here uncovered at low water," "Good anchorage reported on this coast"-delightfully vague those last; while, for irony, I found at one spot in this wilderness the legend "Thinly populated"; and for sheer romance, just behind it, "High Land on

the Main."

Towards evening we passed Boat Island, steered on the White Rook, bumped on the bar, and anchored in the oreek of Bōkpyin. I took a sticky walk of half a mile to the end of all things, where the jungle stands ready to be "let in," watched a tree - trunk being chipped and prized open to form a dug-out, bought some

cocoanuts, and enjoyed one of the sunsets for which the Archipelago is famous. At Bōkpyin there was nothing more to see.

Next day we had another long steam of ten hours. The scenery in this southern section of the Archipelago is more open, and the oppression was relieved by a few deep-red sails. At four we anchored off the jetty at Victoria Point. The officer in whose relief I had come did the honours of the dak-bungalow, and when the Mercury took him away next day I was left, except for an officer of police and his wife, as the sole European resident of the station.

Victoria Point lies on the last southerly tip of Burma, a high narrow promontory pointing due south. West and south are islands and tideraces; north, a road leads up towards Maliwun, 25 miles away, but after the tenth mile is dereliot; east is the estuary of the Păkohan river, and beyond it, four or five miles off, is Siam. Immediately opposite Victoria Point is the mouth of the Renong river, on which lies Renong, a small ramshackle town composed of Siamese officials and soldiers under a half-Chinese governor, an English tindredging company, and an ambiguous conglomerate of Burmese and Malays and nondescripts who carry on all the business there is. There are no Siamese shops: the chief

store is kept by Boon Teck, a delightful Chinaman, once a journalist in the Federated Malay States, and for seven years co-lodger in London with a small girl now world-famous through her connection with British tooth-powder and its artistio ally, the Musical Comedy Stage: to Boon Teok her career is a source of intense gratification. North of Renong is the Isthmus of Kra, destined some day to be world-famous too, through a ship canal; south, the high bare coast runs down past other gravel - tin dredgers at Ngow and Ratrūt, to Pukét, Penang, Singapore, and the Equator.

Life at Victoria Point was simple. My abode was a threeroomed dak-bungalow, raised a dozen feet off the ground on wooden legs. My staff con

sisted of four persons : my priceless bearer, Mohamed Said, from Sialkot; Joséf, a black youth from near the Jaganath temple at Puri, who hewed wood and drew water; Sadhu, a melancholy pallid sweeper boy from the Panjab, who "swept" the whole station, inoluding the little hospital; and Sammi, the Madrasi "oook." But Sammi "could only bake bride-oake," boil eggs, that is, and stew things into a slush: the first fish he tried to cook was, as was truly said by my bearer, who instantly took over his duties, "unripe." However, Sammi was revenged later when a recalcitrant cook, during his execution, dug his spur into Mohamed's wrist; the bird, he told me with ill-concealed glee, "hit him." Sapplies were mainly non-existent, but what there were never cost me a rupee a day; and with fish and eggs and bread and an occasional hen and an insufficiently occasional goat (miscalled "muting"), and plantains at the war rate of twelve a penny, I did well enough. A more serious problem was that of occupation; after a spell of service on two fronts, and a year of duty in India, I was very happy to sit down for a change, but my month passed none too quickly.

Twice a day I had to go to my duties at the Wireless Station half a mile off; but one soon tires of the rending orack of its discharge, and the high thin note in the receiver, like a telephone trying to talk to itself without words. The rest

of the day was my own, to read or sleep or explore. Bathing, of course, was impossible, as I was soon informed by a young shark who came nosing along the rook on which I was sitting. A mile away was the jungle, wherein was an extensive assortment of both small and great beasts: orocodiles and black panthers by the coast; and in the high ridges north of the station, bear, elephant, and tiger, besides snakes and monkeys innumerable. An elephant had recently eaten a native's banana-trees; and just before I arrived, a tiger, driven down by the drought, had killed a cow on the road half a mile away, and snuffed (so the Eurasian operator asserted) round the door of the Wireless Station. But shooting meant a longer expedition than I had time for, and killing things has never amused me. At first I tried to walk in the jungle; but a jungle looks best from the outside. Once you are in, you can see nothing whatever; and the noise you make on the parohed leaves frightens every bird for a mile. The uncanny silence produces a sinister feeling of being watched by unseen eyes: you find that, complementary to your dislike of killing animals, is an even stronger dislike of animals killing you; and after I had been warned that my perambulations were rather foolishly risky, and unlikely to show me any of the wild things I had come out for to see, I desisted.

So my walks were limited to a square mile or so; but in that space were inexhaustible

delights. The scenery, of oourse, was superb; the combinations of 808 and hills rivalled, for sheer beauty, the Western Highlands or the Saronio Gulf. The distant peaks of St Matthew's and Loughborough Islands recalled Mull and Aegina; and the greater richness of vegetation made up, in part, for the lack of "humanity." ." The hills behind the station were thickly wooded, and echoed with the distant wailings of gibbons; there were many flowering shrubs; and

some of the forest trees were enormous. In the competition of the jungle, it is neck or nothing, and the winners run prodigiously to neck.

