The people of the country-side attach a mysterious
character to the volcanoes. A fabulous snake is said to
be imprisoned within, and a house has been built in the
vicinity for the tutelary nat. Nervous people do not
willingly pass by his territories at night. And it must
be admitted that they have a disagreeable character.
No more secret grave for a murdered man could well be
found. No blade of grass grows anywhere within their
sinister neighbourhood. All power of reproducing life
seems to have been crushed out of this grey clay, and
even at the height of the tropical year, when life strains
upwards from the soil and all things that come within
the compass of the eye are clothed in verdure, it spreads,
devoid of every symptom of life, broken and furrowed
only by the rain, like a cold blister on the smiling face
of the world. The volcanoes owe their existence, it
seems, to petroleum springs below the surface.
CH A P T E R XVIII
T O Y E N A N - G Y A U N G
/^~\N the way to .Yenan-Gyaung the river races and
swirls under the high cliffs so furiously, that often
a launch at her greatest speed can make no progress.
The cliffs are of a worn and romantic beauty, the home
of sand-martins which fly and circle unceasingly in the
light; of secret orioles ; of a gracious and tender-hued
acacia ; of pink and crimson convolvuli, which trail like
a rich carpet from the window of a rejoicing citizen ; and
of groups of trees with twisted white trunks and wind-
driven foliage, like Roman pines, where they cluster on
the cliff tops. There is no note of the tropics in this
scene. The full bounty of the season does no more
than to keep it green ; and in the dry weather all is
parched and arid as the desert.
I come upon the village of Gya, built upon the green
slope of a hill, a smiling interlude in the great procession
of the cliffs. It overlooks a sheltered cove, which is
made by the arrival here of a freshet ; a brawling and
turbulent creature for brief moments of its life, but
commonly moribund or dry. Like all of its kind, it has
marked out for itself a territory far greater than it can
fill.
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