Homing Bird

"Elephants?" muttered the harassed Director of the Royal Household, gesturing vaguely at a huge scroll dotted with the great parade's order of march. "Why do you keep talking of elephants? Have you any idea what an elephant eats? There will be no elephants. We've added a new Daimler to the 60 cars in the royal garage and that will be quite sufficient."

In truth it did seem in busy Bangkok last week that the returning King's welcome would be more than adequate without elephants. All over the sunburnt city Siamese soldiers, sailors, royal princes and plain workmen rushed last-minute preparations. Along the broad, apartment-lined King's Walk, 5,000 soldiers marched and countermarched in rehearsal, while their fellows joined hands to hold back imaginary crowds pressing forward from the sidewalks. On the parade grounds near by, carpenters worked hard to complete the wooden tower that would serve late this month as a funeral pyre for the late King Ananda Mahidol who died of a mysterious pistol shot on June 9, 1946.

The Siamese had waited long and impatiently for Ananda's brother Phumiphon Aduladet to return to his throne and light the pyre. Three times in the last three years the young (22) King had been rumored on the way home from the villa in Lausanne, Switzerland to which he went two months after his brother's death. Three times something (a Siamese coup, an automobile accident or a mere change of plans) had interfered. Meanwhile, as the King spent his days going to school, organizing a swing band, tinkering with his cameras and driving his cars from Switzerland to Paris, royal duties piled up in Bangkok.

Most important was Phumiphon's coronation. Then, too, five royal relatives besides his brother had died, and only a King could light their pyres. And if everything went well there was to be a royal wedding into the bargain.

Last week gangling, spectacled Phumiphon was on the Red Sea in the steamship Selandia, with his pretty fiancee, 17-year-old Siamese Princess Sirikit Kitiyakara at his side. In Bangkok's downtown dance halls, where Siam's hepcats curve their fingers backward and dance the rumwong, the hit of the week was a song composed by the royal jitterbug Phumiphon himself:

The little bird in a lonely flight

Thinks of itself and feels sad . . .

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