Page:Further India; (IA furtherindia00clif).pdf/271

This page needs to be proofread.

agité dont le souvenir bouillonnait encore en nous. Quel contraste entre ce calme tableau du Laos tropical et cette Europe, dont le nom même était inconnu à ceux qui nous entouraient? Devions-nous les plaindre ou les féliciter de leur ignorance et de leur sauvagerie? Plus encore que la distance, ces différences entre la civilisation pour la cause de laquelle nous nous étions exilés, et la civilisa- tion dont nous étions devenus les hôtes, nous semblaient creuser entre nous et notre patrie un abime chaque jour plus grand."

Mention has already been made of the Dutchman Duyshart,[1] whose surveying expedition undertaken at the behest of the Siamese Government had been magni- fied by native rumour into a wholesale invasion of upper Laos by the scientists of Great Britain. The fact that no detailed account of his journey appears to have been published leaves the nature of his discoveries somewhat vague. He scems, however, to have ascended the Menam from Bangkok to the mouth of its western branch, the Me-ping, and that river to Chieng Mai, whence he trekked across country, striking the Mekong at Chieng Kong, a point some 225 miles above Luang Prabang. It had thus fallen to the lot of this obscure Dutchman to be, so far as is known, the first white man to traverse the country lying between Chieng Mai and Chieng Kong, and without doubt the first to descend and survey the portion of the Mekong which lies southward of that point and between it and Luang Prabang. More than this we do not know concerning Duyshart's work, but

  1. ↑ Vide supra, p. 201.
This article is issued from Wikisource. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.