Lankar of Callisto

Back on the dock we found our transportation awaiting us, in the form of a rusty, patched, decrepit little steam-launch that was a dead ringer for the dilapidated craft Humphrey Bogart captained in one of our favorite movies, The African Queen. Sir Malcolm’s number-one boy, Charlie Phuong, had already located and loaded our luggage aboard. He was a short, cheerful, grinning, bowlegged boy of indeterminate age, who carried his life’s savings around with him in the form of a wide grin bright with gold fillings. Sparkling black eyes greeted us under the bill of a battered old baseball cap, around which a scrap of fluttering red scarf had been knotted for good luck, or to keep the devils away, or maybe both. The rest of his costume consisted of muddy tennis shoes, a ragged pair of khaki shorts, and a cast-off olive drab army shirt.

The moon had risen while we were at dinner, and the river traffic was at its pitch as we cast off, chugging noisily, into the main channel. Brightly lit sampans and junks floated by us; boats of every description were loading at docks heaped with tins of pitch, bales of raw, unprocessed rubber from the great Chup plantations to the northeast of the capital. We saw workmen, naked to the waist, laboring under flaring torches at sacks of fragrant yieng yieng bark from which incense is made, shoving about baskets filled with garish peppercorns, stalks of green bananas, bundles of peacock feathers, cords of cut bamboo, bundles of turtle shells, anteater skins and kapok. Amusingly, one boat was unloading cases of Coca Cola bottles.

Our boat threaded its noisy path through an arrangement of mud dikes, canal locks, and waterways. Wooden cowbells went click-clack in fields beside the river; oil lamps gleamed in the waxed paper windows of farmhouses and huts as we sailed downriver under star-crowded skies. Peasants worked late in flooded, shallow ricefields, bent double and looming like black cutouts against the moon. We sailed past bamboo forests, lemon groves, ungainly stands of banana trees, and thick banyans. In one hillside farm a clumsy Zadrugar tractor, imported from Yugoslavia, rumbled, belching black, oily smoke.

Noel and I struck up a conversation with our friendly pilot. Charlie Phuong, it turned out, was not a native of Phnom Penh but hailed from a hamlet with the delicious name of Battangbang, which I gathered was the capital of the northwestern province. He had nothing but contempt and derision for the locals hereabouts, whom he considered city slickers, more interested in organized sports, movies from Hong, Kong, and political squabbles, than in the traditional elements of Cambodian life. He was very uneducated and very superstitious, what with his crimson head scarf to frighten off night-wandering demons, and the copper bracelet he wore clasped about one muscular brown bicep which was a good-luck charm. He chattered in friendly, amiable fashion while we glided down the star-mirroring river, which widened. He had worked nearly a calendar year for Sir Malcolm, whom he held in good-humored veneration―his name for the British archaeologist was Lok Thom, which means something like “Mr. Big”―and, although uneducated, he had picked up a surprising vocabulary in English: pungent, earthy, shot through with French cuss-words and the names of Cambodian deities and demons, all mixed together in a patois so inimitable I will not even attempt to reproduce it in these pages.

We passed something like an enormous, densely black, floating island, around the edge of which Charlie Phuong maneuvered the laboring little steam-launch while purpling the night air with a torrent of profanity in at least three languages. This floating island turned out to be a logjam, drifting downstream from the forest around Kratie. Native lumberjacks, only their red, devil-frightening head-scarves visible in the gloom, scampered nimbly about this gigantic raft of logs, keeping careful eyes peeled to be certain the heavy hardwood logs of teak were buoyed up on hollow bamboo trunks.

I smoked cigarette after cigarette, sitting in the prow, staring dreamily out on the starry skies, the moonlit river, and the jungle thickets which lined the river to each side; Noel dozed in the rear, pillowed on our luggage. The trip would take hours.

Then I must have dozed off myself, for the next thing I knew was Charlie Phuong grinning down at me, gold fillings glittering in the torchlight, shaking me awake. I stretched and sat up and looked about me. We were pulled over to one shore of the river, where a crude little log-built dock thrust out on sunken pilings a few yards into the stream. The dock was crowded with small, nimble men passing our luggage ashore, each snatching a bag and tossing it into the waiting hands of the next.

Then a spry, sixtyish, little man with bright, inquisitive blue eyes and a goatee of silvery white, his scrawny form clad in filthy khaki shorts and a mud-besplattered T-shirt, popped up directly in front of me, squinted about, spotted me, and grinned―a grin which made his entire leather-tanned face dissolve into a mass of laughter-crinkles.

“Mr. Carter, I gather?” I nodded, still half-asleep. He rubbed bony hands together briskly.

“Excellent! Excellent! And your charming lady, I see. Well, hop out―hop out―you’re here, you know! Welcome to the city of Arangkor; population twenty-six―now twenty-eight! It’s a five minute stroll through the brush―watch your step, dear lady, or you’ll go up to your waist in mud―the dock we built for a reason, you know! Come-Billy-Boy, my cook, has fresh tea brewing, or instant coffee, if you prefer … come along now. Careful with the gentleman’s luggage, you clumsy monkeys!”