its outer wall there stretches a bank of reeking filth and gar- bage, which at mid-day must pollute the air for miles round. We picked our way over slimy, treacherous paths and across putrid-looking pools, till we passed through the gateway into the main street of the town. It was an exceedingly narrow thoroughfare, and had at one time been paved, but the pave- ment was now broken and disordered; while, as to the people, they looked sickly, sullen and dispirited. But it was in the market-place that we beheld the most shocking sight of all: — there the bodies of two men were exposed to the public gaze, their position indicated by swarms of flies, and the air telling that decomposition had already set in. One of these male- factors had been starved to death in the cage in which he stood, and the other had been crucified.
Beyond the rapids of this part of the river we reach vast cultivated plains, out of which isolated limestone rocks and parallel ranges of mountains rise up in shapes most fantastic, and disorder most picturesque. It was from a hill above the Polo-hang temple that we obtained the finest views of the country. The cultivation hereabouts was of a kind I had never seen before; in the foreground were a multitude of fields, banked off for the purposes of irrigation, but already shorn of their crops; here and there was a mound covered with temples and trees, and beyond, reaching to the base of the distant mountains, were groves of green bamboo, rocking their plumage to and fro in the wind, like the waves of an emerald sea. The bamboo is reared in this and other districts, and forms a valuable article of commerce, the wealth of a farmer being frequently estimated by the number of clumps which he has on his estate. It requires neither care nor tillage, and is a source of wealth in this part of the country.
