Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/48

36 regions of the Han and forcing the terrified rulers to leave their sacred dwelling in the Forbidden City to found a new capital in Nanking on the Yangtze. But another wave of barbarian hordes appeared to conquer and drive out the Khorch'ins and Khitans. These were the Kin Tartars, who supplanted their savage forerunners in the possession of China's rich fields, only to yield themselves, in turn, to the old civilization of the conquered land and disappear in the great Chinese ocean, leaving nothing after them except the impetus to the Chinese to repair and strengthen the Great Wall against possible further invasion from the north.

On my second day in town I secured, for a rather high price, horses and a guide and shortly after dawn on the following day set out from Petuna to travel east along the right bank of the Sungari; for I had been informed that, in the district between the small river of Hsi La Ho and the town of La Lin, situated at the foot of the mountain of the same name, I should find large plantations of beans and numerous native mills turning out oil and beancake.

Above Petuna the country along the river was more sparsely peopled. Sometimes we rode for hours without passing a house. I was even afraid at times that we might have no roof over our heads at night, but in this I was happily reassured, when at sunset we rode into sight of a small hamlet of several farm-houses set in a grove of tall elms.

Here we stopped for the night. Our guide led us to the largest fang-tzu, which was the ordinary, long dwelling with a single thin wooden partition cutting off about a third of the space for kitchen and living quarters. In this there was the typical low mud stove with a big bowl-like