CCXXI
Somerset
Maugham could have devised no better setting. The rain poured down in solid
sheets outside the little building that served as the office and control tower
for Akyab. Slow fans turned within, pushing the humidity around the room, not
strongly enough to rustle the papers on the desks. After a little desultory conversation
with his famous guests, the airport manager had gone back to work. The room was
silent. Amelia sat with a notepad balanced on one knee of her crossed legs. She
was making notes for her book. Fred Noonan was poring over an airport chart of
the area.
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At Rangoon. Note the wet pavement
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Their
plan on June 19th --- assuming the weather cooperated --- was to fly
on to Bangkok, the capital of Thailand. If the weather didn’t cooperate --- and
it didn’t seem that it would --- they would try to hop to Rangoon, the capital
of Burma, only 400 miles away. Having
learned a hard lesson from their “disappearance” at Assab, Earhart and Noonan
had the Akyab radioman broadcast a very specific message --- Destination, weather permitting,
Bangkok; otherwise Rangoon --- assuming they could leave Akyab, that is.
They wanted no more false alarms, no more lurid stories about how they’d
vanished. It was an irony they would never get to appreciate.
The
weather broke just long enough to become airborne, but then it closed in again.
Earhart wrote,
This . .
. hop produced even worse weather than that which turned us back on the
previous day. Then we had tried unsuccessfully to sneak underneath the monsoon.
Those tactics again failing, this time we pulled up to 8,000 feet to be sure of
missing the mountain ridges, and barged through. After two hours of flying
blind in soupy atmosphere we let down and the bright green plains beside the
Irrawaddy River smiled up at us. Then we dodged about for fifty miles . . .
Bangkok was out, at least for today. They made
Rangoon in clear air with the dusk sun lighting the pinnacles of the Buddhist
temples scattered about the city.
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The Shwedagon Pagoda in Rangoon, Burma (Yangon,
Myanmar). It dominates the city skyline today as much as it did eighty years
ago when Amelia Earhart saw it in the setting sun. A major center of Theravada
Buddhism, the relics within include eight strands of Shakyamuni’s hair, and the
patched robe of Kashyapa, the Buddha’s first successor
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It
was momentary luck. Soon, the gold–burnished rooves of the temples went dark
and the rain returned with a vengeance.
It was hazardous,
she wrote, to take off for Bangkok, so we
decided to stay where we were for a time at least.
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Mohinga, a Burmese breakfast staple
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