Those of you who like rivers might enjoy Great Rivers of the World, a collection of writings on rivers originally published in 1908, and available now, in its entirety, on the Internet Archive website. Here is a passage from Emily A. Riching’s chapter on the “mighty Irrawaddy”:
The arrival of the Irrawaddy steamer, towing cargo “flats” in its wake, is the event of the week, and rustic barges thread the narrow defile above Bhamo bringing their contingent of produce and passengers from distant villages on the confines of civilization. One of the great “flats” is a floating market, where Burman and Kachin, Shan and Chin, display their varied merchandise to the motley throng of customers. Gaudy silks and cottons, rude pottery and quaint lacquer-work, barbaric toys and trinkets, fruit, vegetables, and sweetmeats, with household utensils of every kind, fill the dusky space of the covered deck with brilliant colour. Indolent Burmese doze and smoke on gaily-striped quilts, while their wives chaffer and barter with business-like aplomb; for the Burmese woman is the breadwinner of the family, and retains most of the commercial transactions of the country in her capable hands. A pretty girl in white jacket and apple-green skirt, with a pink pawa floating on her shoulders, sits on a pile of yellow cushions and smokes her big cheroot of chopped wood and tobacco in meditative calm. Diamonds glitter in her ears, and ruby studs fasten her muslin bodice, for she goes as a bride to some distant riverside town, and carries her “dot” on her back. Strings of onions and scarlet chillies hang from the rafters above bales of fur from China. Children flit up and down, like many-coloured butterflies, in quaint costumes brightened with pink scarfs and tiny turban, miniature replicas of their elders, for no special garb of childhood exists in Burma, and the general effect suggests an assemblage of gaily-dressed dolls. Shan women in tall black turbans stand round a harper as he twangs the silken strings of a black and gold lyre with sounding-board of varnished deerskin. The weird fractional tones of native music, discordant to European ears, harmonize with the semi-barbaric environment as the musician chants some heroic legend of the mythical past. Presently he approaches a mattress of white and scarlet, occupied by a woman whose brown Mongolian face is blanched to the pallor of age-worn marble by chronic pain, and sings a wild incantation over the sufferer, who by the advice of a fortune-teller undertakes the weary journey to pray for healing at the Golden Pagoda of Rangoon. The charm apparently succeeds, for the tired eyes close, and as the song dies off in a whisperin cadence a peaceful slumber smoothes the lines of pain in the troubled face. Family parties sit round iron tea-kettles, and girls bring bowls of steaming rice from the rude galley where native passengers cook their food.
You can find the entire book in the sites ‘Texts’ section, here.
And if after all that you want still more wordage on rivers, have a look through this handy bibliography compiled by Professor W. Andrew Marcus of the University of Oregon.