The ancient name of Tagoung is now borne by a little fishing-village of forty houses. At the time of our passage the villagers were located in temporary huts on a long sandbank, and busily engaged in preparing ngapé or mashed salt-fish. The fishing stakes were fixed athwart a deep narrow channel separating the sandbank from the village. Such fishing-stations are numerous all along the river. Every morning large quantities of fish are taken, and sold by weight to the makers of ngapé. The fish, when cleaned, are packed between layers of salt and trodden down by the feet in long baskets lined with the leaves of the eng tree. While this narrative was being prepared for the press, a suggestion was made in the columns of a most able weekly paper that in the event of difficulties with Burma the Viceroy of India should prohibit the exportation from British Burma of ngapé, “which must be imported from the seaboard.” Undoubtedly there is a large exportation from our territories, but the fish composing that curious Burmese condiment, which, as Yule says, resembles “decayed shrimp paste,” are caught in the Irawady. The upper river teems with fish; fourteen species[14] were purchased by us at Tagoung, and the numerous fishing-villages could probably render the capital independent of the supply from British Burma.
The Shuay-mein-toung hills, on the right or western bank, opposite Tagoung, are very high, and wooded to their summits, with white pagodas peeping out amidst the dense foliage. A few miles to the north they recede from the river, where, on the eastern bank, the isolated range of the Tagoung-toung-daw, about twenty miles long and one thousand feet high, runs almost parallel to the river, in its intervening valley six miles wide. The Irawady is here studded with large islands, covered with long grass and forest trees; during the rains they are submerged, and become very dangerous to descending boats. A serpentine course, following a broad deep channel to the east of the large island of Chowkyoung, brought us to the town of Thigyain on the right bank, opposite to the village of Myadoung on the left. This latter gives its name to the district south of Bhamô. Here we were startled by the news that the Woon of Bhamô, to whom we were accredited, had been killed during a riot at Momeit, about thirty-six miles south-east of Myadoung. The Woon had proceeded thither with a force of three hundred men to collect taxes, when the Shans and Kkahyens broke out into revolt and surrounded the royal troops, many of whom, with their leader, had been killed. It was impossible not to feel a presentiment that this untoward event would prove a source of delay, by compelling us to deal with subordinates who would be timid, even if well disposed to assist. We passed, hidden by an island, the mouth of the Shuaylee, three miles above Myadoung, and halted at Katha, on the right bank, the largest place met with since Shienpagah. It is a long town, containing at least two hundred well-built timber houses, disposed in two parallel streets, and surrounded by bamboo palisades with three gates. It is the head-quarters of the woon of a considerable district, inhabited by Shan-Burmese. Long hollows of rich alluvium cultivated for rice, and closed in by undulating land covered with valuable forest trees, including teak, separate the town from the western hills. Some cotton is grown and tobacco largely raised on the islands and sandbanks. At the time of our visit, a number of Shan merchants had arrived with salted tea-leaves and other commodities. A few Yunnan Chinese, who had probably come down the Shuaylee, were also in the town. The people seemed well-clad and well-to-do, and the women were busily employed in weaving and preparing coloured cotton yarns for the manufacture of putzos and tameins.
A dense morning fog delayed our departure from Katha, and the whole population of the town swarmed on board the steamer. After satisfying their curiosity with the novelties of machinery, &c., we bethought ourselves of amusing them with a magnetic battery. At first all held back, but a few more venturous spirits leading the way, the operators were speedily besieged by eager candidates for a shock. The grimaces of each patient produced shouts of laughter. The good-humoured Shans discovered or fancied that the shock was good for would-be parents; some coaxed their timid wives to the front, while the matrons brought up their pretty young daughters to obtain a share of the benefits going. Above Katha the river is broken up by large islands into tortuous, deep, and narrow channels. Large flocks of geese kept passing us for nearly an hour, and the sandbanks and shores of the islands were covered with varieties of wild ducks. As evening closed in, at Shuaygoo-myo, immense flocks of Herodias garzetta, or the little egret, were seen roosting in the tall grass and on the high trees, which seemed illuminated by their white forms.
In this neighbourhood we saw several villages deserted for fear of the Kakhyens, who had occupied some of the abandoned houses.
