There are many wonders upon this sacred mountain, one the so-called Glory of Buddha, which we saw every afternoon during the fortnight in August we spent on its summit. Another, more puzzling to me, we only saw once. We were called out about nine o'clock on a keen, frosty night to see the lamps of Kiating, the city ten thousand feet below us, that had come up to be lighted. Some rich donor has given the lamps of Kiating particularly high lamp-posts to facilitate this miracle. Certainly, on each out-jutting spur of the mountain, as we looked down from the edge of the great precipice, we saw a large luminous light apparently quite stationary, and in effect recalling the lamps of Piccadilly at night. Some people say this must be caused by electricity. Certainly, on Mount Omi we always seemed to look down upon the storms of thunder and lightning that evening after evening cooled the hot country below us. But the most beautiful sight was to turn away from the grand views as far as the eye could reach over the rivers and hills and cities of China, and, standing on the verge of the precipice, look just in the other direction, across the sea of mountains with serrated edges or slanting-backs, two flat-topped table-mountains conspicuous among them, till there at last up in the sky, "as if stood upon a table for us to look at," as some Chinaman said centuries ago, stood the long range of the snowy giants of Tibet, with great glaciers clinging to their sides, and catching the first rosy light of morning, whilst all the other intervening mountains were still wrapped in their blankets of mist and night.

Many beautiful descriptions have been written of Mount Omi, that mountain that stands alone in its sacredness in the far west of China, with an all-round view from its summit, where the beholder stands on the verge of one of the most gigantic precipices in the world, said by Mr. Baber to be a mile deep. But it would be hard to surpass that of Fan Yü-tsz, of the Ming Dynasty, who tells how he saw the Wa-wu, and the snowy mountains "running athwart like a long city wall," and India, and the mountains of Karakorum, together with all the barbarous kingdoms, the great Min River, and the rivers of Kiating, the Tung, and the Ya; and winds up by saying: "The advocate and I clapped our palms, and cried out, 'The grandest view of a lifetime!'" The cloud effects from Fujiyama's top are different, but not finer; and Fuji has no snowy mountains of Tibet to look out upon. The all-round view from the ever popular and most beloved Rigi seems a plaything sort of pretty pigmy view by comparison.

And day after day, year after year, all the year round, pilgrims come and prostrate themselves on the different out-jutting bastions of the cliff upon boards laid in the wet grass for their convenience while they venerate Puhsien, who, they say, came up from India on his elephant and settled here; just as their ancestors probably came, before ever Buddha was, to venerate the sun-god, as we call him now, we not apparently having even yet learnt enough to say simply God, as if there were, or could be, God this and God that,—not one God, the Father of All—to use the simple comprehensive Chinese phrase, "The Above All!" The men and women of the province come in great numbers: the men with their brows bound with the white Szechuan handkerchief like Dante, and with mouths like the old Greek gods, with rich, regular curves; the women with their skirts only to their knees, and feet of the natural size or only slightly deformed, and in each case bound with Indian corn-husks, the better to contend with the steep stone steps that lead up and down the ten thousand feet of mountain-side. Men from Yunnan come too, with extraordinarily heavy and knotted young trees for walking-sticks, shod, not with iron points, but small iron spades, that they may if need be re-make the road as they go along. Military dandies even from far Ningpo are carried up the mountain in sedan-chairs (this last a work of great difficulty); whilst old men and very weak women manage to get up in a sort of basket carried on a man's back, their feet holding on round his waist after the fashion that children are carried pick-a-back. And in the winter the Tibetans come, men and women all together, all in furs, and saying, "Om Mani Padmi Hum!" instead of the familiar, "Omito Fo," the habitual greeting on the mountain-side. Some of the wild tribes also come, without pigtails, like decent people, but with their hair strangely sticking out in front of their heads, as if they wore their tails in front. And all prostrate themselves, and do reverence—unless it be the few Europeans who have strayed so far west through China—as they look over the edge of the great precipice, and there on the mist below see the circular halo of three primary colours, very brilliant, and in its central brightness the shadow of their own head and shoulders, or, if their heart be such, Puhsien himself riding on his elephant, as he came from India more than two thousand years ago. Where the pilgrims most do congregate some pious donor has had strong iron chains fastened between iron supports; and in another place there is a low stone wall: but so great is the indifference to its depth that so lofty a precipice inspires,—we ourselves once resided on a fifth story, and found many of our visitors unable to look out, and ourselves suffered somewhat from dizziness; but on moving to the eleventh floor of the same building felt nothing of the kind,—so great is the indifference to its danger that this great precipice inspires, that not a day passes but people are getting outside the chains, or standing on the top of the low wall, the better to see down below.

