The first rattle of the machine guns, at 7:10 in the evening, roused around me the varied voices and faces of fear.

"Sounds exactly like last time".
The young man spoke steadily enough, but all at once he looked grotesquely unshaven.
The middle-aged man said over and over, "Why did I come here, why did I come here".
Then he was sick.
Amid the crackle of small arms and automatic weapons, I heard the thumping of mortars.
Then the lights went out.

This was my second day in Vientiane, the administrative capital of Laos, and my thoughts were none too brave.
Where was my flashlight?
Where should I go?
To my room?
Better stay in the hotel lobby, where the walls looked good and thick.

Chinese and Indian merchants across the street were slamming their steel shutters.
Hotel attendants pulled parked bicycles into the lobby.
A woman with a small boy slipped in between them.
"Please", she said, "please".
She held out her hand to show that she had money.

The American newspaperman worried about getting to the cable office.
But what was the story?
Had the Communist-led Pathet Lao finally come this far?
Or was it another revolt inside Vientiane?

"Let's play hero", I said.
"Let's go to the roof and see".

Gunfire saves the moon

By 7:50 the answer was plain.
There had been an eclipse of the moon.
A traditional Lao explanation is that the moon was being swallowed by a toad, and the remedy was to make all possible noise, ideally with firearms.

The din was successful, too, for just before the moon disappeared, the frightened toad had begun to spit it out again, which meant good luck all around.

How quaint it all seemed the next day.
A restaurant posted a reminder to patrons "who became excited and left without paying their checks".
But everyone I met had sought cover first and asked questions later.
And no wonder, for Vientiane, the old City of Sandalwood, had become the City of Bullet Holes.

I saw holes in planes at the airport and in cars in the streets.
Along the main thoroughfares hardly a house had not been peppered.
In place of the police headquarters was a new square filled with rubble.
Mortars had demolished the defense ministry and set fire to the American Embassy next door.
What had been the ambassador's suite was now jagged walls of blackened brick.

This damage had been done in the battle of Vientiane, fought less than three months earlier when four successive governments had ruled here in three days (December 9-11, 1960).
And now, in March, all Laos suffered a state of siege.
The Pathet Lao forces held two northern provinces and openly took the offensive in three more.
Throughout the land their hit-and-run terrorists spread fear of ambush and death.

"And it's all the more tragic because it's so little deserved", said Mr. J. J. A. Frans, a Belgian official of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization.
We talked after I hailed his Jeep marked with the U.N. flag.

Practically all the people of Laos, he explained -- about two million of them -- are rice farmers, and the means and motives of modern war are as strange to them as clocks and steel plows.
They look after their fields and children and water buffaloes in ten or eleven thousand villages, with an average of 200 souls.
Nobody can tell more closely how many villages there are.
They spread over an area no larger than Oregon;
yet they include peoples as different from one another as Oregonians are from Patagonians.

Life must be kept in harmony

"What matters here is family loyalty;
faith in the Buddha and staying at peace with the phis, the spirits;
and to live in harmony with nature".

Harmony in Laos?
"Precisely", said Mr. Frans.
He spoke of the season of dryness and dust, brought by the monsoon from the northeast, in harmony with the season of rain and mud, brought by the monsoon from the southwest.
The slim pirogues in harmony with the majestically meandering Mekong River.
Shy, slender-waisted girls at the loom in harmony with the frangipani by the wayside.
Even life in harmony with death.
For so long as death was not violent, it was natural and to be welcomed, making a funeral a feast.

To many a Frenchman -- they came 95 years ago, colonized, and stayed until Laos became independent in 1953 -- the land had been even more delightfully tranquil than Tahiti.
Yet Laos was now one of the most explosive headaches of statesmen around the globe.
The Pathet Lao, stiffened by Communist Veterans from neighboring North Viet Nam, were supplied by Soviet aircraft.
The Royal Lao Army, on the other hand, was paid and equipped with American funds.
In six years, U.S. aid had amounted to more than $1.60 for each American -- a total of three hundred million dollars.

We were there at a moment when the situation in Laos threatened to ignite another war among the world's giants.
Even if it did not, how would this little world of gentle people cope with its new reality of grenades and submachine guns?

To find out, we traveled throughout that part of Laos still nominally controlled, in the daytime at least, by the Royal Lao Army: from Attopeu, the City of Buffalo Dung in the southeast, to Muong Sing, the City of Lions in the northwest, close to Communist China (map, page 250).
We rode over roads so rough that our Jeep came to rest atop the soil between ruts, all four wheels spinning uselessly.
We flew in rickety planes so overloaded that we wondered why they didn't crash.
In the end we ran into Communist artillery fire.

"We" were Bill Garrett of the National Geographic Illustrations Staff, whose three cameras and eight lenses made him look as formidable as any fighting man we met;
Boun My, our interpreter;
and myself.

Boun My -- the name means one who has a boun, a celebration, and is therefore lucky -- was born in Savannakhet, the Border of Paradise.
He had attended three universities in the United States.
But he had never seen the mountainous half of his native land north of Vientiane, including the royal capital, Luang Prabang.
Before the airplanes came, he said, travel in Laos was just about impossible.

