Page:Through China with a camera.pdf/316

 The only inhabitants of this region appeared to be a few fishermen, who prosecuted their avocation among the rocks ; while their rude huts could be seen perched high in inaccessible- looking nooks and crannies among the mountains above. Huts, indeed, they could hardly be called ; at least those of them which we visited were either natural caves, or holes scooped out beneath the sheltering rocks, and closed in with what resembled the front of an ordinary straw-thatched cottage.

These smoke-begrimed abodes called to my mind the ancient cave-dwellings which sheltered our forefathers at Wemyss Bay in Scotland. The interiors were dark and gloomy, the clay floors cold and covered with fishbones and refuse, while a dull light glimmering from a taper in a recess in the rocks, revealed at once the grim features of a small idol and the few and simple articles of furniture that made up the property of the inmates. A residence of this sort, with all it contains, might be fitted up at an original cost of probably one pound sterling; and yet it was in such places that we found the frugality and industry of the Chinese most conspicuously displayed; for out- side the caves, wherever there was a little soil on the face of the rocks, it had been scraped together and planted with vege- tables, which were made to contribute to the domestic economy of the inhabitants. This was indeed taking bread out of a stone! Further on we found a number of men engaged in quarrying the stone, and in forming river embankments. The stream in many places hereabouts had undermined the limestone formation of the rocks, so that the softer portions had been washed away, and a series of grotesque flint pillars were left, supporting the upper strata which towered above our heads in precipices of a thousand feet. In other places the rocks looked like the high walls and ramparts of a fortress, or the battlements