During the week after I arrived I was continually mystified by loud noises, as of an invisible motor-boat, or of a steamer creakily blowing off regular jets of steam where no steamer was, At last I disoovered the sound's source, unexpectedly and in the third dimension. Just opposite the jetty was a small precipitous island, where I used to watch, through my glasses, troops of small monkeys burst out on to the shore, plunge into most entertaining free fights, tumble into the sea with piercing screams, and then amicably betake themselves to hunting for shell-fish on the mud-banks just awash. The island was colonised by hornbills; and it was their wings, as they passed home overhead in the evening, that made these surprisingly loud and mechanical noises. Later on I saw one sitting on a dead bough-a big dull

coloured bird with a complicated face; it bent backwards and forwards on its branch, like a gigantic and rhetorical oockatoo, uttering loud vulgar yells at my intrusion, Burma, like India, is rich in birds with maddening voices. One used to utter two even notes all day, unendingly, like an inverted cuckoo. Another would first imitate the whirr of a highspeed wheel; then came eight or ten high, hinge-like oreaks, slower and slower; then off again with the whirr. And it was not only the birds that troubled. As I read in the bungalow at night, I would be startled by a loud noise at my very ear, like an old grouse practising ascending scales for the first time, followed by half a dozen clear, two-note calls, with a littledescending grumble dying away into silence at the end. This was the contribution of the Tuk too (named from its call), the big lizard that haunts Burmese houses,-an unwholesome, decayed-looking brute of a dirty yellow-green with dirtier purplish spots and a staring yellow eye. Later still at night, when the moon had nearly cleared the sky of stars, would come droves of pi-dogs sweeping in rather eerie play through the compound, perfeotly silent. Three of them, with some communal puppies who yapped valiantly at my heels, but fled my face, attached themselves to my staff. Twice I was woken by the shrieks of the lady dog seeking to repel from the refuge of my bedroom a too attentive swain from elsewhere. The second time I was

forearmed. By a divine chance my first stone from the window hit the swain as from heaven. He "went at once," totally bewildered and I then had to stone the rescued lady into silence, and a more befitting distance from my person. Victoria Point, in short, was a silent place; but its silence W&8 "dotted" (in the Irish R.M.'s expressive phrase) with a whole series of arresting and unfamiliar sounds.

One of my chief haunts was, of course, the shore. Unhappily, the coral strand was invisible under alluvial mud; but I never visited it without discovering some new thing. There was a small spring where I could sit (till the mosquitoes became intolerable), and surprise kingfishers and a peculiar pigeon with dark-green wings. The sea contained odd little fish: one was semi-transparent, with a projection on its nose as long as itself, like a five-inch narwhal. On the mud were myriads of little creatures with blunt froggy faces and goggling eyes; they skipped about on fins and tail, and liked to embrace & mangrove shoot, wriggle up, and cling to it, looking for all the world like Bill the Lizard emerging from the chimney. One day, too, I met several columns of little orabs, the biggest a hundred strong, and marching in ouriously regular pairs. As I approached over the mud, they vanished in a breath, dug in: they appeared to have a single enormous claw, as big as themselves, which they brandished in front as they walked; when

they were in a hurry, the claw was folded up with the precise effect of a collapsible fireescape,

Finally, there was always something to look at in the tiny hamlet: ehinlōn, or a man with a casting-net, or the Gurkha guard of the Treasury, opium-store, and wireless, playing barefooted football on hill, or small urchins engaged in an elaborate game like miniature skittles, which they played with the skill and enthusiasm of demons. And by the jetty was a little colony of Salones, living like lakedwellers on tumble-down platforms over the mud. They are sea-gipsies, primitive and nearly naked, who live an amphibious life of their own, and search the sea-caves of the outer islands for edible nests.

Once or twice existence was more exciting. There were little trips up the Māliwün road to a rubber estate, or across the channel to the hospitality of Bilborough Island, where, on the seaward face, was a shore free of mud, with coral and wonderful sand, but disappointingly few shells. Onoe, too, I orossed over to Renong to see the tindredgers and buy excellent whisky at pre-war prices. Nobody worried about passports, though I believe that, officially, my excursion was equivalent to desertion from the British Empire and His Majesty's Forces. But Simla was far away, and the whisky a great acquisition. My conveyance was to have been a substantial boat with a rush awning amid

ships, but it was said to be too heavy for the wind, so we transferred to a tiny native oraft, first cousin to a dug-out, and with only a few inches of freeboard. A boy in the bows and a man in the stern each worked an oar tied with a straw loop to an upright. They rowed standing, like gondoliers; but once past the hornbills' island, we caught a stiff westerly breeze. In two minutes the boy had stepped a bamboo mast, with a transverse spar and a boom, of which he held one end, and away we went. The flimsy boat was beautifully light, and we shipped very little water, which was lucky, as there was nothing else to sit on but the bottom of the boat. Coming home, the sea was still rough, and the wind dead ahead; 80 the orew had two very solid hours of rowing.

But excursions like these were only incidental, and the staple diet of Victoria Point was not imported whisky, but small beer. The place is well worth going to, if only for the voyage. I was delighted to see it, and perfectly content to come away after a month. In the dreary and superficially trivial round of office duties at Rangoon it was a welcome interlude, just as the war itself blew at least a radical change of existence into the lives of some onee toe academic soldiers. Some day Viotoria Point may be developed, and rival Amherst as the watering-place of Burma. But I am glad that I saw it as it is still-simple, yet civilised, a little spot of Western leaven in the great indifferent lump of Eastern landscape, the last place in the Indian Empire ad fines Indiæ. R. H. D.