Page:Peking the Beautiful.pdf/22

 Morning Sunlight on the Great Wall

OF ALL the historic monuments scattered over the face of the erstwhile Celestial Kingdom, Rone enjoy such world-wide and age-old rep utation and prestige as belongs to the Great Wall of China. In comparison with this, the other famous sights of the country sink into insignificance. To many the world over, "China" and the "Great Wall" 3 are geographical terms equally well known. What the pyramids are to Egypt, the Great Wall is to China, a symbol that has made this country famous. It is with an unusual and indefinable thrill of expectancy, then, that the lover of antiquity purchases for the first time his ticket to the Great Wall! Boarding the train at old Hsi Chih Mên - Peking's westeramost gate--a modern train soon whisks us from the fertile plains, with their waving fields of kaoliang, past the old frontier city of Nankow, up. up into the very heart of the hills of Chihli. As our engine slowly puits up the narrow Nankow Pass - that remarkable Thermopylae fifteen miles in length which forms the northwestern gateway into China-the steep bare hills rise higher and higher. Soon "we leave behind us the last little farms, so stony that it seems impossible for industry to wrest a living from such poor soil. Walls curving down into the cañon and watch towers standing like sentinels give a picturesque sky line to mountain profiles, Scarred with the traces of many battles between the Chinese and the nomads, these subsidiary defenses of the Pass, which now seem purposeless and disconnected, send fancy roaming back to the days when they were vitally important in keeping out the ancestors of the Turks, the Huns, the Khitans, the Nüchens, the Mongols, and other barbarians who tried to fight their way into the coveted plains of North China" It is but an hour's climb from the walled city of Nankou to the little station of Ching Lung Ch'iao, or "Bright Dragon Bridge," and from here it is only a few minutes' walk along the ancient and rocky caravan road to the famous Pa Ta Ling Gate on the Dall. Nowhere along its winding course of fifteen hundred miles is the Great Wall more im pressive, nowhere more sublime, than here in the heart of the rugged mountains of Chihli. To see the wall at its best one must climb to the summit above the Pass; and there, in all their age-long glory, the giant battlements may be seert stretching of into the distant horizon as far as the eye can reach, now dipping into valleys, now climbing high on mountain sides resplendent with the glory of the ages, The accompanying plate shows an unusually beautiful section of the wall as it "wanders along the crests of the hills" above the Nankou Pass, "scaling peaks which it seems impossible even the foot of man could climb. The massive loops of historic masonry are doubly impressive in these mountain solitudes," For a detailed description and historic sketch of the Great Wall, see paqes 70 and 112.