of that aboriginal stock which peopled the mainland before the advent of the Htai. The main body of these aborigines drifted away under the pressure of the Htai to the south, there to develop into the Malay race. A fragment of them retreated to the shelter of the islands further down like Phuket island in Thailand ; others cut off from civilizing influences, they have made no progress, and too weak to face their adversaries, they have developed the nomadic life, the habit of few possessions, of flight at the sight of a stranger. If Myanmar would open the Myanmar Thailand border a little bit more it would be a ideal travel combination to tour the islands and after to move up to Thailand's Kanchanaburi province to enjoy the great nature around the huge reservoir.

The attrition of time and the cruelty of man have worn away the race to its present proportions. It has too long bowed down its head, too long ceased to make any effort after greater things to have any future before it. The Malay who is of kin will acknowledge no relationship, and in times that are past he has been its most cruel oppressor. Myanmar or Burma and Malaysia have a long time common golden Myanmar from the colonial area, very close was the relation between Myanmar islands and Penang island in Malaysia.

The fire of Islam, which has molten the Malay into a people, has never warmed the aboriginal Salon. A great gulf of time must therefore separate them and these islands must have known the Salon for far more than a thousand years. Also the
Phi Phi islands in neighboring Thailand have a big sea gypsies community, in Thailand they call them Moken.

Almost the first account of the archipelago, written by a European traveler, is that of Caesar Frederick the Venetian. It has all the charm and interest of early travel ; and is best told in the language of his time.

 " From the port of Pechinco," he says, " I went to Cochin, and from Cochin to Melacca, whence I departed for Pegu - Bago eight hundred miles distant, that voyage was to be made in twenty five or thirty days, but we were for months, and at the end of three months our Ship was without victual's. The Pilot told us that wee were by his altitude

from a city called Tenassiry -Tenasserim, a city in the Kingdom of  Pegu - Bago, -today its around Ranong- and these his words were not true, but we were (as it were) in the middle of many Islands, and many uninhabited rocks, and there were also some Portuguese that affirmed that they knew the land. I say being amongst these rocks, and from the land which is over against Tenassary - Tenasserim, with great scarcities of victual's, and that by the saying of the pylate and two Portugal's holding them firm that we were in front of the aforesaid harbor, we determined to go thither with

" For we had overshot the harbor and left it behind us, in such wise that we had lost the land, inhabited with the ship, and we twenty eight men had no manner of victual with us in the boat, but it was the Lords will that one of the Mariners had brought a little Rice with him in the boat to barter away for some other thing, and it was not so much but three or four men would have eaten it at a meal : I took the government of this Rice promising by the help of God that

 Rice should be nourishment for us until it pleased God to send us to some place that was inhabited, and when I slept I put the rice into my bosom because they should not rob it from me : We were nine days rowing along the coast, without finding anything but countries uninhabited, and deserts Island, where if we had found but grass it would have seemed Sugar unto us, but wee could not find any, yet wee found a few leaves of a tree, and they were so hard that we could not chew them.

The king dispatched against the pirates a fleet of " five Foists, four Galliots, and one Gally Royal," under the command .of a Turkish adventurer, named Heredrin Mahomet ; and " Within these vessels he inbarqued eight hundred Mahometans, men of combat (besides the Mariners) amongst the which were three hundred Janizaries, as for the rest they were Turks, Greeks, Malabars, Achems, and Mogores, all choyce men, and so disciplined that their captain held the victory already for most assured The Portuguese were nevertheless victorious. The dog Heredrin Mahomet was slain amongst the rest, and in this great action God was so gracious to our men, and gave them their victory at so cheap a rate that they had but one young man killed, and nine Portugal’s hurt."

In later days Ilha Grande, now known as King's Island, was bestowed on the French by the King of Siam or Thailand, and might have become, with its ample bay, an important settlement. But it was never used, except in later days by French ships of war, during the wars between England and France, as a place from which to attack and capture British merchant vessels ; and as a place of refuge, when British ships of war were abroad.

Almost the first English attempt to navigate the islands and prepare a chart of the archipelago was made by Captain Forrest, whose journal of the Esther brig, from Bengal to Quedah, narrates how, in 1783, he was driven amongst the islands by the monsoon winds, and gave to many of them names (which they still bear) " in remembrance of Friends whom I Honor and Respect," and others " according to striking appearances and figures."

The ardent Helfer spent a whole winter here in 1838-9, shortly before his death from an Andamanese arrow. Since then many persons have visited the islands, and more than one effort has been made to reclaim the Salon to Christianity and civilization.

But little has been done towards the complete exploration of the archipelago. Its islands range from bare rocks to rich territories like those of Kisseraing and King's susceptible of the finest cultivation. Their fauna include elephants, rhinoceroses, and tigers, and the whale may often be seen plunging amidst the calm of their interior seas.

- On Our Way to the Islands.

