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Gornell University Library
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CHARLES WILLIAM WASON

COLLECTION
CHINA AND THE CHINESE

THE GIFT OF
CHARLES WILLIAM WASON
GLASS OF 1876
1918
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THE RAINBOW BRIDGE
 

Tien TANG ABBEY.
THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

BY

REGINALD FARRER

Author of
* On the Eaves of the World”’

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAP

Third Impression

LONDON
EDWARD ARNOLD & CO,
1926

All rights reserved
&
 

MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY

Lowe anD BrybDone (PRINTERS) Ltp., Lonpon, N.W.1.
Dedication

Still
To Bill
It is my will
This Book be dedicated.

Although

I know

The Press will go
And say it’s overstated.
PREFACE *

Across the distress of the present I wonder if I shall
be able to escape successfully into the sunshine of the past ?
The attempt is worth making, and, as the crowded months
of anxiety flock past, it will grow more and more desperate,
as further and further the sunshine recedes, crowded into
the background of recollection by multitudinous darkness.
Already very far away behind me lie Tien Tang and Chebson,
and the huge harsh glory of their desolate land: if I let
them slip further they may escape me altogether, or be of
no profit to anyone but myself. Let us go, then, for a
while out of storm into calm, out of the clamour of guns
into the radiant stillness that fills the remote heart of
Asia. For, after all, the guns may roar for their time,
and lay a world in ruins round us; but now the irises are
blooming again at the Halls of Heaven. And when the
guns are broken and silent once more, the irises will still
go on blooming year by year. But the Halls of Heaven
are a long way hence!

R. F.
May 19, 1918.

* Mr. Reginald Farrer died far away in the wilds of Upper Burmah,
tn the course of another adventurous journey, on October 16, 1920
In these circumstances tt has been thought best to print his original
Preface unaltered.

vii
CHAP.

III
IV

VI
VII
VIII
Ix

XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI

CONTENTS

LaNcoHOW

Tue New Year

Tue Start

SINING-FU

OvER THE ALPS

WoLvEsDEN House AND WOLFSTONE DENE
WoOLFSTONE DENE AND THE HALts oF HEAVEN
Tren Tanc TO CHEBSON .

CuEBsSOoN ABBEY

Home Acar .

SumMER Work

Tar HastENED END

FAREWELL TO WOLVESDEN

Back ro LancHow

THE Downwarp Tram .

THE WATERWAYS

CoLoPHON

BoranicaL INDEX .

ix

PAGE
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Tien Tang Abbey . - 3 ‘i : . Frontispiece
A Village Inn é . c é : . Facing page
An Interior. , ‘ 5 $ . 3 7
The Walls of Sining j é ; : ‘ »
Wolvesden House . 3 5 . 5 3 #9
The Bridge near Tien Tang . : ; " o
Chebson Abbey ‘ : F : : ‘ i
On the roof of the Abbey Church . i : $8
Dolomite Valley. 7 ; : - - as
In the Da-Tung Alps. : . . : is
Isopyrum Farreri . r , se é i 9
Trollius Pumilus and Geranium : ' ‘ ss
Primula Farreri . ‘ is i : . ”
Gentiana Farrert . Fi a he . . ”
Boats at Bei Shui Jang é : : A +3
The Cliff of the Thousand Buddhas ; ‘ »

Map of the Kansu Province of China showing the
author’s route in 1914 and 1915 : . At end

xi

42
54
60
90
112
154
166
188
212
238
256
274
282
334
348 |
THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

CHAPTER I
rP ; LANCHOW

I took a temporary leave of you, reader, in Lanchow, you
remember, in November of 1914, after my first season of
adventures up the Southern border of Kansu-Tibet. For
the tale of those, the Siege of Siku, the Wars of the Wolves,
the Murderous Monks and the Tepos black of heart as
of head, you must wander On the Eaves of the World. I
take it for granted, in fact, that that succinct and laconic
work is by now so deeply embedded in all your memories
that I need not explain to you myself, nor my objects,
nor my party: nor introduce to you again my beloved
companion, Purdom, whom we will henceforth allow our-
selves the freedom of knowing as Bill, and the ferocious
frightfulness of Mafu ; and goggle-eyed Go-go of the drooping
lip and undauntable endurance. This small caravan it was
that, after many perils and triumphs, at last came drifting
weary into Lanchow in the frozen dead of the year, to rest
for the winter of 1914, until the heart of Asia should once
more melt into spring and flowers.

