A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East. Tiziano Terzani

dawn I left, by air, for the Plain of Jars, a strange valley amid the mountains of northern Laos, which is scattered with huge, mysterious stone vessels, some over seven feet high, all beautifully carved. But by whom? To hold what? Anthropologists say they were funerary urns of an ancient population of Chinese origin, now extinct, but the Laotians prefer to believe their legends. ‘They are amphoras for wine,’ they say. ‘The giants made them. At the top of the mountain there is an enormous stone table where, from time to time, the giants meet for their banquets.’ But no one had ever managed to reach it.

      I spent three days in the region. The ripe opium poppies were beginning to shed their red, purple and white petals, and women were cutting open the bulbs to collect the precious sticky black juice in old bowls. The Muong, the mountain people, were celebrating their New Year. Young people were at their most popular sport: playing ball as a way of finding a mate. In each village rows of girls in traditional dress stand for hours on end opposite rows of boys and throw cloth balls back and forth while chanting an old ditty: ‘If you love me, throw better. If you want me, improve your looks.’

      I was accompanied by a very special guide, Claude Vincent, a cultivated Frenchman of about fifty who had lived in Laos since he was a boy. He had married a Laotian woman, and remained in the country even after the Pathet Lao seized power in 1975. In the years of the war we had often met, but had never known each other well; for him I was one of the many journalist-vultures who descended on Laos, attracted by its dead. Now it was different, and Claude wanted to make me understand his love for a land to whose ancient, beautiful soul he is fervently attached.

      I realized this when, tired after an afternoon exploring the Plain of Jars, we retired for the night to an inn without electricity or water. We talked about the Communists: wherever they went, in China as in Cambodia, the first thing they did was to abolish the popular traditions. They fought against superstition, eliminated fortune-tellers and banned the old ceremonies. I asked Claude how the Pathet Lao had behaved. In reply he told me about something that had happened to him a few years before.

      It was a Sunday in 1985 in Vientiane, and Claude and his family planned to have a picnic on the bank of the Mekong. One of his nieces was very excited about the trip, but she went down with a high fever and they decided to leave her at home. She was terribly upset and insisted that she must, absolutely must go to the river. Not to take her was out of the question.

      They found a place on the bank, the adults eating and the children playing by the water. Only when it was time to go did they realize that the little girl was no longer there. They searched for her everywhere, but she had vanished. In desperation they consulted a famous clairvoyante, who went into a trance and told them: ‘Next Friday, at 3.45 in the afternoon, go to the bend in the river. There, in front of the pagoda, you’ll find her. She will have blue marks on her body: one under her arm and one on her chest.’ The family went, and at the appointed hour the child’s body floated to the surface, bearing the blue marks described by the woman.

      Claude told me that the clairvoyante had made contact with the Spirit of the River and asked it to yield up the child’s body in return for the sacrifice of seven chickens and a pig. The family’s problem was how to give the Spirit the promised reward. These were the hardest years of the Communist regime. There were informers in every neighbourhood, and Claude was afraid of getting into trouble if he organized the ceremony. He went to ask the advice of a high party official. The response surprised him. ‘You absolutely must make the sacrifice. You promised it to the Spirit of the River and you can’t break your word,’ he said, and reminded Claude that during the war every time the Pathet Lao crossed a river, the last man in the patrol had to turn back and call to a non-existent comrade. The Spirit of the River habitually carries off the last of a line, and in that way the guerrillas hoped to deceive it. ‘Today that practice has become a military order for all patrols crossing watercourses,’ said Claude in conclusion.^* The idea that in Laos even the Marxist-Leninists had remained above all Laotians, and in their own way outside time, was enormously pleasing.

      The next day we travelled north by jeep. The area around the Plain of Jars was one of those most devastated by the American war. The old capital, Xianghuang, literally no longer exists: it was obliterated by carpet bombing from B-52S. The new settlement, Phongsovane, is so far only a sprawl of wooden shacks.

      To escape the bombs, the people of the region lived for years in the caves. Now they are rebuilding the villages with whatever materials the war left behind. The shells of cluster bombs – giant eggs that burst in the air and released dozens of murderous little booby-traps – are used as fencing or animal feeding troughs; artillery shells serve as water containers.

      ‘How old are you?’ I asked a woman in the market at Phongsovane. She looked at me, perplexed. ‘When were you born?’ I persisted. ‘Before the war,’ she replied. Which of the many wars was unclear. In human memory Laos has always been at war.

      Thirty miles from Phongsovane is a fork in the road: one road stretches eastward towards Vietnam and the port of Vinh, the other continues north towards the old guerrilla capital Sam Neua and the Chinese frontier. Alongside the latter, about six miles from the fork, is the cave of Tarn Piu. You can only gain access to it on foot, following the course of a little stream. An unexploded bomb is still lying in the middle of a meadow. The place is deserted.

      Halfway up the steep cliff of whitish stone is a big, black, semicircular hole. The meadows are sweetly scented with fresh flowers, but the Laotians with us do not want to continue, because they can smell the odour of death. On we go, up an overgrown path, and venture inside this mouth in the mountainside. The walls are blackened by fire, with traces of phosphorus and pockmarks made by splinters of rock from a huge explosion that smashed the cave and brought great boulders crashing down. You walk amidst the debris – charred fragments of kitchen utensils, a sewing machine, the rags of the long-dead.

      This was one of the famous caves where people lived during the war. Here, in the stone bowels of the mountain, the bombs of the B-52S could not penetrate. But in 1968 a T-28, a small plane used by the pro-American government forces, sighted the cave and scored a direct hit with a phosphorus rocket. The explosion within the stone walls was tremendous. Over four hundred people died. There were no survivors.

      About thirty yards from the entrance the cave dipped, and only by the light of my pocket torch could I penetrate any further. Soon I realized I was walking on bones – some of them small, presumably children’s. In the absolute silence I imagined that I could hear, muffled as if by a veil, the cries of the dead. I thought of the participants’ different perspectives at that fatal moment: the pilot, tense and excited, aware of having scored a bull’s eye; the havoc below, the cries of the wounded as they crawl to the depths of the cave, never to come out of it again.

      Of course it was because I felt so moved that I ‘sensed’ all this. But does not such a tragedy, or any other great sorrow, leave some sort of residue in the air and in the soil? What did the ancients mean by the spiritus loci, if not that something remains hovering in a place where something exceptional has happened?

      On the way down the mountain we passed a group of children cutting wheels for one of their imaginary cars from the stump of a banana tree. ‘Have you been in that cave?’ I asked them. One and all, they drew back from me, as if in terror. ‘No!’ they cried. ‘You can’t go there! It’s scary, the phii are in there!’ The spirits, ghosts.

      In the West, this would be called something like ‘the Cave of the Martyrs’, and annual ceremonies would be held in their memory. Their story would be taught in schools. For the Laotians history does not bear this kind of meaning. In that hole are not the remains of their relatives, but only ghosts that have saturated the walls with wailing, suffering, horror. From this they must simply keep away.

      In their vision of the world the relation between cause and effect is not the same as in ours. Shortly before my visit, near the Plain of Jars, a group of American experts had spent some weeks looking for MIAs (Missing in Action), pilots of planes shot down during the war whose deaths had never been verified. They dug in the jungle, sifting the earth to retrieve the least splinter of bone, and spent their evenings in Phongsovane. The Laotians did not