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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 history 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 Malaca, 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 Kingdome 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 Portugalles holding them firm that we were in front of the aforesaid harbor, we determined to go thither with our boat and 
fetch victual’s, and that the ship should stay for us in a place assigned ; we were twenty and eight persons in the boat that went for victual’s, and on a day about twelve of the clock we went from the Ship, assuring ourselves to be in the harbor before night in the afore said port ; wee rowed all that day, and a great part of the next night, and all the next day without finding harbor, or any sign of good landing, and this came to pass through the evil counsel of the two Portuguese that were with us.

" 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 ; we had
water and wood sufficient, and as we rowed, we could go but by flowing water, for when it was ebbing water, we made fast our boat to the bank of one of these Islands, and in these nine days that we rowed, wee found a cave or nest of Tortugas eggs, wherein was a hundred and forty four eggs, the which was a great help unto us : these eggs are as big as a hens egg, and have no shell about them but a tender skin, every day we sodde a kettle full of them eggs with an handful of rice in the broth thereof : it pleased God that at the end of nine days, we discovered certain fishermen, a fishing with small boats, and wee rowed towards them, with a good cheer for I think there were never men more glad than we were, for we were so sore afflicted with penuries that we could scarce stand on our legs. The first village that we came too, was in the Gulfe of Tavay -Dawai, under the King of Pegu -Bago."

For the subsequent experience of the travelers, and the fortune of the ship left behind without a boat to help her, reference may be made to the original of Messer Frederick.

The Portuguese Trace

His adventures occurred about the year 1567, and it is certain that at that time the islands were well known to the Portuguese. For it is on record that a fleet of Portuguese ships sent by the Viceroy of Goa about the year 545, to search for an island of gold in the Bay of Bengal found it in a manner, by taking to piracy and preying on passing vessels from the shelter offered by the archipelago. " For eight months and more," says Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, " our hundred Portugals had scoured up and down this coast in four well-
rigged Foists, wherewith they had taken three and twenty rich ships, and many other lesser vessels, so that they which used to sail in those parts were so terrified with the sole name of the Portugals, as they quitted their Commerce, without use of their shipping ; By this increase of trade the Custom houses of the Ports of Tanancarim, Juncalan, Merguim, Vagarun, and Tavay fell much in their Revenue, in so much that those people were constrained to give notice of it to the Emperor of Sornan, King of Siam, and Sovereign Lord of all that Country, beseeching him to give a remedy to this mischief, whereof every one complained."

The king despatched 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."

Piracy has in short ever found the archipelago a happy resort.

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

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.

And presently we fall into company. 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 straight­way 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.

Beautiful as is the day, there is a subtle and deeper fascination in the dark.

The world closes in and leaves us the centre of a new universe. I seem by some miracle to have been brought here into the midst of these lonely islands, and the panting dauntless engine that has brought me is like another carpet of Solomon magically put at my service. For, a month ago, I was afoot in the greatest of cities, a straw on the driving tide of its life ; this morning I was ashore, near a court-house, a prison, and a town ; and now, in the company of nameless shadowy islands, I am being swiftly borne away upon the bosom of the dark. A star shines out on the horizon like a beacon or a lighthouse, larger than any star I have ever seen ; grey clouds drift like phantoms in the wake of the departed sun, and each moment the constellations grow in multitude and splendor.

Steering by instinct through the pitchy night, we cast anchor at last in the wake of the wrecked Amboyna ; and the speculative salvage-man in blue garments, his feet naked, comes on board to tell me how he has fought with Chinese and Malay, been prisoner and escaped ; how he has lived for three and thirty years in the East, and has a wife and children in Scotland, but finds folk at home cold and indifferent to one who has spent his life abroad. The cry of all old wanderers.

I pass the night on the floor of the launch with nothing between my vision and the stars. The sea is but a yard below, the roof shelters me without shutting out the sky. All my world for the time is about me ; the gunner, the sea-Gunny, the engineer, and the crew. And here on the trackless seas, the sentiment of our common humanity surpasses all lesser considerations. The same conditions affect us all alike.

