The road to Pnom-Penh, as I have already remarked, leads through a peculiarly lonely and savage region. And it is very narrow, bordered on either side by walls of almost impenetrable jungle. A place better adapted for a hold-up could hardly be devised. And of the reputations or antecedents of my four self-imposed companions, I knew nothing. Nor was there anything in their faces to lend me confidence in the honesty of their intentions. As we were about to start a native gendarme beckoned me to one side.
"Beaucoup des pirats sur la route, M'sieu," he warned me in execrable French.
"How about these men?" I inquired, indicating the motley crew who were to accompany me. "Are they to be trusted?"
He shrugged his shoulders non-commitally. It was evident that he did not hold of them a high opinion.
Producing my .45 caliber service automatic, I slipped a clip into the magazine and ostentatiously laid it beside me on the seat. It is the most formidable weapon carried by any civilized people. True, the German Lüger is larger....
"Tell them," I said to the policeman, "that this gun will shoot through twenty millimeters of pine. Tell them that they had better dispose of their property and burn a few joss-sticks before they start to argue with it. And tell them that, no matter what happens, the car is to keep going."
But I was by no means as confident as I sounded, for the road was notoriously unsafe, nor did I put much trust in my companions. I confess that I felt much happier when that portion of my journey was over.
As the road to Pnom-Penh is quite uninteresting--just a narrow yellow highway chopped through a dense tangle of tropic vegetation--suppose I take advantage of the opportunity to tell you something of this little-known land in which we find ourselves.
French Indo-China occupies perhaps two-thirds of that great bay-window-shaped peninsula which protrudes from the southeastern corner of Asia. In area it is, as I have already remarked, somewhat larger than Texas; its population is about equal to that of New York and Pennsylvania combined. It consists of five states: the colony of Cochin-China, the protectorates of Cambodia, Annam and Tongking, and the unorganized territory of Laos, to which might be added the narrow strip of borderland, known as Kwang Chau Wan, leased from China. In 1902 the capital of French Indo-China was transferred from Saigon, in Cochin-China, to Hanoi, in Tongking.