Page:A wandering student in the Far East vol.1 - Zetland.djvu/348

272 An officer in charge of a small frontier guard quartered at Manshien accompanied me to the frontier. Beyond the village the level plain down which I had been marching for the past two days comes to an end, and the Ta-ping river forces its way along a deep and narrow valley between mountain walls covered with dense vegetation. After marching for about twelve miles we came upon two or three sheds of bamboo matting on the jungle-covered banks of a mountain torrent, the Kulika. This stream forms the boundary between China and Burma, and a guard of ten Chinese soldiers is posted here. It is characteristic of the part of the world in which one is travelling, that with a scientifically devised and well-constructed road on either side, one finds nothing but a large tree-trunk to carry one safely across the frontier stream. And the reason for this anomaly is even more characteristic—namely, an inability on the part of the two coterminous Powers to come to any agreement as to which of them should