And there, as we look down upon the beautiful trees far beneath us, and the flowers finding here and there a foothold, we become aware of a cave, that looks quite inaccessible now, although it may not always have been so; and below the cave, just a little way farther down the precipice, something—we cannot quite make out what. We saw it from the first, and then turned away to look at the city of Kiating, picturesquely situated at the junction of its three rivers, or to notice how swollen the rivers are with the recent heavy rains, or to catch a distant glimpse of the one Taoist monastery on the mountain, perched like an eyrie on its most picturesque out-jutting spur, or, as so often, to watch the mist roll up. Oftenest it comes flying up from the hot lowlands at our feet; but at times it crawls up like a great white bear, lifting first one paw, then another, yet always securing its foothold even on the sheerest edge of the precipice. At other times it comes up like a sinuous serpent; and sometimes, enfolding all the landscape, it flows over the precipice from the top like a Niagara of mist. But always as the mist lifts, and we lean over the precipice, scanning closely, we see that cave, which surely no man could ever reach, and, below, something curious lying aslant on an edge of the cliff; yet never is our curiosity sufficiently awakened to lift an opera-glass, and see what it may be: it looks so small and insignificant—just something out of place in the vast landscape, that is all.

Then we see other caves, and hear wild talk of aborigines, who live, or lived, in them. The coolies talk of nothing but aborigines and the unconquered Lolos. One of them has been two years among the latter as a soldier; and he tells how his general's wife was taken prisoner by them, and put upon an ox to ride, since she could not walk, and describes them as a sort of Highlanders, wearing a skirt and a wrap, and not rude at all to those they carry off—only wanting to get ransom-money. Then we meet a pilgrim, who is standing staring at some caves far below with protruding eyes; and he says, "There are tigers in there!" then stands speechless. But on our laughing we are told again of six men already this year eaten by tigers. It is a comfort to laugh even over tigers; for the high, rare air affects the nerves even of our coolies, and every one is asking for quinine as a cure for neuralgia. For foreign medicines are known in the West, and "They never cost anything," as some women with a sick child said with great energy, and confidence that we must be able to cure the child, and for nothing, as missionaries or foreigners (here the two words are treated as synonymous) always did. Then, as one coolie after another sickened, and we ourselves could hardly breathe or bear the aching of our heads, we were told a very dangerous air came up over the precipice, and how a Taoist priest, who was going to live in a cave on the mountain, dropped down dead of it. And none of our Chinese would hear of a cave being possibly full of gas, or that the air on the top of the mountain was so much lighter than that below that a little time is needed to get accustomed to it.

And whilst explaining scraps of modern science, we forgot all about the Taoist priest who died, till one day again we were hanging over the cliff, watching for the Glory of Buddha below, when we noted a Chinaman gazing down more intently than devoutly. "Do you see him?" he asked. "I could not find him this morning; and I would not believe what they all said, that a Taoist priest lay there. But what else can it be? Do you look through your far-seeing glass, and say what you see." So we looked at that something out of place, that had at once caught short-sighted eyes intently scanning, yet without arresting our attention sufficiently even to wonder what it might be. Yes! certainly there lay, across a fallen tree, what looked like a man with a hood on, like that the chief priest here wore, with an old basket at his feet. "Yes, that's it—that's it. All the Taoists wear that! With his feet in a basket! That is how they say he lies. He has lain there two years, they say; and last year his clothes looked blue, and now they look whitey-brown. Next year, I suppose, they will all fall to pieces. I suppose it must be a man. I would not believe it at first." "No, no; it is not a Taoist priest," said the young Buddhist, whose duty it was to be agreeable to visitors. "It is just some clothes people have thrown down." But, in the first place, no human hand could throw clothes so far. They must long before have, fluttering, caught upon some rugged edge. Next, nothing thrown could so exactly take the semblance of a man,—the hood worn just as the chief priest wears his, only the head fallen forward somewhat, and the lower part of the person in dust-coloured clothes evidently fast approaching decay, but even yet lingering on just where they would be if a man lay there wearing them. The idea of clothes thrown down certainly would not hold water. The idea of a sort of Guy Fawkes figure did at one time present itself; but whilst it seemed possible that some enthusiast might attempt to climb to that inaccessible cave, and so climbing fall and perish, it did not seem possible that any one would be foolhardy enough to climb there for the purpose merely of placing a lay figure there, or could do so, carrying a lay figure. Yet, not wishing to be too credulous, we approached the chief priest the next time his picturesque figure in grey silk gown and black hood appeared beside the parapet, and propounded the theory of clothes. His dark eyes grew luminous with a sad smile; his is a face in which a painter would delight, with its rich dark shades, well-marked features, and general air of an Oriental saint of the early Christian era. "Those are no clothes," he said, sadly smiling. "A Taoist priest lies there."