Some time in the night I wake, and my eyes are dazzled by the lustrous moon hung up in the firmament above me. I sleep again, and wake to find the messengers of day abroad ; lictors with their faces, who fling themselves upon the world and hid it prepare in beauty for the coming of their lord. Strung along the east there is a chain of islands each link a mountain pyramid, the pale sea between crinkling with the first breeze of the dawn.

The first familiar object that greets me is the Marguerite's gig in the wake of the golden dawn ; the crew in her fishing with lines. Far away in the distance a ship is passing silently, a phantom amidst the islands.

Turning to look about me I find that we are at anchor in a small bay, which lies but half awake in an arm of Bentinck Island. As the sun climbs, the island turns a rich and golden green, its beauty reflected in the olive water. But for a wisp of yellow sand along the sea-edge, its entire face is covered with woods of the noblest character. Little valleys run down it to the sea, a thousand birds are singing their un­familiar matins to the day, and trees with long white trunks shining in the light, break up the mass of foliage into aisles, and make the island seem like some Gothic cathedral wrought in an Oriental texture. A few paces off lies the dishevelled Amboyna, her funnel once black, now rust-red in the sea air.

I make my way on board, climbing with some effort through the trenchant air to the upper deck. Mr. McPhairson in blue clothes cut all of a piece like the garments in which infancy is wont to pass its nights, is on board, tanned and ruddy, grizzled, large and weighty of hand and foot, smoked glasses veiling his small blue dogged eyes.

" You don't notice a smell ? " he asks—" a kind of effluvium ? " Candour and courtesy conflict in my mind.

I admit at last that I do.

" Ah," he replies, a little troubled upon the matter, " I was just wondering if it was away, or that I was growing accustomed to it a bit."

Half of her is under water. The fore-end of her is out of the wet, and a Chinese carpenter is at work drilling holes in a plank. On the hurricane ­deck—the Captain's walk—the pumps arc busy, and the glass face of the indicator, like a ship's clock, shows the pressure under which a man is working twenty feet below the level of the sea. A long tube of gutta-percha leads away across a hoarding built of planks, over the sunken middle of the ship. At the edge a'strange man in blue with a Chinese hat is standing acting as a human pulley for the tube. Another sits holding a rope connected with the diver's helmet. Yet another holds the tube of air—the life-line—and lets it slowly slip through his half-closed hand. With head bowed down and hands outstretched, he is, I can see, absorbed in the delicate work that is his. There is something electric in the slow rustle of the rope through his nervous hands. And he has in his keeping the life of the man below in the blind water.

To my unaccustomed eyes there is nothing visible but a hoarding below the surface, and a tube let into the water, but the silent men clustered in the daylight above know well what is afoot below. Old McPhairson, the speculator, interjects occasional remarks. " He is walking now, along the lower deck," as the line suddenly runs out.

" Eh, but he is in the hold away below now, lifting the cargo," as a few bubbles rise to the surface.

"He would be about there now," pointing to a white stanchion out of the water ; and then quickly, "here she comes," as a sudden turbulence in the water and a rush of air bubbles herald the approach of a sack of cargo.

" Chilies," he observes sententiously, as a party of red skirmishers rise up and spread out in a fan upon the water, to be followed by a black and rotten sack, which a waiting man with a large pole thrusts away to sea. In this way rice, chilies, prawns, and tobacco come up and float away, the bay becoming alive with them.

McPhairson, who goes down frequently himself, says the prawns cut his skin, and he points to his red scarred feet.

Silently a diver comes up, has his iron helmet lifted off his collar­bones, and sits dazed and dull in the sunlight, shivering in the gills. Another takes his place.

" They get mortal cold down there," says McPhairson.

" It's a warm day," I remark.

" And may it continue so," he replies ; " for the water takes all the heat out of you down below, and the wind cuts you when you come up.

The other day now, when it was a bit cold, every time I came up I had to get them to wrap me in a blanket."

All this time there is an anxious manner about the man. His launch, the wrecker, and Captain Le Fevre has not yet come in.

