by the thousands of passing mules that it is well-nigh impossible to walk upon them.  As a result a caravan avoids the paving whenever it can find a path and sometimes dozens of deeply-cut trails wind over the hills beside the road.

We are seldom on level ground, for ten per cent of the entire province is mountainous and we soon lost count of the ranges which we crossed.  It is slow, hard work, toiling up the steep mountain-sides, but once on the ridges where the country is spread out below us like a great, green relief map, there is a wonderful exhilaration, and we climb higher with a joyous sense of freedom.

Yuen-nan means “south of the cloud” and every morning the peaks about us are shrouded in fog.  Sometimes the veil-like mists still float about the mountain tops when we climb into them, and we are suddenly enveloped in a wet gray blanket which sends us shivering into the coats tied to our saddles.

For centuries this road has been one of the main trade arteries through the province, and with the total lack of conservation ideas so characteristic of the Chinese, every available bit of natural forest has been cut away.  As a result the mountains are desert wastes of sandstone alternating with grass-covered hills sometimes clothed with groves of pines or spruces.  These trees have all been planted, and ere they have reached a height of fifteen or twenty feet will yield to the insistent demand for wood which is ever present with the Chinese.

The ignorance of the need of forest conservation is an illuminating commentary on Chinese education.  Mr. William Hanna, a missionary of Ta-li Fu, told us that one day he was riding over this same road with a Chinese gentleman, a deep scholar, who was considered one of the best educated men of the province.  Pointing to the barren hills washed clean of soil and deeply worn by countless floods, Mr. Hanna remarked that all this could have been prevented, and that instead of a rocky waste there might have been a fertile hillside, had the trees been left to grow.

The Chinese scholar listened in amazement to facts which every western schoolboy has learned ere he is twelve years old, but of which he was ignorant because they are not a part of Confucius’ teachings.  To study modern science is considered a waste of time by the orthodox Chinese for “everything good must be old,” and all his life he delves into the past utterly neglectful of the present.

Every valley along the road was green with rice fields and this, together with the deforestation of the mountains, is responsible for the almost total lack of animal life.  Night after night we set traps about our temple camps only to find them untouched in the morning.  There were no mammals with the exception of a few red-bellied squirrels (Callosciurus erythraeus sub sp.) and now and then a tree shrew (Tupaia belangeri chinensis).