84 CEREALS 



i 



driblets of India's greatest product were beginning to 

 move, carried in baskets by countless Burmans and 

 immigrant Indians, or by legions of bullocks in 

 picturesque carts lined with matting to contain the grain 

 in bulk. By creek and ditch and backwater moved 

 thousands of boats of every size and shape, and their 

 sails could be seen flitting deliriously through fields and 

 by bamboo clumps and groves of hardwood. As the 

 streams and waterways spread out, the craft seemed to 

 multiply and spawn upon their surface until, in the great 

 canals by which they reached the Rangoon River, they 

 created such a spectacle of progression in a state of 

 deadlock as only the East can present. The spate of 

 grain submerges the railways, submerges Rangoon and 

 Moulmein and Bassein and Akyab, and chokes the mills 

 and rears great billows of golden grain on every vacant 

 space, and then pours out across the sea in scores of 

 ships, feeding the further East and swamping the markets 

 of Europe. 



And in everything that the Burman does he is a person 

 by himself. A most untimely rainfall set in during the 

 rice harvest of 1912. Early one morning I saw a Burman 

 perched precariously on the slope of a great hill of sodden 

 sheaves which he was trying to save. Anyone but a 

 Burman would have taken his clothes off to a job of that 

 kind, especially as it was pouring cats and dogs. But 

 the Burman was clothed in variegated silks, and with his 

 right hand he held an umbrella over his head, while with 

 his left he threw one little sheaf after another up into 

 shelter. 



India supplies about 68 per cent, of the Western 

 world's imported rice. Burma supplies about 63^ per 

 cent, of it. Burma also sends some 837,000 tons of rice 

 to India proper, so that her whole shipments amount to 

 something like 2,250,000 tons. 



The respective systems on which rice and wheat are 

 usually bought from the cultivator for export differ a 

 good deal. Whether there would have been roads in 

 Lower Burma and the Delta if there had been fewer 

 waterways it is impossible to say. Certain it is that 

 roads are almost non-existent, and that, but for the large 