" And the Lord," he says, " knows what has become of her. Oh ! hut, if she is wrecked, there will be a shiny at home when her owners come to hear of it."

At last the laggard comes in sight.

"There she is."

" Time she was," he cries out. " I have passed but a poor night because of her. If I am so fortunate as to get this job through success­fully, I will never again undertake another like it. I am fifty-five the day," he adds, mopping his strong face, " and not the man I was." Yet he looks a man of iron.

The wrecker comes up ; the captain with unkempt hair, and blue shirt flapping outside his trousers, blowing his last anxious instruction through a speaking tube to the engine-room below. The mate, with a big hand which he uses with emotion, and bare feet in white canvas shoes, out at toes and heels, steps on the hurricane deck of the Amboyna. He speaks, encouraged by McPhairson, with anger and contempt of his captain. Clearly in this triumvirate Le Fevre is in a minority of one.

" Hect," says McPhairson, " he is that sort of man who can neither lead nor follow. A coward, Sirr, always on the look-out for what he don't want to see ; a-dreamin' of rocks ten miles inside his course. Phew ! " he adds, sweeping his ruddy face with a blue bandana, " and to think of the night I've spent."

McPhairson by his venture stood to lose two thousand pounds, or win a competency. Long after, I heard with regret that he had lost.

The Pearl Diver

Steaming along by South Passage Island we come suddenly upon a Salon camp. There is a fan of white sand with some boats and huts upon it, and I can see a few men and women moving. By the time I can step ashore—and it takes no more than five minutes over the transparent water—they have all effaced themselves in the primitive woodland, and only one man remains looking ill at ease. The sea-cunny goes with him, shouting to the woods, in the hope of inducing the others to return. The encampment consists of three boats and three huts ; but to call them huts is to misname them, for they arc of all human habitations the slightest. They consist of a few thin sticks—I can count six upright and three laid horizontally, in one—and a frail pleated mat laid over the top. A mat of bamboo strips is spread on the white sand within. Some of their few possessions are scattered around ; bags, baskets, and bedding of mat, and other articles showing some contact with civilization ; large Pegu – Bago jars, Chinese ceramic bowls and plates, a knife or two, an old beer bottle full of wild honey, a couple of wooden boxes—that is all. The spectacle that spreads beyond is of a purple lake, studded on its circumference with blue islands. The sunlight dances on the water, the sea hurtles very gently against the white sand, bees hum in the motionless air, and a bird pipes in the brake. From the deep recesses of the woods comes faintly the voice of the sea-cunny, calling to the trembling hidden people without avail. It is a dreamy soft and beautiful corner of the world, oceans away from this morning's bay and the Scotchman with his divers at work. The Marguerite lying at anchor in the offing, and puffing clouds of white steam against the purple seascape, looks like the denizen of another world. The shimmering heat plays a fugue before my drowsy eyes. . . . I turn with an effort to the realities about me.

The white sand is marked with the footprints of the colony. Its only representative stands half-cowed with fear, a deep, dull, suspicion linger­ing in his eyes. He is a short, strong, black-skinned man, with a sparse moustache and no beard, a loin-cloth and a bandana, both red. He tells the sea-cunny that they came here yesterday, and that they will leave as soon as they have collected enough of a palm with which to renew the upper portions of their boats. It is fiercely hot, and the sea-cunny says the heads of the Salon infants grow red in the sun. They live rough lives, and die hard.

Leaving Bentinck Island and the Perforated rock, we steer directly for the Sisters. Islands bare as Sark lie upon our right, of fantastic form. One is like a Japanese eagle, another like a palace, a third is like a cathedral in the distance.

For the first time now we come upon a pearl diver, sweeping slowly with long oars along a line of shadow, under the precipitous flanks of Maria, most northerly of the Sisters. These islands nearly all stand clean out of the water, and look as if they had no interiors but only summits to be climbed with difficulty. The first of the boats I see is the property of Olpherts the little clerk ; the second of the German Hertzog. The sea is placid as blue marble swaying with the first beat of life. Black rocks show their fangs in the sun, and deep pacific harbors lie between the islands. Between Maria and Elizabeth, where the rocks are strung in a line across the strait, there is a wonderful blaze of sea.

