Page:History of Corea, ancient and modern; with description of manners and customs, language and geography (1879).djvu/424

 394 QEOGBAPHT. because they have well kept beacons along the shores at Shoal gulf. QuELPABT island is oval, with a pleasing variety of hill and dales, and agriculture carried on to a height of 2000 feet above the sea Forests cover all heights above that, even to the peak of Mount Auckland, 6544 feet above the sea. The city is in the centre of the northern coast of the island ; but there are other two cities on the island not seen from sea. And with this we leave the " Pilot'' Corea is essentially a land of mountains and of rivers, — ^the principal mountains running south-east from Changbaishan, and at right angles to that great water-shed of eastern Asia. Corea's greatest length is fix)m north-west to south-east, — extending, according to Chinese geography, to 4000 li ; north to south it stretches 2000 li, and measures about two-thirds of that in its greatest east and west breadth. Corea is divided into eight provinces, called Do. From Funghwangchung of Liaotung, skirting the west side of the splendid pile of high, precipitous mountains of the same name, the road to the Corean-gate is thirty li south-east This is the western point of what has been, up till lately, the "Neutral Territory ; " and at the .village is the Barter market^ between Coreans and Chinese. South-east, from the gate, is the western bank of the noble Yaloo, on the eastern bank of which, crowning the summit of a round hill, is the pretty Corean city of Aichow, surrounded by a white granite wall, and in the neighbourhood of magnificent mountain& To the south of the city is the high, serrated, extensive range of Bengma, affording almost boundless forest shelter to innumerable game, large and small ; fowl and quadruped, ruminant and camivoroua The nooks and corners of the Ov/ragwag range to' the east, are crowded with numerous and well filled temples or monasteries, — ^the monks of the east having, for many centuries, been as fully alive to the grand and the beautiful, indeed perhaps more so, than their monastic brethren of the west Aichow is the city nearest China, of the large province of Pingan Do, which skirts the Yaloo from near its source to its