over vast spaces, it is almost motionless. It is shallow,
and the winter waits to expose its shallowness. Yet
the purple shadows of the mountains lend it the suggestion
of unfathomed deeps. Little, if any, life moves
on its surface. A derelict log floats by with scarcely
perceptible motion; sand-bubbles break and spread
their concentric rings on it in silence. From the cover
of the silver kaing, a buffalo waddles slowly down
to the river’s edge, mammoth-like—a counterpart of
the slow, quiet world about him. In the fading light
he makes a clear black spot on the landscape—a
lictor of the night. On the distant eastern horizon,
clouds, like white puffs from a furnace, stayed in the
full tide of their life, become a palette for the last light
of the sun, and their lustrous reflections make all the
river, looking down, a mirror of pink and opal loveliness,
that is in supreme antithesis to the dark mystery, the
deep unfathomable purple of it, under the mountains.
Mountains and river are here in close fellowship,
yet those blue-green patches on the slopes, and the line
of little houses by the river, are a whole world apart.
To the mountaineer, all below is a forbidden tract of
civilisation, once, in the great days gone by, his prey.
To the plainsman, all that is of the mountains savours
of savagery greater than his own, and a hate that is
never asleep. The one from his valley hamlets, the
other from his eyrie on the cliffs, regard each other and
pass by. There is no communion between them.
Homalin is in the keeping of an Aracanese officer,
one of the ablest of his countrymen. He rules here
440
FROM THE BANKS