From Pnom-Penh, the capital of Cambodia, to Saigon, the capital of Cochin-China, is in the neighborhood of two hundred miles and two routes are open to the traveler. The most comfortable and considerably the cheapest is by the bi-weekly steamer down the Mekong. The alternative route, which is far more interesting, consists in descending the river to Banam, a village some twenty miles below Pnom-Penh, on the opposite bank of the Mekong, where, if a car has been arranged for, it is possible to motor across the fertile plains of Cochin-China to Saigon in a single day. That was the way that we went.

Though separated only by the Mekong, that mighty waterway which, rising in the mountains of Tibet, bisects the whole peninsula, Cochin-China is as dissimilar from Cambodia as the ordered farmlands of Ohio are from the Florida Everglades. In Cambodia, stretches of sand covered with low, scraggy, discouraged-looking scrub alternate with tangled and impenetrable jungles. It is a savage, untamed land. Cochin-China, on the other hand, is one great sweep of plain, green with growing rice and dotted with the bamboo poles of well-sweeps, for water can be found everywhere at thirty [271]to forty feet. These striking contrasts in contiguous states are due in some measure, no doubt, to differences in their soils and climates and to the industry of their inhabitants, but more largely, I imagine, to the fact that while the Frenchman has been at work in Cochin-China for upwards of sixty years, Cambodia is still on the frontier of civilization.

The roads which the French have built in Indo-China deserve a paragraph of mention, for, barring the rivers and the three short unconnected sections of railway on the East coast of the peninsula, they form the country's only means of communication. The national highways consist of two great systems. The Route Coloniale, which was the one I followed, has its beginning at Kep, on the Gulf of Siam, runs north-eastward through the jungles of Cambodia to Pnom-Penh, and, recommencing at Banam, swings southward across the Cochin-China plain to Saigon. The Route Mandarine, beginning at Saigon, hugs the shores of the China Sea and, after traversing twelve hundred miles of jungle, forest and mountain land in Annam and Tongking, comes to an end at Hanoi, the capital of Indo-China. The entire length of the Route Mandarine may now be traversed by auto-bus—an excellent way to see the country provided you are inured to fatigue, do not mind the heat, and are not over-particular as to your fellow passengers. A motor car is, of course, more comfortable and more expensive; a small one can be rented for ninety dollars a day.

Nowhere has the colonizing white man encountered [272]greater obstacles than those which have confronted the French road-builders in Indo-China; nowhere has Nature turned toward him a sterner and more forbidding face. But, though their coolies have died by the thousands from cholera and fever, though their laboriously constructed bridges have been swept away in a night by rivers swollen from the torrential rains, though the fast-growing jungle persistently encroaches on the hard-won right-of-way, though they have had to combat savage beasts and still more savage men, they have prosecuted with indomitable courage and tenacity the task of building a road "to Tomorrow from the Land of Yesterday."

Saigon, the capital of Cochin-China and the most important place in France's Asiatic possessions, is a European city set down on the edge of Asia. So far as its appearance goes, it might be on the Seine instead of the Saigon. The original town was burned by the French during the fighting by which they obtained possession of the place and they rebuilt it on European lines, with boulevards, shops, cafés, a H?tel de Ville, a Théatre Municipal, a Musée, a Jardin Botanique, all complete. The general plan of the city, with its regular streets and intersecting boulevards, has evidently been modeled on that of the French capital and the Saigonnese proudly speak of it as "the Paris of the East." In certain respects this is taking a considerable liberty with the truth, but they are very lonely and homesick and one does not blame them. Most of the streets, which are [273]paved after a fashion, are lined with tamarinds, thus providing the shade so imperatively necessary where the mercury hovers between 90 and 110, winter and summer, day and night. At almost every street intersection stands a statue of some one who bore a hand in the conquest of the country, from the cassocked figure of Pigneau de Behaine, Bishop of Adran, the first French missionary to Indo-China, to the effigy of the dashing Admiral Rigault de Genouilly, flanked by charging marines, who took Saigon for France.

The most characteristic feature of Saigon is its café life. During the heat of the day the Europeans keep within doors, but toward nightfall they all come out and, gathering about the little tables which crowd the sidewalks before the cafés in the Boulevard Bonnard and the Rue Catinat, they gossip and sip their absinthes and smoke numberless cigarettes and mop their florid faces and argue noisily and with much gesticulation over the news in the Courrier de Saigon or the six-weeks-old Figaro and Le Temps which arrive fortnightly by the mail-boat from France. They wear stiffly starched white linen—though the jackets are all too often left unfastened at the neck—and enormous mushroom-shaped topées which come down almost to their shoulders and are many sizes too large for them, and they consume vast quantities of drink, the evening usually ending in a series of violent altercations. When the disputants take to backing up their arguments with blows from canes and bottles, the café proprietor unceremoniously bundles them into [274]pousse-pousses, as rickshaws are called in Saigon, and sends them home.

Along the Rue Catinat in the evenings saunters a picturesque and colorful procession—haggard, slovenly officers of the troupes coloniales and of the Foreign Legion, the rows of parti-colored ribbons on their breasts telling of service in little wars in the world's forgotten corners; dreary, white-faced Government employees, their cheeks gaunt from fever, their eyes bloodshot from heavy drinking; sun-bronzed, swaggering, loud-voiced rubber planters in riding breeches and double Terais, down from their plantations in the far interior for a periodic spree; women gowned in the height of Paris fashion, but with too pink cheeks and too red lips and too ready smiles for strangers, equally at home on the Bund of Shanghai or the boulevards of Paris; shaven-headed Hindu money-lenders from British India, the lengths of cotton sheeting which form their only garments revealing bodies as hairy and repulsive as those of apes; barefooted Annamite tirailleurs in uniforms of faded khaki, their great round hats of woven straw tipped with brass spikes like those on German helmets; slender Chinese women, tripping by on tiny, thick-soled shoes in pajama-like coats and trousers of clinging, sleazy silk; naked pousse-pousse coolies, streaming with sweat, graceful as the bronzes in a museum; friars of the religious orders in shovel-hats and linen robes; sailors of the fleet and of the merch............