Sittang was a mere bamboo village with a few grass-grown streets that faded away in the surrounding wilderness. At one time we lost the path and plunged on aimlessly for hours through a tropical forest. Noonday had passed before we broke out upon an open plain where the railway embankment began again, and satisfied our screaming thirst in the hut of a babu employed by the railway company.
Beyond, walking was less difficult. The wildly scrambling jungle had been laid open for the railroad that was to be built; and where the tangled vegetation pressed upon us, we had only to climb to the top of the newly made bank and plod on. The country was not the lonely waste of the day before. Where bananas and cocoanuts and jack-fruits grow, there are human beings to eat them, and now and then a howling of dogs told us that we were near a cluster of native huts tucked away in a fruitful grove.
Every few miles we came upon gangs of coolies, who fell to chattering excitedly when we came into view, and, dropping shovels and baskets, squatted on their heels, staring until we had passed, paying no attention to the maddened screaming of their high-caste bosses. Good bungalows for engineers were being built on high places along the way. The carpenters were Chinamen, who seemed to work faster than the Hindus.
We saw more and more of these wearers of the pig-tail as we continued our travels on into Burma. Many of them kept stores. They were shrewd, grasping fellows.
We came to the end of the embankment for the new railroad, and tramped on into an open country where there were many streams through which we had to wade or swim. We were knee-deep in one of these when there sounded close at hand a snort like the spouting of a whale. I glanced in fright at the weeds growing in the river about us. From the muddy water were thrust a dozen ugly black snouts.
“Crocodiles!” screamed James, turning tail and splashing by me.
“But hold on!” I cried, before we had reached the bank. “These things seem to have horns.”
The creatures that had so startled us were harmless water-buffaloes, which, being freed from their day’s labor, had plunged into the muddy stream to escape from flies and the blazing sun.
From there the route turned southward, and the red sunshine beat in our faces throughout the third day’s tramp. We passed several villages of brown-skinned natives, and the jungle was broken here and there by thirsty rice-fields.
As the day was dying, however, we tramped along a railway embankment between two dark and unpeopled forests. We were almost ready to lie down and sleep out of doors, when we came upon a path leading into the forest. Hoping to find some empty shack left by a railway gang, we turned aside and tumbled down the bank. The trail wound away through the jungle, and brought us, a mile from the line, to a grassy clearing in the center of which stood a bungalow.