The banks of the river presented a succession of picturesque headlands, fifty to sixty feet high, separated by luxuriant dells, each containing a village. Between two such heights, covered with pagodas accessible only by flights of steps, lay Shienpagah, a thriving town of some four hundred houses. A brisk trade is here carried on in fish and firewood for the capital, and salt procured from the swamps behind the sterile Tsagain hills.[10] Above Shienpagah we changed our course to the other side. The villages on the eastern bank seemed small and few, each embowered among tall trees and groves of palmyra, mixed with a few cocoa-nut palms, relieved by the bright, pale, tropical green of the plantain. A broad alluvial flat extended to the low broken ranges of the Sagyen and Thubyo-budo hills, from the former of which comes nearly all the marble used in Mandalay. The distant Shan mountains rose beyond another plain sparsely covered with lofty trees and richly cultivated. Our course lay up a channel, skirting the long island and town of Alékyoung, till the rounded hill of Kethung, dotted with white pagodas, rose over the dense greenery in which nestled the village so called. On the opposite bank lay Hteezeh, the village of oil merchants. A belt of bright yellow sand, and then a fine green sward, led up from the river to the village, shaded by noble palmyras and gigantic bamboos, which formed a background to a river scene of exquisite colouring and beauty. A mile or two above Alékyoung, the river narrowed, flowing in a stream unbroken by islands or sandbanks. Soon the short well wooded Nâttoung hills abutted on the right bank, in a pagoda-crowned headland, with Makouk village at its base. On the opposite side, the small town of Tsingu, once fortified, and still showing fragments of the old walls, occupied another headland, marking the entrance of the third defile of the Irawady.