A train waited on the far side above a stretch of loose grey sand. I was on my way to Katha to join there one of the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company's boats on its way up to Bhamo, and my dinner was eaten that Christmas evening in a small railway refreshment-room decorated with some prints after Landseer, and one of a sentimental girl's head called "The Soul's Awakening." Another man shared the same table in unbroken silence until, with some very bad coffee, the Hindoo "butler" brought the bills. "Excuse me," I said to the stranger, "but you are an Englishman, and this is our Christmas dinner—will you drink a glass of wine with me?"
So we drank toasts in port that was thick enough to have pleased Alfred Tennyson, and slept none the worse for it on the jolting lumbering train.
There was a dense mist at Katha when I left the railway for the river-boat, and progress was slow until the air cleared and long flat sandbanks became visible and a green tree-clad plain with blue mountains to the north-west. Teak rafts drifted past us downstream on their long journey to Poozoondoung Creek, and the old tusker Mpo Chem and his "lady helps." Many rafts of bamboos passed us also, supporting heavy teak logs below them, for teak is not easily rafted till it is three years dead, and recently-felled logs float reluctantly as if possessing still enough of life to tell their sorrow at leaving the upland forests.
Katha.
It is not many decades since rafts freighted with human bodies, more nearly still in touch with life than the new teak logs, floated down this river. Our captain, whose name was Teeldrup, a Dane with Icelandic blood, ran boats for the Irrawaddy traffic some years before the final annexation, and described to me a passage on this very piece of the river when no less than thirty unfortunate Kachins came floating down the stream crucified upon bamboo frames. "A lot has been talked of the cruelties," said Captain Teeldrup, "but I think the poor devils were generally soon put out of their misery."
Mora and Segaw we passed—villages on the banks—taking on a few native passengers from small boats that came out to us, and at eight o'clock in the evening we anchored in mid-stream. The deck was quite covered in with canvas, and canvas also covered all the cabin windows. Notwithstanding these precautions, however, the mist in the morning was so thick that when I came to dress all my clothes were thoroughly damp. At half-past seven the fog began to lessen somewhat, but there was no question of starting, although we were already many hours behind time. Lumps of brown spongy froth kept appearing to float past and out of sight again in the little space of thick muddy water visible round the boat.
Hours later we got away, and at length sighted Bhamo late in the afternoon. I could just make out the red building of Fort C and a white spot, which I was told was the "bell" pagoda. Of the two existing forts, A is for the military police and C for the regulars, B, the intermediate fort, having been done away with a few years ago.
The broad river with its innumerable eddies comes swirling down between its level sandbanks, and as the scenery was at Katha so it was at Bhamo—just a level plain of tall grasses and trees and beyond these, distant mountains now the colour of a ripe plum's bloom. Then suddenly slate-grey landing-flats appeared against the sand, and in a few minutes I was again on shore.