sprawling on all fours in the slime, and with only the
imperfect footing possible to her with her little stumps, she would have
been submerged, had not the man who had frightened her, at my bidding,
gone to drag her out. As it was, they looked anything but beautiful with
their wet and muddy garments clinging tightly to their bodies, and
betraying every curve of their not unbeautiful figures. One of the
women, a comely damsel of some twenty summers, did not jump into the
field, but lay flat on the ground behind some bushes, thereby hoping to
get out of sight, and now came forward with amorous glances. We,
however, sent them on their way, and I will lay my life that they will
not "scoot" at the sight of the next foreigner.

And now we are at the "Nest." Many travelers have made remarks upon this
place, where I was waited upon by a shrivelled, shambling specimen of
manhood, whose wife--in contrast to her kind in China--seemed to rule
house and home, bed and board. Whilst we were there, a Chinese, bound
on the downward journey, endeavored to mount his mule at the very moment
the animal was reaching out for a blade of straw. As he swung his leg
across the mule took another step forward, and the rider fell bodily
with an enormous bump into the lap of one of my coolies, upsetting him
and his bowl of tea over his trousers and my own. I could not suppress
hearty approval of this acrobatic incident.

But the end was not yet.

I sat on one end of one of those narrow forms, and this same coolie sat
on the other. He rose up suddenly, reached over for the common salt-pot,
and I came off--with the multitude of alfresco diners laughing at this
smart retaliation until their chock-full mouths emitted the grains of
rice they chewed.

After that I cleared off. Descending through a fertile valley, from the
bottom there loomed upwards higher mountains, looking black and dismal,
with clouds black and dismal keeping them company. We had now to cross
the undulating ground still separating us from Pu-peng. The early
portion of the ground was something like Clifton Downs, something like
Dartmoor. The country was poor, and the people barely put themselves out
to boil water for chance travelers.

The storm broke suddenly. From the shelter of a hollowed rock I watched
it all.

Over the submerged plain and the bare hills the blackness was as of
night. Red earth without the sun looked brown, brown looked black, and
the trees, swaying helplessl