Such a gale, wilder than the devil’s passion, I have not known even on the North Atlantic in February.

At times during the day progression in the deepening snow seemed quite impossible, and my two men, worn and weary, bearing the burden of an excessively fatiguing day, well-nigh threw up the sponge, vowing that they wished they had not taken on the job.

But the scenery later in the day, though monotonously so, was grand.  The earth was literally the color of deep-red blood, the crimson paths intertwining the darker landscape bore to one’s imagination a vision of some bloody battle—­veritable rivers of human blood.  To cheer the traveler in his desolation, the sun struggled vainly to pierce with its genial rays through the heavy, angry clouds rolling lazily upwards from the black valleys, and enveloping the earth in a deep infinity of severest gloom.  The cold was damp.  In the small hemmed-in hollows, whereto our pathway led, the icy dew clung to one’s hair and beard.  From little brown cottages, with poor thatched roofs letting in the light, and with walls and woodwork long since uniformly rotten, men and women emerged, rubbing their eyes and buttoning up their garments, looking wistfully for the hidden sun.

At Shao-p’ai (8,100 feet) a brute of a fellow was administering cruellest chastisement to his disobedient yoke-fellow, who took her scourging in good part.  I passed along as fast as I could to the ascent over which a road led in and around the mountain with alarming steepness, a road which at home would never be negotiated on foot or on horseback, but which here forms part of the main trade route.  From the extreme summit one dropped abruptly into a protecting gorge, where falling cascades, sparkling like crystal showers in the feeble sunlight occasionally breaking through, danced playfully over the smooth-worn, slippery rocks; a stream foamed noisily over the loose stones, and leapt in rushing rapids where the earth had given way; there was no grass, no scenery, no life, and in the sudden turnings the hurricane roared with heavenly anger through the long deep chasms, over the twelve-inch river-beds at the foot.

At Lai-t’eo-p’o accommodation at night was fairly good.  Men laughed hilariously at me when I raved at some carpenters to desist their clumsy hammering three feet above my head.  Hundreds of dogs yelped unceasingly at the moon, and with the usual rows of the men in mutual invitation to “Come and wash your feet,” or “Ching fan, ching fan,” the draughts, the creaks and cracks, the unintermitting din, and so much else, one was not sorry to rise again with the lark and push onwards in the cold.

Down below this horrid town there is a plain; in this plain there is a hole fifty feet deep, and had my pony, which I was leading, not pulled me away from falling thereinto, my story would not now be telling.

To Kongshan (6,700 feet), past Yei-chu-t’ang (8,100 feet) and Hsiao-lang-t’ang (7,275 feet), one hundred li away, was a journey through country considerably more interesting, especially towards the end of the day, a peculiar combination of wooded slope and rough, rock-worn pathways.