Panthay mules are not to be found waiting on a stand like taxi-cabs. It is not easy to get them for casual work. Mr. Scott, therefore, was kept some time at Möngnai waiting for mules, and then could not get enough and had to fill the gap with elephants. From Möngnai he went up north by the Nam Teng Valley, crossing the Nam Teng at Ko-up, where a bamboo bridge had been built over the river. The villages on both sides of the river had been raided by the brigand Twet Nga Lu, whose story has been told elsewhere (_vide_ Chapters XV and XVI).
East of the Nam Teng River in the State of Keng Tawng, "the country for nearly twenty miles at a stretch," Mr. Scott reported, "is practically a desert. Yet all along the road old wells and ruinous monasteries and the grass-grown skeletons of former paddy-fields, to say nothing of hill-clearings, showed that formerly there must have been a large population here.... The handful of people who have so far returned to Keng Tawng have settled twenty miles farther south, round the site of the old capital. There is a magnificent banyan-tree, known far and wide as Mai Hung Kan, at Maklang.... The adjoining monastery was burnt by Twet Nga Lu's brigands, and not even the sanctity of the tree which twenty men could not span, under whose branches a fair-sized village might be built, has yet been able to persuade the monks to return. There are not, in fact, enough of the pious in the neighbourhood to support them."
Of the next State entered, Keng Hkam, the same story has to be told. The Nam Pang, a stormy river which rises in the north near Lashio, flows into the Salween near Keng Hkam. The valuable portion of this district consists of an extensive plateau extending along the right bank of the Nam Pang, where tobacco and sugar grow well, and very fine rice-fields and extensive groves of palms made the country rich.
The State suffered greatly in the Twet Nga Lu's disturbances. The old capital was absolutely destroyed, and nothing now remains but the ruins of fine teak monasteries and some ornate pagodas absolutely falling to pieces.
The chief had moved to a new town three or four miles off, but intended, now order had been restored, to build again on the old site. Many families had emigrated to the east of the Salween.