feet.

It was ten o'clock as I pulled over my stool and took tea in the crowded
shop at Lu-chiang-pa. I saw Shans here for the first time.

The village now, however, is anything but a Shan village. Of the people
in the immediate vicinity I counted only ten typical Shans, and of the
company around me in this popular tea-house twenty-one out of
twenty-eight were Chinese, including ten Mohammedans. It was, however,
easy to see that several of these were of Shan extraction, who,
although they had features distinctly un-Chinese, had adopted the
Chinese language and custom. A party of Tibetans were here in the charge
of a Lama, in an inner court, and scampered off as I rose to snap their
photographs. This was a very low altitude for Tibetans to reach.

Whilst I sipped my tea the local horse dealer wanted so very much to
sell me a pony cheap. He offered it for forty taels, I offered him five.
It was gone in the back, was blind in the left eye, and was at least
seventeen years old. The man smiled as I refused to buy, and told me
that my knowledge of horse-flesh was wonderful.

The road then led up to a plain, where paths branched in many directions
to the hills. Men either going to the market or coming from it leaned on
their loads to rest under enormous banyans and to watch me as I passed.
Horses browsed on the hill-sides. One of my soldiers had laid in
provisions for the day, and ran along with his gun (muzzle forward) over
one shoulder and four lengths of sugar-cane over the other. Ploughmen
with their buffaloes halted in the muddy fields to gaze admiringly upon
me; women ran scared from the path when my pony let out at a casual
passer-by who tickled him with a thin bamboo. Maidenhair ferns grew in
great profusion, showing that we were getting into warmer climate;
streams rushed swiftly under the stone roadway from dyked-up dams to
facilitate the irrigation, at which the Chinese are such past-masters.
All was smiling and warm and bright, dispelling in one's mind all sense
of gloom, and breeding an optimistic outlook.

We were now a party of nine--my own three men, an extra coolie I had
engaged to rush Tengyueh in three days from Yung-ch'ang, four soldiers,
and the paymaster of the crowd. We still had ninety li to cover, so that
when we left the shade of two immense trees which sheltered me and my
perspiring men, one of the soldiers agreed that everyone had to clear
from our path. We brooked no interception until we reac