Notices of the wilder tribes who inhabit the northeast of Siam are extremely inadequate, the region being practically unvisited by Europeans, and almost unknown to its titular sovereign, the king. The French expedition under Lagrée passed through the lower edge of the country on their toilsome journey up the Mekong in 1867, and M. de Carné furnishes us with some particulars of the natives in and about the chief centre, Luang Phrabang. "One must go," he says, "to the market to judge the variety of costumes and types. At a glance at this mixed population the least skilful of anthropologists would see beforehand the inextricable confusion of races and languages which he will meet at a short distance from Luang-Praban. Numbers of savages who have submitted to the king come every morning to the town to sell or buy. They live in the mountains. Their dress is extremely simple; so much so that it could hardly be lessened.... The Laotians, who are very proud of their half-civilization, look on these savages as much inferior to themselves, and indeed as almost contemptible. Every group of three miserable huts of theirs has a name of its own, known in the neighborhood; but the most important village of the people, who may be regarded as the original owners of the country, is called by the common and scornful name of Ban-Kas [or Bang Kha,] a kraal of savages. The stranger refuses to accept this estimate formed by perverted pride. The savages are hard workers, and the finest fields of rice and noblest herds of cattle I have seen have been in their parts of the country. They are all shy at first, but they are easily brought to be familiar. How often have I in my walks had to ask these children of the woods for shelter from the sun, or water to quench my thirst, or a mat on which to forget my fatigue! They did not understand my words, but divined with the quick instinct of hospitality the wants which brought me among them, and hastened to satisfy them. I have enjoyed positive feasts in these huts, where the bamboo, worked in a hundred ways, spread all the luxury before me it could display; and I cannot recall without gratitude the recollection of a collation made up of sticky rice, smoked iguana legs, and pepper, which a savage, some sixty years of age, whom I met in the forest, to whom my long beard caused astonishment rather than fear, offered me one day."