FORESTERS’ LIFE IN BURMA 197 
promptitude which alone would command success, 
with the immense areas affected by seed years, more 
especially as Nature gives only a few months’, or 
even weeks’, warning of what is about to happen. 
The small patches of tree-growth resulting from 
experiments made in this direction show what might 
be done, but they also prove the very narrow limits 
of our powers in this direction. And yet the forests 
of Burma might, according to the report of an ex- 
pert especially deputed for the inquiry, yield the 
best quality paper-pulp manufactured from bamboo 
at a remunerative cost. The amount of raw material 
available is, of course, enormous; and were this 
industry started, it would perhaps be the only 
instance on record when the demand for pulp in- 
sured the improvement of the forest, and not its 
destruction. 
In May, 1902, we had the interesting experience 
of a great cyclone that blew for three days, wrecked 
several good ships, and caused considerable damage 
in the city by injury to buildings and by uprooting 
hundreds of avenue trees. The details that were 
impressed on the memory are trivial, in view of the 
widespread disaster. They are of the windows of 
the house being blown in with a loud report, and of 
the rooms being simultaneously flooded with water ; 
of sheet-iron roofing skidding down the gale, threaten- 
ing death to all it encountered; of attempting to 
reach office in a carriage that was ignominiously 
pinned against a wall by the wind; and, lastly, of 
the breaking of the boom confining several thousand 
logs in the Bombay-Burma Corporation’s timber 
depot, and of their sudden appearance in the Ran- 
