Return to Mandalay by Rosanna Ley Page B

back as the early eighteenth century though Lawrence’s company had only acquired the forest leases, the elephant herds and the logging staff at the turn of this century when others had looked to the railways for their living. And the legislation was strict. Every teak tree in Burma belonged to the government and the Forest Departmentsupervised which trees were chosen for felling. They must be mature, they must be dried out for at least three years and seasoned so that they could float. There was a hell of a lot of forest in Burma, but the amount of trees in any given area that were allowed to be felled was inconsistent and the terrain was tough. This made Lawrence’s job still harder.
    He quickly learnt to recognise unsound trees, to take into account irregularities of shape. The trees were felled by saw at ground level and that’s when Lawrence and his crew would visit each one, to measure and hammer-mark it to indicate the points at which it would later be made into logs. It was indeed a trade dependant on nature: on the earth, on the trees, on animals and on the seasons. They needed the rainy season to move the logs down the rivers and they needed the elephants to haul them there. It was quite a spectacle. And the terrain was far too hilly and broken by
chaungs
, the spread of the extractable trees far too random to use mechanical haulage means. He explained some of this to Moe Mya.
    She seemed interested, watching his face as he spoke, occasionally nodding or pouring more tea. ‘And you like our elephants?’ she teased. ‘They work well for you, yes?’
    ‘Oh, yes. Without them we couldn’t do what we do,’ he said. He worked closely with the forest assistant to look after these sagacious beasts and he got to know them individually, you couldn’t help but. They were quirky and they had their likes and dislikes – which side they were approached from, for example (if you got it wrong, you’d get swiped from the swishing tail and that was no joke, as Lawrence had foundout to his cost) and the spot from which they liked to feed. They were sensitive too and had to be protected from sores and disease. Anthrax was the worst; you could lose an entire working herd of a hundred in a matter of days. And they needed lots of food, sleep and baths in order to perform at their best.
    Their working day might be only six hours – by noon they’d had enough – but by God did they put the work in. Lawrence was in awe. Between May and October during the rains, unharnessed elephants would follow the logs downstream, breaking up the jams of wood that tended to occur in the feeder streams and tributaries until they reached the main swollen river and the point where villagers could retrieve the logs (not a job Lawrence would care to undertake himself) and make up the raft. It was a bloody long and hazardous journey.
    ‘I have seen the rafts many times,’ Moe Mya told him. ‘They are so big, yes?’
    ‘They are. They need to be. They even have grass huts to accommodate the raftsmen, their families and possessions.’ The whole family were involved with the retrieval of the logs, they would move location according to where was the best position to be stationed, children would keep lookout for the timber, skilled retrievers would bring in the logs which must be anchored, moored and then bound to make a raft of the size decreed by the timber company. But it was dangerous work. Men could die.
    ‘How strange it all seems,’ she murmured.
    ‘It can take a long time to get to Rangoon by river,’ he explained to her. ‘Weeks, sometimes months. One has to take everything one will need.’ The rafts were powered by the current of the river and guided by oars.
    ‘And when they get there? What will they do then?’ She was teasing him now, that spark in her dark eyes that he had noticed at the market, that meant that she understood him, even that she was laughing at him perhaps. Not that he minded. As long as she was