98 Through the Lutzu Country to Men-kong 
Men-kong every day, and I soon learned the reason. I had 
arrived just too late to meet two Englishmen (afterwards 
identified as Captain Bailey and Mr Edgar, the English 
missionary at Batang). 
It was bitter luck to have missed them! How splendid 
if the three of us had been able to foregather there, and 
compare notes of our journeys which had only overlapped 
for the eight or ten miles from Chia-na! M. Bacot, who 
in the previous year had been, I believe, the first European 
other than the Catholic priests to visit Men-kong, was not 
there at all; the mistake as to who the mysterious European 
was in front of us arose from the fact that Captain Bailey 
and M. Bacot (who had been accompanied by my guide 
Gan-ton) possess the same Chinese name. 
From the military official I learned that India might be 
reached in three weeks, and that eight days journey to the 
west was the village of Chi-géng, where another Chinese 
post had been established, and only a day’s journey from 
Chi-géng was Rima, also Chinese. These places are of 
course within the basin of the Upper Irrawaddy, so that it 
will now be impossible to mark the limits of Upper Burma by 
means of a primary physical barrier such as the Irrawaddy 
watershed. One other feature of Men-kong I can only 
mention here. Mr Edgar, who had slept in the village, 
told me afterwards that he had seen there a number of 
slaves belonging to a dwarf tribe which he could not place 
amongst any known people. This is certainly a discovery 
of remarkable interest, and we may hope to hear something 
about these dwarfs from Mr Edgar himself before long. 
We returned to camp for supper after an interesting 
day’s sight-seeing, but I regretted that I could not start 
westwards in the wake of Captain Bailey who had, I was 
told, set out for India only two days previously. 
