A GLIMPSE AT SIAM.* SIAM is a country of which

very few English people have personal knowledge ; but at the present moment it is a country about which a great many English people want to converse, and Mr. Maxwell Sommerville's notes made in the course of a steamboat trip up the Meinam to Ayuthia and back again, will, therefore, in spite of making a very super- ficial book, be acceptable to a large number of readers. In the abstract there is not the slightest reason why one should object to a book of travel because it is written by a man who has only spent a few weeks in the country he describes, or even because the writer knew very little about the country when he started on his journey of observation. It is pre- judice, not ignorance, that makes the untrustworthy observer,

and it is want of intelligence that makes the uninteresting recorder. Mr. Sommerville is evidently neither prejudiced nor unintelligent, and he makes no secret of the superficiality of his knowledge of the country. When he arrived at

Bangkok, he tells us that he asked for a book on Siam, and the general reply was: "What you require does not exist. If you will prepare a popular notice of our country, we shall be pleased to have it at our disposal." Then, as he puts it, "destiny led me to the jungle of Ayuthia," and he wrote his book :—

" On retracing my steps from that unique journey [the expedi- tion to Ayuthia] I wrote the following sketches on my personal experiences in that country, and created the incidents in the story of Phya-Rama-Ma-Dua,' the sketch of The Fruit-Growers of Muang Pimai,' and The Fable of the Crippled Hare,' as an original means of illustrating phasee in Siamese life and customs, combined with the history of the river Meinam and of the people of the northern provinces, which these romances are intended to portray."

This passage, which is taken from the preface to the book, is a fair example of Mr. Sommerville's style. We may con- gratulate him on the originality of the means he has chosen to illustrate his sketches, but we cannot pretend to think the means particularly good. His "romance" is the sort of composition that has no value unless it is the work of a native or a resident who has almost beccime a native. Siam, though Mr. Sommerville never visited it till last year, and then only penetrated as far as Ayuthia—that is to say, about seventy miles up the Meinam—is a country with an area equal to three and a half times that of Great Britain, a documentary history dating from the middle of the four- teenth century of the Christian era, and a legendary tradition reaching back to the fifth or sixth century before Christ. The river Meinam, of the coast scenery and commercial activity of which Mr. Sommerville gives us such lively and picturesque sketches, is one of the great rivers of the world, second only in interest to the Nile as the fertilising stream of an important country. The ruins of Ayuthia are among the wonders of the world, and the original construction of the Corinthian pilasters Mr. Sommerville admired in the jungle has been imputed to Alexander the Great. It would be too much to expect of a tourist's sketch-book that it should

tell us the full tale of so old and many-sided a civilisation as that which Siam has acquired from centuries of contact, military and commercial, with China, India, Burmah, Greece, Turkey, France, Portugal, and England. But though there may be no popular book about Siam to be found in the bazaars of Bangkok, all these matters have been written about by savants, and may be read up in works easily available in the libraries of Europe ; and we should hope also in those of the United States, of which Mr. Sommerville is a citizen. And, if he wanted to give a moderate, useful, and intelligible account of Siam, Mr. Sommerville ought to have taken the trouble to look up some of these matters, if not in original works, then in the in.

structive articles of the better encyclopa3dias, and to give here and there short summaries of them by way of background to his impressionist sketches of the picturesque scenes that caught his traveller's eye. But this Mr. Sommerville has not done ;

• Sam on the .ffieinam, from the Gulf to Ayuthia. By Maxwell Sommerville, Professor of Ellyptology. University of Penu.sylvania. With 50 Illnetrations. London : Sampson Low, Marston, and Co.

at least if he "read up" Siam between making his notes and sending them to the press, he certainly did not take the trouble to work the outcome of his reading into his narrative. And the result is that the book is a confused and confusing series of shifting impressions with no backbone of method.

Mr. Sommerville has the modern gift of lively word-painting, and gives us some vivid pictures, full of movement and colour, of the bazaars, the temples, the gambling-shops of Bangkok ; of dancing-girls and praying bonzes, and a clever professional romancer who was his fellow-passenger on board the steam- boat that took him up the Meinam. But quite the most interesting passages of the book are the descriptions of the jungle and the ancient ruins beyond Ayuthia ; of the King's elephant kraals; and the shrine of the sacred white elephants. Some of the best of the illustrations—and the illustrations are good throughout—enhance the effect of these descriptions. The picture of the rains is indeed good enough to redeem all the faults of the book, and that of the elephants bathing in the river is delightful The expedition to Ayuthia had to be made by night :—