And could there be a grander grave for a dead man,—the great white mists of Omi his winding-sheet, the Glory of Buddha floating above him his memorial cross, the bosom of Omi's inaccessible precipice his last resting-place? Year by year, day by day, pilgrims kneel, and knock their foreheads on the ground, then hold out hands of supplication over his prostrate form; the bells are struck, the prayers are chanted, the incense burns, above the unburied priest's last resting-place. Never now will hand of man touch him more. He lies secure. He sought to pass away from the contamination of the world, and in pure ecstasy of devotion pass his days in an untrodden cave. And it seems that God—our God, his God, the Lord and Father of us all—accepted the offering without requiring the year-long daily sacrifice. There are no signs of struggle in the orderly disposed garments. It seems as if his spirit passed away as his foot stumbled, and he fell across the fallen tree.

And to make it grander still, he has won no immortal name thereby. The young priest in the temple on the summit says, "That is no unburied saint lies there—only clothes!" He takes us to a neighbouring shrine of his own faith to see a real unburied saint. As we ascended the mountain, we were struck by an image upon an altar from its likeness to a man in its little human imperfections, all covered with gilding though it was, as well as decked out in somewhat tawdry bright embroidered satins. We only noticed, and passed on, repelled by a large and really rather offensively ugly representation of Puhsien standing behind it. The front figure was seated on a large lotus flower, with its legs tucked up underneath it, just as the chief priest at our temple tucked up his legs when he sat to have his photograph taken, putting on his best vestments for the purpose, and looking no longer like an early Christian, without his hood, and with his bald shining head. "There! that was a priest here in the time of Kang Hsi," said the young priest. "It is his very body, not embalmed. It would not decay, and so he was——" Now, did he say canonised? "Few foreigners know of this——" Now, did he say God or saint? So much turns upon a word sometimes, and so few foreigners know Chinese well enough to be clear about these delicate distinctions.

A set of dandies in rich-coloured silks from Kiating, with yellow incense-bags and double purses, invaded the temple, not for the purpose of staring, as we were doing, but to worship. They prostrated themselves, burnt their joss-sticks, and struck the gong before the gilded old man upon the altar just in the same way that they did before the other images. And they looked so picturesque doing this, it seemed a pity to wait to set up the camera till they had gone, and then only to photograph the gilded old man upon the altar and the priest of seventy-one of to-day who ministers before it. The living old man was quite excited by the proceeding, and completely unaware that photography demanded the posture, generally most congenial to a Chinaman, of repose.

Even through all his gilding, the face of the other old man upon the altar gave an idea of holiness, and this in spite of his having as typically slanting eyes as any Chinaman living. Some of his teeth were gone, and his mouth had a little helpless sort of crookedness about it that was very touching. It seemed impossible then and there to hear anything of his history; but it seemed equally impossible, looking at him, to doubt that he had been a good man, a Vicar of Wakefield simple sort of good man, and probably deserved as well to have his body set upon an altar and worshipped as any mere man might. But the place of sepulture of the unburied Taoist priest strikes the imagination as far finer, recalling the grand lines upon the burial of Moses. Angels bore Moses to his sepulchre, we are told. No one has borne the Taoist priest. Even the winds of heaven cannot touch him, as he lies sheltered by the great precipice on which he perished.

Thus, at but a little distance from each other, on the summit of the sacred mountain of Omi, in this land where more importance is attached to burial than in any other, two Chinamen await unburied the consummation of all things,—the one a disciple of Buddha; the other, of that even less known Laotze, Buddha's Chinese contemporary: the one covered over with gilding, raised upon an altar, and certainly apparently worshipped as a god; the other lying prone upon the mountain-side, his poor perishable garments growing threadbare in the snow and rain. But when the mists gather round the mountain-top, and the sun shines slanting from the west, it is above the ardent disciple of Laotze that the Glory of Buddha floats—the man who sought the grimmest possible retreat from the snares of this world, and, thus seeking, found, we trust, the joys of Paradise.

CHAPTER XX.
CHINESE SENTIMENT.

