GEOGEAPIIY OF THE TJPPEE MEKONG. 
545 
lengthen out, you could make any crew go right away from the others, 
to the huge surprise and delight of the whole gang, who seemed to 
imagine that rowing was an unknown art off the Mekong. 
Luang Prabang . — At Luang Prabang we are among a Lao people 
differing in many ways from those of Nan. They smoke opium a 
great deal and occasionally drink ; and though able authorities would 
say they should not be the worse for that, they are distinctly not the 
men the Laos on Nan are, either for grit and energy or purity and 
honesty. The guard I had with me were a set of the most useless, 
opium-smoking, good-for-nothings T ever bad the misfortune to see, 
and in Luang Prabang they found themselves quite at home, while in 
Nan they had been looked on with considerable contempt. 
I had heard so much of Luang Prabang — lt Muang Luang,” as 
they call it — that I was disappointed with it, its plain, its trade, and 
its people, and I should only care to return thither for one thing, and 
that to hear again the soft tones of the Jeans (or Mens ) drifting 
weirdly across the hot night air. The Iran is a hand reed organ, with 
small mouthpiece and air chamber and fourteen bamboo reeds. It is 
the sweetest -toned little imitation of the choir organ that ever piped. 
Every man in the place has one and loves it, and carries it every- 
where; and by the hour he will sit fingering out the quick march 
music or drawling the wail of a love song. 
Away to the east the French have now gotten to themselves a 
country of mountain and valley, more cut up than that of the Sibsong 
Pana, and it remains to be seen what they will find to do with it. 
Nobody knows much about it excepting Messrs. McCarthy and 
Smiles, of the* Siamese Survey, who have carried the triangulation 
right through it, and have been known to and lived for years among 
its peoples. 
Three large streams come into the Mekong on the left bank at 
this point — the Nam Go, Nam Sooung, and Nam Kan — and all are 
navigable for small dug-outs to the small, scattered villages among 
them. 
It is among the confused mountain masses above them that the 
Meos are in most force, and until last year that whole country was 
under Siam up to the watershed, on this side of which no Annamite — 
much less the Annamite influence one has heard talked of — was ever 
seen, both Lao and Annamite cordially hating one another, and giving 
each other a wide berth. 
As evidence of the influence of Siamese rule, I can only quote 
what I saw and heard ; aud it was certainly striking with what pro- 
found respect they spoke of the king and Bangkok, and a journey to 
Krung Tape, as they call the capital, in some capacity or other was 
looked on as a kind of finish to a man’s education, while they always 
spoke of their cousins, the Siamese. 
All this was when the work of the survey was in full swing. A 
popular and really energetic commissioner was stationed there, and no 
dream of coming changes was in the air, much less wished for. 
In the rains the small plain in which the town stands is a sea of 
water, and in the dry season is parched and hot as a furnace down 
there among its hills, the atmosphere laden with smoke from the 
Khache fires destroying whole miles of forest for their rice and cotton 