The pearl divers, more numerous now, are scattered like islands on the sun-steeped ocean, and with the aid of a telescope I can tell if they are at work, from the dark figure of the life-line man erect at the stern.

As we gradually approach I find that four men are working at the pump wheel, two with their hands and two with their feet. A man at the oar is slowly propelling the boat in sympathy with the buried diver below, and two men stand silhouetted against the sky, one at the life, the other at the head-line ; the latter the tender and leader of the boat.

For a little space of time we wait, listening to the monotonous screeching of the wheel ; then the rope tightens, the tender hauls, a burst of bubbles is borne up in tumult to the surface, the tenders run swiftly together, and the diver, like a strange beast hooked up from the sea-deeps, emerges and clings to the ladder over the side of the boat. And there he lies, bent over, the type of exhaustion. The crew hasten to raise his helmet, and lightened of its burden, he steps on deck, his startled Japanese head showing out of his monstrous clothes, his eyes blinking with the change from the deep sea floor to its sunlit surface. In a small brown net, like those which old ladies use in England when they go a-shopping, lie the shells he has found. Anything from sixpence each to a thousand pounds.

We move on and I find Allingham in the midst of his boats, a pile of shells about him. He uses a big flat blade and peers as he opens the shells into their lustrous depths ; flinging the meat with its food of live red prawns into a bucket of water, which he afterwards searches with fingers skilled with usage. When he has gone tragically through the entire pile finding nothing, I descend with him into his cabin, garnished with bottles of sauce, a rusty tin containing a few pearls, an iron safe, an open shell with the mark on it of a rifled pearl, a pipe or two, a tin of " Navy Cut." Enters the German Hertzog, brusque, keen, intelligent, curiosity written large in his eyes. For the coming of the Marguerite is a riddle to be solved. Meanwhile we lie at ease on the cabin roof, and get the launch to tow us to the Bertha at anchor in the shelter of an island. They talk of a Salon camp assembled in the neighborhood, and as we go, I see their fleet of boats making away across the water, in the wake of a double-sailed Chinaman, who has come to trade and barter.

It is evening in the Myanmar islands of the Andaman Sea, the closing hour, and there is a general movement on the seas. The pearling-boats are coming in to their rendezvous beside an island, the home of the edible-nest builder, which from its strange picturesque outline is a landmark to them all. It is nearly bare rock, but at its corners trees droop over the sides, like parasols, and it is so much like a Japanese picture, that I give it, in emulation of the worthy Captain Forrest, the name of 0 Mimosa San. The last pink of the sunset turns the space between the islands into sea-ways of exquisite color. Cliffs and precipices rise up about us, and in their shelter we anchor for the night.

I spend an hour in the Bertha listening to the pleasant German talk of the pearler's wife.

" Ach," she says, speaking of the islands, " when I came here, I did think I could never wonder enough. Nicht  Mark ? Oh, but they are so beautifully."

While we talk the pearl diver cleans and searches his shells by the lantern-light ; in all he does a man of character. It was he who wrecked the Amboyna ; he has a master's certificate ; but he sits here undaunted in spirit, and he holds on while the Englishmen go, one by one, because he knows how to make an income in many ways. He takes photographs of the islanders, and sells their skulls and skeletons to anthropological institutes in Berlin. He took home a pair of orang-utangs for which he asked 20,000 francs. One died on the way, and the other, as his wife says, " did sigh with his head in his hands ; oh ! so sad, for one of his own nation." A year ago they found a pair of dwarfs, and took them away to Germany, where they are now famous and a source of unascer­tained income to the pearler and his wife. He has sent for whaling tackle ; and is, in short, a man of ability. His wife is a plump, bright-eyed, brown-faced girl, with some English which she has learnt since she came to these seas, and many pretty Germanisms. She talks well, and is full of appreciation of every kind of beauty, and what she calls " the Nat-ure." " Ach Gott ! " she says, speaking of the archipelago, " but it is so beautifully. It do make such a theme for the letters home."

