Let us now take a look at the country in which Mr. and Mrs. Judson at last found themselves. At the present time there are two distinct Burmahs: British Burmah and Independent Burmah. But at the time when Mr. and Mrs. Judson arrived in Rangoon, these two countries formed one great Empire, ruled by one monarch, whose throne was at Ava. Under successive British invasions the Empire has shrunk to two-thirds of its original size. The English have appropriated the whole of the seaboard, the fertile lowlands forming the richest rice-producing district in the world, and the heavy teak forests of Pegu, which yield ship timber unrivalled for its durability. At the time of the arrival of the Judsons, Burmah was 1,020 miles long and 600 miles wide. It was bounded on the north by Assam and Thibet; on the east by China and Siam; and on the south and west by the Bay of Bengal and the British provinces of India. Its area was 280,000 square miles; so that it was four times as large as the whole of New England. Burmah is scored by three parallel rivers that flow southward: the Irrawaddy, Sittang, and the Salwen.[8] By far the largest of these is the Irrawaddy, which is navigable by steamers to Bhamo, 840 miles from the mouth. The country is made up of these three parallel river valleys, and the mountain chains which flank them. The land in Asia gradually slopes from the Himalayas southward toward the Bay of Bengal. Starting at the south and moving northward, the traveller finds first broad paddy-fields, submerged during a part of the year by the network of streams through which the Irrawaddy finds its way to the sea; then he traverses upland plains; then a rolling country, with ranges of hills; and finally deep forests, high mountains, and the magnificent defiles, through which the rivers flow. The southern part of Burmah, like Egypt, owes its fertility to an annual inundation which is thus described by an English officer:[9] “With the exception of high knolls standing up here and there, and a strip of high ground at the base of the hills, the whole country, fields, roads, bridges, is under water from one to twelve feet, or more, in depth. Boats are the only means of locomotion for even a few yards. You sail across the country, ploughing through the half-submerged long grass, piloting a way through the clumps of brushwood and small trees, into the streets of large agricultural villages, where the cattle are seen stabled high up in the houses, twelve feet from the ground; the children are catching fish with lines through the floor; the people are going about their daily concerns, if it is only to borrow a cheroot from their next-door neighbor, in canoes; in short, all the miseries and laughable _contretemps_ sometimes pictured in the illustrated papers as caused by floods in Europe, may be seen—with this difference, that every one is so accustomed to them that they never create a thought of surprise.”