Page:A wandering student in the Far East vol.1 - Zetland.djvu/238

174 this material manifestation of authority to awe the populace I was constrained to put up with such quarters as I could get, and to spend a disturbed night in the midst of a crowd of brawling and quarrelsome coolies and muleteers, who gambled and fought by turn until finally lulled to slumber by the soothing fumes of the opium-pipe.

At 7000 feet we reached the summit of the range on the south side of the Niu-lan river, and then dropped again into an open, flat-bottomed valley, well cultivated, at the end of which stands the village of I-che-hsun, where I spent the night. For the next two days we picked our way through a tumbled labyrinth of brick-red mountains, patched with pine, walnut, and the "wax-tree." Sometimes we descended abruptly hundreds of feet to flat-bottomed valleys possessing neither entrance nor exit, with the result that we had almost immediately to climb hundreds of feet up again in order to get out on the other side. This is the country of "alternating bare, wind-swept downs and precipitous canons," an inhospitable land, miles upon