Page:Mongolia, the Tangut country, and the solitudes of northern Tibet vol 1 (1876).djvu/112

46 town of Nan-kau, 1,000 feet below Chadau, from which it is only fifteen miles distant.

Thus the entire width of the border of the plateau, from the summit of the descent above Kalgan to the entrance into the plain of Peking at Nan-kau, is about 130 miles. Towards the west it probably widens, dividing into a number of parallel chains, abutting on the northern bend of the Hoang-ho, while to the east the distinct ranges unite in one broad belt of mountains, which continues to the Gulf of Pechihli in the Yellow Sea.

Peking is only one day's journey, i.e. about 35 miles, from Nan-kau. The country is a plain, hardly above the sea level, with an alluvial soil, consisting of clay and sand, highly cultivated in all parts. The frequent villages, groves of cypress, tree-juniper, pine, poplar, and other trees marking the burial-places, lend variety and beauty to the landscape. The climate is warm; at a season when in Russia severe frosts are prevalent, the thermometer here at noon rises many degrees above freezing point in the shade. Snow is rare; if it fall occasionally at night, it generally thaws the next day. Wintering birds abound, and we saw thrushes, mountain finches, greenfinches, bustard, rooks, kites, pigeons, and wild ducks.

Nearer to Peking the population is so dense that villages grow into towns, through which the traveller is unconsciously approaching the wall of the city, until at last he finds himself to have entered the far-famed capital of the East.