New Mandala

It was about half-past four on a blazing afternoon that I again stood on the fo’c’sle on the look out for the mouth of the Me Nam Chow Phya–the Most Noble Mother of All Waters, she who had poured her mud-stained issue for countless millions of years into the Gulf of Siam.  The hot deck burned through my shoe soles, the air was like a draughtless furnace, the boiled onion smell was mixed with the scent of burning joss sticks; and the distant mangrove swamps were not yet in sight.

The water was getting browner, and ahead there were many acres of grey green seaweed.  Steadily we chugged on through the seaweed at which I glanced at first incuriously–and then was suddenly spellbound.  The seaweed was alive–it was snakes!  Millions and millions of knobbled, writhing, poisonous, useless, green bodies which the ship’s bow wave cut into and rolled over obscenely. 

I see them now, as it were but yesterday, and as though their eyes looked into mine and their million voices said “Death–on our terms–if your ship founders–here.”

- Extracted from S. Conyers-Keynes (1950), A White Man in Thailand, London: Robert Hale, pp.21-22. 

Here he is describing his first entry to the Kingdom of Siam.  Conyers-Keynes lived there during much of the first half of the twentieth century.  As a related point, in Chapter 36 he describes in 1924 “[t]he recognition by other powers that the newly opened aerodrome at Don Muang, just north of Bangkok, was likely to be of world importance” (p.243).  For that reason few of us today have ever entered Thailand via the river route. 

But, of course, if anyone has lurched into Bangkok from the Gulf of Thailand it would be great to hear your story.