4 The Call of the Red Gods 
cantered slowly down the long white road that leads to 
China. 
The initial stage out of Bhamo is only nine miles, 
and it was undoubtedly this fact alone which caused me 
to feel extraordinarily lonely on the first evening of my 
journey. Arriving very early in the afternoon there was 
of course nothing to do but to take out a gun and look 
round for game, but, do what I would, there was no getting 
away from the sense of utter desolation which seemed to 
crush me. Even the mild excitement of putting up a 
barking deer amongst the reeds of the river failed to 
alleviate the depression and after dinner I was only too 
glad to crawl into bed and, weary in spirit, court oblivion 
in sleep. Never again did the sense of paralyzing isolation 
come so vividly upon me as on that first night, when all 
the trials that awaited me seemed to take shape and rise in 
arms to mock my ignorance and feebleness. 
The scenery as the plains of the Irrawaddy valley are 
left behind and the road gradually ascends the mountain 
side to traverse the gorge of the Taping river, grows more 
and more picturesque, and the booming of the torrent, soon 
a thousand feet below us, alternately dies away and swells 
up louder and louder as the road sweeps round the gullies. 
Finally we catch a glimpse of it foaming over the rocks, 
and then it quickly dies out of sight and sound once more, 
till only the tinkle of our gongs echoes through the 
slumbering forest. The mules, with the natural cussedness 
of the breed, trudge stubbornly along on the extreme edge 
of the precipice, though the road is, as a matter of fact, 
respectably broad here. It takes a little time to get accus- 
tomed to the idea of riding along with one leg hanging 
over the edge of a precipice, whence a sheer drop would 
land one on the tree-tops hundreds of feet below. ; 
On the fourth day we crossed the bridge which marks 
the frontier between two Empires. To us in our little 
island, a frontier sounds a more or less nebulous quantity, 
something drawn rather whimsically on maps, and a chronic 
source of petty international jealousies as difficult to de- 
fine as the boundary line which gives rise to them. But 
this elusive idea becomes almost a physical reality when 
one crosses the frontier of a British possession overseas, 
