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from the mouth of the former river to Kamarat. The rainy season had not yet begun, and the exposed bed of the Mekong was seen to be a mass of enormous rocks and boulders which lay about in wonderful confusion, piled one upon another like a heap of gigantic pebbles, amid which the river made its way in numberless shrunken. streams. In places its channel was barely 200 feet in no part did its width exceed 1,000 yards. At its narrowest and deepest, soundings could not find bottom at 300 feet. Each narrowing of the fairway pro- duced rapids, the ascent of which was difficult and even dangerous, while here and there the current ran grandly between sheer cliffs of water-worn rock. The river, in fact, was now running through a mountainous zone, which it enters a little below Chieng Kang, and its course from that point to the mouth of the Se-Mun is beset with difficulties. None the less, it is freely used for the big rafts upon which the Laos people transport their goods down-stream, and it is also navigable for native craft of light calibre.

De Lagrée, meanwhile, and the rest of the party, had left Ubon on January 20th, with fifteen bullock-carts and fifty Laotine porters, bound upon an overland march to Kamarat. Four days' tramp over a flat and often sandy plain, covered with rice-fields and clearings, and traversed by an unmade cart-track, brought him to Muong Amnat, thirty-five miles due north of Ubon. Here the cultivation of silk-worms and of the coccus lacca were found to be the principal industries of the natives, and here too de Lagrée paid off his carriers and engaged fresh men for