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This hill is really too steep for a vehicle to ascend, but the plucky pony and the Kling driver together pulled the gharrie up the zigzags in a series of spasms, and I was glad to get out of the sunshine into a cool, airy house, where there was a hope of breakfast, or rather tiffin. The Residency is large and lofty, and thoroughly draughty, a high commendation so near the equator.
I was loath to exchange my good horse for a gharrie, with a Kling driver draped slightly in Turkey-red cotton sitting on the shafts, who, statuesque as he was, had a far less human expression than Mahmoud and Eblis.
The people were as gentle and inoffensive in their manners as the Japanese, without their elaborate courtesy and civilized curiosity. Having seen all I could see, I turned shipwards, weary, footsore, and exhausted; my feet so sore and blistered, indeed, that long before I reached a gharrie I was obliged to take off my boots and wrap them in handkerchiefs.
After leaving the convent I resumed my gharrie, and the driver took me, what I suppose is the usual "course" for tourists, through a quaint Asiatic town inhabited by a mixed, foreign population of Hindus, Malays, Tagals, and Chinese merchants, scattered among a large indigenous population of Anamese fishermen, servants, and husbandmen, through the colonial district, which looked asleep or dead, to the markets, where the Chinamen and natives of India were in the full swing and din of buying and selling all sorts of tropical fruits and rubbishy French goods, and through what may be called the Government town or official quarter.
On my weary way I was overtaken by a young French artillery officer, who walked with me until we came upon an empty gharrie, and was eloquent upon the miseries of Saigon. A large force of infantry and artillery is always in barracks here, but it is a most sickly station.
Rejecting a guide, I walked about Saigon, saw its streets, cafes, fruit markets, bazaars, barracks, a botanic or acclimatization garden, of which tigers were the chief feature, got out upon the wide, level roads, bordered with large trees, which run out into the country for miles in perfectly straight lines, saw the handsome bungalows of the residents, who surround themselves with many of the luxuries of Paris, went over a beautiful convent, where the sisters who educate native girl children received me with kindly courtesy; and eventually driving in a gharrie far beyond the town, and then dismissing it, I got into a labyrinth of lanes, each with a high hedge of cactus, and without knowing it found that I was in a native village, Choquan, a village in which every house seems to be surrounded and hidden by high walls of a most malevolent and obnoxious cactus, so as to insure absolute privacy to its proprietor.
He then insisted on taking our hired gharrie and scrubby pony and sending us on in his buggy with a fine Australian horse, but Mr. Maxwell says that this was as much from policy as courtesy, as it gives him importance to be on obviously friendly terms with the Resident.
My gharrie driver took me to see a Chinese pepper plantation to me the most interesting thing that I saw on a very long and hot drive. Pepper is a very profitable crop. The vine begins to bear in three or four years after the cuttings have been planted, and yields two crops annually for about thirteen years.
No amount of world-wide practice in the getting in and out of strange vehicles is any help to the tortuous process necessary for mounting and dismounting from a Larut gharrie. A gharrie is a two- wheeled cart with a seat across it for two people and a board in front on which the driver sits when he is not running by his horse.
Up to this time we had expected to find perfectly smooth sailing, as a runner was sent from Malacca to the Resident yesterday. We supposed that we should be carried in chairs six miles through the jungle to a point where a gharrie could meet us, and that we should reach the Residency by nine tonight at the latest. On arriving at Sempang, Mr.
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