The mountains crossed were often of some height, and between the altitudes of 3,500 and 5,000 feet were covered with pine forest. The main range of Loi[40] Pè Möng, the great divide between the Salween and the Mekong Valleys, which averages 6,000 feet, and rises in many places to more than 7,000, carries no pine forests. "On the spurs and sub-features, which stretch far away to the west, forming what may be almost called a plateau--a very uneven one certainly, cut up by gigantic gullies, and sprinkled with numerous eminences, but still a rough sort of tableland--pine forest is the prevailing growth, and seems to give place to oak and chestnut above 5,000 feet, which, however, is about the average of this high-land plain. Notwithstanding the ruggedness of the country which is very much like a Brobdingnagian ploughed field, the road is not by any means bad. It is very fatiguing, but for a mule-track it is very much better than the roads at many places in the Western States, where the path climbs straight up the hillside with a Roman directness of purpose, or follows stream beds and rocky gorges with a pertinacity born of an ignorance of shoe-leather. Beyond the Salween the track follows the line of the spurs, with the result that one very seldom has a back-breaking climb. The credit of this natural engineering eye seems to belong rather to the Panthay and Chinese merchants than to the natives of the country; for farther south, where the Panthay caravans pass but seldom, the paths follow the usual Shan system of going straight from point to point." It was through a country of this sort that the little party which was to receive the submission of its chief, and settle his relations with the Sovereign Power, made its way. With Scott were two other white men, Captain Pink, of the Queen's Royal West Surrey Regiment, who was a member of the Commission, and Dr. Darwin, a civil surgeon, in the service of the Burman Government. The escort consisted of eighteen old soldiers, Sikhs of the Shan levy which had lately been taken over by the army, and as many untrained recruits of the same corps. There were besides a few Burmese clerks on Mr. Scott's staff, some servants and camp-followers, the transport mules with their Panthay drivers, a few elephants--which were more imposing though less agile than the mules--and lastly the princely wooer in the shape of the Myoza of Keng Hkam, with a tail of rough spear-men to give a touch of romance to the cortège. Not a very imposing embassage, certainly, to represent the majesty of England, and to require the allegiance of a chief who ruled over twenty thousand square miles of country. But the leaders had the right spirit, and not a man with them, from the trained soldiers to the rough mule-drivers, but marched with his head high. The town of Kengtung is about ten miles as the crow flies from the pass over the Loi Pè Möng.