Nearer Pegu the interest grows. Villages and
monasteries line the banks, passengers embark and
disembark, cocoanut palms and groups of trees break.
WAITING FOR TH E STEAMER
the monotony of the level rice-lands; signs of the
harvest greet one on every hand; the yellow grain
lies piled in great pyramids before the houses; and
boat after boat, with carved stern and bellying sail,
sweeps by.
The telegraph wire hums by the banks, and at
long intervals there are houses built for the canal
officers, which recall the Ittle gares of the Suez Canal..
It is with this on the whole that I compare the Pegu-
Sittang Canal at this season ; yet the country through
which it passes is one of the richest in the world, and
its very monotony is due ' to its richness, since it has
all been levelled for the cultivation of rice.
The company assembled on board provides material
for entertainment, and this is as well, since discomfort
is the keynote of the only accommodation the steamer
offers. Out of the crowd of Burmese, and Indian faces,
there is notably one that stands out in a kind of
majestic supremacy. It is the face of a Bussorah Arab
a face in which race and blood are writ clear. Beside,
it, the flat mongoloid features of the Burmese men
and women look plebeian and unfinished; those of the:
Madrasis, brutish; of the Chittagonians and Suratis,
weak and effeminate. The man looks like a king
fallen upon evil times. H e ; wears a saffron cloth
over his head, like a burnous,, and it frames his-,
clear grave features, his pointed grizzled beard, his
straight-cut nose, and his forehead graven with lines.
He can talk no language but his own, and he sits,
here isolated,, a continent apart from the crowd
about him, telling his beads, while his lips murmur the
name of the Prophet. What mission I wonder has;
brought him here ?
As the poles to him, heavy of. paunch,. naked,
the, loud vulgarian, is the Chetti., The face; of the