It is so much our habit in China to think the Chinese have no sentiment, that I have thought it might be interesting to gather together what indications I have observed during eleven years' residence among them, leaving the reader, if of a judicial frame of mind, to sum up and formulate his own conclusions.

One of the most poetic events in history used to seem to me in childhood that crowning of his dead Queen by King Pedro, to which Mrs. Hemans consecrated some of her most pathetic verses. To this day I cannot think of the beautiful dead Inez de Castro in all the grandeur of her coronation robes, seated upon her throne, without feeling something of the faint, cold shuddering which the poetess imagines. Yet when I went for the first time to a grand Chinese house in the Arsenal at Shanghai, and found it all dressed out with signs of mourning, white cloths, and balls of twisted white cotton, people all in their best dresses, and preparations complete for three days of theatrical performance, though I was startled to find that all this was to commemorate the birthday of the wife of the master of the house, lying quiet in her grave already these twenty years, the twenty-years-in-China-and-not-know-a-word-of-the-language men all said it was quite usual, and seemed surprised and annoyed that I should find it affecting. Alas! to this day I have never learned whether he loved her very much, nor quite satisfied myself whether it was really her birthday or the day of her death they were thus celebrating. But, interpret it all after whatever fashion, there was surely in this some indication of sentiment.

Again, there are many suicides in China, and habit seems to make both Europeans and Chinese callous. Yet when a German who had returned to China happy in the belief a girl he knew would follow and marry him, and on hearing she had changed her mind, or for some other reason would not come, thought it better to leave a life that for him held no promise, the following poem appeared in a Shanghai paper:

"AVE ATQUE VALE!

In memory of the late ——.

Viceroy's Yamen,
Wuchang, December 4th, 1893."

The Englishman who could write as good a poem in Chinese has not yet been born; but I quote it because of the sentiment it expresses.

The Chinese love of beautiful curves, spending time and money on the roof-cornices and outside ornaments of even quite a poor cottage, indicates a deep-seated sentiment for the beautiful, as do also the trees in their towns, some of which have almost as many trees as houses, as also their love of flowers. In the flowering season a bough of blossom may be seen in a vase on the counter of even the darkest little shop; whilst no literary man would think his writing-table complete without a vase for one lovely blossom, and no woman would think herself dressed until she had stuck a flower on one side of her glossy hair. But every one probably would acknowledge that the Chinese have a very strong æsthetic sentiment. Here, however, is an adieu to the Old Year much resembling one of Burns' songs in its sentiment, or want of it:

"ADIEU TO THE OLD YEAR.

Translated by W. A. P. M.

But this Chinese drinking-song, which could without exciting any special comment appear upon a New Year's card of to-day, was published in the Chinese Book of Odes 500 B.C. Twelve centuries later we find a decidedly prettier sentiment and finer touch in Li-tao-po, one of China's favourite poets A.D. 720. It is interesting to notice that four of China's poets, Tze-ma-hsiang-yu, Yang-hsiung, Li-tao-po, and Su-tung-po, were all born and spent their earliest years in Szechuan, on the borderland of Tibet, and the yet unconquered Lolo country, like our own English Border country, China's cradle of legend and song.

This is an attempt to render the best-known ode of China's favourite bard, A.D. 720:

"ON DRINKING ALONE BY MOONLIGHT.

The fancy if not the sentiment of this song is so pretty, that it is hard to see how the nation that produced it can be rebuked for want of sentiment by the nation that to this day sings, "Drink, puppies, drink." Indeed, I think this Chinese drinking-song dating from the eighth century A.D. the very prettiest I have ever met with in any literature. It has three if not four of such graceful conceits as would alone make the success of a modern bard. But they are old, very old. And China, too, is old; and is said to produce nothing of the kind now.

To turn to comparatively more modern days, Lu-pe-Ya's Lute, Englished and reduced into poetry by Mrs. Augusta Webster, shows a sentiment for friendship and for music deep in the Chinese breast. It is, I suppose, because I am so very unmusical that I rather enjoy Chinese music. It seems to me very merry, especially its funereal chants.

People often wonder if the Chinese enjoy European music. Two Englishmen were invited not long ago to a military mandarin's house to hear one of his sons, a great musician, play. The latter could only perform if perfect silence were observed by the audience and a vase of flowers and lighted incense before him to help his inspiration. Unfortunately, after all these preparations, it appeared his was a stringed instrument, to be laid upon the table and played with the nails—the most difficult instrument to play upon that the Chinese possess; and the melody, if it were a melody, was so low, the Englishmen came away quite unable to judge of its beauty. "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard——" However, some other young military mandarins had played a duet on flutes, and another performed on a flageolet, both very agreeably.

