Back to Burma 247 
crossed the river. It was an hour after dark when I 
eventually rode into Nantien, the usual stage, fully 
expecting to find Kin standing at the inn door waiting 
for me with the plaintive remark that hot water and 
supper were ready, and my bed made; it was therefore 
rather distressing to find nothing at all, neither men nor 
mules. 
There would have been no great hardship in this, for 
I could speak Chinese with sufficient fluency to get all 
I wanted, or if not, to take it, and I was thoroughly har- 
dened to Chinese food and the casual ward for the night. 
But unfortunately, as already stated, I had gratuitously 
crossed the river by the bridge, and in order to reach 
Nantien found it necessary to recross it some miles lower 
down where there was no bridge, but only such fords as 
heaven vouchsafed. Consequently I was both wet and 
cold, and the disagreeable prospect of having to sleep in 
my wet clothes did not appeal to me at all. 
One needs to wade and swim a pony across a deep and 
swiftly flowing river to get an idea of its possibilities for 
raising a conflict of emotions. Beauty after some pre- 
liminary hesitation having ventured in, my own sensation 
was one of complete bewilderment for several minutes, 
and I found it quite impossible, once the water was up to 
the pony’s middle, to resolve the different motions. The 
water was spinning past in one direction, Beauty was 
struggling diagonally across in another, and at the same 
time being washed down stream, and the net result was that 
my head whirled round till I lost my bearings completely 
and nearly fell out of the saddle. Though already some 
distance below the landing place for which I had originally 
headed him, Beauty still kept his feet, and we were scarcely 
ten yards from the bank when he suddenly went down with 
a plopping splash; we had floundered into a deep channel 
and he was swimming. 
My first conscious impulse was emphatically to jump off, 
but happily some higher instinct, bred perhaps of familiarity 
with similar situations, declared itself, and I found myself 
gripping the saddle more tightly than before. The bank 
was high, and Beauty, though he had but a few yards 
to swim, was being washed down stream at a great pace. 
