ceptibly the one into the other; little creeks and inlets clinging to the ragged skirts of the vegetation, and mud-stained amphibious trees wading out into the shallows, or standing ankle-deep in the slime and ooze.
The forest—an endless sea of tree-tops—inundated the plain, the sombre waves of colour fading as they receded to melt at last into a misty blur of delicate, elusive tints low down about the fretted skyline. Here and there the sombre monotony of the jungle was relieved by wide washes of vivid green, where the rice stood ripening in the irrigated fields; and in places the surface of the earth was stained, as by some parasitic growth, by the dusty greys and browns of thatch, and the raw reds of tiled roofs visible beneath their canopies of palm-fronds. For the rest the forest—forest indescribably dingy, squalid, and melancholy—draped itself like a death-cloth over the face of the plain.
Nowhere else in all the wondrous fairyland of tropical Asia could a landscape be found more dreary to the eye, more depressing to the spirit, than this spot on the shores of Tonlé-Sap in the lower valley of the Mekong. The sparse hillocks served but to emphasise its flatness. The very trees of the jungle had the air of having slunk out of the muddy waters and of huddling together shamefully, like a host of woebegone waifs, on the parched and thirsty soil. In their colouring there was no richness; and the thin heat-haze that shimmered so rest-
