Hsiao-lang-t’ang, twenty-five li from the end of the stage, overlooks a wide expanse of barren, uninviting moorland.  Deep, jagged gullies break the uneven rolling of the mountains; dark, weird caverns of terrible immensity yawn hungrily from the surface of weariest desolation, ever widening with each turn.  Mist hid the ugliest spots high up among the peaks, whose white summits, peeping sullenly from out this blue sea of damp haze, told a wondrous story of winter’s withering all life to death, a spot than which in summer few places on earth would be more entrancing.  But these mountains are breathing out a solitude which is eternal.  Man here has never been.  Far away beyond lies the country of the aborigines; but even the Lolo, wild and rugged as the country, fearless of man and beast, have never dared to ascend these heights.  They are mournful, cheerless, devoid of a single smile from the common mother of us all, lacking every feature by which the earth draws man into a spirit of unity with his God.  Horrid, frowning waste and aimless discontinuity of land, harbinger of loneliness and of evil!  People, poor struggling beings of our kind, here seemed mocked of destiny, and a hot raging of misery waged within them, for all that the heart might desire and wish for had to them been denied.  If, indeed, the earth be the home of hope, and man’s greatest possession be hope, then would it seem that these poor creatures were entirely cut off, shut out from life, wandering wearisomely through the world in one long battle with Nature whereby to gain the wherewithal to live in that grim desert.  There were no exceptions, it was the common lot.  Each day and every day did these men and women, with a stolidity of long-continued destitution, and temporal and spiritual tribulation, gaze upon that bare, unyielding country, pregnant only with aggravation to their own dire wretchedness.

In such spots, unhappily in Yuen-nan not few, does the mystery of life grow ever more mysterious to one whom distress has never harassed.  A great pity seized my heart, but these poor people would probably have laughed had they known my thoughts.

As I passed they came uninterestedly to look upon me.  They watched in expressive silence; they were silent because of poverty.  And I, too, kept a seal upon my lips as I ate the good things here provided under the eyes of those to whom hunger had given none but a jealous outlook.  Pitiful enough were it, thought I, merely to watch without allowing speech to escape further to taunt them.  So I ate, and they looked at me.  I came and went, but never a word was uttered by these men and women, or even by the children, whose most painful feeling seemed that of their own feebleness.  They were indeed feeble units standing in a threatening infinitude of life, and their thoughts probably dwelt upon my luxury and wealth as mine could not help dwelling upon their hungry town of hungry men and famished children.  Words cannot paint their poverty—­men void of hope, of life, of purpose, of idea.  Happy for them that they had known no other.