air, and ships at the harvest season wait for their
cargoes to the distant world.
Looking more directly to the west, there is the
river again in a straight bar of gold under the long town
of Moulmein. More ships lie here, and they look to me
as if they had dropped without explanation from the great
world outside, into this land-locked anchorage under the
swooning palms. For as I look, the conviction is borne
in upon me of a drowsy land of extraordinary beauty ;
but not of a modern city ; and the ships that lie here
for a season seem to me to form no part of it.
Looking a little more towards the north, my eyes
are greeted by the Zingyaik hills, whose loftiest peak,
three thousand feet in height, dominates the whole
panorama. Between these hills and Bilu-Gyun the right
branch of the Salwin makes its way to sea. In times
gone by—in the days of the Castle of Murmulan, when
Portuguese artillerymen manned the guns of Martaban,
and hungry adventurers from the West swept in their
galleons up the gulf—and down even to more recent
times, this was the main channel of the river. It is not
the channel now. It has ceased for more than a
generation to be navigable by steamers, and the time is
approaching when it will cease to be navigable at all.
Even now the aspect it wears is that of a low country
slowly rising from the sea ; a new world that is shaping
into being. The claim of this western channel to be
the main stream of the Salwin was, however, curiously
established seventy-five years ago. The Salwin had
been fixed upon as the boundary between British and
VOL. II. 593 N