bites, he managed the last fifty miles, where the river grew navigable, in a log dugout, his clothes in tatters and his last pair of boots long fallen to bits. Yet when his crew of two junglis managed to make him understand that the headquarters of the Bor Shap was near, he extracted from his one despatch-box a muchcreased glad rag, which had done duty at the Yamens and Taotai courts over the other side-a blue serge suit, a shirt, and a collar. In these, and a pair of carpet slippers, he shuffled ashore and found his way to the Political's bungalow. Here, from 2 P.M. to 5, he waited patiently, not caring to send a message down to the Courthouse. The Political arrived, and a light tea, which X., with quiet restraint, ate conventionally; so that it was not till an hour later that the big man realised that he had a case of starvation in front of him. Thereupon followed a mighty meal. But, to my mind, that initial restraint over the thin bread and butter and the bunlets commenced a bond between the two men that lasted for years after a bond that had its bearing on much of the frontier work which followed.

By midnight the story was pieced together, rendered into telegraphese and cipher, and the Political, sitting over the Eurasian clerk in the tiny telegraph hut, dictated the groups and discouraged the sleepiness which would have relegated the job to to-morrow marnin, sah!

The thing had its amusing aspect, not the least being the subsequent arrival from Olympus of a scarlet-crested letter, in tone as stiff as the creamlaid on which it was typed. It conveyed the severe official censure of the Ultimate Power in Council for the overstayal of leave; and went on to add, para. 2, the unsolicited fact that the sum of a large number of rupees had been awarded to the officer towards the expenses of the astonishing journey.

He took ten days' leave to Calcutta for a refit. There he got out from the remnants of his kit a bunch of notebookleaves on which he had recorded a series of prismaticcompass bearings of the snow peaks visible from the valley as he travelled, and hitherto unknown. The bearings were accurate, but, in the nature of things, he had gone on from page to page as he marched, 80 that intersections, crossbearings, and back bearings were never on the same sheet. He had forgotten to number the pages, and the binding of the notebook had long since dissolved into fragments. He was seen, some time later, seated at a large table with the distracted Surveyor-General; the table was strewn with notebook leaves, and they were trying to piece together an important contribution to the world's geographical knowledge by the light of pure hope.

The whole thing was an epic; it will be related some day in its proper place.

Some time after X. had brought the state of affairs to light, Headquarters told the Local Government to see to it. The idea was the use of local resources to go and look into the matter. The corollary that the matter should be taken on, if found to be as stated, was implied rather than expressed. In the hands of the energetic frontier officers of the time, the taking on may well have been a foregone conclusion.

It was characteristic of the confidence reposed in the Political Officer by the Local Government that from the first they gave him practically a free hand in money and personnel wherewith to carry out the task, thereafter asking him to get ahead with it.

The job was big enough, in all conscience. Imprimis, there were these intruders to be found, seen to, and the status quo ante re-established. He knew enough about Chao to realise that his men would probably not take it lying down. Then there were the intervening tribes. Nobody knew anything about them, their numbers, their location, or their will to fight. If they were at all like their congeners near the border, anything from unpleasantness to a blaze-up of the whole frontier might be expected. But long experience of jungle tribes gave him hopes of a minutely sub

divided collection of village democracies, mutually distrustful and without a common leader, using their gams as spokesmen, but depending for action on the results of dissecting by talk each problem as it occurred; they might flash out into a vindictive warfare wherein ambushes, poisoned arrows, and whirlwind dao charges would figure largely, or they might remain in a condition of unstable equilibrium. They were not to be trusted. On the whole, he banked on the weaknesses of self-determination (though, indeed, that pestilent polysyllable" had not at that time come to birth), and if he were able to show them that he neither feared them nor wanted to worry them, then the problem of oozing through their country with an ever-decreasing force at the head of an everlengthening line of communications might yet be solved.

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Least of all could any assistance be looked for from them. They lived from hand to mouth on a little rice cultivation and much foraging in the jungle, so every scrap of food for the force would have to be carried, and the force would have to carry it. How much food? How many carriers? There he couldn't even begin to guess. This much he knew of the country, unexplored though it was: it was a simply damnable tangle, wherein jungle, in

kit.

Now the first principle of jungle warfare is "little and often." Tactics, movements, camps, stockades, cannot be worked by horde, as in open warfare. A force with a frontage of one man will, if large, have an interminable length, and will invite trouble all along its vulnerable body. Much subdivision needs many leaders; and though he knew and trusted the Gurkha company commanders, yet many white men would be wanted in a land where every normal condition seemed to be standing on its head and waving its legs. So the first use he made of his carte blanche was to indent for officers. His requirements centred in the versatile. Physical fitness, confidence, and enthusiasm were almost as necessary, since work-unremitting, and exhausting to mind and body -would be the order of the day. His wide acquaintance of men gave him more to pick and choose from than he had room for, but twenty names were sent in and their owners were bidden to the feast. Hardly two came from the same cantonment, but they had one thing in common as they pushed north at their best speed: each travelled light, and each man's

One limitation only was imposed on the Political-no more than one battalion of Military Police might be used. It was necessary to keep the thing as civil as possible, therefore the fewer soldiers the better.