" The darkness of the jungle was relieved by the flickering lamps burning on occasional rude wooden altars elevated on posts like the dove-cots of Ahmedabad in India. Every now and then, as we strode through the narrow, tortuous way by the faint light, we could perceive that devout men and women had deposited offerings of fruit. votives of cut coloured paper, and objects in wood. Within the denser jungle, Nature cheered our path by the flashing, flitting light of thousands of fire-flies. With the coming day we arrived in the heart of the ancient city, and were surrounded by ruins which demonstrated its former importance, and which convinced us that the ambition of the Buddhists of three centuries ago must have been to create a city of monasteries and temples. Ancient ruined forums, palaces, and amphitheatres in Europe stand generally in strong contrast with the modern cities that have been created around them or in their vicinity. Here in the silence of this forest jungle, itself a ruin, the scene is weird. The brighter light now discloses more dis- tinctly the palace walls, towers, topes, and spiral pagodas, closely overgrown by flowering plants, orchids, and numerous tropical trees. We realise that we are in the midst of relics of an Asiatic race, the remnants of whose architecture have the charm of being unlike any that we have seen in Europe, Africa, Ceylon, or India."

To the visit to the white elephants belongs an interest of another sort, and Mr. Sommerville tells us just what we most want to know about these animals, and the ideas with which they are regarded by their keepers :—

"Across the way from the money-mill (the mint) we go in to see the Chang-Phoouk, or White Elephant. These white elephants are now (1896) four in number, domiciled at their special house in this wat adjoining the king's palace. Each has a private apartment to himself, and a valet or keeper, over whom, by appointment, are several supervising noblemen of the court. Their food consists of bunches of tender grass, bananas, herbs, sugar-cane, and coarse biscuit; their beverage is the purest water, into which fragrant blossoms are often thrown. There are agents of the government always on the lookout for such pale specimens of this noble animal. The gentlemen of the court who attended us throughout our visits in the palace enclosure assured us that they did not worship these sacred white elephants, but that, believing in the doctrine of metempsychosis (the transmigration of souls), they accept the theory that the souls of the greater, wiser, and most holy have, in their transmigrated state, passed into the bodies of several species of white animals. Certain pure white birds are believed to be the domiciles of the noble saints whose bodies have been cremated, and whose spirits have returned, by this inexplicable metempsychosis, to exert a beneficial influence on those who are tarrying in this vale of shadows. They do not recognise deity in a white elephant, but have learned, simply through tradition, to regard them as the tenements of the transmigrated spirits of their wisest and purest ancestors. Therefore they reverence and tenderly minister to all their wants. This is an evidence that superstition prejudices the sight. Of the four elephants that the author saw in the sacred stables, not one was really white ; the lightest in tone was of granite gray. In fact, some of them were really of a light pinkish-gray hue, others ashy gray ; their heads and broad flapping ears appeased to have been sand-papered or rubbed with powdered pumice-stone. Their pale eyes resembled very much those of human albinos. These soi-disant white deities, in nowise saintly, were chained by the feet. This seems to settle the question of sanetity. They stood at the end of their tethers, swaying backward and forward, devouring the bunches of selected grasses and bananas, and evinced timidity rather than holiness, as they trembled before the upraised goads of their custodians. These beasts were formerly waited upon by the noblest mandarins in the kingdom. The monotony of their lives within these stables is in a measure relieved by bold ,drawings, in colour, of jungle grasses and trees, which afford some illusion to the deified prisoners. When these elephants pass on the public highways, on festive or state occasions, the people of all classes make obeisance to them. The more enlightened Siamese —those who have seen the world—although not willing to re-

nounce the religion of their birth and ancestors, will in converse, tion virtually acknowledge the absurdity of certain superstitions. One of these gentlemen informed us that often the ignorant natives would secretly confide their troubles to the ear of one of these sacred white elephants."

Mr. Sommerville was struck by the wonderful scrupulous- ness of the Siamese about destroying the life of any kind of animals, even to the cockroaches and the animalculas in water. But he was also struck by the fact that their superstitions reverence for life does not prevent Buddhists from being cruel to living creatures and brutally irreverent in their treat- ment of the dead. In his account of the Ilia/ Bah Kcite of

Bangkok—the horrible pit where the remains of the dead are

cremated or given to the vultures, according to the means of the friends of the deceased—he spares us no gruesome detail of horror; and he indicates a good deal of cruelty in the breaking-in of the elephants for the King's service. In the chapter on the religion of the country he gives a very clear account of the outward forms of Buddhist worship, but renounces as hopeless the task of expounding Buddhism. After all there is no lack of matter in the book, but it is imperfectly digested, the style is bad, and the grammar not seldom defective.