to be strained. For washing the negative pailful after pailful
had to be carried sometimes from a very long distance, and the film exposed
for hours to the carelessness or curiosity of the natives. In our cramped
quarters perhaps a corner of the tent would be pushed open admitting a
stream of light; the electric flash lamp might refuse to work, leaving us
in complete darkness to finish the developing "by guess and by gosh," or
any number of other accidents occur to ruin the film. At most we could not
develop more than three hundred feet in an afternoon and we never breathed
freely until it finally was dried and safely stored away in the tin cans.

We left Habala, on November 23, for a village called Phete where the
natives had assured us we would find good hunters with dogs. For almost the
entire distance the road skirted the rim of the Yangtze gorge and there the
view of the great chasm was even more magnificent than that we had left.
While its sides are not fantastically sculptured and the colors are softer
than those of the Grand Canon of the Colorado, nevertheless its grandeur is
hardly less imposing and awe-inspiring. If Yuen-nan is ever made accessible
by railroads this gorge should become a Mecca for tourists, for it is
without doubt one of the most remarkable natural sights in the world.

About two o'clock in the afternoon we saw three clusters of houses on a
tableland which juts into a chasm cut by a tributary of the great river.
One of them was Phete and it seemed that we would reach the village in half
an hour at least, but the road wound so tortuously around the hillside,
down to the stream and up again that it was an hour and a half before we
found a camping place on a narrow terrace a short distance from the nearest
houses.

Next day we could not go to the village to find hunters until mid-forenoon
because the natives of this region are very late risers and often have not
yet opened their doors at ten o'clock. This is quite contrary to the custom
in many other parts of China where the inhabitants are about their work in
the first light of dawn.

The hills above Phete are bare or thinly forested and every available inch
of level ground is under cultivation with corn and a few rice paddys near
the creek; the latter were a great surprise, for we had not expected to
find rice so far north. The village itself was exceedingly picturesque but
never have we met people of such utter and hopeless stupidity as its