It may interest those interested—and who of us in China are not?—in the great opium question to hear that a young lad of sixteen went away from the dinner-table to smoke opium. "How dreadful!" said one of the Europeans. "A lad of sixteen to smoke opium! He will never live!" "Why, look at my five sons, all born since I smoked," said the host; "I began when I was twenty. But, indeed, his family are rather glad he smokes. You see, my guest is a very rich young fellow from up the river, who has no father; and if he did not smoke opium, he would be sure to be getting into mischief with women or gambling. Now, smoking opium, they think, will keep him at home." Is not this rather a novel view of the question?

The old legend of the Fairy Foxes, which I Englished some years ago, and brought out in Mr. Hasegawa's very pretty crêpe paper series, shows a sentiment of kindness for animals with which some people are unwilling to credit a nation that emphatically does not say, "What a beautiful day! Let us go out and kill something." Both that and The Rat's Plaint, translated from the original Chinese and rendered into verse by my husband, and very beautifully illustrated as well as reproduced on crêpe paper by Mr. Hasegawa, might be circulated by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The latter's quaintness—it is a very old Chinese legend—alone makes the reader pass over the very nice sentiment for poor pussy, as well as the homely Chinese sense of justice, stating the rat's case in the first instance so very plainly as almost to make the reader incline to his side.

There is an easy-going live-and-let-live character about the Chinese, which makes them very pleasant employers, as all steamship captains will testify, and which, perhaps, accounts for their not hurrying off the face of the earth the rats that are such a great pest in a Chinese city. An English Consul, on undoing a not yet used camera, found that to get at the gum used they had eaten through each fold of its dark chamber. One year in Chungking they made a hole through a strong wooden case we thought safely closed down, opened the tins of milk just as we should have done ourselves, and evidently dipped their tails in, and fished out all the milk those tails could reach. We have often thought this worthy to be a Spectator story. But, however incredible it may sound, it is true; and when we opened the case, we found all the top layer out of two dozen tins of milk opened and half emptied in this way. Worse still, that same year—there was famine in the land, and human beings were dropping down dead of hunger every day by the river-side—there was a hole one morning in our dear little pony's back, said to be caused by the wicked rats.

The Chinese easy-going liberal disposition and sense of justice have been immortalised in The Rat's Plaint, translated by my husband, where the poor rat's case is made out as I never saw it till I read it there; though in the end the rat is awarded punishment, and pussy-cat installed in her high place as favoured friend in every homestead. And so herewith an end of Chinese sentiment.

CHAPTER XXI.
A SUMMER TRIP TO CHINESE TIBET.[2]

There are many summer trips that are a joy in the remembering, but a trip to Chinese Tibet had never fallen to the lot of any European woman before. And it was the more delightful, perhaps, because we never thought of anything of the kind when we started. But there is a drawback to living on a mountain-summit that it is such a climb to come back again when you go out; and our quarters on Mount Omi were not too comfortable! Only one small room for living and sleeping in, like a back room in a Canadian log-hut, and without a window to open, makes one restless after a time. So we thought we would gently stroll on to another sacred mountain, whose flat top was a very striking feature in the landscape. And we went down into what is called the Wilderness, where there are wild cattle and wild men, and for about a week wandered on, passing along by the boundary of the unconquered Lolos, and up the most magnificent ravine I have seen or can imagine, down which a torrent had swept but a week before from the Sai King, or Drying Prayerbooks Mountain, to which we were bound, drowning twenty-six people in one hamlet alone.

Climbing the Sai King was rather a formidable affair. But for the guidance of a young priest, returning from one of those begging excursions by means of which he had bought the whole mountain-summit, we never should have reached the top before darkness set in; and in the dark no man would dare to move upon the Sai King. For not only are there all manner of wild beasts, but the path leads along the narrow edge of a col, and then up staircases, till at last you arrive at three ladders, one of twenty-seven rungs, before you find yourself at the top of the awful precipices that girdle it all round, in a sort of park with firs and rhododendrons, the latter at least twenty feet high, moss hanging from them in garlands, as well as a foot deep upon the ground. It is a veritable boys' paradise (and as such I have described it at length in the Nineteenth Century of January, 1896), with squirrels and deer and birds innumerable, large very sweet white strawberries in the greatest profusion, raspberries abundant, currants plentiful, mushrooms in bushels. There are glorious views from the brink of precipices, when you can break your way through the rhododendrons and look over, hearing the rivers murmuring some five or six thousand feet below, and seeing the Tibetan summits like a sea of mountains.

