s chest and a carbine tucked
under his arm, paced slowly up and down--an ever-present symbol of
Dutch power--watching the posturing princes with a sardonic eye. That
is Holland's way of showing that, should disaffection show its head,
she is ready to deal with it.

CHAPTER X

THROUGH THE GOLDEN CHERSONESE TO ELEPHANT LAND

Since the world began the peacock's tail which we call the Malay
Peninsula has swung down from Siam to sweep the Sumatran shore. A
peacock's tail not merely in configuration but in its gorgeousness of
color. Green jungle--a bewildering tangle of trees, shrubs, bushes,
plants, and creepers, hung with ferns and mosses, bound together with
rattans and trailing vines--clothes the mountains and the lowlands, its
verdant riot checked only by the sea. Penetrating the deepest recesses
of the jungle a network of little, dusky, winding rivers, green-blue
because the sky that is reflected in them is filtered through the
interlacing branches. Orchids--death-white, saffron, pink, violet,
purple, crimson--festooned from the higher boughs like incandescent
lights of colored glass. The gilded, cone-shaped towers of Buddhist
temples rising above steep roofs tiled in orange, red, or blue, their
eaves hung with hundreds of tiny bells which tinkle musically in every
breeze. The scarlet splotches of spreading fire-trees against
whitewashed walls. Shaven-headed priests in yellow robes offering
flowers and food to stolid-faced images of brass and clay. Long files
of elephants, bearing men and merchandise beneath their hooded
howdahs, rocking and rolling down the dim and deep-worn forest trails.
Snowy, hump-backed bullocks, driven by naked brown men, splashing
through the shallow water on the rice-fields harnessed to ploughs as
primeval in design as those our Aryan ancestors used. Bronze-brown
women, their lithe figures wrapped in gaily colored cottons, busying
themselves about frail, leaf-thatched dwellings perched high on bamboo
stilts above the river-banks. And, arching over all, a sky as
flawlessly blue as the dome of the Turquoise Mosque in Samarland. Such
is the land that the ancients called the Golden Chersonese but which is
labeled in the geographies of today as Lower Siam and the Malay States.

If you will look at the map you will see that Lower Siam extends
half-way down the Malay Peninsula, running across it from coast to
coast and thus forming a barrier between British Burmah and British
Malaya, prec