474 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol. IX. 



steady my trembling hands and the old single-barrel Brown-bess 

 I had borrowed on the rock in front of me, and at last pulled the 

 heavy trigger. With what a bang it went off and what a kick it 

 gave me on the nose and cheek, for I had forgotten to press the 

 butt tight to my shoulder. It did not matter though, for one of the 

 two curlews I had fired at lay dead, and though my nose did 

 bleed and my face was swollen and lopsided for a couple 

 of days after, what did I care ; I had got my bird. I re- 

 member too that I skinned and stuffed that curlew, and a 

 woeful bedraggled likeness of the original it presented when stuck up 

 with wires on a wooden stand, but it was my first specimen ! How- 

 ever to return to the Limestone rocks. I was crouched behind a 

 fallen boulder at the foot of a hill and the marsh lay at my feet. 

 Behind me the rocks, in scarped walls and rugged ridges, rose tier 

 above tier, steep and utterly inaccessible, except by the one path 

 pointed out to me by the Karen guide the day before. I had started 

 long before dawn from the zayat or rest-house by the riverside to get 

 to the foot of the limestone hill which I intended to climb, but it being 

 still dark when I arrived, and the old Karen guide saying it would 

 be dangerous to attempt the ascent before daylight, I sat down on a 

 fallen rock at the foot of the hill and listened to the sounds of birdlife 

 on the marsh, the waters of which swept up to the rocks on one side. 



These limestone hills are, I believe, peculiar to Burma. Geologists 

 say they are of the same age as the carboniferous limestone of Europe, 

 but very few fossils have been found though the hills abound in caves, 

 which one would think should be rich in the remains of animals if 

 not of prehistoric man ; but the fact is, judging from the appearance 

 presented by the coast-line from Moulmain to Mergui to-day, with its 

 numerous rocky islands rising there from the sea, these steep lime- 

 stone hills, now comparatively far inland, were no doubt once 

 surrounded by the sea, whose waves incessantly sweeping through 

 their caves and crannies sufficiently accounts for the paucity of fossil 

 remains to be found in them now. The most marked feature of these 

 rocks is that they occur in solitary masses, rising abruptly with 

 scarped sides out of the alluvial plains in the valleys of the Salween, 

 the Gyne, the Ataran, and other rivers in Tenasserim. Their preci- 

 pitous pinnacles worn to needle points and knife-like ridges, are the 