Allingham, a red man, sad and bashful, sits on a stool offering a word only now and then.

They talk of ambergris, and whales, and divers' risks ; of two recent deaths from the snapping of the tube (the life-tender hauled hand-over­hand, but not quick enough to save his man, who came up dead and black in the face) ; of divers half-paralyzed and scarce able to walk, who still dive ; of one who tired of life as a cripple, shot himself ; of the man whose helmet being unadjusted let in the water (he signaled, but was kept down, being supposed nervous, and ultimately came up, dead) ; of one whose head swelled up, so that they could scarcely remove the helmet. The diver's life in these seas is risky, short, riotous, lucrative, and there is no lack of apprentices to the trade. And so as we talk, the German finishing his work, falls back into a long armchair ; the poultry in the hen-coop cackle and fill the air with the scent of feathers ; the schooler's dog still wet with the sea, dozes under the lantern's light ; a kettle boils on the hob in the cabin below, and oars splash in the darkness, as boats go to and fro. From the distance there are borne upon the swaying sea the voices of the assembled crews, in song, in laughter, in the telling of strange tales before they sleep.

" Well," says Allingham mournfully, " I haven't given up hope yet. From now till April there are still four months to run, and who knows what we may find."

 She.—" Oh, but England is already—what you say ?—internatsio ; but in Shermanie they do think much of a tiger-claw necklace. Nicht Mark ? " and at intervals she says soothingly : " So " . .. " So."

WITH THE SALON

During the night the launch and the schooner Bertha developed an intimacy, and the dawn as it came stealing over the seas, found them linked in an embrace of their anchor chains. When at length we got away, day had broken, and we steered into the lake of water between Jane and Charlotte, and thence across the sea to Bushby in the track of the departed gypsies. In the far distance I could trace the smoke of their moving fires, and the gleam of an oar blade as it caught the sun. Skate were flapping about in the sea, and a shoal of small fish leaped and plunged, pursuing and pursued ; the war of nature incessant under the smiling surface of life. The Sisters, all blue and green now, lay strung in a line upon the western sea, and 0 Mimosa San was fading out of sight. Father and Son, a solemn couple, greeted us on the south. I hailed the Chinaman as we came up to him, and he sent off a present of green-snail shells, and a polite message to say that the Salon would rendezvous in his neighborhood in the evening after the day's work.

The green-snail shell is a beautiful object, deep sea-green without, white and iridescent within. All the beauty of the sunset is by some miracle of nature caught and imprisoned in the mould of this deep-sea dweller. And so as we went on, I came upon the Salon in the clear green water, under a rocky coast. There were several boats, and from one a man with a Burman air about him, a very merry fellow, signaled to us to come up that he might look upon us. In the boats before me there were men and women, children and boys, but the young unmarried girls must have hidden themselves away, for I could sec none. The children were of a fairer complexion than their parents, and all but the very youngest were at work with oar or punting pole. The most attractive child of all was a girl almost grown up, bedecked with beads, and swathed in a single garment of blue cloth. She had brown eyes and dark ringlets, and was so frightened at being photographed, that she broke into tears, and was with difficulty reassured. As it was, the tears lay in a rim about her eyes long after she had ceased to cry ; and she could not be persuaded to resume the pole, which she used at the prow of her father's boat with an admirable grace. Behind her in the recesses of the boat crouched her grandmother, a midnight hag—type of the terrible old age of the Salon woman. I do not suppose that there is anywhere in the world any one more ugly than an old woman of the Salon.