But I have mentioned nearly all there was to eat on the Sai King Shan, and our room was almost more cracks than room, so that we shivered inside it even when almost blinded by wood smoke. And when the wind howled and the rain poured in like a waterspout, it did occur to us to wonder what we should do if one of the ladders were carried away. Besides, by dint of thinking about it, the going down those ladders became increasingly terrible. I had paused in the middle of coming up, and, looking between my feet, had seen the mists moving and the cataract falling four thousand feet sheer below me, and through a rift in the clouds had caught a sight of the great precipice to the north, greater even than that on Omi. We found ourselves wondering whether it would be wise to look down and gaze on everything, if clear, when descending. When we had got as far as that, it seemed more prudent to go down at once. And it was then we saw from the bottom the great north precipice, that is the most glorious east end of a world's cathedral. Looked at from where one will, one could not but feel in comparison how poor was a temple made with hands. Yet there in the valley six thousand feet below was the chapel and priests' house, built by their own hands with their own money by the people of the wholly Christian village of Tatientze. And here, close to the summit of the mountain, where a cord used to hang over the precipice to get down by, was the cave where two Buddhist sisters, till last year, lived seven years "to purify their souls." There was a little platform in front of the cave where they could stand and look out upon the glories of the Creator's handiwork, if so minded. Did they stand there, those two sisters? Did they worship there? Did they in the end purify their souls? Or did they find it was a mistake, thus retiring from their kind? Their father used to send them rice, which was let down to them by the cord, and a stream poured over the precipice in a sort of waterfall hard by. And they only went away the year before because the tidings had come of their mother's death.

Again we wandered on, or rather walked hard, for one day across the mountains, till we came to a village full of conquered Lolos, women fearless and frank as American girls, riding and walking with a grace I have never seen equalled; their men with elaborate ceremonial of politeness, but, alas! too much given to the delights of drink. We would gladly have learned more about them. But now we heard six days more would bring us to Tachienlu, in Chinese Tibet, and all our following were wild to get there, and to get fur coats, the Chinaman's ambition. As for ourselves, we wondered if it were worth while to go on, but we were certainly in no hurry as yet to get back to Chungking. Our last news from there was that it was 100° in the shade, and cholera worse than ever. Thirty thousand people, we learnt afterwards, died of it in the course of the summer, and it was worse still at Chengtu, the capital of the province, by which we had purposed returning.

Not at all particularly anxious for fur coats, not at all distinctly remembering what we had read of Tachienlu, we decided to go on if we could get ponies, and thus decide for ourselves if it were worth while. But now came the difficulty. With ponies grazing all round, we never could succeed in hiring one. Certainly they were very small, and we very big by comparison. Every one told us we must get ponies at Fulin. So to Fulin we pushed on. But this was thirty-six miles, over any number of passes, one seven thousand feet high, so we were obliged to stop a little short of it that night. Next day, however, we got there for breakfast. We had formed high expectations with regard to Fulin. For six days we had seen men staggering along under crushing weights of salt, two hundred pounds to each man, too much exhausted by their burdens even to look up. And they had all been bound for Fulin. People may not want to be missionaries in China, but I do not think any European could travel there and not wish to undo the heavy burdens, and I have seen no beasts of burthen whose sufferings have so moved my heart to pity as these salt-carriers. Salt is such a hard, uncompromising load, and it was so pitiful to notice how they had to protect it from being melted by the sweat that streamed down their poor backs. Then the passes were so high, and the paths so narrow and so wild, and the heat so great. It seemed as if any human heart must break, if it contemplated beforehand all it would have to undergo to carry one load of salt from Kiating to Fulin. Then, however often we calculated it, what they were paid, how many days they spent upon the journey, how many days going empty-handed back, we never could make out that the poor carriers were any the better off at the end of all their exertions. Of course they must be, or they would not make them; but it must be by a miserable pittance indeed. It appeared now, too, that Fulin, though well-to-do enough, was but the distributing centre for two very rich prosperous valleys and the country beyond, and there were no ponies to be had there. Later on in the day, however, when we really did succeed in hiring capital ponies, we no longer wondered that it had been difficult to get any for such a journey as we were undertaking. For what road there had ever been had been carried away in several places, and so had the bridges. The mountains looked exactly as if, according to the Chinese saying, a dragon had really turned round at the top, and clawed and scored and gashed the mountain-sides. All the people were going to market, as they always are in Szechuan, and in one place was a crowd busy remaking a bridge in order to get over, whilst farther on three of the strongest men of the company had stripped, and, holding hands, were cautiously trying fording. Then the others followed their example, and for a moment or two were carried off their legs by the furious stream. The hills were terrible, and, clambering up one, a mule in our company failed to establish its footing, and, turning over and over, reached the bottom dead. Just the moment before I had been wondering whether my tiny pony could make the final effort necessary to attain the top of that hill.

