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But the pack-leader had round his neck a raucous bell and its clanged so loudly that my reflections were very much disturbed. It was like a muffin bell and it make me think of Sunday afternoon in the London of my youth... I put spurs to my pony so that I might trot on and escape the dreary sound, ...I galloped and in a moment mules and ponies, their packs jangling and bumping, were galloping helter-skelter after me, and the muffin bell rattled madly at my heels as though it were knelling the death agonies of all the muffin-makers in London.
Somerset Maugham, The Gentleman in the Parlour, Signet Classic Books, London, 1967, p. 39.
PLACE: The Shan States, above Burma
TIME: early 1920's
There was not a sound. The day waned and the peace of the water, the peace of the tree-clad hills, and the peace of the evening were three exquisite things.
Somerset Maugham,The Gentleman in the Parlour, Signet Classic Books, London, 1967, p.50
PLACE: The Shan States, above Burma
TIME: early 1920's
At dawn a cock, crowing loudly, woke me; and the various sounds in the compound, first one and then after a pause another, stealing upon the silence of the night a little uncertainly, as in a symphony one instrument takes up after another the first notes of a theme, the theme of day and the labour of man - the various sound in the compound prevented me from going to sleep again: there was the bell around the neck of a mule that tinkled as he stirred or the shake another gave himself and the hee-haw of an ass; there were the lazy movements of the muleteers, their muffled talk, and their cries as they called their beasts.
Somerset Maugham,The Gentleman in the Parlour, Signet Classic Books, London, 1967, p. 52.
PLACE: The Shan States, above Burma
TIME: early 1920's
...the chairs and tables returned to the humdrum repose from which for a few hours the arrival of myself and my caravan had rudely snatched them. When I went down the steps and untethered my pony, silence, like and old mad woman with a finger on her lips, crept past me into the room that I had left.
Somerset Maugham,The Gentleman in the Parlour, Signet Classic Books, London, 1967, p. 53.
PLACE: The Shan States, above Burma
TIME: early 1920's
Here and there a little band of musicians occupied a booth.... In one three men beat on gongs, one played the cymbals, and another thumped a drum as long as himself. My uneducated ear could discern no pattern in that welter of sound, but only a direct and not unexhilarating appeal to crude emotion; but a little further on I came across another band, not of Shans this time but of hillmen, who played on long wind instruments of bamboo and their music was melancholy and tremulous. Every now and then I seemed in its vague monotony to catch a few notes of a wistful melody. It gave you an impression of something immensely old .... You had the feeling of a music recollected at night by the camp-fires of nomad tribes on their wanderings from the grasslands of their ancient home and begotten of the scattered sound of the jungle and the silence of the flowing rivers; ... it suggested the perplexity in the midst of strange and hostile surroundings of men who came they knew not whence and went they knew not whither, a plaintive, questioning cry and a song sung together (as men at sea in a storm tell one another lewd stories to drive away the uneasiness of the battering waves and the howling wind) ...
Somerset Maugham,The Gentleman in the Parlour, Signet Classic Books, London, 1967, p. 69.
PLACE: The Shan States (north of Burma)
TIME: early 1920's
We camped beside it, among lofty trees, and at night the noise of the crickets and the frogs and the cries of the birds were loud and insistent. There is a notion abroad that the jungle at night is silent and writers have often been eloquent on the subject; but the silence they have described is spiritual; it is a translation of the emotion of solitude and the distance from the world of men and of the sense of awe that comes from the darkness of the solemn trees and the pressing growth of the greenwood; in sober fact the din is tremendous, so that till you become accustomed to it you may find it hard to sleep. But when you lie awake listening to it there is a strange uneasiness in your heart that does feel oddly like a terrible, an unearthly stillness.
Somerset Maugham,The Gentleman in the Parlour, Signet Classic Books, London, 1967, p. 83.
PLACE: The Shan States, above Burma
TIME: early 1920's
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