THE "INDIA ROAD" TAKES OVER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 143, 20 March 1942, Page 6

THE "INDIA ROAD" TAKES OVER

Across Ranges Twice As High As Cook: Over Gorges Two Miles Deep

(Written for "The Listener" by

A.M.

R.

T is Chungking’s darkest hour. China’s coasts are at last effectively blockaded, if only because there are no non-Japanese ships left, outside the "occupied" Philippines, within a thousand miles of them. The short-legged barbarians (we are the long-legged ones) who once seemed likely to collapse for sheer want of food «nd resources, are renewing their strength from the rich southern islands. Russia has for months been unable to send supplies, while her troops who formerly kept immobilised in Manchukuo half the Japanese Army are needed to relieve Leningrad. And now the approaches to the Burma Road are in enem; hands. The siege is complete. The Chinese giant is bound. But his courage and resourcefulness are undaunted. "We shall build"~ announces Chiang. "We have been building these last two years, another Road." Asia’s No-Man’s Land The original Burma Road was a feat. It joined two sides of the continent, two races, two civilisations, sundered by geography and practically without contacts since the world began. It was dug out by the crude hoes and wooden ploughs uf impressed peasants and filled in by endless lines of hill savages each carrying his bamboo-and-banana-leaf basket of spoil, all working under the rifles of reformed bandits themselves under the lash of Necessity and Time. Its thin rei line of overheating lorries and shivering coolie-carriers for three long years held at bay the Divine Destiny of Imperial Japan. But to build and keep open a Bengal Road or an Assam Road will be an even greater, a vastly greater, task. And this is why.

There is a 1r.0-man’s-land in Asia. You will find it on the borders of various maps, where the "up-country" of China, India, Burma, Thailand, Annam, and Tibet approximately meet. It is the home of the ponderous, but fortunately vegetarian, Panda, only recently seen by European eyes. In its alpine meadows gre the fabulous Black Rhododendron among eternal snows and primroses of indescribable colours. In its canyons, some so deep that they are always hot even in winter, others such funnels that the winds tear boulders and travellers off the hillsides, are known to dwell tattered savages with cross-bows who prefer tea and salt to money, and there also are reported to dwell naked savages "in trees like monkeys." "Civilised" Tibetans are there too, in places, who normally have one wife to several husbands and who spend much time in mechanical prayer-by carving formulae on rocks, inscribing them on wheels, ar.J e,sn harnessing waterpower to keep prayer-mills turning. Further afield yet other people hold tournaments in which horsemen charge each other whirling bags of pebbles (as lances) and hold annual "exhibitions" of "painting" and "sculpture" in butter! Caverns Measureless to Man Geographically this region consists of seven close and parallel mountain ranges, nowhere falling as low as Mt. Cook (12,349ft.), often twice as high, and averaging 20,000 feet. Into the can-yon-valleys between them-gorges up to two miles deep and so narrow that, though they are barely outside the Tropics, the winter sun leaves many pockets unvisited-flow rivers from unknown sources in Tibet and Central Asia

called Sok-chu, Chan-do, Luntsan, and Ka-kiang. Out of them, threc hundred miles or so to the south, emerge presumably the same streams, but now known to the world as the Yangtze, the Mekong, the Salween, the Irrawaddi, and the Brahmaputra. (‘"Presumably," because no human foot has passed through such gorges as that where the

normally broad Yangtze is squeezed to something less than the width of our streets-22 yards-in a cleft 13,000 feet deep, and the greater part of each river course appears accordingly on maps as a dotted line.) At one place all except the Brahmaputra race along within forty-eight miles of each other as the mole burrows. But once out into sunlight and jungle and human’ knowledge again they part, to flow finally into different seas on opposite sides of the continent thousands of miles apart. Only the Salween and Irrawaddi continue straight south to Burma and the Indian Ocean. The Mekong wanders off twice as far to seas opposite Borneo. The Brahmaputra turns due west and finally enters the Indian Ganges. The Yangtze after a spell of heading alternately north and south parallel to itself at a distance of a few miles, makes off east across China and at long last (lorlg=3,000 miles) makes the Sea Yellow opposite Japan. Only One Way The Chinese government has refused all details of its mew Road-under-way. But there is only one way it can go. And that, unfortunately, is dead across these "Great River Trenches of Asia," as the geographers call them. To attempt to by-pass them to the north would mean heading into regions unexplored. To skirt south, as did the former Kunming-Lashio (Burma) Road, has become useless. To reach the first port not occupied by Japanese, Chittagong, it would have to be continued more than its original length again tight through India’s Maginot Line-the 2,000-mile-wide belt of literally trackless hillside jungles, and swamps that is Eastern Assam. (At least, when five (Continued on next page)

THE "INDIA ROAD"

(Continued -trom previous page) years ago I was investigating getting a baby car through as a "world-beater" reliability advertising stunt, I could not find even a pack-track by which to do it.) And anyhow such an extended road would almost certainly be cut. Even when Japanese planes had to fly all the way from the Chinese coast and back, they made Kunming (says a letter from there that lies before me) look like ‘some L‘itzed British city. .. . No, China has no alternative. Any road that is to reach the Chittagong railhead at Sadyia on the Himalayan foothills, must cross direct the Great River Trenches. Centuries of Pilgrims Nature has allies in holding this region against all comers. The Tibetan lamas have from tine to time murdered such few missionaries and Chinese farmers as have established themselves; and been made no friendlier by the conse-

quent C -‘nese punitive expeditions from Yunnan. But Tibetan Buddhism (so called) has, on the other hand, made roads (of sorts) and even bridges (of sorts). through strips of the area. Centuries cf pilgrims, twenty thousand a year, sore travelling with their total property in sheep and yaks, have worn tracks towards the Dokela -hrine on an errinence of the Salween-Mekong divide. Many indeed, have polished them with their bodies, "measuring" the whole distance, over ice and snuw, "y lying prone, then dragging their feet to the point which their outstretched fingers touched, and repeat: + the process until arrival. Inet’ rn traffic is not quite so heavy. The Sacred Spot itself has yrobably the world’s l.:ghest suicide rate, since to die on it is to escape all future rebirths, and one step out into space is enough. Maybe these tracks are what the mysterious cable which spoke of twothirds of the "India Road" as already built was referring to. It did not read "ready for motors".

And the bridges? They are single rope mede from twisted strands of bamboo. Each is swung from a tree or crag high on one canyon bank to a much lower support on the other. The traveller ties himself into a sling, greased with yak butter to glide easily, and simply lets go. Over he flies, at 20 m.p.h., over sheer space, amid a burning smell from friction on the unevenlybraided wooden rope-unless, that is, he has the bad luck to be lighter than the "bridge’s " own weight expre:sed as sag, in which case he helplessly slides back from near his destination into midair and must painfully pull himself uphill to shore. again, hand over hand. Since such bridges are one-way (without nead uf traffic police to enforce the rule) another hung on the opposite angle must be some vhere near each for return traffic. Taey last about three months, except in the pilgrim season when they must be renewed every few days. Truly Chungking has the obstaclesurmounting courage that sept ites to win out.