintance with rain. The dust was deep, very deep, upon her roads, but the dust was not, as in India, everywhere else also. The rice crop had been cut and the paddy fields were full of long yellow stubble; but the sheltered betel vines, the sesamum, Indian corn, and tobacco were still green and growing, and there was a touch of autumn quiet in the few trees which had turned to honest October gold, and in the scarlet or crimson branch load of leaves upon others. For in India there is no twilight of the seasons, no spring and autumn, only hot and cold weathers; and even this hint of that gayer masque of the northern year was pleasing, as was also the touch of autumn in the weather, the warm still noonday suns and the and the cool dawns and evenings. After the close thunderous heat of Rangoon-which Rangoon protested was quite unlike its January habit-a breath of fresh dry

air was welcome, and had a sobering effect on the mosquitoes, which are in Upper Burma of a size and impudent voracity which seem to vindicate the most lurid tales.

There was an interesting difference in the entertainments which Mandalay offered the Prince from those which had been devised elsewhere for him; everything was Burman, and Burman as arranged by the Burmese. Elsewhere had always been the concession to English taste, or the white directing finger behind the local colour. Here there was nothing done for the Prince's amusement that the Burman would not have done for his own. We saw thus two most characteristic displays, a Burmese boat race and a Burmese pwé. The boat race, or boat racing, as one should more properly call it, since it lasted all the afternoon, was as well "run "run" and as keenly followed as that at any regatta at home. The spectacle was not quite so dispersedly decorative as might be some racing festa on the Thames, since the water was sternly swept of all but the racing craft and the gilded karaweiks in which the starter and the judge were seated. But in the crowd that stood five and six deep along the northern side of the moat there was a gaiety and variety of colour that could not be matched in the whole of Henley.

Pinks, in a score of delightful distinguishable shades for pink is the preponderant Burmese