Page:Through China with a camera.pdf/223

 we had a panorama of surpassing grandeur. The grandeur of this region during the wet season must baffle description. Then a thousand cataracts veiled in vapour and illumined with rainbow hues, leap from the mountain sides, roaring and tumbling in their downward course to the broad river.

Before us, as in a peaceful vale, we could see the settlement of Lakoli — a few rude dwellings, and a patch of tilled land, amid a jungle wilderness. In the fast-failing light we could just make out its hedges and areca-palms, its mango and langan trees; but ere long the darkness closed in around, and left us groping our way forwards at the outskirt of the hamlet. We could hear the sounds of rude music, laughter and dancing; but there was no one to be seen until we fell in with the hut of one "Kim-Siang." Here we met but a cool reception. The old man was laid up with the effects of rheumatism and opium-smoking, and we found a slave girl fanning him in an adjoining hut. His son, a fellow over six feet high, stood in front of the doorway of the cabin, and beside him was his wife, a woman from a friendly mountain tribe. Outside this abode hung festoons of deer-skulls and boar-heads that had been taken in the chase. When the father had finished his opium- pipe, he consented to allow us to occupy an outer shed for the night.

Anxious to procure food, and a vessel in which to boil down my nitrate-of-silver bath to dryness (photographers familiar with the wet collodion process will know what is meant by the bath having struck work and obstinately refusing to produce a picture), I made my way by torchlight to the hut of one **La~ liat," an Amoy man, engaged here in barter traffic with the hill-tribes. We found little or no evidence of any goods in La-liat's abode ; there was a table on the clay floor, and a taper