r the
entire distance. But in the dreaded Valley several trees were ablaze
with blossom, and oranges shone like small balls of gold in the rising
sun. Children playing in between the trees ran away and hid as they saw
me, although I was fifty yards from them--they did not know what it was,
and they had never seen one!

Farther down I caught up my men, Lao Chang and Shanks, and pleasant
speculations were entered into as to what Singai (Bhamo) was like. They
were particularly interested in Singapore because I had lived there, and
after I had given them a general description of the place, and explained
how the Chinese had gone ahead there, I pointed out as well as I could
with my limited vocabulary that if the people of Yuen-nan only had a
conscience, and would only get out of the rut of the ages, they, too,
might go ahead, explaining incidentally to them that as lights of the
church at Tong-ch'uan-fu, it was their sacred duty to raise the standard
of moral living among their countrymen wherever they might wander. Their
general acquiescence was astounding, and in the next town,
Lu-chiang-pa, these two men put their theory into practice and almost
caused a riot by offering 250 cash for a fowl for which the vendor
blandly asked 1,000. But they got the chicken--and at their own price,
too.

As I was thus gently in soliloquy, I first heard and then caught sight
of the river below--the unnavigable Salwen, 2,000 feet lower than either
the Mekong or the Shweli (which we were to cross two days later). It is
a pity the Salwen was not preserved as the boundary between Burma and
China.

Gradually, as we approached the steep stone steps leading down thereto,
I saw one of the cleverest pieces of native engineering in Asia--the
double suspension bridge which here spans the Salwen, the only one I had
seen in my trip across the Empire. The first span, some 240 feet by 36
feet, reaches from the natural rock, down which a vertical path zigzags
to the foot, and the second span then runs over to the busy little town
of Lu-chiang-pa.

Here, then, were we in the most dreaded spot in Western China! If you
stay a night in this Valley, rumor says, you go to bed for the last
time; Chinese are afraid of it, Europeans dare not linger in it. Malaria
stalks abroad for her victims, and snatches everyone who dallies in his
journey to the topside mountain village of Feng-shui-ling. The river is
2,000 feet above the sea; Feng-shui-ling is nearly 9,000