Flight by Elephant by Andrew Martin Page B

He was at a spot called Namgoi Mukh, about eight miles south of the camp at Simon where Millar and Leyden had been greeted with sausages and tea. If Simon was obscure, Namgoi Mukh was more so, and the map at the front of this book is one of the few on which it has ever appeared. Before Mackrell had arrived there in early May there’d been nothing but a couple of broken bamboo houses built amid the trees. On arrival, he had written a letter to a friend, beginning, ‘I don’t know quite where “here” is, as we have no maps, but here I am anyway!’
    Actually, Namgoi Mukh would have been a logical place for a village, because it stood at the confluence of two rivers. The first ran south from Simon, and its name fluctuates exasperatingly depending on who’s referring to it, but let’s call it the Namphuk. The other river, branching off to the south-west from the Namphuk, was called – by some – the Namgoi. If, in early June 1942, you’d taken a boat fifteen miles from the place called Namgoi Mukh along the Namgoi river, you would have arrived at a refugee relief camp called Nampong, which lay more or less in the middle of the Hukawng Valley evacuation route. But you would have been going against a strong current, since the river flowed north, which is why Gyles Mackrell was sending most of the supplies he was dispatching to the Nampong camp by porter or by elephant.
    At Namgoi Mukh, Mackrell inhabited a humid, watery world, living amid the roar of the rain and the additional roar of the two rivers. The supplies – ‘rice, dall, potatoes, blankets etc’ – came in by boat from the camp at Simon. Mackrell paid the boatmen their fee of eight silver rupees per boatload, from government money labelled the Burma Refugee Fund. He then loaded the stuff onto elephants, for which he tended to use the Hindi word ‘hathis’ or ‘haths’, and of which he had thirty-one at his disposal. He spent all day unloading and loading, and slept on a camp bed in a basha, next to the main, tin-roofed godown, or warehouse, on a riverbank that was at all times a foot deep in reddish mud.
    He was probably enjoying himself greatly, the only reservation being that he was not in the thick of the action. He was fifty-three, and it bothered him that this might preclude him from a more central role. Mackrell was a former fighter pilot turned supervisor of tea plantations and big-game hunter. He lived in a big house in Shillong, the capital of Assam, but was hardly ever there. He was a burly, kindly, avuncular looking man – bald, but you wouldn’t know it because he always wore (for reasons of practicality, not vanity) either a sola topee or a bush hat. He also always wore long shorts, and below these, and above his long socks, his large knees had the touching appearance of being on the wrong way round. He was somewhat elephantine, in fact, and he certainly had an affinity with elephants.
    He had turned up at the Ledo camp in late April, volunteering for any work at all in the relief operations, whereupon he was given the nebulous title Indian Tea Association Liaison Officer. As he wrote in that letter to a friend, ‘It all seems most casual … Even now, I don’t know who or what I am.’ On 17 May, he reported for duty at Simon camp with, according to an official document, ‘four and a half elephants’ in tow – that is, four adults and one baby elephant. (A female elephant which has lately given birth will continue to work, but only if she has her baby by her side.) He was immediately dispatched to Namgoi Mukh, where a man called Bathgate was in charge. But Mackrell noticed that when he arrived with his four and a half elephants, Bathgate barely looked at them. You don’t look a gift
horse
in the mouth, but it seems you should do with an elephant. But Bathgate was depressed. He’d been a timber merchant in Burma and had lost his entire business; the rain and mud and general obscurity of Namgoi Mukh wouldn’t have helped. Bathgate