te, climbing up for a thousand feet, a hundred
yards on the level, twisting round corries--such fascinating corries,
stuffed with every sort of tropic growth, like the pictures one saw in
stories of Jules Verne, but in such rich varied colouring! I vow I saw
creepers of two hundred feet, wild plantains with fruit, and great
ferns, heavy-leaved dark foliage and feathery bamboos, the leaves yellow
and dropping and covering our path with a crisp brown carpet.

[Illustration]

We rode generally in single file, our right sides against rocks or
cuttings in the yellow earth bank, and every here and there were views
through the foliage, sometimes almost straight down below us a thousand
feet, where we could catch a glimpse of foaming river and hear its roar
coming up to us.

[Illustration]

The sowars cut branches for us to hold over our shoulders to keep the
heat of the afternoon sun off neck and back--Birnam woods _a deux_, and
Nampoung fort instead of Macbeth's castle.

Nampoung--the edge of the Empire!--We are now well into the Kachin
Highlands, 6000 to 7000 feet above the sea, and the air is delicious.
The last part of our ride here was very steep. G. and her pony were only
just able to scrape up together. I and the sepoys had to walk. Almost in
the steepest part some sixty Chinese mules and ponies came down, and we
pulled aside at a bit of the path where two could barely pass. It was a
cheery sight, the long line of ponies and the blue coats and mushroom
hats, jogging, slipping, and jangling down the zigzag path, with an
occasional cheery shout to the beasts as they disappeared round
corners, appeared again, and finally showed a mile below, when only the
sound of their bells came up to us faintly from the tropic woods in the
bottom of the Nampoung Valley.

I am not sure that having reached a point within pistol-shot of the back
of China fills one with any enormous sense of accomplished endeavour.
What strikes me mildly is the feeling of being at the present extremity
of British possessions, and we speculate where the March may be in years
to come--East or West? The tiny little frontier fort we have arrived at
is on a saddle-back hill, and overlooks the angle of China between two
valleys, that of the Taiping and its tributary, the Nampoung. As we
passed through the wire entanglements on the summit, after our climb up,
the Indian sentinel facing China across the glen struck me as being
rather a suggestive figure, so