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Chapter one. The Beginning |
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(5) Dazed, tired, bewildered, and not sure what had happened, I was decanted from the car that evening in the middle of Manipur. |
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I woke next morning to as pleasant a backwater as anyone could wish. Manipur State lay deep in the hills between Assam and Burma. Part of its territory was mountain country, but the heart of it was a level plain, an old lake-bed now drained and cultivated and covered in little square rice-fields yellow with stubble. Raided with hideous cruelty by the Burmese early in the nineteenth century, notorious for its rising of 1891, it slept now in a warm quiet. The one long road to railhead cut it off effectively from the rest of the province. A mule-track linked it to Burma through Tamu, and that was all. |
