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Updated: June 25, 2025
Before beginning to construct the bed, he had carried the snakes into the Phongee; after first cutting off their heads which, as he knew, the Burmans never touch. "This is good, indeed, my son," the priest said. "Here we have our breakfast and dinner. I will boil some rice, and fry four of them for breakfast." The bed was but half completed, when he heard the priest sound a bell.
They also purchase slaves in great numbers; and there are wild men in the mountains who watch Burmans and Karens to sell them to the great chiefs of Siam. It is the pride of their chiefs to have thousands of slaves crawling around them. This city is built on an island in a broad river, and part of it on the banks of the river.
The Burmans are a sunny, happy people, as you see, who hope for a good time here, and a good time in the worlds to come. They held the same expectations and creed, and wore the same clothes, two thousand years ago; time does not appear to touch them; they are as gay and irresponsible as so many butterflies. You know Kipling's lines to Rangoon?"
There the buffaloes are turned out into the jungle for eight months in the year, and are only caught for ploughing and carting. Naturally they are quite wild; in fact, many of them are the offspring of wild bulls. The Burmans, too, are very fond of dogs. Their villages are full of dogs; but, as far as I know, they never use them for anything, and they are never trained to do anything.
At all times of the day it is thronged by people, not only from Rangoon, but from all parts of the country, who come to pray or wonder at its beauty. At the shrines, in which are always one or more images of Buddha, groups of devout Burmans pray.
Then all was quiet, and traders and passengers and their families were asleep, stretched round the deck aft of our portion Burmans, Phunghis, Shans, Karens, Chinese, Sikhs, wrapped in various coloured sheets, in lines fore and aft and from side to side, dimly lit from above by lamps the same in the two decks of the flat which we are to take up the river with us alongside.
But to him who has never felt this life, who has never been wooed by the trees and hills, these things are but foolishness, of course. To the Burman, not less than to the Greek of long ago, all nature is alive. The forest and the river and the mountains are full of spirits, whom the Burmans call Nats.
There was a rather neat little Burmese girl, you see a sort of niece of Moung Gway's who had taken a fancy to me; and this turned out to be a disappointed lover, just turned up from a voyage to Cagayan in a paddy-boat. I believed he had fixed it up with the venerable one to hold me with the magic until he got in his stroke. Venomous beggars, those Burmans, if you cross 'em in the wrong way!
The consequence was that in issuing the order for the new levy a bounty of twenty pounds, which to the Burmans was a very large sum, was offered to each man who obeyed the call. The first step, on the part of the British general, was to send proclamations through the country; guaranteeing protection to all, and inviting the population to return to their towns and villages.
Then Stanley and one of the Burmans lay down, and placed the cutting end of the long ramrod against it; and the others, by turns, struck the end with the back of a light hatchet, those holding the rod turning it, slightly, after each blow.
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