For the time we alighted in the chief inn, described as
“ semi-foreign.” This means no more than that it has
panes of glass in its windows as well as paper. Otherwise
it was merely the typical inn of a big Chinese capital. Up
a narrow little long dark alley you go, hedged in closely
on either side by dark little rooms like hutches, to where
at the end, behind a painted wooden screen (on which is

1 B
2 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

depicted a very stout and very décolletée lady), the main
building stands, with three rooms of honour on the ground
floor, and three more rooms of honour above, and then
another line of hutches on either side at right angles, running
back above the lower ones. Of the state apartments in
the upper story we took possession while the servants
unfolded in the darker set beneath, and considered ourselves
very lucky to have secured such accommodation, though it
was obvious that we could not long endure to retain it,
Both feelings sprang from the same cause. Lanchow,
being a capital, and the seat of a Viceroy, is always densely
crowded with officials in Esse or in Posse, men out of a job,
or hoping for a better one. So that every inn in the town
is perpetually occupied by office-seekers, awaiting from
day to day, often for many months on end, the moment
that shall at last call them to audience of His Excellency,
or of some minion of His Excellency’s who may be able
to open a backdoor to prosperity, in consideration of proper
presents bestowed. And, as hope deferred maketh the
heart sick, stimulant is clearly indicated for those awaiting
jobs, heavy-handed as they are with idleness and expectation.
All day and most of the night they sit on their kangs and
play the morra-game for thimblesful of warm spirit, until
the noise of their revelry grows deafening, and their shouts
reverberate in the close dark channel of the courtyard.
Accordingly we very soon concluded that, for peace and
quietness, we must remove into more secluded quarters and
take a house of our own.

It became a matter of making acquaintances. Lanchow
has no European residents at all (not being a treaty town)
except a knot of Missionaries outside the city. The Postal
Commissioner—call him Postmaster for short—happened in
1914 to be a Yorkshireman of that true-blue brand which
only Lincolnshire produces. And with this jovial soul
we had gladly foregathered, in mutual satisfaction at
finding a fellow human being who read real books and had
real interests. When the need of a house grew plain we
LANCHOW 3

repaired to him, and found that he and his sparkling little
wife had a ramification of acquaintance among the citizens
exactly of the sort we wanted to help us to our object.
Negotiations were soon set going, and we embarked on
the tortuous currents of Ma-y’s friendship. Ma-y was a
crony of the Postmaster, but not a person of any social
standing : being a man of nothing, who by mulc-contracting
on a grand scale had raised himself rapidly to affluence. He
was—as his name declares, Ma being Mahomed—one of the
Mahomedans with whom North Kansu so ominously
swarms—a round comfortable person with a comfortable
round red face, twinkling undecipherable little eyes like
blobs of darkness, and a geniality sinister, enveloping and
unescapable. In every pie he had a finger, and in each
transaction an interest. Despite the protests of the Post
Office that Ma had a soul of lily-pure disintercestcdness, tho
truth of things could not be hidden. There was nothing
we wanted that Ma could not procure, not a wish that he
did not anticipate, but always at an excessive price, benignly
stated and inexorably maintained. Out of his vast circles
he collected pictures, bronzes and china. Mafu grew
every day more dour and furious at seeing my avidity and
innocence being so beguiled. But there was no help for it :
sustained by scoldings from Bill and Mafu I might indeed
learn to be adamant against pictures that I didn’t want, at
prices that I didn’t wish to pay: but it was inevitable,
on the impulsion of the Post Office, that Ma should have
the privilege of getting us a house.

Meanwhile the social aspects were developing. We
dined with our friends of the Post Office, and began to
meditate official calls, learning that the Viceroy hoped to
seeme. Tomy experience and exalted rank, City Governors
were by now no more accounted of than silver in the days
ot Solomon, but Viceroys, it was felt, were fish of a larger
fry, and needed more stately approach. Accordingly
a go-between was found to arrange the protocols of a meeting
between two such potentates. And the next morning, as I
4 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

sat in a red impotent fret of worry over long-dead happenings
in the war, there entered to me Mr. Li, a radiant little
vision of elegance pale and dainty and smiling, sumptuous
in fur-lined coat and skirt of brocaded silks. It was my
first sight of a Southern Chinese, of that delicate, small-
boned, small-made pussyfoot type, quick-witted as a needle,
and supple, sinewy, and nervous as the small cat that it
irresistibly suggests; wide poles asunder from the large
and solid-minded carthorse type of Northern China.

