CHAPTER XV 1t 
THE LAST OF THE MEKONG 
Tuis was the last we were destined to see of the great 
Mekong river. Between the chain suspension bridge on 
the high road across Yunnan (lat. 25° 15’) and Samba-dhuka 
in Tibet (lat. 29° 35’), a distance of perhaps five hundred 
miles as the river flows, we had followed it altogether for 
seventeen days’ journey, representing two hundred and fifty 
miles of road, and now we were about to take our final 
farewell. We were to turn westward from this point and 
cross the Mekong-Salween divide ex route for T‘eng-yueh. 
I was scarcely sorry to say good-bye, for the Mekong 
gorge—one long ugly rent between mountains which grow 
more and more arid, more and more savage as we travel 
northwards (yet hardly improve as we travel southwards)— 
is an abnormality, a grim freak of nature, a thing altogether 
out of place. 
Perhaps I had not been sufficiently ill-used by this 
extraordinary river to have a deep affection for it. The 
traveller, buffeted and bruised by storm and mountain, 
cherishes most the foe worthy of his steel. Nevertheless 
there was a strange fascination about its olive green water 
in winter, its boiling red floods in summer, and the ever- 
lasting thunder of its rapids. And its peaceful little villages, 
some of them hidden away in the dips between the hills, 
others straggling over sloping alluvial fans or perched up 
on some ancient river-terrace where scattered blocks of 
stone suggest the decay of a ruined civilisation—all these 
oases break the depressing monotony of naked rock and ill- 
nourished vegetation, delighting the eye with the beauty of 
their verdure and the richness of their crops. 
