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I happened to be at Rangoon when six large bales of pheasant skins were seized by the Custom officials. A Chinaman had brought them from Yunnan via Bhamo, and was preparing to ship them as ducks' feathers. Two of the bales were opened for my inspection. The first contained about five hundred Lady Amherst pheasant skins, falling to pieces and lacking heads and legs.
At Bhamo the river broadens into a lake again, something like what it is between Saigang and Mandalay beautiful enough to travel a long way to see. There is a little desert of sand between the water's edge and Bhamo, across it were trekking in single file Burmans, Shans, and Chinese, to and from our steamer with lines of ponies, with bales of merchandise on their pack saddles.
They are hard as nails but looked just the least thing tired, having ridden a great distance since yesterday on an inspecting tour from some hill village. They hoped to get to Bhamo by night if their steeds held out.
Only by way of one little corner in the north-east, where Burma joins the Chinese province of Yunnan, is access from the land side easy, and here caravans of Yunnanese constantly enter the country to trade at Bhamo and Hsipaw.
And here am I in this God-forsaken hole with nothing to do but to keep an eye on that Ford there. Bhamo is better than this; Mandalay is better than Bhamo, and Rangoon is better than either. Chivvying dakus is paradise compared with this sort of thing. Anyhow, I'm tired of fishing." He began to take his rod to pieces preparatory to returning to his quarters on the hill.
We look at the distant mountains beyond Bhamo that bound the horizon they tempt us and we wonder if we should not venture further north; and take the caravan route into China rather a big affair for peaceful tourists. Captain Kirke came in strongly here, said, "Go, of course I will show you how to do it, give you ponies, and find you guide and servants."
They looked to their local leaders for help, and, as too often these local governors were not very capable men, they sought, as all people have done, the assistance of such men of war as they could find brigands, and freelances, and the like and put themselves under their orders. The whole country rose, from Bhamo to Minhla, from the Shan Plateau to the Chin Mountains.
The only difference consisted in the fact that Captain Gregory and his subaltern Dempsey, having finished their period of enforced exile, had returned to Bhamo to join the main body of their regiment.
He went with us on a pack mule to Bhamo, down the Irawadi River to Rangoon, and across the Bay of Bengal to Calcutta. He then visited many cities in India, and at Bombay boarded the P. & O.S.S. Namur for Hongkong and became the pet of the ship. From China we took him to Japan, across the Pacific to Vancouver, and finally to our home at Lawrence Park, Bronxville, New York.
Leaving these people with gilded teeth, Marco Polo took the great road which conveys all the traffic between India and Indo-China, and passed by Bhamo, where a market is held three times a week, which attracts merchants from the most distant countries.
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