PART II.
Muang Nan to Huang Chieng Kong.
From Muang
Nan my orders were to find the best route I could over the watershed to
M. Chieng Kong in the Mekong valley. As usual, the information
obtainable was very meagre. One trail goes west from Nan till the
valley of the Nam Ing is reached, when that stream is followed down
north; a second follows the Nam Nan northward, and crosses the range
north-north-westerly up the stream flowing down from M. Yao; the third,
which I selected, as showing one more of the Nam Nan valley, follows
that river up as far north as M. Ngob (lat. 19° 29'), when the
direction becomes north-westerly over the rough country which brings
one to M. Chieng Hon and M. Chieng Kob.
Leaving
Nan on February 1, we followed a good tract among low but precipitous
and picturesque limestone hills, into a curiously disforested country,
where the only growth was bamboo, until we dropped suddenly upon the
river once more at Pak Ngao, where we camped on the sandbank. We had by
this time picked up, as one does in the East, a considerable following.
A Commissioner had been sent across from Chieng Mai to accompany me up
to Chieng Kong. What his actual duties were I never discovered; he was
very useful, however, in helping me in various ways, but I would
willingly have done without him, for he was evidently one of that class
of officials who grind the people very tight when their superiors are
out of sight. Another, the brother of Chow Sa, by name Chow Benn Yenn,
who was with me all the time from Muang Sa until I reached Bangkok
again, was the greatest contrast to the former. He was a small, neatly
made fellow of about twenty-one, a splendid forest man, who, though a
great swell in these parts, travelled with only three or four lads with
him, and could walk the whole expedition off their legs. He knew and
could imitate exactly every forest
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