River Road to China Read online

  By January 14, the party was at Sisaket. River travel was no longer of any value after this point, as the main course of the Se Moun swung back to the north whereas Garnier's route lay almost due south. In place of pirogues they now traveled in light ox carts through the dry countryside. The rains had ended little more than two months before, but sixty days of unrelieved sunshine left the earth parched and dusty. The villages, grouped about small, weed-filled lakes and surrounded by sugar palms and fruit trees, seemed like oases in the desert. For the rest, Garnier noted, the countryside seemed “sterilized by fire.” Thirty miles farther south the surroundings changed, and Garnier's small caravan of ox carts entered an area of forest. The flowering trees and the cool of the shadows cast by the thick vegetation were almost a compensation for the red dust that rose constantly from the hooves of the oxen trotting before their carts.

  Forty miles south of Sisaket they came to Khu Kan. As was the case with settlements farther to the north, they were still within the territories of the King of Thailand, but here at Khu Kan the cultural ambience was Cambodian. The area had passed under Thai control in the seventeenth century, but the language spoken by the inhabitants was still Cambodian. One of the first inquiries Garnier made on reaching Khu Kan concerned the interpreter Alexis Om. Had he visited the settlement? When the expedition left Alexis at Bassac, the intention was that he should travel to Angkor through this region. Nothing was known of him at Khu Kan, however, which made Garnier's trip in search of the passports the more urgent.

  From Khu Kan the party traveled in a largely westerly direction to Sangkeak, a distance of some forty miles. The problems of what route to follow and which direction to take now loomed large in Garnier's mind. His destination was to the south, yet all of the information he could glean from his local informants suggested that the best way to reach Cambodia was by continuing farther to the west. He was handicapped by language. He spoke Vietnamese but not Cambodian and had to rely on the uncertain translations provided by Renaud, whose service in Cambodia had given him some limited ability in the language. Garnier's concern became more acute after speaking with the Governor of Sangkeak, who claimed that the route the French party should follow lay through Surin, a town he described as being to the west. More disturbing still was the Governor's insistence that a southerly route would lead them to mountains that would surely bar their way. In an apparently dead flat landscape this warning seemed meaningless. Nonetheless, dependent as he was on local authorities for the provision of ox carts, Garnier agreed to travel to Surin with the hope that he might there gain information to clarify the situation.

  To his almost immediate distress, he found that the route to Surin was as much to the north as to the west, taking him ever farther from his goal. Worse still, when the party reached Surin the local Governor was absent and his subordinate staff showed the greatest reluctance to associate in any way with the Frenchmen. Only after Garnier stormed and shouted, and following a day's infuriating delay, were carts found to take them south again. Now, to complicate matters further, the ox carts were being provided on a relay basis. Each village became a staging post where it was necessary to convince the village headman of the urgency of their need. There was no meeting of minds. The Frenchmen wanted to travel as fast as possible. The villagers could not understand either such haste in this increasingly hot period of the year, or Garnier's refusal to wait the four or five days it would take to furnish the travelers with new ox carts, better suited to their route.

  And still there was talk of mountains. Late in the evening of January 22 the five men reached the village of Soukrom, having noted during the afternoon that the plain they were crossing was beginning to slope upward to the south. The information they received at Soukrom was just as puzzling as before. The village chief warned of mountains and precipices, but where these were and how they might affect the group's plans was beyond the Frenchmen's understanding. The headman wanted to assemble more men to travel with them, to assist the ox drivers they now had. But arranging this would take time, and, in any case, Garnier saw no need for more men. His account of the circumstances is remarkably frank. “I was accustomed to having the natives predict difficulties and then never encountering them. I thus did not take any objection seriously.”