The launch, with loud heart beating, drives a pathway through the narrow strait. Turning our backs upon Mergui, now hidden behind Patit, we reach a space of green sun-touched water, with low mangrove swamps upon our larboard bows. Upon our starboard the mountains of King's Island, cloven to a third of their height by dark lines of swamp forest, reach into the heart of the swooning clouds. We are steering south by west for the island country, and the most notable object in view is the pyramid of Merghi Island, sixteen hundred feet above the sea. Nearer, several others lie in our way, outlined in solid forms against the misty blue of their lofty companion. Away under the opal sky, there is a narrow mirror-like calm, which makes the islands in its compass seem unreal ; mere phantoms of the vision suspended between earth and heaven. In striking contrast, the sailing-boats of the coast fishers are cut in black patterns against the
clouds.

No two consecutive moments present the same spectacle. The clouds over the Myanmar islands of the Andaman Sea melt from one ecstasy of beauty into another ; the sea, played upon by the wind, is one instant billowy and placid as oil, another crimped with laughter, a third a meadow of diamonds in the sudden sun ; and the brave launch, leaping forward, overcomes space, so that the dreamiest island becomes a reality, the most palpable one of woods and precipices a dream. The sailing-junks, with their double diamonds of black sail suspended above their small hulls, fill the eye with the spectacle of their grace ; saying that man has never invented anything more in harmony with nature than a sail.

The junks driven by the wind, come up in a great flight, with the swell of a bevy of portly matrons, all ribbons and bosom ; the

wrecker, very surly and dirty, overtakes us to starboard, flinging silver from his bows ; and in the offing there is the first Salon boat moving to the impulse of a small white sail.

The wrecker looks evil enough for any trade, and as he leaves us behind him in spite of all our pace, is like a big cur in a run after Jack, outpacing some gallant little panting fox-terrier, all heart and pluck, but too short dear fellow, in his legs to keep ahead. No matter ; we will come in yet.

The Salon here is eloquent of the irony which relegates this country of beautiful

Myanmar islands of the Andaman Sea to an abject and dying race. Their rich luxuriance is beyond belief. They look as if they were forests sprung from the bottom of the sea. There is scarcely an inch of them that does not teem with life. There are islands of such length and altitude that they might be portions of a continent, and others, happily, that are palpable islands, with the sea in a ring all round them, waiting for you or me to go along and give them a name. And out of the misty void each moment, new islands are born like stars on a summer night.

As the afternoon grows we steer for a silver strait, all molten and a-fire, between blue Myanmar islands of the Andaman Sea portals. And passing through them we come up a wide sea, Ross and Elphinstone in long mountains on the west, Burnett behind us, and Merghi Islands hard on our left ; dark blue, with a lane of sea between and faint purple ridges beyond. It is a lane that invites one to enter. On Cantor, a brief way ahead, with single palms in outline on its crest, there is a settlement of Salon, learning, or trying to learn, the hard alphabet of civilization.

As the afternoon wanes and earth moves up against the sun, the Myanmar islands that have been every color all day, from tropic green to misty northern blue, turn to their proper purple. In the cast a curtain of velvet rain blots out the main of bay and peak and cove ; but elsewhere each island stands out distinct and clear in its own serene personality. Nearest to us now and happily appropriate to the season of our voyage are the Christmas Islands. The sea is billowy, undulating, tumultuous almost. In a bigger ship it's swell would pass unnoticed, but our Marguerite is a small craft. We are steering for the criddles in twenty fathoms of water, but the gunner has his eyes on a sunken rock. Soon we shall turn away to the south to anchor for the night in the bay of the Amboyna disaster. The white clouds above the rain purple of Morrison's Bay catch the lessening light and fling it down upon the sea, which straight'way becomes all silver as though the moon were up. Between Court and criddles there is nothing but the monsoon sea.

And so we come upon the glory of the closing day. The sun's golden light, stealing out from under clouds, sends a long stream of fire down the sea, fills with lightning a diadem of cloud that sits upon the brows of the Mew Stone, and swiftly turns that island, purple a moment earlier, into such a haze of supernatural flame as our eyes dare not look upon. It is flame cut in flame, and no more an island.

In a little while the pageant is over. The great world swings up like a porpoise in the sea ; the sun's last arc of fire is swallowed in the void, and the Mew Stone, in the instant of its passing, becomes the darkest purple under the firmament. For a rose haze still lingers upon the fringes of the sea, and clouds in a great circle catch up and reflect the fragments of prismatic color into which the pure sunlight is now broken. The sky becomes a palette, the sea a pool of pink. And as the grey closes in, the patch last touched by the sun grows iridescent as a pearl, in waves upon waves of transient blending color.