HARPOONING

Some of the men plunged with harpoons to show me how they did it, and the exhibition was greeted with laughter from the assembled boats. The harpooner before plunging strains forward, every muscle taut, the whole weight of his body resting on the ball of his foot—a missile incarnate. Then he flings his harpoon with a whirr through the sunlight, and leaps after it into the water. Spear and man are lost to sight. A moment later up he comes with dripping hair, clutches the cut in the shapely gunwale, and climbs with a swift action into the boat. When engaged in the serious business of fishing, the Salon spear a large fish, like a skate, which lies upon its back in the water and paddles with its wide fins. When the agitation reaches the surface and is caught in the straining vision of the fisher, his boat flies forward, and the harpoon-man, poised on its prow, plunges swiftly on seeing the white stomach of the fish, and drives home his weapon with the weight of his body. This done, he loosens the spear-head from the shaft and climbs hack into his boat, now speeding over the water in the wake of the maddened fish. Gradually its strength fails it, its speed slackens, it can go no farther. Then it is hauled on board, cut into strips, and dried in the sun.

The Salon also dive for pearls, but only in shallow water, now rifled for the most part by the regular pearler.

" But Lord ! there was a time," as the old sea-captains say, " when good pearls could be had for a pouch of tobacco." That was when the Salon had his island seas to himself, and knew nothing of the value of pearls. But the coming of the pearler has brought enlightenment, and with it scarcity, and the Salon when he does find a pearl, sells it to advantage. The Beche-de-mer is caught by him in baskets of rattan, trailed slowly over the muddy shallows. It is dried in the sun and looks unappetizing enough ; but when soaked in water it becomes like a clean white jelly, and makes a soup that is esteemed good and delicate by the Chinese gourmet.

When you think of the Salon's place on the ladder of human life, of his limitations, his approaching extinction, you pity him ; but he has his compensations. His toil is to his liking. He is ever plunging in the warm transparent water, or chasing the wild hog with his dogs. Save that he must live, he is burdened with few cares ; and all said he lives a free, wild, and unfettered existence. That must be dearer to him than the sordid drudgery of his brother, learning here and there the slow lesson of the primitive tiller of the soil. As to schools and so forth, who on earth would willingly exchange the sunlit water, the white sands, and the wandering life, for the finest school in the world ?

And religion ? his immortal soul ? It is true the poor Salem is limited in his religious notions. He is much concerned with the devil, whom he finds active in many uncomfortable forms ; he has glimmerings of a good spirit, whose power is unhappily, he finds, usurped by the devil. But the world that might teach him is itself oppressed with such burdens.

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. They could tell nothing of any one's age. They live only in the present, looking neither forward nor back. Once a year they change their habitat, from the western or outer side of the islands, to the inner or eastern side. This is at the time the north-west monsoon begins to blow, lashing the unprotected sea into fury. In the turmoil of the long-drawn battle between wind and wave, which lasts from May to October, there is

no place for the frail craft of the Salon, and he lives with his boats drawn up ashore, in the sheltered inlets on the eastern face of the archipelago. Testimony to this double life is written on the face of the islands ; and there is no contrast in nature more striking that that between the gothic calm, the tropic splendor, of the island woods which look towards the rising sun, and the torn storm-wrought landscape that faces the western sea and the fury of the winds. Thus, on a calm winter day when the sea is billowy as oil, one is confronted on turning the point of an island with a strange picture of an embodied gale. There is no ripple on the sea, the woods are still and silent, yet they seem shaken in the grasp of a pitiless and furious storm. It is as though a god had stilled for ever the blast in the climax of its wrath.

WITH THE DEVIL

Bidding our Salon adieu, we steer across a blue oily sea for the Elephant, a monstrous group of rocks that rise in sheer cliffs out of the sea. On our left other islands deploy in long lines, broken by deep and narrow straits, inter-island lakes, and sweeping bays, which recede to blue mountains in the distance against the opal of the sky. Every corner tempts one to go round it and look for some yet uncaptured beauty ; and that is one secret of archipelagian charm. One is never at the end of its mystery. One feels that satisfaction cannot come till one has explored every strait and island ; and when one has done this, one must of needs begin again, because of the infinite variety which comes of an ever-changing perspective, of the play of sun and wind and shadow and cloud.

