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Flory got out of the water, put on his clothes and re-crossed the stream. He did not go home by the
road, but followed a foot-track southward into the jungle, intending to make a detour and pass through
a village that lay in the fringe of the jungle not far from his house. Flo frisked in and out of the
undergrowth, yelping sometimes when her long ears caught in the thorns. She had once turned up a
hare near here. Flory walked slowly. The smoke of his pipe floated straight upwards in still plumes.
He was happy and at peace after the walk and the clear water. It was cooler now, except for patches
of heat lingering under the thicker trees, and the light was gentle. Bullock-cart wheels were screaming
peaceably in the distance.
Soon they had lost their way in the jungle, and were wandering in a maze of dead trees and tangled
bushes. They came to an impasse where the path was blocked by large ugly plants like magnified
aspidistras, whose leaves terminated in long lashes armed with thorns. A firefly glowed greenish at
the bottom of a bush; it was getting twilight in the thicker places. Presently the bullock-cart wheels
screamed nearer, taking a parallel course.
‘Hey, saya gyi, saya gyi!’ Flory shouted, taking Flo by the collar to prevent her running away.
‘Ba le-de?’ the Burman shouted back. There was the sound of plunging hooves and of yells to the
bullocks.
‘Come here, if you please, O venerable and learned sir! We have lost our way. Stop a moment, O
great builder of pagodas!’
The Burman left his cart and pushed through the jungle, slicing the creepers with his dah. He was a
squat middle-aged man with one eye. He led the way back to the track, and Flory climbed onto the
flat, uncomfortable bullock-cart. The Burman took up the string reins, yelled to the bullocks, prodded
the roots of their tails with his short stick, and the cart jolted on with a shriek of wheels. The Burmese
bullock-cart drivers seldom grease their axles, probably because they believe that the screaming
keeps away evil spirits, though when questioned they will say that it is because they are too poor to
buy grease.
They passed a whitewashed wooden pagoda, no taller than a man and half hidden by the tendrils of
creeping plants. Then the track wound into the village, which consisted of twenty ruinous wooden
huts roofed with thatch, and a well beneath some barren date palms. The egrets that roosted in the
palms were streaming homewards over the tree-tops like white flights of arrows. A fat yellow woman
with her longyi hitched under her armpits was chasing a dog round a hut, smacking at it with a
bamboo and laughing, and the dog was also laughing in its fashion. The village was called
Nyaunglebin–‘the four peepul trees’; there were no peepul trees there now, probably they had been
cut down and forgotten a century ago. The villagers cultivated a narrow strip of fields that lay
between the town and the jungle, and they also made bullock-carts which they sold in Kyauktada.
Bullock-cart wheels were littered every where under the houses; massive things five feet across, with
spokes roughly but strongly carved.
Flory got off the cart and gave the driver a present of four annas. Some brindled curs hurried from
beneath the houses to sniff at Flo, and a flock of pot-bellied, naked children, with their hair tied in
top-knots, also appeared, curious about the white man but keeping their distance. The village