e
been scooped out to serve as beds and all the cooking is done not far from
the door. The caves, although almost dark, make fairly comfortable living
quarters and are by no means as dirty or as evil smelling as the ordinary
native house. The mines are straight shafts dug into the cliffs where the
rock is quarried and crushed by hand.

CHAPTER XX

THROUGH UNMAPPED COUNTRY

We left the Taku ferry by way of a steep trail through an open pine and
spruce forest along the rim of the Yangtze gorge where the view was
magnificent. Someone has said that when a tourist sees the Grand Canon for
the first time he gasps "Indescribable" and then immediately begins to
describe it. Thus it was with us, but no words can picture the grandeur of
this titanic chasm. In places the rocks were painted in delicate tints of
blue and purple; in others, the sides fell away in sheer drops of hundreds
of feet to the green torrent below rushing on to the sea two thousand five
hundred miles away.

The caravan wound along the edge of the gorge all day and we were left far
behind, for at each turn a view more beautiful than the last opened out
before us, and until every color plate and negative in the holders had been
exposed we worked steadily with the camera.

We were traveling northwestward through an unmapped region which Baron
Haendel-Mazzetti had skirted and reported to be one of vast forests and
probably rich in game. After six hours of riding over almost bare
mountain-sides we passed through a parklike spruce forest and reached
Habala, a long thin village of mud and stone houses scattered up the sides
of a narrow valley.

Above and to the left of the village rose ridge after ridge of dense spruce
forest overshadowed by a snow-crowned peak and cut by deep ravines, the
gloomy depths of which yielded fascinating glimpses of rocky cliffs--a
veritable paradise for serow and goral. Our camping place was a grassy lawn
as flat and smooth as the putting green of a golf course. Just below the
tents a streamlet of ice-cold water murmured comfortably to itself and a
huge dead tree was lying crushed and broken for the camp fire.

The boys turned the beautiful spot into "home" in half an hour and, after
setting a line of traps, we wandered slowly back through the darkness
guided by the brilliant flames of the fires which threw a warm yellow glow
over our little table spread for dinner.

We sent men to the village to bring in hunters and afte