Page:Further India; (IA furtherindia00clif).pdf/241

 was not too dense to admit of the use of vehicles. At Kukan, thirty-eight miles to the south of Si-Saket, he found himself once more in Kambodian country, the natives being all Khmers who spoke none save their own language, in spite of the fact that the province had been annexed by Siam at a period anterior to the conquest of Batambang and Siamreap.

Still using his carts, and crossing the rivers by means of good wooden bridges constructed by the Kambodians, Garnier drove west-southwest to Sankea, a distance of some twenty-five miles, where the track bifurcates, one branch leading west to Korat, the other south to Ang- kor. Taking the former by the advice of the local authorities, who seem to have misled him through sheer inability to understand that any one could possibly be in a hurry, he went out of his way as far as Suren, whence he again turned towards the south, reaching Su-Krom on January 22nd. Here he was assured that the road ahead of him was impassable for vehicles, but declining to be moved by these representations, he pushed on resolutely. Despite the desertion in mid-forest of all his guides and native drivers, he presently found himself, with the little knot of French sailors and non-commissioned officers whom he was taking back to Kambodia, on the lip of a precipitous cliff some 600 feet in height; he had reached the abrupt ending of the plateau across which he had been travelling ever since his departure from Ubon. A path down the face of the cliff was discovered, but it was of a nature which necessitated the bullocks being unyoked and the carts being taken to pieces before it could be nego-