Asked where the spirits of evil reside, my cheerful friend to-day, stretching forth his hands, replied : " Everywhere ; in the sea, in the air, in the forests, in the mountains ; sometimes behind one island," pointing vaguely to Eliza, " sometimes behind another," pointing to Jane. He spoke with conspicuous gaiety at the moment, but a mental weariness crept over his eyes as he answered my unfamiliar questions. He grew bored, and his fellow at the prow of their boat began to unfasten the cane that bound it to the launch. I hastily changed the subject, and with revived interest they came on board the launch, and looked into the engine-room and the cabin, making long-drawn clicking sounds expressive of a certain limited wonderment. The engine-room, they said, was hot, the sleeping-places very fine, and an inner room, only partially visible through a half-open door, filled them with a sense of mystery.The ship, they said, moved with a screw ; but they couldn't say what made it revolve. One man was full of cheeriness and curiosity now that he was released from the toils of theology, but the other was dull. Even in these early stages there arc marked differences between man and man. When I suggested that now they were bound to the launch, I would take them away with me, they showed a fine alarm, and the dull fellow again began rapidly to unfasten the cane that bound us together. They were as quickly reassured, and laughed at their own timidity. They could hazard no opinion at all of what the white man's country might be like.

Being gently led back to the way of cross-examination, they said that when any one died it was due to an evil spirit.

They stayed with the dying man to the last, and then laid him out on a platform of canes on piles, after which they went away and never came back.

All the people, they said, wept when any one died. Of time they had no conception beyond that involved in the succession of darkness and light, and the changing of the dry and wet seasons.

By these means, and before the night made seeing impossible, I caught a glimpse of what the sea-cunny had discovered ; a lake of copper green water set in an inferno of cliffs and precipices. A stone flung by him as he hung on to a knife-edge of rock blobbed with a dull sound in the still water. We came down after this and reached our boat, the sea-'cunny bleeding at his feet. We rowed, the sea-cunny loyal and con'temptuous of protest from the less keen Chittagonian, all in the dark, half-way round the island, on the chance of finding the exit of the waters. The island towered above us into the starry sky, and each time the blade of an oar ploughed the inky sea it flung off a cloud of phosphorus, that floated away like a jelly-fish on fire. We were all by now fallen under the dominion of the damon of the place. The sca'cunny had no longer any word to say. We rowed in silence. The truculence of nature obsessed us. And even now, as I sit and look out on the stars and the heaving sea, I cannot shake off the pervading horror of this place. We seem, and I am sure my companions think, that we have lighted upon the secret home of the Spirit of Evil.

They call it Elephant Island, but that is a name bestowed by a stranger from afar. There is nothing of the elephant about this place at close quarters. It is purely diabolical, and the whole is a palace of the devil'a cathedral of wickedness. Every time I look into the night and see its sinister pinnacles and revetments outlined against the stars, I am assailed by their awful suggestion. Even the wash of the sea, so pleasant at other times and in other places, is here of a sinister purport, like that within the cave, of some blind gross being of another world, into whose jaws life is drawn unresistingly without hope or power of escape. It comes, no doubt, of the eccentric action of water on limestone ; but the explanation counts for less than nothing here. Are not all impressions of nature illusions ' And now think of this infernal interior of the sea-lake we have found, of this dark cave under its colossal propylon, hidden away in the heart of this smiling archipelago. Who would suspect its existence if he were not told of it ' And if there be such things in one island of these seas, what may there not be hidden away amongst its thousand fellows ' Such arc the speculations that are filling our minds.

Victoria Point

for all primitive folk hate being cross-examined, sent forth volumes of amazement at hearing that for ten days the Malay went in and came not out. I imagined the wild scene within when these men are at work ; the roaring echoes that fill and resound in the dark vaulted cave finding no outlet, the glimmer of the dimmer torches, the daring climbers far up in the pitchy recesses, the whirring of a thousand wings, the sea beating hoarsely against the blind walls of the cave.

As we went on grey egrets skimmed the water like phantoms before us, streamers of color, reflected from the cliffs, painted its lustrous surface, and silver showers of fish, driven up to the light for their lives, flashed in the sun. The Salon tried with his spear, under the shadow of the walls where larger game lay concealed, and the sea-cunny toiled up steep places after delicate orchids,

plunging back into the sea, and spluttering and laughing like a child. We lay for hours outside the Myanmar islands of the Andaman Sea until at noon there became visible to us in the launch a faint pinprick of light in the cave, and we knew the way was open to us at last. It was dead low water, and the bay, as we rowed across it to the cave's mouth was lean from the depletion of the tide. The cave from the same cause had quadrupled in size, and its roof under which I had stooped to enter, now rose far out of reach above my head. Water still dripped from it as we advanced, and green and scarlet weeds and berries flung a color over the interior. The sinister murmur of the lapping sea was stilled, but every sound we uttered gathered a monstrous intonation from the vaulting of the cave. A cool wind blew through the narrow tortuous aperture, as lying flat upon our backs in the boat, we propelled it forward with our hands against the roof.

Beyond its darkness there lay a sheet of pale green water and a world of sunlight. Steering slowly through the passage we emerged at last upon the lake. Its walls rose up, sheer and steep in a million pinnacles of rock, to a height of a thousand feet. But for the low-browed passage by which we had come, there was apparent neither inlet nor exit. The waters lay calm, unruffled, and still. The blue sky gleamed overhead. It was hard to believe that here we were in the midst of the ocean.

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