  He did not have to wait long to discover how wrong he had been in doubting the good faith of his informants. Early on January 23 the party set off with three ox carts reluctantly provided by the village. Traveling through a forest, the track ran slowly upward, crossing a series of small streams. At one of these an ox cart driver asked them to stop, asserting that this was the last water they would encounter. Garnier did not believe him. It was early in the day and he saw this request as merely another “ruse” and confirming his view that the native population was both lazy and untrustworthy. He insisted that they should move on, and gave the lead by walking ahead at the front of the small group. To emphasize their determination, the three Frenchmen with Garnier took the reins of the oxen and urged the beasts forward. One by one the ox cart drivers slipped away until Garnier suddenly realized that the five of them were on their own. At almost the same moment the ox carts emerged from the shadowy world of the forest into the light and the Frenchmen found that their path had vanished. They stood at the edge of a high cliff more than six hundred feet above a vast plain that stretched away to the southern horizon. What they had been told was the truth after all. Garnier had known from barometric readings that there was a difference of some six hundred feet between the altitudes of Ubon and Angkor. What he had not anticipated was that this difference was contained in a single physical feature.

  Standing at the edge of the cliff, Garnier saw that it might still be possible to go on. Zigzagging down to the plain below were rough tracks that clearly were used by men and beasts from time to time. They too would use these; and he gave the necessary orders to his men. They would not go back, for too much time had been lost already. Instead they would unload their ox carts, then they would dismantle the carts themselves and carry them, and their supplies, to the foot of the cliff. The decision was typical of Garnier but remarkable nonetheless. Commencing their work at midday, when the sun was at its hottest, they were without water or resources beyond their own. The rocks over which they had to climb and walk were burning hot from the sun, and the combined effect of heat and physical effort began to take its toll.

  By the middle of the afternoon both the four Frenchmen and the one Vietnamese were close to heat exhaustion, dehydrated and without apparent access to water. And the greater part of their task still remained to be done. Activity ceased and the men slumped down to rest, unable to go on. They were too exhausted even to speak. Then, and only then, Garnier found a source of fresh cool water, a pool at the base of a now dry waterfall. Refreshed, they could continue. By ten o'clock at night they were at the base of the cliff with their carts again assembled and loaded. Detailed though it is, Garnier's account only hints at the worst hardships of the undertaking. For five men to carry their stores and three dismantled carts down a steep cliff, as Tei led the unwilling oxen behind him, under a burning tropical sun, and to accomplish the whole task in some ten hours suggests powers of endurance beyond easy metaphor.

  They camped for the night at the base of the cliff, sleeping with a great fire burning to ward off the tigers that they heard making their characteristic coughing calls in the enveloping darkness about them. Sunk in exhausted sleep, the party was roused before dawn by a band of men from the village where they had stopped the night before. The villagers had come to help and were amazed to find the five travelers already at the base of the cliff.

  The route to Angkor was now clear of any major obstruction and the party made good time. They passed through well cultivated landscapes, finding ever more frequent reminders of the great Angkorian period in Cambodian history along their way: a mighty bridge, built more than six hundred years before, still spanning a river, and the ruins of temples and sanctuaries. Garnier's enthusiastic desc
ription of all that he saw reflects his conviction that every step brought him closer to the passports. But this was not the only reason to take pleasure in the sights they saw. After the austere landscape they had witnessed in northeastern Thailand, the land through which they traveled now seemed rich and bountiful. The harvest was in progress and the stubble in the paddy fields was golden brown in color, reminiscent of the final summer weeks in Europe.

  Late in the afternoon of January 29, nineteen days after leaving Ubon, they saw the citadel of Angkor in the distance. It rose before them with the setting sun outlining the battlements and giving grim emphasis to the rotting head of an executed criminal impaled upon a tall bamboo pole. The party had reached its primary destination.

