make a pleasant interlude in the stillness of the day.
The conp'regfation is a small one. and the hill tracts of o o 1
the Salwin appear to have been but very partially
absorbed into the missionary fold. The chief elder is
a young man named Moung Lon Le, with a refined
and clerkly face, and English which he talks with an
American drawl. He seems to feel acutely the general
backwardness of his race.
Apart from these exotic advantages, Pha-pun—the
primitive site, as the Creator made it—is a place of
great natural beauty. Behind it there rise, in fold
behind fold, a mass of exquisite hills, tapestried with
woods ; and their colouring, where they reach away in
faint waves to the north, is, at this season, of such soft
and delicate tones as go to the making of an English
landscape after rain on a summer day. Facing these
hills on the west, there is another line of hills, beginners
of the Paung-Laung range, and between them lies all
there is of the valley of the Yunzalin.
The little river is spanned at the landing-place by a
temporary bridge of bamboos, raised only a few inches
above its surface, and the waters pour clear and limpid
under it. There are rapids just below, which for the
last time strain the muscles of the polers ascending to
Pha-pun, and all through the still hours of the night I
can hear their murmur as they break over the stones.
Sleeping, I dream of the Jarlot and the Queffleut where
they mingle at Morlaix.
Above the bridge, there is a long stretch of silent
water, winding in easy curves, and almost flush with the
674
low grassy banks. The mystic beauty of the Lower
Salwin, the stately pomp of the Irrawaddy, the sad grey
wastes of some Indian river, toiling through spaces it
cannot fill— there is no hint of these on the banks of the
Yunzalin as I look upon it to-day at Pha-pun. There is
little happily to detract from its homely English beauty.
But the human note is essentially Eastern. Women
bare to the shoulder come to the river’s edge to bathe
and to fill their waterpots ; small lads splash about on
rafts of green bamboo ; groups of wayfaring Shan ford
it at the shallows ; and elephant-men scrub their restless
beasts, lying prone and immersed to the skull in the
water. By the bridge a fleet of Chittagonian boats lies
at anchor—the only link that binds Pha-pun to the outer
world.
CHITTAGONIAN BOATMEN