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into the sea on stilts. At the pagoda, I was amazed to meet someone I knew. The Moulmein police chief, now on a short pilgrimage and surrounded by barefoot policemen with guns slung over their shoulders, greeted me warmly. The beach was flooded and muddy during the monsoon season, so I dashed through the heavy shower to a modest Chinese restaurant, the best there was, where I dined on soup and noodles for a dollar.
    The road through Pa-an on the way back to Rangoon was now impassable, so we took the ferry to Martaban, where the muddy river showed through the rust holes of the deck. I remembered Kipling's lines: “And the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandhu, / And the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.” But in that swampy, sleepy village, I saw no signs of prodigious depravity or sexual corruption, and Ali bounced off the ferry with his usual enthusiasm.
    Everyone I had met in Rangoon told me that I had to visit the Golden Rock Pagoda at Kyaiktiyo, but they were all terribly vague about how to get there. Ali, swerving to avoid a few more obstacles, turned off the main road and drove to the base camp, which was as far as cars were allowed to go. Once there, I joined forces with an Israeli couple and three Spanish women, who were not at all surprised to find a Spanish-speaking American in the wilds of Burma. We negotiated a price of two dollars each for a thrilling half-hour truck ride up steep mountain passes and over torrential streams to the end of the road. I took a room (and was, once again, the only guest in the hotel) just above the truck stop. As in Moulmein, they refused to take traveler's checks or credit cards, and I had to pay in U.S. dollars. The others set off for the summit, where there was another place to stay.
    I was mobbed by porters and bearers who offered to carry me—a humiliating alternative to hiking—up to the top. They followed me as I climbed the steep hill in the heavy rain, which quickly soaked my clothes and skin. Fog obscured the magnificent views on this one-hour via dolorosa. When I reached the top, I had to give my passport number and pay six dollars to enter what seemed, after all the shops along the way, to be the headquarters of Buddha, Inc. I proceeded with bare feet across the perilously wet, slippery tiled floor and, perched on a tilting rock, finally took a photo of the famed pagoda. The Israeli engineer I'd met, suddenly appearing out of thefog, explained that the rock was held like a ball-and-socket and may also have had a lead weight to balance the strange tilt.
    As he berated his wife for dragging him to this Buddha-haunted peak, I wondered why travel maniacs suffered great expense and extreme discomfort to see such inevitably disappointing sites. Burma is dilapidated, its people oppressed and rather unhappy, and once you leave the cruise ship, traveling there is exhausting. But the greater the hardship, the more memorable the experience. Unique, almost untouched by tourism, its rural regions still pristine, the country is for travelers who have done it all. It is now possible to stay for a month and visit places north of Mandalay and south of Rangoon that have been closed since 1948. There's still time to see the most remote, traditional and mysterious part of Asia before revolution, prosperity or Chinese dominance destroys the old way of life.

FOUR
O RWELL
The Honorary Proletarian
    This breakthrough review-article on Orwell's
Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters
(1969) was my first long piece, at the beginning of my
soi-disant
career, in a prestigious scholarly journal
, Philological Quarterly.
It enabled me to formulate my essential ideas about him and make a case for the importance of his minor works, and it became the solid basis of my later articles and books. I placed Orwell in the English moral tradition of Johnson, Blake and Lawrence (and later wrote lives of both Johnson and Lawrence). My Orwellian prediction that a definitive edition