Mr. Li and Mr. Lo—for I cannot ever think of them apart
—were a brace of strayed swallows from Canton, young
gentlemen of wealth and quality, dispatched for family
reasons into an Ovidian exile in the remote and inexpensive
North. For about these reasons, Mr. Lo made no disguise.
“In Canton,” he said, “ plen’y dlink, plen’y ho’house,
plen’y money lose. My Fam. think go way more better.”
And accordingly here were these two little frail birds—
it is so I always think of them, as a pair of lovebirds together
on a perch—enduring the rigours and deprivations of hard
work and scant diversions in Lanchow, serving in the Post
Office. Probation, not pay, was their object: each day
they appeared in fresh furs and satins, always glittering
with neat elegance. Amid the dust and damnations
of the Post Office they daily shivered and shone: and
when work was over, retired to shift their silks again in
the many-yarded house where they lived together and
collected bronzes and pictures. Mr. Li had little English
and Mr. Lo had less: but they became to me very real
people, for they were so much gentlemen, and of s0
genuine a charm. They had wide ideas too, and made me
parties at which Mrs. Lo and charming Mrs. Li played an
unabashed part impossible in any really provincial family
of North China.

However, this is for thefuture. Mr. Li first dawned on me
as my medium for approaching the Viceroy. He announced
that His Excellency hoped to see me in the very near
future, but would I, in the meantime, go and pay a call on
LANCHOW 5

General Wu? Mr. Li would be my escort: a day was
duly appointed. But now as these splendours surged over
our social horizon, the heart of Mafu grew troubled with the
problem of presenting Great Lord Law-and-order (which is
the Chinese for Me) in adequate style. Unassuming dignity
had been all very well in Jo-ni and Siku; but Viceroys and
Generals I must meet on a more ostentatious footing.
Mafu besought me, through Bill, to remember hard what
other honorifics, or titles of nobility I might possess. I
ransacked my memory, and ran down a mental list of the
various Clubs and Learned Societies that I adorn. But
nothing suited: and unfortunately this all happened long
before these latter days when initials of honour rain so
copiously that few can hope to escape. However, at last
it came upon me that I was indeed a Justice of the Peace:
to Mafu I tried to explain the rather misty majesty of a
Great Unpaid, and he went away in apparent satisfaction.
To return in triumph a few days later, with a brand-new
visiting card of scarlet, a foot long by six inches wide, on
which enormous black characters announced the “ Great
Man Law-and-order, Lord High Keeper of the King’s Peace.”
On contemplating which I felt that even Viceroys must
now assuredly bite the dust, and that China in general,
considering the European war, would certainly feel how
properly the Lord High Keeper of the King’s Peace was here
in Lanchow, his functions at home being so lamentably in
abeyance. Surely never yet have Peace and Justice
(excellent humdrum inevitabilities of life as we used to
think them) been expanded into so majestic a mantle for
the draping of a mere everyday J.P.

Arrayed then in my new majesty, and trying to live up to
it in stateliness of demeanour, I accompanied Mr. Li to call
on General Wu. Down the long main East-West street
we proceeded, stiltedly conversing across smiles, till we
reached the big Yamen half-way towards the main market-
place on which the huge outer gate of the Viceregal palace
directly fronts. Salutations and presenting of arms. Up
6 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

