Page:Further India; (IA furtherindia00clif).pdf/259

country which, though it had not been examined in de- tail, had already been visited by Europeans. In only a few places had they been able to look around them with that peculiar pride and triumph which belong to the white man who knows that for him has been reserved from the beginning the tremendous privilege of gazing, the first of all his kind, upon scenes never beheld before by European eyes. That joy of joys to one bitten by the love of wandering was to be theirs when they should win free at last of the places over which their fellows had scored a trail; but if an English expedition of imposing numbers, and presumably far better equipped than them- selves, had slipped in ahead of them, this experience was like to be indefinitely postponed. They never dreamed of questioning the accuracy of the report: it was felt to be vraisemblable, to be completely in keeping with the ubiquitous character, the unblushing intrusiveness of the Englishman. They could only set their teeth and de- termine to die rather than to suffer themselves to be out- done, while they said bitter things of England and of Fate, and Garnier's anglophobia revived of a sudden with some- thing of its old passionate force. Intense thereforc was their relief when, shortly after leaving Chieng Kang, they met three rafts journeying down-stream, on board one of which was a Dutchman, named Duyshart, a surveyor in the employ of the Siamese Government, who turned out to be the egg from which, through the incubation of the native imagination, this monstrous canard had been. hatched. This man, the record of whose journey and surveys seems to have been engulfed in the files of one