Two of our party set out to visit and make their first acquaintance with those wild highlanders, who reminded them of the East Karens; they were civil, but declined an invitation to the steamer, pleading that they must rejoin their chief, but really fearing reprisals from the Burmese. Of their kidnapping habits, several proofs were given, one being in the person of a boy of Chinese extraction, who had been sold by them to the village headman for twenty-five rupees. At our departure in the morning, young women and boys raced along the river-side, keeping up with us, to secure protection from the hillmen on the way to their villages. We were also informed that the priests’ pupils who collected food from village to village were obliged to creep along under the high banks to escape the kidnappers. Subsequent experience has shown that the villagers on the eastern shore, as far as Bhamô, are in the habit of sleeping in boats moored in the river; only thus can they be secure from the nocturnal raids of their dangerous neighbours.
Leaving Shuaygoo-myo, we passed the large island of Shuaybaw, with its thousand pagodas, their bright golden htees strikingly contrasting with the rich green massive foliage, above which they rose. The great pagoda is about sixty feet high, enclosed on two sides by a richly carved zayat of teak with an elaborately decorated roof, and a cornice of small niches, containing seated marble Buddhas. Two broad paved ways, one known as the Shuaygoo-myo and the other as the Bhamô entrance, approach the pagoda, which is three quarters of a mile distant from the river. Numerous zayats cluster round the central shrine, piled to the ceiling with Buddhistic figures in metal, wood, and white marble, offered by the worshippers who yearly throng this holy place sanctified by the footprint of Gaudama.
Three miles above the island is the entrance to the second defile, where the Irawady flows through a magnificent gorge piercing a range of hills at right angles. For five miles the deep dark green current, narrowed to three hundred yards, but deepening to one hundred and eighty feet and more, is overhung by gigantic precipices. Their summits are mostly covered with scanty stunted trees, but some rise bare, with splintery peaks, and red, rocky escarpments; lower down their bold sides are mantled in dark green forest, picked out here and there with the fresher green of festooned clumps of bamboos, palms, and luxuriant musæ. Little fishing-villages enclosed in bamboo palisades lie snugly in the hollows. Entering the defile, we rounded a many-peaked hill on the left bank, which rose precipitously four hundred feet, its outline broken by huge black rocks standing out against the blue sky. The little white pagoda of Yethaycoo, in front of a cave, and dominating a grey limestone precipice one hundred and fifty feet in height, looked across the gorge to a phoongyee’s house perched on high, and accessible only by bamboo ladders. The most striking feature was the great limestone precipice which rose like a gigantic wall eight hundred feet from the water’s edge. This is the Deva-faced cliff celebrated in the mythical history of Tsampenago. At its base the little pagoda of Sessoungan was perched on a detached pyramid of limestone embowered in fine trees. During the March festival many devotees scale the long bamboo ladders which form the only access to the shrine. The Buddhist love for preserving animal life is here manifested towards the large monkeys (Macacus assamensis, M’Lelland), which, like the tame fish, come when called, and devour the offerings of the devotees. Projecting and depending from the precipice were huge masses of stalagmite formation, seemingly liable to fall at any moment. Water was dripping over them, and the natives say that during the rains the water pours over the face of the precipice in a tremendous cascade, the roar of which is deafening. It may well be so, for the echoes in the defile are most wonderful, echoing and re-echoing in almost harmonious reverberations. In the earliest morning the loud shouting of the hoolock monkeys in the forest made the whole air resonant, as it was taken up by another troop on the opposite bank, and echoed along the hills and from cliff to cliff in a constant wave of sound, curiously blended with which rang the shrill crowing of jungle cocks. As the sun rose higher, a deep bass was supplied by the hum of innumerable bees, whose pendant nests thickly studded the rocky projections of the precipice. At the next turn of the river another pagoda, with a handsome many-roofed zayat by its side, high on the western hills, marked the northern entrance of the defile, and we soon passed the ancient mart of Kaungtoung, celebrated for the repulse of the Chinese invading army in 1769, and the treaty which thenceforward secured peace and commerce between Burma and China. Subsequently it became a rival of Bhamô as an emporium of Chinese trade by the valley of the Shuaylee and the Muangmow route. The river now spread itself into a broad stream, broken up by islands and sandbanks, but in some places not less than a mile and half wide between the main banks. In front of the village of Sawady a long stretch of sand was occupied by a large encampment of Shan, Chinese, and other traders, a large fleet of boats lying ready to convey the goods down the river.
THE DEVA-FACED CLIFF, SECOND DEFILE OF THE IRAWADY.
Here we sighted Bhamô in the distance, situated on an elevated bank overlooking the river, the htees of its few pagodas glistening brightly in the setting sun. To the right the high range of the Kakhyen hills was seen stretching away in an unbroken line to the east-north-east, and on the left a low range of undulating tree-clad hills bent round to join the western heights of the defile.