spectacle which we who were privileged to
see it will remember always. What a pity that Cap'n Bryant was not
alive so that I might sit on the steps of his Mattapoisett cottage and
tell him all about it.

CHAPTER XII

EXILES OF THE OUTLANDS

From Pnom-Penh, the capital of Cambodia, to Saigon, the capital of
Cochin-China, is in the neighborhood of two hundred miles and two
routes are open to the traveler. The most comfortable and considerably
the cheapest is by the bi-weekly steamer down the Mekong. The
alternative route, which is far more interesting, consists in
descending the river to Banam, a village some twenty miles below
Pnom-Penh, on the opposite bank of the Mekong, where, if a car has been
arranged for, it is possible to motor across the fertile plains of
Cochin-China to Saigon in a single day. That was the way that we went.

Though separated only by the Mekong, that mighty waterway which, rising
in the mountains of Tibet, bisects the whole peninsula, Cochin-China is
as dissimilar from Cambodia as the ordered farmlands of Ohio are from
the Florida Everglades. In Cambodia, stretches of sand covered with
low, scraggy, discouraged-looking scrub alternate with tangled and
impenetrable jungles. It is a savage, untamed land. Cochin-China, on
the other hand, is one great sweep of plain, green with growing rice
and dotted with the bamboo poles of well-sweeps, for water can be found
everywhere at thirty to forty feet. These striking contrasts in
contiguous states are due in some measure, no doubt, to differences in
their soils and climates and to the industry of their inhabitants, but
more largely, I imagine, to the fact that while the Frenchman has been
at work in Cochin-China for upwards of sixty years, Cambodia is still
on the frontier of civilization.

The roads which the French have built in Indo-China deserve a paragraph
of mention, for, barring the rivers and the three short unconnected
sections of railway on the East coast of the peninsula, they form the
country's only means of communication. The national highways consist of
two great systems. The Route Coloniale, which was the one I followed,
has its beginning at Kep, on the Gulf of Siam, runs north-eastward
through the jungles of Cambodia to Pnom-Penh, and, recommencing at
Banam, swings southward across the Cochin-China plain to Saigon. The
Route Mandarine, beginning at Saigon, hugs the shores of the China Sea
and, after traversing twelve hundred m