and up through successive courtyards we passed, all of
them as neat and clean as a packet of new pins: till, after
waiting a moment in the room of an A.D.C., we were shown
on into the innermost sanctum, and there received, with
significant courtesy, on the very threshold, by the General.
Few people have more charm of courtesy and dignified
cordiality than a cultivated Chinese official of high standing,
and General Wu was no exception—a singularly attractive,
pleasant-smiling man of about forty, slim and elegant in
his uniform. You will often see his portrait in French
Galleries, but there he is called Cardinal Richelieu, and has
nothing of the geniality and less of the refinement that
he shows in China. Ina high and stately flow of courtesies,
with assiduous swimmings and floatings and bowings on my
part, we were conducted in, through apartment after apart-
ment, each presenting the aspect of a railway refreshment-
room with a long white-clad table down the middle and
white-clad chairs set round, and the whole place done with
white, spacious and clean in the mellow glow of the sunlight
pouring in through the pane of glass that made the centre
of each paper-latticed window down one side of the wall.
Tea, too, was served in European coffee-cups: we sat and
chatted of la haute politique with that au bout des lévres
effusiveness which is the rule in China, revealing nothing at
all under an appearance of ebullient ingenuousness. Mr.
Li interpreted, and I can but hope that Law-and-order lived
up to his visiting-card. I think he must have: the General
expressed himself much gratified with our talk, and con-
gratulated the city on now holding within its walls a man of
such high erudition and breadth of view. Not only this,
but when—having sipped, as etiquette bids, the valedictory
tea which is always the Chinese tag for ending an interview,
the Yours Sincerely of conversation which we unfortunately
have only for the written word—we rose to go, the General
persisted in seeing us through all the many courtyards down
to the street-gate itself.

This, you must know, if you have not already learned,
LANCHOW 7

is the crucial point of decorum in a Chinese leave-taking.
Down through the various courts the host must personally
escort the guest : and at each gate the guest must pat him
back and protest against his coming any farther, while the
host must insist on being allowed to do so. But all the
time both parties know perfectly well the precise point
to which the host must advance without showing either too
much honour or too little, and the precise point at which
the guest can let himself be abandoned without losing face.
Codes, both subtle and rigid, govern each step of welcome
and farewell, and the possibilities of insult are infinite,
though both insult and the possibility of it are alike invisible
to the innocent stranger who does not know his claims in
honour, nor how minutely the lookers-on are noting the
degree of respect he is receiving from his host. If a new-
comer is escorted to the outermost gate, the news is all over
the city in an hour, and his status is secure. So that Mr.
Li grew discreetly enthusiastic over the success of our visit
to the General.

But Viceroys tower, in China, far higher than Generals :
and not even Lords Keepers of a King’s Peace can expect
more than three or four gateways’worth of farewell from
Eminences so August. A few days passed—days of dancing
diamond deliciousness in the hard brilliant clearness of the
Northern winter, and then, after inquiring if I wished to
talk politics or merely to pay a call, the Viceroy made an
appointment toreceiveme. This time there was no question
of going a-foot. Mr. Li, more splendid than ever, called
for me in a Peking cart, and together we jolted awfully up
the cobbles of the lane, and along the main street. The
scene and the ceremonial were similar to those of my last
visit ; but the ceremonial was more brief and stately, the
scene a great deal ampler. For the Viceregal Palace at
Lanchow is an enormous place, huge open expanse behind
expanse, with living-courts for the family tucked away in
lateral labyrinths. At various of the vast gates we waited,
and attendants hurried forward with our cards, and then
8 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

came back to call us on. Then there were sittings about in
salles d’attente, the walls of which were hung with scrolls
that in the floweriest of involved language gave hints on
the advantages of brevity in speech when dealing with
Viceroys. And finally a railway restaurant-room like that
of the other day, but larger: a solemn pause—and then
in loomed the Viceroy, the most complete contrast to
General Wu—a great stout heavy man, with immense
bullet-head and solid jowl, tightly bound in dull black
satin, and looking the very image of a reformed dissenting
burglar, buttoned up in his Sunday blacks for Chapel.
He was stout and solid in manner too: not easily genial
like General Wu, but ponderous and searching in his ques-
tions. I twittered inside my cloudy grandeurs, and gradually
as he talked I felt him growing larger and larger upon me
in every way, like a thing in a nightmare, until the Viceroy
of Kansu! came to remain in my mind as one of the biggest
men J have ever confronted. All went well, however; Mr.
Li congratulated me afterwards, and said that His Excellency
was really anxious to be all that was cordial, and promised
an invitation to a banquet at an early date. So homeward we
came, and by way of a bathos proceeded to call on the
City Governor. I had meant only to leave cards, but finding
he would like to see me, in I went, and found him a kindly
old black-satin gentleman in a bowler hat, but without very
much tosay. And thus finished the round of dissipation for
the day.

