moved up and down just like that. We had to
plunge through a lot of very marshy ground before we got to it, and
sometimes we lost sight of it altogether; but it came again, and then it
went out for good. We arrived at a high thorny hedge and I shouted, and
then there was such a noise you would have thought the world was coming
to an end,--dogs barking, cocks crowing, people chattering, and at last
a man with a lantern crept out from the hedge--it must have been his
light we had seen--and he was followed by heaps of others, all Burmans,
and they waved the light about; and when they saw who we were, and that
we were alone, they were very kind and took us in through an opening in
the hedge, and kicked the dogs away. We couldn't see much inside, for
the moon wasn't up then, but they led us to a house, and made us go up a
ladder on to a verandah and into a nice wooden room, where there was a
civilised oil lamp on a bracket, and several women and children sitting
and lying about on mats on the floor.

Joyce looked at me and I at her and we both knew what sights we were,
all scratched and torn and muddy. Her dress had been white when we
started, but you could hardly tell that now. I don't know how she felt,
but I was glad to drop down on to a mat they gave us. We tried to
explain who we were, but no one understood any English. Then they
brought us some water from a great jar in the corner; they handed it to
us in half a coco-nut, but it smelt so that we couldn't touch it, though
we were awfully thirsty. So one of the men who had followed us in took
up a round green thing with a smooth shell outside (I never knew
coco-nuts looked like that before), and with his great knife made four
cuts across the top in a neat square, and took out the piece as if it
were a lid, and offered us the nut, making signs we were to drink it.
Joyce tried first and nodded with pleasure. "It's good," she said, and
it was! A sort of sickly sweet stuff came out like sugary water, and
when you drank a lot of it it made you feel very full inside suddenly.
When I read about coco-nut milk in _Swiss Family Robinson_ I always
thought it was really like milk.

Then they opened a great tubful of cooked rice and put some on two
plates and gave it to us, and they put beside us two little bowls filled
with smashed-up sardines, at least I thought it was that, but oh----You
would have known it was there a mile off! I would have stood it, because
I didn't want to hur