  Only a few minutes were necessary for Garnier to learn that his mission was still incomplete. Alexis, the interpreter, upon whose devotion to duty they had unwisely pinned their hopes, had still not reached Angkor. Worse still, the insurgency led by Pou Kombo had grown rather than diminished. The Governor had warned Garnier that it would be folly to attempt a passage to Phnom Penh in the unsettled conditions that prevailed. But to have come this far and failed would have been unendurable for Garnier, and he insisted on making the last leg of the long voyage. He engaged a Vietnamese fishing boat to complete the journey to Phnom Penh, estimating that such a craft would be of little interest to the rebels who held the banks of the lake and the Tonle Sap that lay between Angkor and the Cambodian capital. Leaving the Angkor region on February 2, they traveled south, at one stage sighting a band of rebels but passing by them without incident, and arrived at Phnom Penh shortly before midnight on February 5. In less than a month, under difficult conditions, they had covered a distance little short of four hundred miles. And, to Garnier's great joy, the passports were at last available.

  Yet, if the essential travel documents were finally available, there were other disappointments. Ever since leaving Saigon the previous June the expedition had been acutely aware of the inadequacy of their scientific equipment. But the extra instruments they had supposed would be forwarded with the passports were still, it seemed, in Saigon. So, too, were the private letters that the explorers awaited. Garnier was briefly torn between traveling to Saigon to collect these items and returning to the expedition's main party with the least delay. But his journey had already lasted much longer than either he or Lagrée had hoped, and thus on reflection the decision seemed clear.

  Without any sure knowledge of the progress made by the main party since he had left it at Ubon, and aware of the importance of the passports that he carried, Garnier rested for the minimum of time in Phnom Penh. For the three French soldiers who had accompanied him this was almost the end of their travels. They were to return to Saigon and pass, with the exception of Charbonnier, from our knowledge. Sergeant Charbonnier is the exception because he became the expedition's first fatality. He returned to the more familiar setting of Saigon already ill with dysentery and never recovered. As for Garnier, having paid a brief courtesy visit to the Cambodian King on February 7 and now accompanied only by his Vietnamese orderly, Tei, his path lay north once more. Passing unscathed through rebel areas a second time, they reached Angkor on February 13.

  Speed being the most vital concern, Garnier decided to seek a more direct route than the one he and his companions had followed previously. Warned that to travel due north would take him through uninhabited territory, he still did not hesitate. Engaging an ox cart and a few Cambodian porters, he and Tei struck out to the north. The statement that this was uninhabited territory proved correct, and the rough cart tracks they followed through the forest were overgrown with shrubs and creepers which had to be cleared away in order for the cart to move forward. At one point, as they labored to clear a path, they were forced to pause by the presence of a herd of wild elephants. Ever impetuous, Garnier would have fired on the leader had not his more knowledgeable Cambodian assistants warned him that to do so risked a stampede that would surely kill them all. At length, on February 18, they emerged from the forest. Their route had been direct but slow. In covering forty miles they had not seen a single other human being. The next day Garnier decided that speed required him to abandon the use of an ox cart to carry their supplies. From this point they would rely on porters alone.

  By the evening of February 19 Garnier and Tei were at the foot of the vast cliff face that had cost them such efforts nearly four weeks before. Now, with a minimum of supplies, the task of ascending the cliff was simple in comparison to their earlier experience. A “game” was what Garnier called it. Two days later, having traveled rather more to the west than they intended, he and Tei found themselves back in Khu Kan. For the first time there was news of the interpreter, Alexis Om. To his chagrin, Garnier learned that Alexis had finally passed through Khu Kan, headed towards Phnom Penh only a few days earlier. When the expedition left him at Bassac, in December 1866, Alexis had promised to do everything possible to make his way to Angkor in search of the missing passports. Instead, Garnier learned, he had remained in Bassac to marry a Laotian woman and spent a month in sweet dalliance before remembering the task with which he was charged. The Governor of Khu Kan laughed until there were tears in his eyes as he recounted the story. Even Garnier, finally, seems to have seen the lighter side of the tale as he reflected on the fickle Alexis, a member of the Catholic Church, awaited by his wife in Phnom Penh, who had now left a second wife in distant Bassac.