House-hunting now filled our thoughts in the intervals
of getting the season’s store of seeds duly cleaned, sorted,
packed and dispatched. But incidentally there were
strolls through the streets, and idle chafferings for the few
poor objets d’art that are all Lanchow has to offer the

1TI call him the Viceroy: under the then-moribund republic
his title changed from day to day, and one never knew for long
which to call him—Changchun or Dudu or something else. But
Dudu I always wanted to avoid: it sounded such a silly name,
like some extinct bird.
LANCHOW 9

collector (and that at preposterous prices) unless he has the
entrée to private collections, and can purchase quietly.
This was the secret of Mr. Lo and Mr. Li, knowing, as they
did, all ‘‘ the best circles, spheres, lines, ranks, everything ”’
in Lanchow. We had a notable lunch-party in their house
one day to inspect their treasures. We went, and Mr.
and Mrs. Post Office went, and charmingly pretty little
Mrs. Li was hostess, and beside her Mrs. Lo in her tight
silk trousers, and between them a tiny solemn Japanese
dolly girl-child, in whom a very un-Chinese amount of
pleasure was obviously taken. The meal was very merry,
and a happy hybrid between Chinese and European styles,
with soup, sharks’ fins, pigeons’ eggs in a soft sop, duck,
fried mutton, chicken and bamboo shoots, beef rissoles, and
many another delicacy served in Chinese fashion, and
without forks, so that the knives were useless, and it became
a case of bravely plying chopsticks. And in the middle
of the banquet, served in a round copper bowl on a flaming
Etna, appeared the delicious stewing lotus seeds (like
little sweet chestnuts) which are essential to every Chinese
feast, as they are held to keep off the ravages of the hot
spirit which is perpetually being poured out of little kettles
into elfin cups no bigger than thimbles. On this occasion,
though, beer was the beverage: no doubt it was this fatal
Boche drink that inspired Mr. Lo with the typical Boche
remark that women ought not to be taught too much.

But by this time the house was found, and taken, through
Ma-y, and at Ma-y’s price—a combination that made Mafu
as glum as a dyspeptic gorilla. It was a stately place,
though, and I was in no heart to cavil at terms, tired as
I was by this time of the roars and stinks of the inn. My
house was in the roughly cobbled street that goes straight
to the North Gate. It had the advantage of having Mr.
and Mrs. Post Office living only a dozen or so doors down
in the main street, so that we could mutually dine and
play bridge without having to rush home early for fear of
being cut off from one’s home by the wooden gates like
10 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

cages that stand at all the important intersections of streets
in Lanchow, and after 9 at night are shut and locked.
And in itself it was worthy even of my habitation and a
Viceregal visit. Past the gate-keeper’s lodge you went
into a wide clean court: then fronted you a very long
building with carved and latticed verandahs, divided
longitudinally into one back room and one front one:
it was here that Law-and-order had his tabernacle. Behind
this there was a neat new alley-court with rooms and to
spare for the staff on either hand: and at the end of all
a block of buildings for Bill’s quarters. The whole place
was solid and handsome and new: when we had evicted
some soldiers and their horses and litter, it took us little
time to put things in order, white-paper the state apart-
ments, lay down matting, install stoves and generally
make the house shipshape for a winter residence.

We were in luck, indeed, to get it at all. We were told
it was the property of a Mahomedan noble, who, on being
suspected of complicity in some Mahomedan intrigue against
the Chinese, had been so overcome with shame as to throw
himself into the Yellow River, off the hideous iron bridge
just outside the North Gate. But the currents of Chinese
gossip are as devious and subtle as those of Chinese politics :
the real fact of the matter was that our unwitting landlord
had fled away Southward to the safe Mahomedan district
of Ho-jo, where no Chinese would ever venture, let alone
lay hands on him. Everybody knew this, and everybody
knew that every one. else knew it: but the polite fiction
of his suicide in the Hwang-ho was imperturbably main-
tained. In no case did the question trouble us: for in
the meantime we were in possession of his house, and for a
rent of 24 taels a month. This means some £3 12s., and
is, for China, grossly excessive to the extent of surpassing
what a Chinese would have paid by about sixteen taels :
but I could not grudge it, first or last, though the Mafu’s
gloomy sourness put me to confusion, as also did the cluck-
cluckings of Mr. Lo and Mr. Li when they heard the price,
LANCHOW 11

and the civil snoring suppositions of Great Lord Lang as
to what he thought I should be giving—as compared
with the facts of what I really was giving.

