"We rose as soon as the audience was ended, and went down the steps where we had left our shoes. When we were all re-shod, I went with my introducer to see the famous white elephant, which was standing in a stable not far away. He was not particularly white--in fact, his name was the whitest part of him. His ears were slightly spotted, and so were the front and top of his head, while the rest of him was about the complexion of the ordinary elephants. He had a gorgeous lodging all to himself, but he was said to be of a bad temper, and, in spite of his noble character, he was chained to a post as any ordinary beast might be. I fancy he would have made things very lively if he had been divested of his chains and allowed to walk around freely. "Burmah shares with Siam the honor of being one of the lands of the white elephant, and some of the wars between the two countries have grown out of disputes relative to the possession of these coveted beasts. They are held in great esteem, partly on account of their being the habitations of Buddha in his numerous transmigrations, and partly because their possession is held to be synonymous with good-luck both in peace and war. When a white elephant dies he is buried with royal honors, and the whole nation goes into mourning.[7] [7] For a full account of the white elephant, and the reverence he receives, see Part II. of "The Boy Travellers in the Far East," Chapter XVIII. [Illustration: MOUNTAIN GORGE ON THE UPPER PART OF THE RIVER.] "So much for Mandalay and the King of Burmah. It is a pity you cannot go up to the city, and also to Bhamo, three hundred miles farther, where steamboats can run nearly all the year. Between Mandalay and Bhamo the scenery is more interesting than on the lower part of the Irrawaddy; in many places the mountains come close down to the river, and just before you reach Bhamo there is a narrow gorge where the river flows for a dozen miles or more between steep mountains several hundred feet high. Some of the cliffs are nearly perpendicular, and the river is penned in so closely that the current is very swift; one mountain, nearly a thousand feet high, is called 'Monkey Castle,' on account of the great numbers of monkeys that are frequently seen around it, and there is another where thousands of screeching parrots make the air resound with their unmelodious calls. "On an island some distance above Mandalay there is a Buddhist monastery, where the monks keep some large fish in a tank, and have made them so tame that they come when called to be fed, and will allow their keepers to stroke their backs. They belong to the dog-fish family, and their mouths are capacious enough to take in anything that their stomachs will hold.