  From Khu Kan to Ubon, Garnier followed the route he already knew, arriving at the settlement on the banks of the Se Moun on February 26, more than a month after the main expedition had left Ubon for Khemmarat. He had no way of knowing how much farther along the Mekong the French party had traveled. In these circumstances he decided that speed was even more vital than before. On February 27 he and Tei set forth, therefore, on foot, heading due north towards Ban Mouk, a settlement on the Mekong some miles north of Khemmarat. In many ways this final leg of Garnier's journey was the most remarkable. Apart from the briefest of pauses at Phnom Penh, they had been traveling almost constantly since January 10. The stages he and Tei undertook after leaving Ubon were the most demanding yet. Aided by bands of porters that changed regularly through the day, the French explorer and his Vietnamese orderly walked an average of twenty-two miles each day for a week, under a sun now approaching the full heat of the dry season. Tei's feet were painfully blistered and swollen by the arduous effort, and both men were pushing their endurance to the limit.

  There were, however, moments of relief. At one point during their forced marches they had as porters a dozen young Laotian women, for the men were busy in the fields with the harvest. At each stream they passed, the women stripped and bathed themselves. They felt no embarrassment about Garnier's presence, it appeared, for by his beard they judged him to be an ancient of at least one hundred years whose thoughts had long since passed beyond the pleasures of the flesh. As for Tei, they rejected his amorous advances with laughter.

  More dramatic was their encounter with a tiger. Towards the end of one long day's march they came upon the outskirts of a village surrounded by forest. Suddenly the evening calm was broken by cries of fear and alarm. As Garnier and his small band halted to take their bearings a tiger bounded past them, only yards away, carrying a screaming child in his powerful jaws. Reacting almost instantly, Garnier drew his revolver and fired at the tiger, then dashed in pursuit of the beast. In a moment they found the child, whom the tiger had dropped, profoundly shocked but physically unhurt. There was nothing the villagers were not prepared to offer Garnier if only he would stay as their protector. The next day, however, he and Tei were once more marching north.

  At last, on March 4, they reached Ban Mouk, and saw the Mekong once again — for the first time since late December. The main party, they learned, had passed north a dozen days before, but now Garnier felt close behind his leader. Using a small craft, they headed up the river, sacrificing all to speed, and on March 10 Garnier saw the tricolor waving in the middle
of a clump of palm trees at Uthen. His heart, he later wrote, beat a little faster.

  Two months had passed since Garnier had left the main party at Ubon. During his travels to and from Phnom Penh he had covered a total distance of a thousand miles, much of it on foot and under the most trying conditions. Between Ubon and Angkor the area over which he had traveled, in both directions, was totally unexplored by Europeans. During his entire return journey he was a month without a single occasion on which he could speak his native language. Possibly most striking of all, yet this is not a point to which he refers himself, he began his journey only three months after recovering from the grave fever contracted in Stung Treng. If he was inconvenienced by the lack of full strength in his left leg, he did not make this a matter for commentary. To have done so would not have sat well with the stoic standards he so admired.

  Now what was important was the future of the expedition as a whole. Together as a party for the first time in two months, they possessed the passports that should ensure their passage into China. But how and when they would reach this goal remained unknown.

  CHAPTER VI

  MIDDLE PASSAGE

  The “great idea” supposed the Mekong would run wide and free for most of its course, with untapped sources of commercial wealth set along its upper reaches. For Frenchmen in Saigon in the early 1860s, populous China, to the far north, loomed as an oriental El Dorado, still holding something of the golden promise found in Marco Polo's chronicle. Linked together, the mystery of the Mekong and the supposed opportunities for trade in rich and exotic commodities had been a heady incentive to action. Now, in March 1867, with the entire French expedition reassembled at Uthen, their passports for China finally in hand, few of the original expectations seemed to be matched by reality. It was clear, even to the constantly optimistic Garnier, that hopes for easy navigation along the river were illusory.