sheer size of its muddy bulk. We stopped off at Pagan, a town accessible only by boat. This former capital of Burma, which prospered between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, is indisputably the most impressive site for Buddhist temples after Angkor, though they are all already in ruins. There is a printing house run by monks for sutras in Pagan, and I vied at length to buy a particular stele; I desperately wanted to take such a treasure back to France, where, I was quite sure, it would have delighted our museum curators, for it bore an inscription of a long text in Pyu, Mon, Pali and Burmese, relating, according to the translation I was given, a grim assassination committed in the fifth century. The victim was one of the most famous Buddhist scholars of the time. But the head of the monastery proved intransigent and refused to let me have it, whatever my price.
The name Irrawaddy may have made the adventurous telegraphers ears ring to the sound of the river sweeping through high mountains, but that of Mandalay had been charming—even fascinating—pilgrims through the ages. From the nineteenth century onwards, Mandalay had the same effect on English writers and poets who covered the length and breadth of the British Empire, under the spell of its name. I myself took the Mandalay Express and, sitting on a narrow seat between sleeping passengers, I read Somerset Maugham’s The Gentleman in the Parlour. Maugham travelled across Burma on a pony between 1922 and 1923. Mandalay, he wrote, is above all a name. There are towns like this whose names have their own magic. He thought that a man might be wise not to visit such places for fear of disappointment: like Trebizond, which might be just a miserable village but whose name carries the weight of an empire, or Samarkand—the word alone makes the pulse race and fills one with a sense of unquenchable longing.
Even before Somerset Maugham, towards the end of the nineteenth century, Kipling himself had written a poem called “Mandalay” in his collection Barrack-Room Ballads, earning him comparisons with Byron from the critics of his day. Although Kipling wrote it after his one brief stopover in Burma, and his talent as a poet doesn’t match his abilities as a short-story writer, the fascination exerted by Mandalay is here, conjuring its nervous energy as it quickens the heart:
“If you’ve ‘eard the East a-callin’, you won’t never ’eed naught else.”
No! you won’t ‘eed nothin’ else
But them spicy garlic smells,
An’ the sunshine an’ the palm-trees an’ the tinkly temple-bells;
On the road to Mandalay …
For me, personally, the road to Mandalay, the very name Mandalay, is more inclined to evoke the gloomy apprehension that gripped me when the tropical fever—which I’d congratulated myself for avoiding for more than five years—suddenly took hold again without any warning in a carriage on the Mandalay Express after seven hours of travelling, when I was still only halfway there. I stayed pinned to my seat by the hefty threat implied by this gratuitous recurrence. Scalding hot flushes, each hotter than the last, then bouts of icy shivering, each colder than the last, swept over me, growing more powerful, more furious, overwhelming me when I was already dazed by the constant stream of local music spewing from loudspeakers.
As the train began to climb an incline I felt myself descending into a sort of trance and, unable to bear the music another second, I opened the carriage window; a cloud of white mist blew in and through it I could see neat lines of crosses in a military cemetery, stretching as far as the eye could see, probably the graves of soldiers who fell in the battle of Mandalay in 1945. I saw ghosts looming out of the fog and glimpsed scattered bones from skeletons, strangely clear but swallowed up immediately by the dark night. I couldn’t say how long the hallucination lasted. A minute? Thirty seconds? I was afraid this fleeting moment was only the prelude to an even more violent attack, an imminent catastrophe, but nothing disastrous happened.
We stopped briefly in a small station before crossing the viaduct at Goktek and, in an effort to shake off my torpor and return to reality, I gazed at the gigantic arches of the bridge rising up from the shadowy gorge cloaked in jungle. I noticed, although I didn’t really believe it, that my temperature was stabilising. The train swayed, juddering over some points; the hammering of the wheels changed