66 NOTES ON THE SIAMESE PROVINCES OF KOOWI, &C 



1879) — was practically negative, but the religious purposes 

 to which these caves are put deters one from actively pursu- 

 ing operations. 



These limestone hills and caves seem fairly well distributed 

 along either coast of the Peninsula — seldom I believe rising 

 many hundred feet above sea level. On the West coast 

 away as far North as Moulmein, one finds similar hills with 

 famous caves — also used as temples ; in the Lenya valley 

 again there are said to be some remarkable specimens, and 

 there are others in Selangor, Kedah and Pahang, besides 

 in many of the islands lying along that coast. In the four 

 Siamese provinces they are common, and at Pateeo a group 

 of these limestone hills rises from the sea like a great set of 

 decapitated sugar cones, while away much further North 

 beyond these provinces, at Petcheburee, there is a famous 

 cave containing a gigantic wooden image of Bhudda. Among 

 the islands and shores along the Eastern side of the Gulf of 

 Siam one comes across them, while they abound in North 

 Borneo. 



The Rising of the Land. 



Assuming then that these caves are the result of sea-action, 

 as in all probability they are, and seeing that some of them are 

 now high and dry some hundred feet or more, we may con- 

 clude that the land has at any rate risen that amount in recent 

 times. A writer in this Journal for 1879, discussing those 

 limestone hills and caves in North Borneo, concludes that 

 that part of the island had risen about 500 feet in recent 

 times, and before I saw that article I had concluded that at 

 any rate the land in these four provinces lying three hundred 

 feet above the sea level had emerged from the water in a re- 

 cent era. Mason, in his work on Burma, gives it as his belief 

 that the Burmese coast is rising, and states that the land on 

 the other side of the Bay of Bengal is sinking. Probably the 

 whole great tract of country — almost the whole of the Indo- 

 China Peninsula — over which this limestone formation oc- 

 curs is rising ; at any rate that small part of which I write, I 

 believe to be in course of elevation. In the great flat plain, 



