s short road was more fatiguing than the
main road would have been.

We again turned a dwelling-house upside down. People did not at first
wish to take me in, so I pushed past the quarrelsome man in the doorway,
took possession, and set to work to get what I wanted. Soon the people
calmed down and gave all they could. My bed I spread near the door, and
to catch a glimpse of me as I lay resting, the inhabitants, in much the
same manner as people at home visit and revisit the cage of jungle-bred
tigers at a menagerie, assembled and reassembled with considerable
confusion. But I was beneath my curtains. So they came again, and when I
ate my food by candlelight many human and tangible products of the past
glared in at the doorway. After dark we all foregathered in the middle
of the room and round the camp fire, the conversation taking a pleasant
turn from ordinary things, such as the varying distances from place to
place, how many basins of rice each man could eat, and other Chinese
commonplaces, to things military. Everybody warmed to the subject. My
military bodyguard were the chief speakers, and cleverly brought round
the smoky fire, for the benefit of the thick-headed rustics who made up
the fascinated audience, a modern battlefield, and made their
description horrible enough.

One carefully brought out his gun, waving it overhead to add to the
tragedy, as he weaved a powerful story of shell splinters, blood-filled
trenches, common shot, men and horses out of which all life and virtue
had been blown by gunpowder. The picture was drawn around the Chinese
village, and in the dim glimmer each man's thought ran swiftly to his
own homestead and the green fields and the hedgerows and dwellings all
blown to atoms--left merely as a place of skulls. They spoke of great
and horrible implements of modern warfare, invented, to their minds, by
the devilry of the West. Each man chipped in with a little color, and
the company broke up in fear of dreaming of the things of which they had
heard, afraid to go to their straw to sleep.

As I lay in my draughty corner, my own mind turned to what the next day
would bring, for I was to go down to the Valley of the Shadow of
Death--the dreaded Salwen. I had read of it as a veritable death-trap.

CHAPTER XXIII.

_To Lu-chiang-pa_. _Drop from 8,000 feet to 2,000 feet_. _Shans meet for
the first time_. _Dangers of the Salwen Valley exaggerated_. _How
reports get into print_. _Start of t