Page 48 - NOMADS_NO3_2015

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We arrived in Kengtung at sunset. After many miles of tiresome ascents and descents, through narrow gorges between monotonous mountains, where the eye never had the relief of distance, we suddenly found ourselves in a vast, airy valley. In the middle of it, white pagodas, wooden houses and the dark green contours of great rain trees, were silhouetted like paper cutouts against a background of mist, that glowed first pink and then gold in the setting sun. Kengtung was evanescent, incorporeal like the memory of a dream, a vision outside of time.
The town was at supper. Through the open doorways of the shop-houses, with dogs on the thresholds, we could see families sitting around their tables. Oil lamps cast great shadows on walls dotted with photographs, calendars and sacred images. There was no traffic on the streets; the air was filled with the quiet murmur of evening’s isolated voices and distant calls.
A fair was in progress in the courtyard of a pagoda. People crowded around the many stalls lit by small acetylene lamps, to buy sweets and gamble with large dice that had figures of animals instead of numbers. Wide- eyed children peered through the forest of hands holding out bets to the peasant croupiers.
Night fell in Kengtung, timeless night, a blanket of ancient darkness and silence. All that remained was a quiet tinkling of bells, stirred by the wind at the top of the great stupa of the Eight Hairs. Led by this sound we climbed the hill by the light of the moon, which, almost full, rimmed the white buildings in silver. We found an open door, and spent hours talking with monks, sitting on the beautiful floral tiles of the Wat Zom Kam, the Monastery of the Golden Hill.
That afternoon several lorries had arrived from the countryside full of very young novices. Accompanied by their families, they were all sleeping on the ground along the walls, at the feet of the large Buddahs, with their faint mysterious smiles, that glimmered in the light of little flames. Statues though they were, they were dressed in the orange tunic of the monks, exactly as if they too, were alive and had to be shielded from the night breeze that came in at the windows.
When we left the pagoda it was still a couple of hours before dawn, but along the main street of Kengtung a silent procession of extraordinary figures was already under way. Passing in single file, they seemed to have come out of an old anthropology book: women carrying huge baskets on long poles, supported by wooden yokes across their shoulders; men carrying bunches ofducks by the feet; more women, moving along with a dancing gait to match the movement of the poles.