carelessness or curiosity of the natives.  In our cramped quarters perhaps a corner of the tent would be pushed open admitting a stream of light; the electric flash lamp might refuse to work, leaving us in complete darkness to finish the developing “by guess and by gosh,” or any number of other accidents occur to ruin the film.  At most we could not develop more than three hundred feet in an afternoon and we never breathed freely until it finally was dried and safely stored away in the tin cans.

We left Habala, on November 23, for a village called Phete where the natives had assured us we would find good hunters with dogs.  For almost the entire distance the road skirted the rim of the Yangtze gorge and there the view of the great chasm was even more magnificent than that we had left.  While its sides are not fantastically sculptured and the colors are softer than those of the Grand Canon of the Colorado, nevertheless its grandeur is hardly less imposing and awe-inspiring.  If Yuen-nan is ever made accessible by railroads this gorge should become a Mecca for tourists, for it is without doubt one of the most remarkable natural sights in the world.

About two o’clock in the afternoon we saw three clusters of houses on a tableland which juts into a chasm cut by a tributary of the great river.  One of them was Phete and it seemed that we would reach the village in half an hour at least, but the road wound so tortuously around the hillside, down to the stream and up again that it was an hour and a half before we found a camping place on a narrow terrace a short distance from the nearest houses.

Next day we could not go to the village to find hunters until mid-forenoon because the natives of this region are very late risers and often have not yet opened their doors at ten o’clock.  This is quite contrary to the custom in many other parts of China where the inhabitants are about their work in the first light of dawn.

The hills above Phete are bare or thinly forested and every available inch of level ground is under cultivation with corn and a few rice paddys near the creek; the latter were a great surprise, for we had not expected to find rice so far north.  The village itself was exceedingly picturesque but never have we met people of such utter and hopeless stupidity as its inhabitants.  They were pleasant enough and always greeted us with a smile and salutation, but their brains seemed not to have kept pace with their bodies and when asked the simplest question they would only stare stupidly without the slightest glimmering of intelligence.

It required an hour’s questioning of a dozen or more people to glean that there were no hunters in the village where they had lived all their lives, but Wu, our interpreter, finally discovered a Chinese who told us of a hunter in the mountains.  He asked how far and the answer was “Not very far.”

“Well, is it ten li?”

“I don’t know how many li.”