Repassing the Lolo village, we followed the river gorge at the upper end of
which Chung-tien is located and left the forests when we emerged on the
main road. From the top of a ten thousand foot pass there was a magnificent
view down the canon to the snow-capped mountains, which were beautiful
beyond description in their changing colors of purple and gold.

Just after leaving the pass we met a caravan of several hundred horses each
bearing two whole pigs bent double and tied to the saddles. The animals had
been denuded of hair, salted, and sewn up, and soon would be distributed
among the villages somewhere in the interior of Tibet.

On the second day we saw before us seven snow-crowned peaks as sharp and
regular as the teeth of a saw rising above the mouth of the stream where it
spreads like a fan over a sandy delta and empties into the Yangtze. Here
the mighty river, flowing proudly southward from its home in the wind-blown
steppes of the "Forbidden Land," countless ages ago found the great Snow
Mountain range barring its path. Thrust aside, it doubled back upon itself
along the barrier's base, still restlessly seeking a passage through the
wall of rock. Far to the north it bit hungrily into the mountain's side
again, broke through, and swung south gathering strength and volume from
hundreds of tributaries as it rushed onward to the sea.

For two days we rode along the river bank and crossed at the Shih-ku ferry.
There was none of the difficulty here which we had experienced at Taku, for
the river is wide and the current slow. It required only two hours to
transport our entire caravan while at the other ferry we had waited a day
and a half. Strangely enough, although there are dozens of villages along
the Yangtze and the valley is highly cultivated, we saw no sign of fishing.
Moreover, we passed but three boats and five or six rafts and it was
evident that this great waterway, which for fifteen hundred miles from its
mouth influences the trade of China so profoundly, is here used but little
by the natives.

On the ride down the river we had good sport with the huge cranes (probably
_Grus nigricollis_) which, in small flocks, were feeding along the river
fields. The birds stood about five feet high and we could see their great
black and white bodies and black necks farther than a man was visible. It
was fairly easy to stalk them to within a hundred yards, but even at that
distance they offered a rather small target, f