Page:Through China with a camera.pdf/307

 and others below, making and twisting the thick strands.

Next morning the skipper's wife and the crew got through a good deal of bad language between them before we made a start. The conversation was a shrill-toned one, and alternated between Mrs. Wang in her cabin at one end of the boat and the crew in the hold at the other. The latter objected to turn out until their captain was at his post. This difficulty the gentle wife settled ultimately by kicking her husband out of bed on to the deck, hurling torrents of abuse at his unhappy head and supplementing those delicate attentions by a plentiful supply of cooking utensils. Let the reader imagine himself afloat in such a vessel as 1 have described, with such a crew, on a river red like the soil through which it flows, and from half a mile to a league in breadth; let him conceive himself ascending the stream between low level monotonous clay walls; he will then have a picture of our craft and our surroundings for many days as we pursued our voyage up to the Gorges. We break- fasted and dined, anchored and slept, surveying the river as well as we could, and here and there marking out sundry sand- banks and other barriers to commerce, formed since the one and only chart of the river had been made.

We had chosen our opportunity well. There can be no better time for examining the features of a river than when it is at its lowest, and the Yangtsze was now running far below its banks, which in summer are completely submerged. But our careful soundings, our notes of bearings and our chart- projecting need find no record here. Their very sameness grew wearisome at last; but, as for our secretary, he would have been quite willing to sail on until he had digested the whole of the ancient classics, drinking our wine and smoking our cheroots as frequently as they were offered. He had marvellous