For polite life was now in full flow: visits and cards
were returned, and dear old Jang! actually turned up from
Siku to hang round Lanchow drearily on his savings till
the Viceroy should give him a new job. We had to increase
our staff to cope adequately with our new way of living.
A door-keeper was established in the gate-house, and to
replace the good little Cook, whom wife-hunger now recalled
to Siku, we engaged a gaptoothed Mahomedan person
with a flapped fur hat, a repulsive face, and a Christian
smile acquired in Missions, whence also, it is only fair to
add, he had drawn the much more useful art of making
scones. Our former staff seemed rather grotesque in a
city. Even Mafu as major-domo was like a gorilla promoted
butler ; and when one afternoon General Wu came riding
up in state to return my call, there was only the Go-go to
hand. Left alone to cope with such an emergency, the
poor lad lost his head completely, and rushed wildly about
with eyes protruding from their sockets under the impression
that here was the Viceroy come in person.

Come the great man did, though, a few days later: but
by the convention of etiquette we were “not at home,”
so that only his card adorned the room. A few days later
came the announcement of his promised banquet. Law-
and-order by that time lay sick of a fever: however, it
was very urgently represented by Mr. and Mrs. Post Office
that only death could justify the star-guest in evading His
Excellency’s feast. So I buckled myself into a firm deter-
mination to be better: and better I promptly therefore
began to be, as soon as I had signified my intention
of waiting on the Great Man at dinner. In response to
my acceptance there came back a lovely folded card
of scarlet silk crape, on which, beneath golden headings,
columns of delicate spidery characters gave a list of the

1 For him and the good little Cook see On the Eaves of the World.
12 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

proposed guests. Under our own columns Bill and I made
marks of acknowledgment, and returned the document,
though eagerly did I long to keep it.

The next day was that of the banquet. We got ourselves
into what bests we could achieve, and considered how
imposing a cortége could be managed. Mafu and Go-go
by this time had adapted themselves to our new social
exigencies by fitting themselves out in khaki-coloured
livery, copied by a Lanchow tailor from Bill’s own khaki
tunic arid breeches, so that they now presented a much
more suitable appearance, Chairs, too, were hired—not
common carrying chairs, but the stately, roomy, well-
upkolstered ones such as important officials affect, covered
in dark cloth, with:glass windows and silvered top-knots
and pole-knobs and fittings, and lined with soft fur. About
4 o’clock the summons came, and the procession formed.
Bill went ahead of me in the first chair, and the Keeper
of the King’s Peace followed augustly after with Mafu
and the Gate-keeper on the ponies clattering before and
behind, and two enormous lanterns of scarlet with characters
announcing my name and quality bobbing and floating up
the December dusk of the street before me.

In due course we alighted at the outer gate of the Palace
and proceeded through the courts and along labyrinths of
alleys, each shabbier than the last, till we came at length
into a smaller yard with rockworks like a skeleton edifice
of Pulhamite preparing for a show, and a big white airy
room at the end. Here were many of the guests already
gathered—Mr. Post Office, and General Wu, General Lu
and Mr. King (who some say is the real power in Kansu),
with various others, including Mr. Li, very sumptuous but
very piano, as neither age nor status gave him any place
at such feasts, to which he was only asked as a conversational
link between me and my host. We all stood about and
bowed and smiled: suddenly there was a murmur of
announcement, and in rolled the Viceroy with his curious
smooth swift massiveness of movement. Handshakes all
LANCHOW 13

round and quick bows over each: more guests arrived :
we sat down along the white-clothed table, drinking tea
and smoking and making suitable remarks while we awaited
the call to dinner. On word of this His Excellency arose :
arm in arm we led the procession out into the frosty dark,
through an e@il-de-beuf door in the wall, and along the
rim of a huge forested and mounded garden park (which
I hope to show you again when it is no longer all bare
dust-coloured earth) till we came to a new room lit feebly
with electric light. Here the feast was spread at a round
table, with absurdly low seats. I was duly posted in my
proper place, and the banquet began.