Elephant Island -somehow like Phuket Island, as we approach it, surpasses all other objects in interest. It is the most wild and stern and romantic of all the islands I have yet seen. Its dark walls rise straight from the rim of the green motionless sea, and the lowest footing on it seems to be five hundred feet high. Its crest is like a sierra of sharp iron teeth. A few trees find, as if by miracle, a foothold on this forbidding exterior. Purple jelly-fish with streaming beards swarm in its neighborhood, and small fry leap in terror out of the sea about it, like fireworks of silver. A low dark line at its pedestals marks the limit of high water. The passages between it and its satellites are like the fiords of some inferno, and the transition from its shadow into the sunlight is as quick and sudden as the transition of a solar eclipse. Its black sides stream with milky cataracts of lime ; dark caves lead into its bowels near the sea-rim, and in them, reaching away into blind interiors of the rock the edible-nest makers build their homes. It is a terrible, picturesque place. An echo resides under its bastions, and the launch's heart beats near it with a muffled roar that borders on the supernatural.

Such at least were some of the impressions made by a first circum­navigation of this island—and at some distance, for the launch approached it at her peril. To make a closer acquaintance with it I caused the launch to anchor, and made in the gig for a small strip of yellow sand, the only visible landing-place on the island. This brought me unexpectedly into a circular bay, of which a fraction only was open to the ocean. The water here was an opaque green, the color of vert-de­gris. The harsh grey cliffs towered above its edge, their sheer sides wonderfully made a foothold by the sago palm and a few straggling shrubs. Skirting the curve of the bay I came upon a cave, black and yawning, with huge bulbous stalactites depending from its roof. Some thongs of a creeper, hanging downwards, showed that the place was used by the Salon for tying up their boats. In this dark and lonely place the swallows were building those nests that furnish a soup for the gourmets of China.

The air within was hot and close, the stalagmites and projecting bastions of the cave were covered with a mosaic of shells and other marine life. The water lapped the cave with a hoarse long-drawn sigh. I don't suppose that I can communicate the horror of that sound, for the cave seemed to me, who had never heard of it or seen it before, like some evil monster on the outskirts of sentient life, dark, blind and awful, swallowing up its daily tribute from the sea. Big jelly-fish floated by into its recesses, and I discovered with a disagreeable sensation, that a strong current was making for the low-hung lips of the cave, along which the hapless fish were being borne. Looking back from the tense gloom of the cave, my eyes turned with relief to the open landscape of the world outside ; to its beautiful reaches of luminous water, to an island framed in a sky of small pink clouds, drifting slowly with the wind ; and I emerged from the cave with a feeling of sheer physical relief.

Outside, the strip of yellow shell-sand that had brought me so far, offered its smiling hospitality. I was soon at ease in the buoyant water. At such a temperature ! rich refreshing and cool. I had come it seemed upon a bathing-pool of the Gods. On such occasions one's spirit reverts by a natural cadence to its primitive youth ; the youth, not alone of the individual, but of the race. So it came that I swam about and lay on the yellow sand just covered by the lambent water, wondering at the new view of the world that comes to one who lies upon his back and looks out across the level face of the sea. I shouted to the world and laughed, and raced against my dog, who was scarcely less infected with delight than I was. And the sea-tunny who had come with me in the gig, ran to and fro flinging his casting-net for minnows.

But the sand, we found on subsequent inspection, had traces on it of a curious pattern. The bathing-place of the gods was an alligator pool !

" Wah," said the sea-cunny, staring at the prints on the narrowing sand, while from the cave there came the booming of the tide, " wah ­it is a place of devils, a Shait-an-ka-jagah."

The sea-cunny, for it is time to introduce him, is the kind of elemental person one likes to travel with ; with sinews and a chest of iron, a square jaw, a deep harsh baying voice, and bloodshot eyes ; a splendid figure of a man, intended by nature for the pirates calling of his ancestors but yoked by fate to a civilized life, and now a desperate assistant in any cause that appeals to his sense of loyalty.

