Page:A wandering student in the Far East vol.1 - Zetland.djvu/133

Rh and vicious gyrating swirls. As the river rises the low-water rapids disappear and others form, the worst on a thirty-foot level being the Yeh T'an, the Meou Kou, and the Fou T'an, while the reaches between the rapids are converted from quiet stretches into turbulent rock-strewn mazes of swirling waters. The Yatse Ho, a stretch of fourteen miles between Nan Ton and Kong Ling, provides an example of this phase of the river. With a further rise during summer to a level of sixty or more feet, the peaceful gorges of the low-water period became turbulent chutes. The vast volume of pent-in water meeting all manner of submerged obstacles dashes in zigzag from shore to shore, cannoning off walls of rock until the whole gorge becomes one rushing, gyrating mass of angry water. A whole treatise might be written upon the particular obstacles which obtrude themselves at various places upon the river at different times of the year, but perhaps enough has been said to show that it was the opinion expressed by the members of the Blackburn Commercial Mission, rather than the "terrors of the