After Nitou, which proclaims on a stone tablet that it is the western boundary of the black-haired or Chinese race, Tibet seems to begin. We climbed a pass nine thousand feet high, then descended again for five miles, always in uninhabited country, full of flowers. Especially lovely in that September weather was the small but very luxuriant deep purple convolvulus twining round the acacia mimosas. Just as we passed out of the mist—it was unfortunately always misty at the tops of the passes—we met a Lama quite resplendent in crimson and old gold, and then passed troops of men carrying brick tea. One man carried seventeen bars, each weighing twenty pounds; others fifteen, thirteen, or eleven. A boy of fourteen, of ten, even one of seven, was carrying, the latter four half-bars, poor wee child! Just as we were sorrowing over the children, trees glorious with coral flowers flashed upon our sight. And on the second day after leaving Nitou we once more came upon the great Tung river, by the side of which we had before travelled for one whole afternoon, separated only by it from the unconquered Lolo country. Never a boat nor raft upon the Tung, except one to take people back into Lololand from a great theatrical performance, at which all the countryside had mustered. And once we saw a boat by the side of it, but hauled up high and dry. It was a round skin-boat, for all the world just like the coracles the ancient Britons used. We came also upon a terrible gully, descending by a severe slant directly into the river. A shower of stones was almost continuously rattling down, mixed with a little water; every now and then the shower slackened somewhat, and then first one and then another large stone would come down, wildly bounding from side to side; after that, the shower would be stronger than ever. When the erratic blocks came bounding down, no one put his feet in the footprints left by some one else across the shifting torrent of stones, that here constituted the whole of the great brick-tea road, the great main road between Peking and Lassa. At other times they paused behind a projecting rock, to watch for a good opportunity, and then ran for it. And the usual thing seemed to be to laugh. Our little dog had its misgivings in the middle, and paused, to be half kicked, half thrown across. For it was an anxious moment for our carrying coolies and the heavily laden brick-tea men. Meanwhile, our cook amused himself by pitching stones into the air, and it was eerie to observe that, wherever thrown, and however often they bounded, they all ended by falling into the deep, swift waters of the unnavigable Tung.

The next wonder was the celebrated bridge, three hundred feet long, and with hardly any drop in the nine iron chains of which it is composed. Planks were laid loosely upon the chains, starting up at each of the ponies' steps, and the whole bridge swayed like a ship at sea. Two guardians of the bridge at once rushed forward, and placed their arms under mine to support me across, taking for granted that I should be frightened. But looked upon as a yacht pitching and tossing, the bridge really did not make bad weather of it, so I preferred to walk alone and to notice how sea-sick our coolies looked. Just at that point the Tung vividly recalled the Rhine at Basle, but with probably a greater volume of water. That afternoon the scenery began to be as wild and gloomy as we had anticipated, granite mountains increasing in size and narrowing in upon us, the road taking sudden drops down precipitous gorges of four or five hundred feet, and then at once up again. There were prickly pears all about, and pomegranate-trees in hedges, the air full of thyme and peppermint and aromatic scents. Tibetan villages, just like the pictures, were visible on the far left bank of the Tung,—two-storied houses, with tiny holes for windows, and door uncomfortably high up, so that no one could get in, if once the entrance ladder were drawn up; roofs set so as apparently to let in a free current of air. Not a tree visible, not a man moving: there never is in the pictures! Impossible, however, to get across the Tung to look at them; and when isolated houses were visible on our side, it was always in inaccessible eyries.

The little pony I rode, not one of those excellent ponies we hired the first day for a few hours only, had come down twice on both knees with me on its back. It was evident its little legs might have been stronger. And as I rode along these granite precipices, my hands were hot with terror, until at last I could bear no more. For some time beforehand I had been looking at the road in front, curving round two headlands—granite precipice above, granite precipice below—the road overarched by the rock, and had wondered how all our party would get by. "We met one hundred and fifty people coming from that direction before our luncheon," I said to myself. "I know it because I counted them. And if anything, I left out some, when the road was too alarming. They must all have got by alive! And all these brick-tea men now coming along with us, of course they are all intending to get by alive. It can't be so bad!" But it was of no use! I could not ride along that road, with the pony slipping and stumbling among the stones, and sliding down the little descents at the corners with both its hind feet together. Yet the road was good for those parts, being all of granite and painfully chiselled out; so the pony-boy, a most lively youth of fifteen, was greatly shocked at my dismounting.

