A Burmese wonderland; a tale of travel in Lower and ... - Khamkoo

132 A BURMESE WONDERLAND.
and stuffy curtains. The villagers are kept luiming
about laying mats, raising dust, and supplying your
supposed craving for cocoanut juice. When these
duties are all done and overdone, they stare at you
irritatingly in your comfortless if splendid isolation. It
is quite essential, if human sympathy is to be restored,
to break from such tyranny, and assume a more approachable
and less ceremonious seat under a tamarind tree.
We travelled on all next day obtaining relays of
carts as we went, and comparing the various exhortations
with which successive drivers addressed their
bullocks. The formula is nearly always the same, and
consists of the word niva. (cow), spoken as if the
animal's incredible laziness astonished the driver. This
is followed by the word Oh, uttered as if that exasperating
laziness was a thing past endurance. I expect
every traveller in Burma is familiar with the Nwa,
Oh with which the bullock is urged into a crawl.
The bullock cart is truly the symbol of patient
protest. Its occupants abandon themselves goodnaturedly
to tobacco and talk. The bullocks move,
but only when urged : and the wheels whine and groan
in the loose sand, but not unmelodiously. or with any
hope of redress.
I was interested this day to see a cow open a
Burmese gate by pulling out the bars sideways. I
suppose everyone has read the argument that soulless
animals work by instinct and without reasoning.
Surely such a view is opposed to the daily evidence