; and
as for the rich--does wealth ever go on a pilgrimage nowadays? All
carried on the back a yellow bag (yellow is Buddha's colour) containing
bundles of tapers to burn before the shrines, and in their girdles were
strings of cash to pay their way; priests and beggars alike must be
appeased.

After an hour or so we left behind the cultivation of the valley, and
entered the wild gorge of the Omei, and after this our path led upwards
through fine forests of ash and oak and pine. The road grew steeper and
steeper, often just a rough staircase of several hundred steps, over
which we slipped and scrambled. Rain dripped from the branches, brooks
dashed down the mountain-side. We had left behind the great heat of the
plain, but within the walls of the forest the air was warm and heavy.
But nothing could damp the ardour of the pilgrim horde. A few were in
chairs; I had long since jumped out of mine, although as Liu complained,
"Why does the Ku Niang hire one if she will not use it?" He dearly loved
his ease, but had scruples about riding if I walked, or perhaps his
bearers had. Some of the wayfarers, old men and women, were carried
pick-a-back on a board seat fastened to the coolie's shoulders. It
looked horribly insecure and I much preferred trusting to my own feet,
but after all I never saw an accident, while I fell many times coming
down the mountain.

The beginnings of Mount Omei's story go back to the days before writing
was, and of myth and legend there is a great store, and naturally
enough. This marvel of beauty and grandeur rising stark from the plain
must have filled the man of the lowlands with awe and fear, and his
fancy would readily people these inaccessible heights and gloomy forests
with the marvels of primitive imagination. On the north the mountain
rises by gentle wooded slopes to a height of nearly ten thousand feet
above the plain, while on the south the summit ends in a tremendous
precipice almost a mile up and down as though slashed off by the sword
of a Titan.

Perhaps in earliest times the Lolos worshipped here, and the mountain
still figures in their legends. But Chinese tradition goes back four
thousand years when pious hermits made their home on Omei. And there is
a story of how the Yellow Emperor, seeking immortality, came to one of
them. But Buddha now reigns supreme on Omei; of all the many temples,
one only is Taoist. According to the legend, at the very beginning of
Buddhist influence in Ch