Of course we should have been very glad to go on with Mr. Worcester into the Apayao country if he had asked us; but it is practically trailless as yet, and for a party as large as ours would have been, questions of supply and transportation would have been difficult, to say nothing of the impolicy of taking a large number into the country at all.  And so, on Saturday morning, May 14th, we shook hands with Mr. Worcester and his companions.  His progress so far had been an unqualified success, unmarred by a single adverse incident, for the deplorable loss of life at Kiangan could in no wise be attributed to our presence or to the occasion.  What the results of the visit of 1910 will be, only time can tell; but experience shows that every year marks an advance in the spread of friendly relations, not only between the Government and the people, but between the subdivisions of the people itself. [41]

The Chico being still up when we reached it, we crossed again on submarines, climbed the bank, and found ourselves in Tabuk (or Talbok), the most pestilential hole in the Archipelago.  Nothing is left of it now but a ruinous church and one or two houses.  The first mass was said here or hereabouts in 1689, by the Dominicans, who kept up the mission until the monks all died of fever.  Did an occasional officer in the old days prove objectionable to the authorities in Manila, he got an order to proceed to Tabuk for station; it was almost certain that he would never return.  The point is of unquestionable importance, commanding, as it does, the main outlet, of the Kalinga country to the plains of the Cagayan Valley; and so our own Government undertook to garrison it with Constabulary as a check on raids.  The garrison remained long enough to be carried out on stretchers, and was removed to Lu-bagan, where the check is just as complete and personal control possible.

We had a long and hard day before us, but we did not know it when we set out from Tabuk at about seven in the morning.  Gallman, Harris, and I kept together; our first business was to cross a vast, roughly circular plain fifteen miles in diameter, and densely overgrown with a rough, reedy grass two feet and more high.  A foot-path ran across the plain, visible for only a very short distance ahead as long as one was in it, but imperceptible twenty yards to the right or left.  To lose this path would have been a serious matter, as it would have been a heart-breaking thing to force one’s way through the undisturbed grass.

It would be hard to imagine anything else more wearisome than that fifteen-mile stretch.  The sun was riding high in the heavens, “shining on both sides of the hill”; not a breath of wind was stirring nor was there, barring a rare bird or two, a sign of life save the thousands of flies which, as our ponies pushed aside the grass overhanging the path, rose in clouds only to settle on our faces, hands, necks, backs, everywhere.  We began by brushing