We slept that night where the Lu joins the Tung, cutting a granite mountain in half to do so, the half that is left standing towering some three or four thousand feet above our heads. The Lu is the fullest glacier stream I have ever seen. It has a great deal more water to carry than the Thames at Richmond, and sometimes it is compressed into a width of six yards, with a tremendous fall, coming straight, we are told, from a lake at the foot of the great glacier we saw first with such delight from the summit of sacred Omi, about a hundred miles away as the crow flies. All day we rode or walked up the defile, that would have been too solemn but for this rollicking glacier stream tumbling head over heels all the way down it, with side cataracts leaping down, equally overfull of foaming water, equally in hot haste to reach the Tung. The road was all the way so bad that at last my only surprise was to find that there were places the ponies could not manage, and that on one occasion they had, twice in five minutes, to ford a stream with the water well up to my feet, as they stumbled among the big boulders in order to avoid a bit of road that all the heavily laden brick-tea men had managed. It seemed too absurd that those ponies could not, they had done so much already. But at last the pony-boy waved his arm, as if to say, "There's Tachienlu! I've got you there at last! You can't get into trouble now, I think, along what we call the bit of smooth road in front. And I wash my hands of you!"

We rode on, past our last Tibetan bridge. How often they had haunted my childhood's dreams! And now I saw a woman seat herself astride the stick hanging from the cord drawn taut across the stream, and, resting one arm upon a very smooth piece of bamboo that runs along the cord, hold with the other hand a series of loops of cords hanging from it, and allow herself to be pulled across. I longed to do likewise, and went the length of seating myself on the stick; but the foaming torrent below meant certain death if one could not hold on, nor did I know at all what reception the Tibetan men on the other side might give me, so I got off again. People say it is easy enough to go as far as the slope of the cord is downwards, but very hard to pull oneself up the other side, and that just at the centre the impulse to let go is almost overmastering. We passed flagstaffs with lettered pieces of cloth hanging from them inscribed with prayers, passed rocks with prayers chiselled on their smooth surfaces, into the little frontier town at the junction of three valleys, with granite mountains hemming it in all round, one terminating in a sharp little granite pyramid, quite a feature in the view, and in what looked exactly like a fortress with three big cannon pointed in different directions.

We had already met one most exciting party of Tibetans, the men fine-looking, one even more than that, the women rosy and pleasant-faced and very short-skirted, but evidently all thinking it an excellent joke not to let me look at them, and such fleet mountaineers that, though I ran, I could not keep up with them, and they were all out of sight, merrily laughing, before we had half seen them. But now at Tachienlu far more wonderful people became visible. It was as if every wild tribe on the borders of China were represented, and a piece of the garment of each patched into the garment of every other. And in and out among them strode the Lamas, right arm and shoulder bared, like Roman senators in dull-red togas, their arms folded and their attitude defiant. A beggar passed singing, with a face like Irving's, only glorified. He had bare feet, but his face was sublime. Then strode by what looked like a tall Highlander, with a striped garment of many colours draped round him, boots of soft woollen coming to the knee, and edged with a coarse stuff of brilliant red and yellow. Next, two wild-looking men, with blue hats, that were hats and hoods all in one, slouched upon their heads, a red disc in the centre of each, their most luxuriant hair, in innumerable very fine plaits, twisted round and round, and fastened at one side with large red and yellow rings. Tibetan women, with fine, rather Irish features, black eyes and hair, and rosy cheeks, were smiling on us from the doorsteps, their hair plaited with a red cord, and twisted in a most becoming coronal round their heads. They had large silver earrings with red coral drops, red cloth collars fastened by large silver clasps, always a lump of coral in the centre of the middle one, and a large turquoise in that on either side. They had silver châtelaines hanging from their waists, though often only a needlebook on the châtelaine, large silver bracelets and strings of coral beads on their arms, and their fingers covered with enormous rings.

Every one looked at us and smiled. Could anything be more different from the reception we were accustomed to in a Chinese city? Every one looked at us as if to say, "Are not you glad to have got here?" We felt more and more glad every minute, but a little bewildered too. It was all so strange; the streets were so full of corners and of strange-looking people, all looking and smiling at us. And they seemed to go on for ever. When were we going really to arrive?