172

INDIA

mountains ; of light and colour ; of laughter, song, and
wooden pagodas, is almost as distinct from India in
physical and ethnographical characteristics as Australia
is from England. It has no recognised overland connection
 with India. Only by way of the sea can it be
approached from the west, and this no doubt has contributed
 greatly to preserve its mixed nationality from
recent floods of Aryan immigration, Not that the province
 of Burma (so lately the Burmese empire) is otherwise
 homogeneous in its ethnography. There are men
of many races, speaking many languages, included within
the red line that now defines British Burma, but they
are all of one original stock—a stock which, whilst we
class it under the general designation of Indo-Chinese or
Mongoloid, offers far more evidence of the Mongolian
element than the Indian. There is apparently no affinity
whatever between the short, stout-limbed, indolent, ignorant,
and gaily dressed (though not over-dressed) Burman, and
the slight-limbed, long-headed Bengali graduate of the
Calcutta University. And yet the two countries are not
(geographically) far separated. Practically, however, they
are separated by the deep sea, and the width of that sea
is a matter of great consequence where a sea of any sort
is a final and fatal obstacle to the personal enterprise
involved in travel. Burma is shut off from Assam on the
north-west by a mass of densely forest-covered mountains,
running in steep and high ridges, intersected by deep and
narrow valleys, inhabited by the wildest tribes of the
aboriginal inhabitants of our north-east frontier ; Singphos
and Nagas on the north, Karens farther to the north-east,
Lushais and Chins on the north-west ; all of them secure
‘n their almost impenetrable jungles, through which no
right of way from west to east exists, or ever has existed.
This band of impassable hills is more or less continuous
 down the whole southern watershed of the Assam
valley ; it envelops the little independent state of Manipur,
and reaches into the Khasia and Garo plateau north of
Sylhet and Tipperah to the west. One long arm stretches
away southwards, and gradually separates the coast district