Mountains were wild and barren, with nothing in them to enable one to forget in natural beauty the fatigues of a toilsome ascent.  Villages came now and again in sight, stretched out at the extremity of the plain before my eyes, with their white gables, red walls, and black tiled roofs, but during the day we passed through two only.  The first was a little place where decay would have been absolute had it not been for the likin[AR] flag, which enables “squeezes” to be extorted ruthlessly from the muleteer and conveyed to the pockets of the prospering customs agent.  It boasted only ten or twelve tumbling lean-to tenements, where my sympathy went out to the half-dozen physical wrecks of men who came slowly and stared long, and wondered at the commonest article of my meager impedimenta.  They seemed poorer and lower down the human scale than any I had yet seen.  On one of the ragged garments worn by a man of about twenty-five I counted no less than thirty-four patches of different shapes, sizes and materials, hieroglyphically and skillessly thrown together to hide his sore-strewn back; but still his brown unwashed flesh was visible in many places.

Looking upon them, one did not like to think that these beings were men, men with passions like to one’s own, for all the interests, real and imaginary, all the topics which should expand the mind of man, and connect him in sympathy with general existence, were crushed in the absorbing considerations of how rice was to be procured for their families of diseaseful brats.  They had no brains, these men; or if Heaven had thus o’erblessed them, they did not exercise them in their industry—­their coarse, rough hands alone gained food for the day’s feeding.  And these mud-roofed, mud-sided dwellings—­these were their homes, to me worse homes than none at all.  In their architecture not even a single idea could be traced—­the Chinese here had proceeded as if by merest accident.  All I could think as I returned their wondering glances was that their world must be very, very old.  But I have no time or space to talk of them here.  To throw more than a cursory glance at them Would lead me into interminable disquisitions of a mythological, anthropological, craniological, and antediluvian nature for which one would not find universal approval among his readers.  To those who would study such questions I say, “Fall to!” There is enough scope for a lifetime to bring into light the primeval element so strangely woven into the lives of these people.

At Yuen-nan-i bunting and weird street decoration made the place hideous in my eyes.  The crowded town was making considerable ado about some expected official.  I saw none, more than a courteous youth—­to whom, of course, I was quite unknown and deaf and dumb—­who graciously shifted goods and chattels from the inn’s best room to hand it over to me for my occupation.  With due tact and some excitability, I protested vigorously against his coming out.