Page:A wandering student in the Far East vol.1 - Zetland.djvu/226

164 From here on, until I reached Burma and civilisation, I proposed to proceed on foot, and on December 26th my party of coolies, chair-bearers, soldiers, and servants—a motley crowd of forty souls in all—moved out of Sui Fu. The first eighteen miles took us up the left bank of the Yang-tsze to the village of An-pien, whence a five days' tramp, during which we followed, as far as the exigencies of gorge and precipice would allow, the turbulent torrent of a tributary from the south, the Ta-kuan Ho, brought us to Lao-wa-t'an, the Customs barrier between Ssŭch'uan and Yün-nan. The road, which perhaps scarcely deserves the unmeasured condemnation which it appears to have called forth from such travellers as have covered it, is a stony, but tolerable, mountain track, which swarmed with coolies carrying skins, hides, copper, and lead from Yün-nan, and salt and cottons from Ssŭch'uan. Large cases of cartridges, too, from Kynoch of Birmingham, were being carried painfully along on the backs of bent and stunted coolies, destined for the troops of Yün-nan Fu. Let those whose enthusiasm has led them to pit