T’ong, laughing derisively, waved fond and fantastic salutations to the disappointed vendor of pigeons, and moved backwards on tiptoe till he could see him no more; then we went noiselessly down a steep incline out into an open space of distracted and dishevelled beauty on our way to Chao-t’ong-fu.

From Chung-king I had stuck to the regular stages.  I had done no hustling, but I decided to rush it to Chao-t’ong if I could, as the reports I heard about being overtaken by the rains in Yuen-nan were rather disquieting.  I had taken to Sui-fu three times as long as the regular mail time, the service of which is excellent.  Chung-king has no less than six local deliveries daily, thus eliminating delays after the delivery of the mails, and a daily service to the coast has also been established.  A fast overland service to Wan Hsien now exists, by which the coast mails are transmitted between that port and Chung-king in the hitherto unheard-of time of two days—­a traveler considers himself fortunate if he covers the same distance in eight days.  There are fast daily services to Luchow (380 li distant) in one day, Sui-fu (655 li) in two days, Hochow (180 li) in one night, and Chen-tu (1,020 li) in three days.  It is creditable to the Chinese Imperial Post Office that a letter posted at Sui-fu will be delivered in Great Britain in a month’s time.

It was a dull, chilly morning that I left Sui-fu, leading my little procession through the city on my way to Anpien, which was to be reached before sundown.  My coolies—­probably owing to having derived more pecuniary advantage than they expected during the journey from Chung-king—­decided to re-engage, and promised to complete the fourteen-day tramp to Chao-t’ong-fu, two hundred and ninety miles distant, if weather permitted, in eleven days.  We were to travel by the following stages:—­

Length of        Height above
stage              sea

1st day—­Anpien 90 li ——­ 2nd day—­Huan-chiang 55 li ——­ 3rd day—­Fan-ih-ts’uen 70 li ——­ 4th day—­T’an-t’eo 70 li ——­ 5th day—­Lao-wa-t’an 140 li 1,140 ft. 6th day—­Teo-sha-kwan 60 li 4,000 ft. 7th day—­Ch’i-li-p’u 60 li 1,900 ft. 8th day—­Ta-wan-tsi 70 li ——­ 9th day—­Ta-kwan-ting 70 li 3,700 ft. 10th day—­Wuchai 60 li 7,000 ft. 11th day—­Chao-t’ong-fu 100 li 6,400 ft.

I knew that I was in for a very hard journey.  The nature of the country as far as T’an-t’eo, ten li this side of which the Szech’wan border is reached, is not exhausting, although the traveler is offered some rough and wild climbing.  The next day’s stage, to Lao-wa-t’an, is miserably bad.  At certain places it is cut out of the rock, at others it runs in the bed of the river, which is dotted everywhere with roaring rapids (as we are ascending very quickly), and when the water is high these roads are submerged and often impassable.  In some places it was a six-inch path along the mountain slope, with a gradient of from sixty to seventy degrees, and landslips and rains are ever changing the path.