Free Forgotten Life by Brian Aldiss Page A

magnificent experience of the night; perhaps such exciting experiences are always enjoyed alone – unless one has a girl there. In any case the driver was a man of few words.
    The track across the plain led us to the River Chindwin, where a Bailey bridge had been built. It was strongly guarded. Men lounged about, brown-naked to the waist, smoking, rifles on their shoulders, sweat-rags tied round their necks. We called out cheery greetings as we crossed that splendid river, its name honoured in the East. Finedust hung in the air, sun shone on the water as it ran dark and flat between its sandy banks. It was as peaceful a scene as you could wish. Only two nights earlier, men had died at that spot.
    Myingyang, the town on the far side of the river, had been almost completely destroyed in the fighting. Smoke still drifted among the ruined trees. Everything – remains of houses and bungalows – took on tones of black; smoke issued from their gaping black mouths. Tree stumps still burned quietly.
    Black also were the piles of corpses gathered up neatly here and there and now left to ripen like grapes in the sun. They were swollen as if about to burst, and stank with the powerful smell of death. So much for the remains of the Japanese Army.
    The Jeep driver stopped at one of the biggest piles. He went over to it and helped himself to a pair of boots from one of the dead. I cannot say how this offended me. A fat porker was feeding among the corpses, scarcely able to waddle. The driver, kicking the animal out of the way, beckoned me over. I would not leave the Jeep. He selected the pair of boots he wanted, dragging them off the corpse, kneeling in the sunlight to do so. He fitted the boots on to his own feet before coming back to the vehicle. I could not look the man in the eye.
    To everything that happened at that period in time, an extra weight of significance was added. It was as though I travelled back through time to witness the traits of man and nature at their most basic, as though our movement through trees was also a movement through centuries. My understanding of the world, which had hitherto been rather childish, or child-based, advanced greatly, so that everything that happened, down to the movement of my own muscles, was surrounded by a nimbus of truth, in which the ugly was perceived as being as sacred as the beautiful. The blessed sunlight contributed to this revelatory mood.
    I was a little mad in the nights, as in the days. The world turned – I heard its axis rotate. One night early in the campaign we were bivouacked by the improvised road which, in the wet season, served as a river bed. A Burmese moon shone through the trees – the moonseeming always to be at the full, when Chinese Buddhist thought has it that the Yin (female) influence is at its most strong. I could not sleep, pent in my little bivouac, for an overwhelming feeling of excitement, so was forced to get up and walk among the dust-saturated trees and shadows. Muffled trucks and guns rumbled out of the silver darkness and into the opaque distance. I stood by the road, unable to leave it, letting the dust settle on me. The behemoths, with dim orange headlights for eyes, were the sole occupants of this world.
    Of course what I longed for then – there and then – in my hot little heart, was love or, less abstractly, a woman to love.
    Greater than the Chindwin is the river into which it flows, the unmeasurable, immemorial Irrawaddy. The waters of the Irrawaddy are fed both by tributaries rising nearby and distant tributaries which rise in regions of rock and ice up in the Himalayas, so that, like life itself, the river consists of alternating currents of warm and cold streams; and no swimmer can tell which he will encounter next, the warm or the cold. Just to stand looking at the Irrawaddy after the weeks and miles of drought we had put behind us was to drink deep, and to feel its flow as something profound – a main artery in