ite Residency on the banks of the Mekong.

I know of no region of like size and so comparatively easy of access
(the great liners of the _Messageries Maritimes_ touch at Saigon,
whence the Cambodian capital can be reached by river-steamer in two
days) which offers so many attractions to the hunter of big game.
Unlike British East Africa, where, as a result of the commercialization
of sport, the cost of going on _safari_ has steadily mounted until now
it is a form of recreation to be afforded only by war profiteers,
Cambodia remains unexploited and unspoiled. It is in many respects the
richest, as it is almost the last, of the world's great
hunting-grounds. It is, indeed, a vast zoological garden, where such
formalities as hunting licenses are still unknown. In its jungles roam
elephants, tigers, rhinoceroses, leopards, panthers, bear, deer, and
the savage jungle buffalo, known in Malaya as the seladang and in
Indo-China as the gaur--considered by many hunters the most dangerous
of all big game.

Nailed to the wall of the Government rest-house at Kep was the skin of
a leopard which had been shot from the veranda the day before my
arrival, while raiding the pig-pen. The day that I left Kampot an
elephant herd, estimated by the native trackers at one hundred and
twenty head, was reported within seven miles of the town. Twice during
the journey to Pnom-Penh I saw tracks of elephant herds on the road--it
looked as though a fleet of whippet tanks had passed.

Nevertheless, I should have put mental question-marks after some of the
big game stories I heard while I was in Indo-China had I not been
convinced of the credibility of those who told them. Only a few days
before our arrival at Saigon, for example, an American engaged in
business in that city set out one morning before daybreak, in a small
car, for the paddy-fields, where there is excellent bird-shooting in
the early dawn. The car, which, owing to the intense heat, had no
wind-shield, was driven by the Annamite chauffeur, the American, a
double-barrel loaded with bird-shot across his knees, sitting beside
him on the front seat. Rounding a turn in the jungle road at thirty
miles an hour, the twin beams of light from the lamps fell on a tiger,
which, dazzled and bewildered by the on-coming glare, crouched snarling
in the middle of the highway. There was no time to stop the car, and,
as the jungle came to the very edge of the narrow road, there was no
way to avoid the a