The elephants amused themselves as they went along by showering down bamboo seeds upon the men as they passed among the clumps, and seemed not to care at all for the mahout’s whip with the lump of lead attached to the end of its thong. The climate in the basin of the Meh Low being moister than in the Zimmé plain, the verdure is more luxuriant. I noticed a bamboo 60 feet high growing without soil, rooted in the arm of a tree four feet above the ground. At times, on stretching my neck out of the howdah in order to get a further glimpse of something we had passed, I would see a group of white-turbaned Shans squatting in a bamboo bower, looking, in their great peaked hats and their blankets wrapped round them, like gnomes in the Black Forest. Here would be a party of villagers who had scuttled out of sight as they heard us approach. There a group of porters, with their burdens by their side, chatting and resting in the shade. In a jungle-clad country, nothing could be easier than to surprise an enemy. After passing several Lawa villages we reached the large Shan village of Meh Pik, or the Pepper river, and halted for ten minutes to visit a temple, which was handsomely decorated with gold-leaf and vermilion, and occupied by a very ugly image of Gaudama, about which stood many smaller and less hideous images. The offerings, which consisted of flowers, food, dolls’ houses, and toy elephants and ponies, were indications of what the votaries wished forwarded to the spirits of their deceased relations and friends. Written instructions frequently accompany such emblems, stating for whom they are intended, and at the tag end the writer curses any one that steals them, and hopes that that individual may be punished in the four hells. Leaving the village we entered a large grazing-plain, in which many buffaloes with their usual attendants, white paddy-birds and mynahs, were feeding in the plain, crossed the Meh Low and the large rice-plain of Ban Pong, and halted for the night on the bank of the Meh Soo-ay, near the large village of the same name, which is situated 323½ miles from Hlineboay and 1566 feet above the sea. Ban Meh Soo-ay is the headquarters of the governor of this district, who called on us as soon as he heard of our arrival. He told me that the valley of the Meh Soo-ay is the private game-preserve of the King of Zimmé, and that no one is allowed to hunt there, or even enter the valley without the royal permission. It is therefore uninhabited, except by deer, tiger, rhinoceros, elephant, wild cattle, and other large game. From slate and quartz being the only pebbles in the stream-bed, it is not at all unlikely that gold may exist in the hills stretching into this valley, as it does in the same geological formation in other parts of the Shan States.