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Now this, I admit, appears to have nothing to do with the city of Prague; it is indeed a far stretch of vision from "a Terrace in Prague" to the banks of the Irrawaddy. Nevertheless, memories of far-off days in Burma came surging up one day as I sat on my terrace reading a newspaper printed and published in the city that lay shrouded in historic mist below.
For a thousand miles the Irrawaddy is alive with traffic, and on its banks have settled the greater proportion of the population of the country, for with the exception of a few isolated towns and settlements, which are surrounded by cultivated areas of limited extent, the whole country away from the river-banks is densely covered by scrub jungle and primeval forest, practically uninhabited and uncultivable.
"I'm afraid not; I'm going straight up to Mandalay, but I shall be down later, and meanwhile I'll do my best to settle you in that chummery. I'll send a line to FitzGerald of my service; he lives there; a rattling Irishman, with lots of brains in his handsome head, and a good sort; there's also Roscoe, a clever oddity, and MacNab of the Irrawaddy Flotilla a wonderful golfer.
I had a presentiment that an accident would happen, and had waded back to the channel and was standing by at the time. But for this the papers might have been floated down to the Irrawaddy and been lost to the world loss irreparable! The sun was very hot. I laid out my things on the bank and dried them.
And thus, with Christianity on the quarter-deck, and paganism on the forecastle, the Irrawaddy ploughed the sea. As if to symbolize this state of things, the "fancy piece" astern comprised, among numerous other carved decorations, a cross and a miter; while forward, on the bows, was a sort of devil for a figure-head a dragon-shaped creature, with a fiery red mouth, and a switchy-looking tail.
At the ends of the sand-spits are waders oyster catchers I vow one might be at Arisaig in a splendid June instead of the Irrawaddy in January.... Long rafts of teak logs pass us occasionally, drifting slowly down with the current.
All these lower water-ways of the Irrawaddy are tidal, for they are quite close to the sea, and at high water the land is scarcely raised at all above the water level. Mango-trees, dwarf palms, and reeds fringe the muddy banks, on which, raised upon poles and built partly over the water, are the huts of the fishermen, who, half naked, ply their calling in quaintly-shaped, dug-out canoes.
The house stands on legs, so that the under part is quite open, and a broad flight of wooden steps leads up to a verandah on the first floor. Stop to examine the carving on the balustrade. It is wonderful! When we arrived in Burma yesterday we came up the river Irrawaddy, which at its mouth is called the Rangoon River.
But he said that the smaller hills that we crossed on the way to your village which he called the Pegu Yoma hills some of whose swells come down to the bank, extend all the way down to the sea between the Irrawaddy and the Sittang rivers; and that, from them, streams flowed to one river or the other. Therefore, if we could gain that range, we should avoid the swamp country, altogether.
For the abandonment of the Macaulay mission, and the recognition of their right to receive the tribute mission from Burmah, the authorities at Pekin were quite, at the moment, willing to forego material claims such as a port on the Irrawaddy.
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