Page:Through China with a camera.pdf/332

 declared, the cold perspiration trickling down his face the while, that he could make out sylph-like forms waving the lights to warn wayfarers off the edge of the abyss :

" This seraph band, each waved his hand,

It was a heavenly sight: They stood as signals to the land,

Each one a lovely light."

The true explanation of the phenomenon lay in the fact, perhaps, that in this very gorge there are hapless beings, con- victs, immured in prison-cells cut in the face of the rocks, into which they are dropped by their gaolers above, and from which they can never hope to escape unless to seek destruction by a plunge into the river below. Here, too, we find inhabitants of a widely different stamp, a number of philosophic followers of Laou-tsoo, who pass their lives as hermits in these dark solitudes. In one cave we came across the remains of a Taouist philo- sopher of this sort; a recluse who expired, so it was said, at the ripe age of 200 years. Several of the boatmen averred that they knew him to have been more than a century old. His relics lay in the centre of the cave, covered over with a cairn of stones and sods, which had been thrown up by passing mountaineers.

February 15. — To-day we met with a disaster as we were ascending a rapid. The boat was caught by a blast of wind, and this, aided by a strong eddy, was just sending her over, when the skipper's mate, the most active youth on board, sprang forward and cut the tracking line. The trackers unexpectedly relieved of the great strain, were sent sprawling over the rocks ; while as for the boat, she righted at once and then drifted down the rapid, till at last she settled on a spit of sand half a mile below the scene of the accident. So far the result