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A traveler from Rangoon to Bhamo will find one language spoken throughout his journey, but an expedition of the same length in the hilly country to the east or to the west of the Irrawaddy valley would bring him into contact with twenty mutually unintelligible tongues.
But here is movement! and a cheery jingling! a whole string of Chinese pack ponies, eighty at least, coming up from Bhamo, each laden with bales, a Chinaman to every three ponies. At the end stalks a lean Indian. I suppose he owns the show his wife follows, a very black thing, a Madrassee, to judge by her not very white and inelegant hangings.
Time was given for the circulation of rumors as to the approach of a foreign invader along a disturbed frontier held by tribes almost independent, and whose predatory instincts were excited by the prospect of rich plunder, at the same time that their leaders urged them to oppose a change which threatened to destroy their hold on the caravan route between Bhamo and Talifoo.
After Mandalay, Bhamo will be our objective; it is the most northerly British cantonment in Burmah, and is near the Chinese frontier. All the way there trade is carried on at the stopping places between the traders' booths on the flats and the riverside villagers. We expect to find this trade mightily interesting, as we shall see men and women of the wild mountain tribes.
Lord! how thankful I am it's not true." Next morning George Bertram, as he called himself, left Nampoung for Bhamo, with Gregory's cheque for five hundred rupees in his pocket. "You must take it," said that individual in reply to the other's half-hearted refusal of the assistance. "Treat it as a loan if you like. You can return it to me when you are in better circumstances.
I held his pulse and tried to look as if I knew what to do with a sick Hindoo, tucked him up in his blanket under the bungalow and left him in charge of the native Durwan, and arranged to send out a conveyance for him on the morrow from Bhamo. Then we took the hard high road again in the pony cart, and it felt very hum-drum trundling along on wheels on the straight level road across the plain.
Two miles below Nampoung the two rivers join, and the combined stream flows on to enter the Irrawaddy a mile or two above Bhamo. No change could be greater or more sudden. We toiled upwards in the blazing sun, and in two hours we were deep in the thickest jungle, in the exuberant vegetation of a tropical forest.
This devoted evangelist told me that a poor woman, a Kachin Christian, in whose welfare he felt deep personal interest, was, he greatly feared, dying from blood-poisoning at a small Christian village one hour's ride up the river from Bhamo; and he had little doubt that some surgical interference in her case would save her life. I at once offered to go and see her.
The spot was redolent with the atmosphere of the lazy East; the East which, like the fabled "Lorelei," weaves a mystic spell about the wanderer whom she has loved and taken to her heart, while yet he feels it not. And when he would cast her off and return to his own again she knows full well that her subtle charm will bring him back once more. The next morning we entered Bhamo.
It is a beautiful spot where a foaming mountain torrent rushes out of the jungle in a series of picturesque cascades and loses itself in a living wall of green. The stream is spanned by a splendid iron bridge from which a fine wide road of crushed stone leads all the way to Bhamo. What a difference between the country we were leaving and the one we were about to enter!
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