We ascended over a road of unspeakable torture to one’s feet.  Gazing down, far away into a seemingly bottomless abyss, we could faintly hear in the lulling of the wind the rush of a torrent, fed by a hundred mountain streams, which washed our path and in horrible disfigurement tore open the surface of the hill-sides.

The long day was drawing wearily to a close.  As the sun was sinking beyond the uneven hills over which I was to climb before the descent to the town begins, the effect of the green and gold and red and brown produced a striking picture of sweet poetic beauty.  I stood in contemplative admiration meditating, as I waited for my coolies, who sat moodily under a dilapidated roadside awning, nonchalantly picking out mouldy monkey-nuts from some coarse sweetmeat sold by a frowsy female.  Then upwards we toiled in the dark, the weird groans of my exhausted men and the falling of the gravel beneath their sandalled feet alone breaking the hollow’s gloom.  Uncanny is night travel in China.

“Who knows but that ghosts, those fierce-faced denizens of the hills, may run against thee and bewitch thee,” murmured one man to the others.  They stopped, and I stopped with them.  And in the darkness, pegging on alone at the mercy of these coolies, my own thoughts were not unsynchronistic.

At last, with no slight misgiving, we came down into the city’s smoke.  Dogs barked at me, and ran away like the curs they are.  Midway down the stone footway my yamen runner too cautiously crept up to me in the dark, muttering something, and I floored him with my fist.  Afterwards I learnt that he came to relieve me of the pony I was leading.

Every room in every wretched inn was occupied; opium fumes already issued from the doorways, and it was now pitch dark, so that I could scarce see the sallow faces of the hungry, uncouth crowd, to whom with no little irritation I tried to speak as I peered carefully into the caravanserai.  Evident it certainly was that the duty lying nearest to me at that particular moment, to myself and all concerned therein, was to accept what I was offered, and not wear out my temper in grumbling.  My boy, Lao Chang (an I-pien), the brick, expressed to me his regrets, and something like real sympathy shone out from his eyes in the dimness.

“Puh p’a teh, puh p’a teh” ("Have no fear, have no fear"), said he; and as I stood the while piling up cruellest torture upon my uncourtly host, he made off to prepare a downstair room (to lapse into modern boarding-house phraseology).

First through an outer apartment, dark as darkest night; on past the caterwauling cook and a few disreputable culinary hangers-on; asked to look out for a pony, which I could not see, but which I was told might kick me; then onward to my boy, who stood on a stool and dropped the grease of a huge red Chinese candle among his plaited hair, as he wobbled it above his head to light the way.  He gripped me tenderly, took me to his bosom as it were, gave me one push, and I was there.  He tarried not.  What right had he to listen to what I in secret would say of the horrid keeper and his twice horrid shakedown inn?  He passed out swiftly into outer darkness, uttering a groan I rudely interpreted as, “That or nothing, that or nothing.”