IN THE EAST INDIES. 99 
bothered us a good deal. When we found that we had 
to wait for the next steamer anyway and, as Rangoon 
is rather damp and hot, we decided to go to the Shan 
mountains and see the wonderful Gokteik gorge. We 
made a three day trip there and put up in a very 
comfortable Dak bungalow there, our servant cook- 
ing and buying our food in the small bazar of a Shan 
village not far away. 
* *% * * * * 
The Irrawaddy is a fine river, twelve hundred 
miles long, but now, in the dry season, very shallow in 
many places. Our trip was most interesting, as our 
boat towed alongside great flats on which was a native 
bazar; to this all the peoples of the river bank came 
to do their trading for matches, cloth, ete. We made 
rather long stops ashore, so that we had plenty of time 
to see the native villages, which were very interesting. 
At Bhamo we saw hundreds of Chinamen with their 
caravan trains taking our cargo overland from Bhamo 
to the little known Chinese borderland. Here we also 
saw the Kachins, a very little known tribe of people, 
said to be cannibals, who live in extreme North Burma 
near the frontier. We secured some photographs of 
them, but they are not especially good, for the savages 
are shy and dishke being kodaked, as many other 
people do. They often had their sword slings deco- 
rated with tiger jaws, for the possession of which they 
had killed the owners. At Gokteik I went hunting for 
a day with a party of Shans, people who live near 
the Siamese frontier. They drove a bear or a leopard 
very close to me, but the jungle was so thick that I 
eould not catch a glimpse of it. I do not think it was 
twenty feet from me and I eould hear every move it 
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