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The morning following the receipt of the heliogram we broke camp at daylight. When the last mule of the caravan had disappeared over the brown hills toward China we regretfully said farewell and rode away. If we are ever again made "prisoners of war" we hope our captor will be as delightful a gentleman as Captain Clive. From Ma-li-pa we traveled almost due north to the Salween River.
Another of those remarkable works which declare the engineering skill of the Chinese, is the suspension bridge which spans the Salween by a double loop the larger loop over the river, the smaller one across the overflow. A natural piece of rock strengthened by masonry, rising from the river bed, holds the central ends of both loops.
It is a long hard climb out of the Salween valley. We left on March 24 and all day crawled up the steep sides on a trail which doubled back and forth upon itself like an endless letter S. From our camp at night the river was just visible as a thin green line several thousand feet below, and for the first time in days, we needed a charcoal fire in our tents.
Their own traditions tell of their coming from the north across a great river of sand and of having been driven out of the basin of the Irrawadi at a later date . At present the Karens are found chiefly in the Karen hills of Lower Burma between the Irrawadi and the Salween and in the basin of the Sittang River, which runs southwards midway between those two greater rivers to open into the head of the Gulf of Martaban.
Here it will be sufficient to mention the important work of Mr. He was even able, through the means of vocabularies furnished to him by the late Bishop Bigandet, to discover the nearest kinsmen of the Khasis in the Palaungs, a tribe inhabiting one of the Shan States to the north-east of Mandalay on the middle Salween.
Peafowl are said to be rather disagreeable pets because they often attack infirm persons and children and kill young poultry. In some parts of Ceylon and India the birds are so abundant and easily killed that they do not furnish even passable sport, but in other places they are as wild and difficult to shoot as we found them to be on the Salween River.
The Salween at this point is about two hundred yards wide, but narrows to half that distance below the ferry and flows in a series of rapids between rocky shores. The valley is devoid of human life except for three boatmen who tend the ferry, but the deserted rice fields along a narrow shelf showed evidence of former cultivation.
China disheartened could need but little persuasion to accede to the just demand of England that the frontier of Burma shall be the true south-western frontier of China the Salween River. There are no Chinese in the valley, nor would any Chinaman venture to cross it after nightfall.
The squadron now took up a position at the mouth of the Rangoon river, the commodore declaring the rivers of Rangoon, the Bassein, and the Salween above Maulmain, to be in a state of blockade. Meanwhile the steamer Proserpine, after landing the hostages from Rangoon at Maulmain, was ordered to proceed to Calcutta with despatches from the commodore.
The king, therefore, gave both powers an assurance of his friendship; and marched his army down to the frontier of the province of Martaban, which bordered on the great Salween river on the Tenasserim coast, and lay some two hundred miles from Rangoon, across the gulf of Martaban.
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