The next rapid lies a short distance above Ban Soop Tau, a long house inhabited by some Kamook foresters. Trusting solely to the current and our steersmen and the men with bamboos, we rushed along at railroad speed for three-quarters of a mile, doing the distance in four minutes. After passing the house, which is situated 154 miles from Zimmé, we saw many teak-logs floating down the stream, and some Kamooks on elephants who were engaged in keeping the logs from stranding on the boulders, and edging them off when they did so.
Loi Pa Khun Bait.
A little farther we came to another rapid below which the hills again closed in—the one on the left afterwards retiring at a hamlet near the twenty-seventh rapid, the last that needed the use of the rope. The boat was allowed to rush along the edge of the cliff at the next one, at such a pace as to make me clench my teeth and bite through the cigar I was smoking.
Three miles farther the hill on the left again closed in, and we entered a defile and descended through rough water over a rapid that looked like a chopping sea. A mile farther we halted for the night in a bay of the hills close to the foot of Loi Pa Khun Bait—a pillar-rock about 250 feet high that rises from the foot of a hill near the east bank of the river. The hills had latterly become less precipitous, and the defile ended near the traveller’s rest-house called Sala Bau Lome. The river had latterly varied from 300 feet to 120 feet in breadth.
A mile from the gorge some palmyra-trees on the west bank mark the site of a former village, and soon afterwards the pilots left us to conduct some boats up-stream. The valley between the last gorge and the next one is about 13 miles long and of considerable breadth. It is bounded on the east by the Loi Pa Kha range, and on the west by a bold plateau-topped range of hills known as Loi Luong, which separates the southern branch of the Meh Tuen from the Meh Ping.
Extremity of spur from the west range.
After shooting two small rapids, and passing a couple of small villages situated on the west bank, we halted for breakfast near a great spur from the western range. This spur appears to be more than half a mile high, and precipitous near the end, where a great cave is seen high up in the cliff. I sketched the end of the spur from the foot of the eastern hills, which had now come to the river.
Two miles beyond the spur we reached the village of Soom Cha, whence there is a pass across the eastern hills to Ban Meh Pik, a village near the Meh Wung, through which roads lead to Zimmé and Lakon. Soom Cha is situated on the east bank of the river, and contained fifteen houses, besides a temple and pagoda, of the ordinary Shan type. Three miles farther we halted for a couple of hours at Ban Nah, which, with its suburb Ban Ta Doo-a, contained 135 houses.