Page:Notes of a journey across the Isthmus of Krà.pdf/24

 angle. It is quite open, and the strong E.N.E. winds which prevail in the height of the N.E. monsoon blow dead in on its western shore. The bay is shoal, and has silted up very considerably since I surveyed it in 1872. At that time there were about two and a half feet in the narrow channel at the entrance of the river, now it can be waded over at low water, and trading boats have to mark the channel with branches of trees every time they come in and out at high water. At low water spring tides the sand and mud bank dries a good mile from the west side, and the three fathom line is about one and three-quarter miles out. The silting process is gradually going on, owing principally to the freshets from the two rivers in the bay at the end of the rainy season being directly opposed by the constant easterly winds which prevail here during both monsoons. The tides also are too weak to remove the sedimentary matter kept in suspension by these opposing forces, and it appears to me that its being blocked up altogether is only a question of time.

The extreme rise and fall of tide is nearly four feet. A small coral patch lies about a mile from the north shore in a S.E. direction. At the entrance of the river there is a small village, and a wood station for supplying the Government steamers. I may here remark that when I surveyed this locality, I scaled an elevated rocky islet (Koh Teluh) some miles from the coast, and from its summit the distant high land to the westward continued in one unbroken but varied outline as far as the eye could see. Between this range and the coast line, mountains and kills of every form and altitude appeared in grand confusion.

tapers from its mouth upwards, and is about 250 feet wide at the City of Chumpon, where the banks rise twenty-two feet above the bed. The course of the river is very serpentine, one of the bends being nearly a circle. The distance from Paknam to Chumpon by the river is from nine and a half to ten miles. The river is very shoal, full of sand banks and sunken trees from landslips, which are frequent. In the dry season at low water, native boats constantly ground on the sand banks and get capsized on hidden obstructions, of