INTRODUCTION, 111 



THE NATURAL FORTRESS OF DONGYANG. 



On looking abroad from the pagoda hills of Maulmain, an 

 unbroken range of primitive mountains, four or five thousand 

 feet high, are seen on the margin of the eastern horizon, sweep- 

 ing around to ihe north west like an amphitheatre, where they 

 are lost in the misty distance. From Martaban Point another 

 range extends directly north, parallel with the west bank of 

 the Salwen. In the space between these mountains, bounded 

 by the Salwen river on the west, and the Gyaing on the south 

 and east, is an immense alluvial plain, resembling the prairie- 

 lands of Illinois and Missouri. In the midst of this plain, 

 twenty miles north of Maulmain, and six or eight east of the 

 Salwen, the attention of the spectator is arrested by a pile of 

 the most picturesque mountain limestone that ever adorned a 

 landscape. Rising abruptly, in the most fantastic shapes, from 

 the level of tide-water to nodding precipices two thousand feet 

 high at a single leap, they seem to shake their hoary-lichen 

 faces and fern-fringed foreheads at the passing traveller, and 

 threaten him with instant destruction. The whole range is not 

 more than eight miles long, and at twenty miles distance its 

 numerous grotesque peaks give it no very dissimilar resem- 

 blance to a Gothic cathedral ; and the illusion is made the 

 more real by the spire of a small white pagoda being distin- 

 guished with some difficulty in the distance, on the very top- 

 most summit of the highest point of the range, and on the mar- 

 gin of an abrupt precipice. 



On a near approach the range loses the continuous appear- 

 ance which it possesses in the distance, and assumes an undu- 

 lating aspect, like the waves of an angry ocean. A precipice, 

 near two thousand feet high on the north west extremity, sinks 

 to the south east to within a short distance from the ground, 

 then rises abruptly again to nearly its former height, present- 

 ing an unbroken precipitous front for three or four miles. 

 In one place the precipice is not more than five or six hundred 

 feet high, and at this spot a cool crystal stream, several yards 

 wide, and two or .three feet deep, gushes out of a purple grot at 

 the base A writer in the Maulmain Chronicle, describing this 

 stream several years ago, remarked, M It was in the hottest part of 

 the y«ar that I went to the spot, accompanied by several Karen* 



