Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III KANGOON On September 7 we embarked for Rangoon, in H.M.S. Sphynx, and the H. E. I. Company's s. Mozuffer, which towed the s.s. Graham. If our voyage was lacking in incident, it certainly was not so in discomfort; even Mark Tapley himself might have been jolly without discredit. A troopship is never over and above comfortable, but a man-of-war improvised into a transport is the perfection of misery. We were crowded so that some sixteen officers had only a small place to wash and dress in. We slept on deck, and the mosquitoes as we neared land had a splendid time of it. Arnold Ward of Ours suggested that the last joined recruit should be tied naked in the rigging in order to draw them from us. Every one approved his suggestion, but strange to say it was not carried out. In addition to our other discomforts we were handicapped by having to tow the Graham, and her faulty steering not only gave rise to fearful swearing on the part of our captain and first lieutenant, but more than once the hawser broke, and we were delayed in mending it. We sighted the Andaman Islands—a spot so lonely that no one, I should fancy, would ever wish to see more of it than we did. The approach to Rangoon is very tame and uninteresting, but the first glimpse of the town itself, with its magnificent pagoda and gilt tee glittering in the sunshine, is fine, and its background of forest is very beautiful.A CURIOUS PLACE 39 The river too at the jetty is a magnificent outspread of -water. We landed on the 14th, and formed up on the Bund, and then marched off towards the Great Pagoda, which is called Shoay Dagon. Our strength was forty officers and nine hundred and sixty rank-and-file—something like a regiment! Our route lay along a broad flat road bordered on either side by innumer...