they giggled delightedly, but took no sort of notice of his prayers. At each stream they cast aside their scanty garments and bathed themselves elaborately, while he, in outraged modesty, stood protesting on the banks. It was with a sigh of intense relief that he at last saw their burdens transferred to the shoulders of sober-minded respectable men, who were innocent alike of their follies and their feminine caprices.
Travelling in this fashion from hamlet to hamlet, Gar- nier crossed the Stung-Treng close to its source, and scaled the cliff, in which the Ubon plateau has its abrupt ending, at a point somewhat to the cast of that at which he had descended it with so much labour. He discovered, however, that his guides had not taken him sufficiently far in the desired direction, and that he was even now only two days' march from Kukan. For this place he accordingly made, and thence followed his original route to Ubon where he arrived on February 26. The rest of the expedition had left for Kamarat more than a month earlier, so Garnier hastened to overtake them, descending the Se-Mun to its mouth and poling up the Mekong un- til, on March 10th, thirty days after his departure from Pnom Penh, he saw the French flag flying over a hut at Hutien, and knew that his solitary journey was ended.
Since parting with de Lagrée at Ubon he had trav- ersed over a thousand miles of country, the greater part of which had never previously been visited by a European; he had filled in a blank which had long disfigured this part of the map; he had fixed the position of numerous landmarks, had discovered several Khmer ruins of im-
