ooks violet in the fading light.

At dinner, yarns on the fore-deck, big beetles humming out of the night
against our lamp, and the Captain telling us deep-sea yarns--how he
signed articles as a cabin boy, and of the times before the annexation
of Upper Burmah, when the white man skipper was of necessity something
of a diplomatist and a soldier. Some sailors can't spin yarns, but those
who can--how well they do it!

As we were at coffee there was a gurgling and groaning came from the
people aft, so we took our cigars, and went to see the row, and order
restored. There was a little crowd struggling and rolling in a ball, and
it turned out there was a long Sikh in the middle of it in grips with a
diminutive Chinaman, who might have been a wizened little old woman from
his appearance. It was the big Sikh who had done the horrible gurgling;
the silly ass had joined in with several Chinese, professional gamblers,
and of course lost, and unlike a Burman or a Chinaman, the native of
India can't lose stolidly. He vowed he'd been set on from behind, and
had been robbed of fifty-four rupees. The Captain assessed probable loss
at two rupees, and the first officer took him down the companion to the
lower deck, the Sikh standing two feet higher than the little Scot.
Later, the long black man went hunting the shrimp of a Chinaman round
the native part of the ship, and caught him again and asked the Captain
for justice, and looked at me as he spoke, which made me uncomfortable,
for I could not understand, but guessed he expected the Sahib to stick
up for a Sikh against any damn Chinee. I would have liked to photograph
the two--they were such a contrast as they sat on their heels beside
each other, the wizened little expressionless, beady-eyed Chinaman with
his thread of a pigtail, and his arm in the grasp of the long Sikh, with
black beard and long hair wound untidily round his head.

[Illustration]

22nd January.--Another very distinctive charm about this river is that
the two sides are generally quite different in character. On one side
this morning, the sun is rising over a wilderness of level sandbank,
buff-coloured against the sun, over this there is a low range of
distant mountains, with Popa by itself, lonely and pink; and looking out
on the other side from our cabin window we find we are steaming close
under steep, sunny banks, overhung with luxuriant foliage.

Where there is a break in the bank we look up sandy corries th