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The upper portion of Burmah is mountainous. The scenery is among the most beautiful in the world. Plains and mountains, lovely valleys and gaping chasms, present themselves to the wondering eye of the traveller. Now there is a space of level ground, covered with straggling underwood; plants trail along the earth, the high disorderly grass of the jungle waves, and the wild stunted trees stretch their deformed limbs toward heaven, as if to pray that the hand of civilised man might at length relieve them. The waving grass is gone, and we are again amid the mountains, clothed with majestic trees, arching gloriously over the weary traveller’s head, and concealing from his view the wild animals that house there. Such is the greater part of Burmah, thus uninhabited and neglected; such the condition of a region belonging to an unenergetic people; and such it will remain, until the nations can recognise the vast wealth that the gorges and abysses of the mountains contain. Rich and unexhausted is the land; but the race that shall gather its treasures, and turn its wild wastes into populous cities, is not, and will never be, that of the Burman!