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CH A P T E R VIII
T H E D E F I L E S
H H H E Irrawaddy is of all the great rivers of Indo-
JL China the ■ greatest. Through Burma it flows
for a thousand miles, in a broad navigable stream, from
the “ confluence” in the far north, where, emerging
from its still mysterious birthplace, it unites with its
first great tributary, to the measureless sea into which
it pours through a hundred mouths. The mountains
in which it is born, an offshoot of the Himalaya, follow
its destiny seaward, and when they sweep down to
its water’s edge, or tower mistily on its wide horizon,
lend it its incommunicable charm and beauty. Lessening
gradually from altitudes of eternal snow, they
sink with the river into the ocean, their last bluff
crowned by the golden pagoda of Moodain, “ Gleaming
far to seaward, a Burmese Sunium.”
It is no light undertaking to describe this majestic
creature. Its length and volume, its importance as an
artery of the world, its rise and fall— these are easily
recorded facts. The beauty of its waters that mirror
a sky of varied loveliness, of its hills and forests and
precipitous heights, of its vast spaces that bring a
calm to the most fretful spirit, of the. sunsets that wrap