They're still in the heart and in Kipling, Rob. Same thing with Burma. "An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!" It was stuff like this that made me volunteer for Siam twice. And the first time I got out of the airplane in Bangkok what I saw was right out of Kipling and his fellows. In my stories about Col. Gus Cass in Thailand (
Short Stories from Thai Seeds) I wrote about his arrival in Bangkok the second time:
"Cass was astonished at the changes in Don Muang airport since he'd last passed through it. The old, tile-roofed buildings had been water-stained and shabbily exotic, his vision of what turn-of-the-century Siam might have been. Now there was a lot more concrete on the field and he and Pat were walking toward a flat-roofed, concrete-block military passenger terminal that would have seemed more in place on a base in the United States. He could see the old civilian terminal a half mile down the ramp and he remembered the feeling of adventure that old building always had given him.
"The air and the countryside fit his memories though, the crushing heat, the faint fragrance of myriad flowers, beyond the tarmac a tracery of lacelike foliage leading the eye out and out, plane by plane, until distance vanished in an accumulation of haze. To understand Asian painting, he thought, one had to see Asia. Rising planes rather than vanishing-point perspective to symbolize distance wasn't a "primitive" device. It was an accurate rendition of this reality."
