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Updated: May 28, 2025
Out of forest and creepers into bamboo thickets; then into glades with flowering kaing grass and wild fruit, redder than tomatoes, hanging from creeping plants; across slender wooden bridges, over roaring streams, always getting lower till the path came out on the plains again on the wide macadamised road. ... It was rather sad getting on to the plain again.
The first pool was lit by a golden shaft of light through the greenery, rising fish were breaking its smooth weedy surface, but duck there were none; so we plunged on in the silence in another direction, came out into the kaing grass again, left the comparatively open forest behind us, and entered a trackless sea of reeds, which closed round us thickly on all sides.
There were yellow-robed priests walking in the groves of trees and palms, and they noticed us I daresay, but made no sign that to their way of thinking we were doing harm to ourselves by going to kill snipe the Phoungyi does not judge. We then entered the kaing grass of which we had seen so much from the steamer and realised the difficulty of getting at game in this country.
Then music, our host singing, "When Sparrows Build," and Kirke sang and played his own "Farewell to Burmah," of which both music and words expressed the very essence of the charm of this country, and a little of the sweet sadness there is in glens and rivers, and of the peace of evening when the kaing grass is still and the white ibis and crows flight home across the broad river into the sunset.
All the way along the edge of the river, where there are not trees, there is Kaing or elephant grass grass that waves some eighteen feet high and runs far inland, and here and there are bits of tree jungle.
Now we let go our wire rope from the red and black timber head in the sand, slip away quietly into the current and leave the sandbank to the Chinese ponies and a few bales of cotton, all in the dripping rain. The kaing grass is drooping with the downpour, but it will be dry as tinder in an hour or two, dry on the top at least.
After the Defiles we stop at Sinkan on the left bank, where the river spreads out again into the more usual style of Irrawaddy scenery, the valley very wide, the sandy river's edge capped with a jungle of waving kaing, or elephant grass, eighteen feet high, and over and beyond bluey-green tree-clad mountains, not very high, but high enough to be interesting and to raise hope.
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