eastward, ever eastward, through a land sparsely peopled for all its virgin fertility.  Behind their flying progress the days dropped—­one, two, three, four, at last five; and then they entered a more populous region.  Kan Wong, his nose flattened against the glass that held the moving picture as in a frame, wondered much at the magic that unrolled to his never-sated eyes.  Yet the journey’s end was beyond his questioning.

Once more they came to a seaport.  Marching from the carriages, once more they beheld the sea.  But this time it was different—­more turbulent, harsher, more sombre with the hint of waiting storms.  Was there, then, more than one ocean, Kan Wong asked himself?  He found that it was indeed so when once more a fire junk received them.  This one was greyer than the first that they had known.  Upon her decks were guns and at her side were other junks, low, menacing, with a demon flurry of vicious speed, and short, squat funnels that belched dense smoke clouds.  Within the town were many Foreign Devils, all dressed alike in strange drab uniforms; on the docks and here and there at other places they bore arms and other unmistakable equipment of fighting men, which even Kan Wong could not but notice.

The grey ship moved into a cold grey fog.  With it other ships as grey and as crowded, ships that crawled with men, strange Foreign Devils who clanked with weapons as they walked aboard.  Again a waste of water, through which the ship seemed to crawl with a caution that Kan Wong felt, but did not understand.  With it on either side, moved those other junks—­squat, menacing, standing low on the horizon, but as haunting as dark ghosts.  Where were they bound, this strangely mixed fleet?  Often Kan Wong pondered this, but gave it no tongue to his fellow-passengers, holding a bit aloof from them by virtue of his caste.

Again they neared the shore, where other boats, low-built and bristling with guns, flew swiftly out to meet them like fierce ocean birds of prey.  Now they skirted high, bleak cliffs, their feet hid in a lather of white foam; then they rounded the cliffs and passed into a storm-struck stretch of sea through which they rolled to a more level land, off which they cast anchor.  The long ocean journey was finished at last.

There was a frantic bustle at this port, increasing a hundredfold when once they set foot upon the land.  Men—­men were everywhere; men in various uniforms, men who spoke various tongues in a confusing babel, yet they all seemed intent upon one purpose, the import of which Kan Wong could but vaguely guess.  All about them was endless movement, but no confusion, and once ashore their work commenced immediately.