of heavy weather.

Snow came cold and sudden. As we slowly and toilsomely ascended, the
velocity of the wind fiercely increased; down the mountain-side, at a
hundred miles an hour, came clouds of blinding, flinty dust, making the
blood run from one's lips and cheeks as he plodded on against great
odds. With the biting wind, howling and hissing in the winding ravines
and snow-swept hollows, headway was difficult. Often was I raised from
my feet: helplessly I clung to the earth for safety, and pulled at
withered grass to keep my footing. The ponies, patient little brutes,
with one hundred and fifty pounds strapped to their backs, came near to
giving up the ghost, being swayed hopelessly to and fro in the fury. For
hours we thus toiled up pathways seemingly fitter for goats than men,
where leafless trees were bending destitute of life and helpless towards
the valley, as the keen wind went sighing, moaning, wailing through
their bare boughs and budless twigs.

Such a gale, wilder than the devil's passion, I have not known even on
the North Atlantic in February.

At times during the day progression in the deepening snow seemed quite
impossible, and my two men, worn and weary, bearing the burden of an
excessively fatiguing day, well-nigh threw up the sponge, vowing that
they wished they had not taken on the job.

But the scenery later in the day, though monotonously so, was grand. The
earth was literally the color of deep-red blood, the crimson paths
intertwining the darker landscape bore to one's imagination a vision of
some bloody battle--veritable rivers of human blood. To cheer the
traveler in his desolation, the sun struggled vainly to pierce with its
genial rays through the heavy, angry clouds rolling lazily upwards from
the black valleys, and enveloping the earth in a deep infinity of
severest gloom. The cold was damp. In the small hemmed-in hollows,
whereto our pathway led, the icy dew clung to one's hair and beard. From
little brown cottages, with poor thatched roofs letting in the light,
and with walls and woodwork long since uniformly rotten, men and women
emerged, rubbing their eyes and buttoning up their garments, looking
wistfully for the hidden sun.

At Shao-p'ai (8,100 feet) a brute of a fellow was administering
cruellest chastisement to his disobedient yoke-fellow, who took her
scourging in good part. I passed along as fast as I could to the ascent
over which a road led in and around the mountain with al