ute has had for dinner; when he will walk into the open
in dim light and shoot, with a .22 high-power rifle, a tiger which
is just ready to charge; when he will go alone and unarmed into the
mountains to meet a band of brigands who have been terrorizing the
country, it means that he has more nerve than any one man needs in
this life!

After leaving the train at Feng-chen, the journey was like all
others in north China; slow progress with a cart over atrocious
roads which are either a mass of sticky mud or inches deep in fine
brown dust. We had four days of it before we reached the mountains
but the trip was full of interest to us both, for along the road
there was an ever-changing picture of provincial life. To Harry it
was especially illuminating because he had spent nineteen years in
south China and had never before visited the north. He began to
realize what every one soon learns who wanders much about the Middle
Kingdom--that it is never safe to generalize in this strange land.
Conditions true of one region may be absolutely unknown a few
hundred miles away. He was continually irritated to find that his
perfect knowledge of the dialect of Fukien Province was utterly
useless. He was well-nigh as helpless as though he had never been in
China, for the languages of the north and the south are almost as
unlike as are French and German. Even our "boys" who were from
Peking had some difficulty in making themselves understood, although
we were not more than two hundred miles from the capital.

Instead of hills thickly clothed with sword grass, here the slopes
were bare and brown. We were too far north for rice; corn, wheat,
and _kaoliang_ took the place of paddy fields. Instead of
brick-walled houses we found dwellings made of clay like the "adobe"
of Mexico and Arizona. Sometimes whole villages were dug into the
hillside and the natives were cave dwellers, spending their lives
within the earth.

All north China is spread with _loess_. During the Glacial Period,
about one hundred thousand years ago, when in Europe and America
great rivers of ice were descending from the north, central and
eastern Asia seems to have suffered a progressive dehydration. There
was little moisture in the air so that ice could not be formed.
Instead, the climate was cold and dry, while violent winds carried
the dust in whirling clouds for hundreds upon hundreds of miles,
spreading it in ever thickening layers over the hills and plains.
There