Prime minister moves fast

Alas, so it almost proved for us, too.
To go outside the few cities required permits.
And getting them seemed a life's work.
Nobody wanted Americans to be hurt or captured, and few soldiers could be spared as escorts.

We were told that to the Pathet Lao, a kidnaped American was worth at least $750, a fortune in Laos.
Everyone had heard of the American contractor who had spurned an escort.
Now Pathet Lao propagandists were reported marching him barefoot from village to village, as evidence of evil American intervention.

Although we enjoyed our rounds of the government offices in Vientiane, with officials offering tea and pleasing conversation in French, we were getting nowhere.
We had nearly decided that all the tales of Lao lethargy must be true, when we were invited to take a trip with the Prime Minister.
Could we be ready in 15 minutes?
His Highness had decided only two hours ago to go out of town, and he was eager to be off.

Prince wears ten-gallon hat

And so, after a flight southeast to Savannakhet, we found ourselves bouncing along in a Jeep right behind the Land-Rover of Prince Boun Oum of Champassak, a tall man of Churchillian mien in a bush jacket and a ten-gallon hat from Texas.
From his shoulder bag peeked the seven-inch barrel of a Luger.

The temperature rose to 105-degrees.
With our company of soldiers, we made one long column of reddish dust.

In Keng Kok, the City of Silkworms, the Prime Minister bought fried chickens and fried cicadas, and two notebooks for me.
Then we drove on, until there was no more road and we traversed dry rice fields, bouncing across their squat earth walls.

It was a spleen-crushing day.
An hour of bouncing, a brief stop in a village to inspect a new school or dispensary.
More bouncing, another stop, a new house for teachers, a new well.
Then off again, rushing to keep up.
We were miserable.

But our two Jeep mates -- Keo Viphakone from Luang Prabang and John Cool from Beaver, Pennsylvania -- were beaming under their coatings of dust.
Together they had probably done more than any other men to help push Laos toward the 20th century -- constructively.
Mr. Keo, once a diplomat in Paris and Washington, was Commissioner of Rural Affairs.
John, an engineer and anthropologist with a doctorate from the London School of Economics, headed the rural development division of USOM, the United States Operations Mission administering U.S. aid.

"What you see are self-help projects", John said.
"We ask the people what they want, and they supply the labor.
We send shovels, cement, nails, and corrugated iron for roofs.
That way they have an infirmary for $400.
We have 2,500 such projects, and they add up to a lot more than just roads and wells and schools.
Ask Mr. Keo".

Mr. Keo agreed.
"Our people have been used to accepting things as they found them", he said.
"Where there was no road, they lived without one.
Now they learn that men can change their surroundings, through their traditional village elders, without violence.
That's a big step toward a modern state.
You might say we are in the nation-building business".

In the villages people lined up to give us flowers.
Then came coconuts, eggs, and rice wine.
The Prime Minister paid his respects to the Buddhist monks, strode rapidly among the houses, joked with the local soldiery, and made a speech.
The soldiers are fighting and the Americans are helping, he said, but in the fight against the Pathet Lao the key factor is the villager himself.

Then we were off again.
We did it for three days.

But our stumping tour of the south wasn't all misery.
Crossing the 4,000-foot width of the Mekong at Champassak, on a raft with an outboard motor, we took off our dusty shirts and enjoyed a veritable ocean breeze.
Then we hung overboard in the water.

Briefly we rolled over a paved road up to Pak Song, on the cool Bolovens Plateau.
The Prince visited the hospital of Operation Brotherhood, supported by the Junior Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines, and fed rice to two pet elephants he kept at his residence at Pak Song.

Strings keep souls in place

In the village of Soukhouma, which means "Peaceful", we had a baci.
This is the most endearing of Lao ceremonies.
It takes place in the household, a rite of well-wishing for myriad occasions -- for the traveler, a wedding, a newborn child, the sick, the New Year, for any good purpose.

The preparations were elaborate: flowers, candles, incense sticks, rice wine, dozens of delicacies, and pieces of white cotton string.
The strings were draped around flowers in tall silver bowls (page 261).

The candles were lighted, and we sat on split-bamboo mats among the village notables.
I was careful to keep my feet, the seat of the least worthy spirits, from pointing at anyone's head, where the worthiest spirits reside.
Now a distinguished old man called on nine divinities to come and join us.

Next he addressed himself to our souls.
A man has 32 souls, one for each part of the body.
Those souls like to wander off, and must be called back.

With the divinities present and our souls in place, we were wished health, happiness, and power.
Then, one after another, the villagers tied the waiting cotton strings around our wrists.
These were to be kept on, to hold in the 32 souls.

As we stepped out into the sunlight, a man came up to John Cool and silently showed him his hand.
It had a festering hole as big as a silver dollar.
We could see maggots moving.

John said: "I have some antiseptic salve with me, but it's too late for that".