But the battalion was worth many. Minutely subdivisible into responsible parts, the squad was the unit, and all larger formations multiples thereof. The N.C.O.'s were in daily habit of acting on their own with their squads. The company commanders (it was in the days before platoons) might be relied on in distant and prolonged responsibility. The white officers were final arbiters; but, being scanty, were more administrators than tactical leaders. All native ranks were Gurkha, born to the jungle and the queer ways thereof, and so closely akin to unadorned and uncomplicated Nature that they needed little training. The first lesson of all, the essential friendliness of the jungle itself, was a thing which one might preach in vain to the open plainsman or towndweller; to the Gurkha it was such a matter of course that he would have gaped at any one bothering to assert it. This confidence, wedded to a merry combativeness and a complete trust in his fellows and in his superiors, made up the ideal jungle soldier.

All this needs stating once to show how a great deal of what subsequently happened

would have been impossible with any but Gurkhas.

The details of how the supplies were obtained, and with them the semi-Tibetan coolietransport to lift them, are irrelevant. Both had to come from a long way off; in the end, both infinitely exceeded the initial estimate. When the column eventually got back, it found the base camp four times as large as when it started.

We next find a semi-cleared level space in the jungle, at the highest point on the river to which a stern-wheel steamer could penetrate-the bottom of the first rapids. Here foregathered, first, the battalion of Military Police with its four white officers. As their cooking fires twinkled on the first evening, the Political stepped ashore.

Charles Douglas PardonHowe, Political Officer of the Jungle Tracts, plenipotentiary in the Areas North of the River, friend of the worker and terror of the slacker, confirmed bachelor and occasional teetotaller, was born at Ballater, in the kingdom of Scotland, forty-two years previous to the time with which we deal. He stood six feet four in his rubber-soled shoes, had a chest as big as a bass drum, and the voice of the bull of Bashan. The immense dome of his bald head held a brain which no problem could stump and nothing could flurry; withal, he was a man of his hands, and

great freckled hairy paws they were as they hung loosely to his sides. On occasion he could fly into a fury; and then the great air-passages, as round and big as the Marble Arch, would reverberate through the jungle like rolling drums. Only once can I remember seeing him struck dumb and stupid: a bit of petty meanness came to light in the dealings of a tribe with its neighbour, what time he held durbar between them; if recollection serves, he let the whole thing slide, and went off to the mess for a drink.

The gams, or headmen of tribes, would pad down to his bungalow at headquarters. Here, in the deep verandah, he would hold informal court, plaintiffs and defendants squatting on the bare boards. In five minutes he would get to the root of it all, and in nine cases out of ten an inter-tribal head-hunting would cease to impend. Once a gam said something impertinent. The Political Officer leant across the table and "Hr-r-r-r-ONGG!" said he, or noise to that effect; and, before the glassware in the dining-room had ceased vibrating, the gam had shot off the verandah, across the lawn, and into the jungle. These eyes saw it.

Tireless of body, single and simple of purpose, withal kindly and courteous, a very parfyte gentyl knight was he. He stalked through the land with a lilt and a swing of which each and all of us, white man or Gurkha, caught the direct in

the mad adventure would have fizzled out, or, more probably, would never have started.

As he emerged from his hut next morning, his new officers commenced to arrive. Each,

as he came ashore from steamer or dug-out, was met by a havildar and fatigue-party, and a note showing his shanty and the direction of the mess hut; also the fact that a meal was available. Each, neglecting the meal and leaving kit and servant to the fatigue-party, repaired forthwith to the Political, who, figuratively, took him by the hand and offered him beer. Most were welcomed by their short names. Each emerged from the hut with orders to go and get fed, and thereafter repair to the particular job assigned. Not one but was on working terms with his job by bedtime. Shorts and shirtsleeves clothed each, the toilsome day sparsely punctuated with precarious meals, or meals indeed clean forgotten.

This

would end with a bath, the garb of the day flung down in a sticky heap in the corner of the shanty, dinner in clean clothes, and a general uprising from camp-chairs as the Political beamed in the doorway and took the head of the table. Appetisers stood on a sidetable; vermouth of two colours, and gin (the three were generally known as roast wolf, fried fox, and boiled owl), but nobody bothered about them much. They were abstemious folk, and an unexpressed feel

was a long way from short drinks.

Followed strenuous days. The heat was terrific; the rain, incessant for ten months of the year, was a warm downpour. If you stood in the doorway of your hut and put your hand out, it felt like a shower of blood. In five minutes it soaked you; but since it never chilled you,

soaked you remained till bath-time. Any attempt at a mackintosh was futile; you got just as wet with perspiration inside it as you would with rain, and it hampered you. Luckily the base camp stood on an old sandbank. Had it been soil, the whole fit-out would presently have sunk into the mud and been no more seen.

The cheery efficiency of the camp was infectious. It was also a little strange, by standards of purely military expeditions. More work was got through, but in a looser way. It is hard to define the difference. Possibly something of the same sort differentiates an English industry run by private enterprise from the same industry nationalised or run by a Government department. The visible out turn and economy of effort bore the same difference in both cases. But it was obvious that the work, loose though it was, would not have gone so well had it not been for the Political's power to choose his instruments.

In a little more than a fort