Page:Lord Amherst and the British Advance Eastwards to Burma.djvu/75

 kingdom which was ruled from Ava. Assam is the upper portion of the basin of the Brahmaputra, which flows into the Bay of Bengal. Burma, including in that term the lower province of Pegu, consists roughly of the valley of the Irawadi. which Hows into the Gulf of Martaban. The watershed which divides the two is a vast expanse of mountains peopled by wild tribes, barren, inhospitable, and all but impenetrable. A huge spur, projecting from this central mass towards the west, divides Assam from Cachar. The main mountain system continues southwards in a direction roughly parallel to the coast, thus dividing the comparatively level strip of seaboard, called Arakan, from the basin of the Irawadi, that is to say from Burma and Pegu. Thus the land barrier is practically complete from the gigantic mountain masses of the Chinese frontier to Cape Negrais on the south, where the coast suddenly turns to the east and forms, beyond the rib of hills, the Delta of the Irawadi. But even now we have not completed our survey of the theatre of the coming war. Beyond the limits of Pegu, and separated from it by another system of hills, lies the valley of the Salwin, and from the mouth of this river, which is hardly inferior to the mighty Irawadi, stretches still southward much in the same way as Arakan the coast territory of Tenasserim. We have described the interior of Burma as ground almost untraversed by European feet, but centuries before the coast had been the haunt of Portuguese adventurers, whose exploits and whose crimes form one of the most