Burmah has almost unprecedented natural wealth. Minerals, woods, marbles, and gems are in Burmah in seemingly inexhaustible stores. Useful vegetation springs in spontaneous plenty from the pregnant soil. Nature does almost everything for the Burmans, and yet, Orientals though they are, they are exceptionally industrious. The palmyra tree leaf gives them paper. Butter, sugar, and flour, or their substitutes, grow on trees. Game, fish, fruit, and vegetables are most abundant. And yet they work—the men and women of Burmah—work with a will and to a right good purpose.
The marvellous pagodas, that are the artificial glory of the Burmese landscape, represent all that is best in Burmese art, all that is most persistent in Burmese industry. They are indescribably beautiful, with their huge, graceful, jewelled peaks and their lace-like, golden carvings. Lepers swarm at their gates. Heavy, pungent flowers are scattered before their thresholds, and often beneath their shadows lie the full cemeteries of the Europeans. They dot the Burmese landscape like huge jewels—do these matchless pagodas, and their sweet, swinging bells and singing gongs break the Burmese silence with clear, tinkling music.
Except the “monkey-slipping-tree,” almost every tree in Burmah is festooned with a creeper,—such wondrous creepers! About the tree trunks glide snakes, pythons, lizards, chameleons, scorpions, and deadly centipedes. In the river wallow gruesome alligators.
KING THEEBAW’S STATE BARGE. Page 80.
King Theebaw is no longer in Burmah; but Burmah is foul with his memory, and the more odious memory of his chief queen, Soo-pyah-lat.
Theebaw came of a race in which insanity had found many a victim. The kindest thing that can be said of his reign is that it was the reign of a madman. But for Queen Soo-pyah-lat there is no such possible excuse; her brain was as clear as her heart was bad.
Theebaw was married to three wives; they were sisters, and were named Soo-pyah-gyee, Soo-pyah-lat, Soo-pyah-galay; but Soo-pyah-lat was the real queen, the chief queen, and she ruled her two sisters as well as Theebaw’s concubines, or “under wives.”
Opium, wine, and liquors were forbidden to the king’s subjects, but not to the king. His potations were so deep that they will be remembered when he is forgotten.