Taking to the gig, we made for the opening of the bay, and had nearly come out of this cauldron of devilry and beauty, when the conviction came upon me that the massive bastion of rock under which the cave lay was part of an outer defence, and not the main wall of the island fortress. " Allah—Khuda ! " said the sea-cunny, rising to his feet in the swaying boat, " there is surely something on the other side." Some trick of the slant fading sunlight revealed to us in a moment, what we had failed to see during the hours we had been looking upon the stony face of the island. Late as the hour was, we turned with a common instinct to the exposing of its mystery. Rowing slowly under the for­bidding bastions of rock, which offered no foothold, we came upon a place up which a man might venture to climb. It was inhospitable, but the sea-tunny was not to be restrained. While he was away and lost in the growing darkness I rowed into the cave, and flung into the blind water objects which I meant to go and look for on the other side of the island, in the view that there might be an exit for the flood now visibly being swallowed into the recesses of the cave. My plans were obliterated by the harsh roaring voice of the sea-cunny, which, coming from afar, filled the dark vault above me with its echoes. " God," I heard him calling ; for the man was frequent in his appeals to heaven, " I have found it. There is water, water, a lake within." Leaving the boat to the lascar, I clambered up the face of the rock. It struck up on all sides in thin fluted pinnacles like the columns of an ant-hill. " Churry-Ke­rmafik," said the sea-cunny, tapping one large pinnacle with his hand till it rang like steel.

" Allah," he said, " but they are sharp. If a man were to fall here—Bus Khalas bo giya" (There would be an end of him). Allowing for picturesque phraseology, there was in fact some risk in climbing at this dark hour, and the only means of ascent were offered by these sword-edges of rock that rose one above the other.

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 con­temptuous 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 sca­cunny 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.

THE HIDDEN LAKE

Last night the sea-cunny, untiring in adventure, sailed away through the night in search of a Salon camp, whose fires shone like pinpoints in the dark. For it seemed probable that the Salon could pilot us by an easier route to the lake whose existence we had discovered. The first light of dawn showed me a Salem boat lashed under the bows of the launch, the sea-cunny in possession ; and I am sorry to say, its owner lying on its bottom trussed like a fowl. He made no protest. Taking him with us we climbed once again up the sharp pinnacles, and looked down upon the hidden waters ; but descent to them from there was impossible. We turned back, somewhat torn as to our hands and feet, and rowed away to the cave, as interesting as it was the night before, but less tragic now in the light of day. The hoarse lapping of the sea still echoed there, but the sun, stealing in under the stalagmites, counter­acted these dark suggestions. The water was now a translucent green, and its roof was lit with dancing water-gleams. The Salon informed me that through this cave at low water I could enter the hidden lake. In the direction of the passage, still invisible, there was silence ; a roar came only from the blind walls where the sea could find no entry. Through this passage the sea enters and retreats, and the evil genius of the lake gorges and disgorges daily. At spring tides the mouth of the cave is filled to the roof, and there is no passage.

Coming away, till the ebbing of the tide should serve our purpose, I made a tour of the island, and entered another cave called Gwa Chee Boh. It lies outside the perimeter of the island on its eastern face, and is overhung by sheer and tragic cliffs from which great stalactites depend, threatening to fall upon an intruder. Long ropes of rattan, leading up into secret places, and now rotting with half a year's disuse, show that the cave is visited. The Salon on being questioned disclaimed, with a sort of awe, their ever exploiting these cliffs for nests. They were too ignorant, he said, to find the nests, and too fearful of falling down from the great heights to attempt to do so. But the Malay come twice a year from Penang and climb up. They bring torches with them and remain within the inner cave ten days, getting shut in there by the sea ; and they collect six gunny bags of nests. It is a fearful place, where men fall and are killed. Formerly it was worked by Burmans, and the cave is named after one who fell and broke his back here.

The sea-cunny, who extracted this information by slow degrees,

 AT VICTORIA POINT: THE SOUTHERNMOST LIMIT OF BURMA

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:

The Salon who accompanied me led us to a cave that lies at the south­east corner of the lake. The approach to it was heavy with slime and the strange debris of the departed tide. From the deep gloom of the inner hall the swallows flew out in swarms, and high up from invisible recesses came the million-fold " chuck-chuck" of the nesting birds. A strange creature, with prawn-like lip, beady eyes, and twitching antenna:, the whole pose of his body