88 NOTES OF A JOURNEY ON
and
the relations between them and the Laos seemed to be most happy. This
is, naturally, not always the case; but I am bound to say that,
wherever the official is one of some standing, this state of things is
the usual one. Cultivation goes on round the villager; but as soon as
one gets a couple of miles away, the sandy jungle or the ; nongs resume
their sway. The latter are the most peculiar feature of the region, and
cover a vast area, which is larger to the eastward. Some of them are
merely small swamps, with shallow water and long reeds, extending over
a surface of one or two square miles ; others, again, are extensive
areas, in which water and reeds are the only object the eye meets for
miles, with here and there a little green island, where trees exist,
and, in the distance, the low, long, green line of the jungle along its
edge; an ideal home for the various herons, and other long-legged
waders, but, alas ! also tenanted by leeches and by flies, who attacked
us all. The poor little oxen, at the end of a few miles, especially if
the sun came out for a little in the burning way it does between rains,
were covered with clouds of the latter, their necks and nose, humps and
legs, smeared with blood. No resting is possible, for every moment a
stop is made the deeper everything sinks into the mud; so it is
plunging and struggling to the next little island, where we would stop
and cook breakfast with a score of other weary mud-bespattered carts.
Besides these, we also met some pack-oxen going north to get salt; but
as the water was out everywhere, they would have to wait before
returning south. One may roughly say that the salt efflorescence
occupies the low grounds, between the slightly higher laterite jungle
ridges, which are yet just higher than the surface of the nongs. The
villages in the neighbourhood are generally wretchedly dirty and untidy
in appearance ; the growth is only stunted bamboo, and the whole place
uninviting enough.
The
cold weather, with its advantages of dryness and absence of insects,
has also the disadvantage that water is very scarce. When we crossed,
the whole low-lying area may be said to have been under water, but
water of such a description that it was only here and there that it was
fit for man to drink; while in the sandy forests the water, all
perforating through, drained off at once, and the lower ends of the
track, where it began to rise toward the ridges, were, on the other
hand, lakes of mud. Thus, between endless seas of bad water and long
miles of sand, the water question remains
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