transformations. Luminous clouds climb in fantastic
forms up the ladders of heaven, and all day long their
pageantry fills the eye. Purple banks and curtains in
lone corners of the horizon speak of the gathering rain,
and at evening, great, shadowy, drifting forms, grey,
purple, and ink-black, sweep over the world.
The summer is over. And yet, such is the strange
medley of the seasons here, spring, laughing and
youthful, is everywhere abroad; in the green, delicate,
tracery of great trees, ,in the cherry-like bloom and
laburnum-gold of acacias ; in the purple clusters of
the pinma, soon to be shaken from their boughs by
torrents of driving rain.
But on the hill-slopes all is withered and barren.
Each shrub and tree stands clear of its neighbour, every
leaf of the underworld is dead. I f some forest creature,
a deer or a panther, were to start up from the river’s
edge, one could trace every movement of it against the
hillside, as it bore upwards through the skeleton maze
of trunks. A month hence, the jungle will be all but
impenetrable. And there is colour in all this, and such
variety as goes to the making of landscapes ; green
little valleys, ruddy brown hills, a river of purple silk,
and cloud shadows alternating with the light on peaks,
and slopes, and wooded lanes of water.
Thabeit-kyin is the port of Mogok, capital of the
ruby mines district, and this circumstance gives it
its character. At this little village all the mining
machinery, the electric plant, the batteries and engines
of the company, have been landed. Through this