By this time I knew the duty of a principal guest, and
lost no time in dipping first into each dish as it was plopped
on the centre of the table, and transferring as little as I
could to my own tiny plate, or as choice a morsel as I could
find to that of any neighbour I wished to honour, with
breath-takings and smiling bows. For myself I felt in
no very fine feather for feasts, and dreaded both the good
victuals and the drink. The latter proved to be hot
Curacao: a fearsome food at first, but practice ere long
made perfect in its consumption, and a modest joviality
began to develop. But with the food I could not cope,
except for an omelette of sharks’ fins, a souse of pigeons’
eggs, and ajujube pudding. Bird’s-nest soup-bouilli seemed
to me tasteless, and all the most cherished Chinese dishes
are in general glutinous, gristly, or gelatinous, invariably
sloppy in juice and dishwash, and usually of a rather nauseous
insipidity to the untrained foreign palate. However, the
feast flowed well, and His Excellency flowered into an
unbuttoned gaiety that showed him in quite a new light.
We foregathered particularly over pictures and objets
@ art, of which he is the chief and (naturally) most successful
collector in these parts: learning that I had enthusiasms
in the same direction he announced that he wanted to see
my acquisitions, and that I must certainly ask him to dinner
in return,
14 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

This daunted me: for who can cope, in collecting, with
Chinese Viceroys? Everything of the best goes first to
them as a matter of course, and in the way of presents they
do far better than the foreigner with no matter how large
a power of cash. But let no one therefore think that these
great and honourable persons are to be corrupted by gifts
from aspirants to office, or officials under a cloud. Far
from it: they are rigid in their refusal of any present of
more than some half-a-crown’s worth or so in value, such
as is therefore a merely formal token of respect. But alas
for human wickedness! how should an innocent Viceroy
guess the real worth of some masterpiece of Tang that an
unscrupulous would-be Governor is offering him as a mere
humble half-crown’s worth? All the world knows. how
ill-bred and ungracious it is to look a gift horse in the
mouth: who could be so tactless then as to point out
that the five-shilling scroll would really be cheap at twenty
thousand dollars? This would be to wound the aspirant
unduly, to convict him brutally of either ignorance or
dishonesty. Accordingly the picture goes smoothly into
the Viceregal gallery : and by an odd coincidence a plump
office slides ere long with equal smoothness into the hands
of its former possessor.

I hope I do not detain you unduly with feasts and foods ?
But the fact is that the countless cross-examinations I
have undergone since my return at the hands of the more
intelligent have left me with a conviction that people’s
prime interest in one’s travel-experiences lies in learning
what one had toeat and drink. So that I intend to continue
unashamed, not burking the various banquets that occur
in my course, on account of any craven fear of repetition
or the accusation of it. And in any case remember, you
who have read On the Eaves of the World, that there
are many small points that I must needs touch on here
again in order to make the details of Chinese life and
ceremonial plain to those who haven't.

But on Ma-y’s feasts I will not dwell: I never enjoyed
LANCHOW 15

them. He made me many, and insisted on my going to
all of them: and in a wish not to offend him (and still
more the Post Office, which patronized him strongly) I
went again and again, however reluctantly, and however
clearly realizing that all this was done, neither for fun nor
friendship, but simply to gain “face” by getting known
as the constant dinner-host of so eminent a person as Law-
and-order. From one of these parties, indeed, I returned
the richer by a large orange-coloured cat: but even this,
I soon learned, Ma-y had only “ given” me on the hire
system. I had flirted with it during the course of an
interminable meal, and at the end, just as I was climbing
into my cart, Ma-y, flushed with convivial generosity, but
not to the extent of forgetting prudence and profit, pursued
me from his house brandishing the puss by its hind leg.
On to my lap he frantically compiled it, and told me how
much I was to pay: and the cart set off. But this cursory
treatment had, not unnaturally, discomposed the puss:
and she screamed vindictively allthe way home. This meant
much, for the way was very long and very bumpy, Ma-y living
meanly ina mud-built shack, outside the city wall, down in
a desolate loess area of wide expanses and little rutty lanes.

Nor when I got her home did the cat ever develop into a
comfort. She was, in fact, a stupid cat, with a great silly
face like a kitchen clock. Also, she spoke, and understood,
nothing but Chinese, and never made the smallest attempt
to learn English. Temperamentally, too, she was unre-
sponsive as a dead slug: passive of caresses, but never
reciprocating them, and unrestrainably evasive. A dull
dog : not even when Go-go pursued her about with saucers
of milk and ‘ Mao;lai, Mao-lai” did she manifest any
human feelings: but perhaps her particular brand of
Mahomedanism had narrower notions about milk than her
original ‘owner’s about wine. In any case, back to her
original owner she soon returned, packed up in a basket,
with my best thanks and declared disinclination to deprive
him longer of such a treasure.
16 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

Thus we settled into the jog-trot monotony of that long
winter, broken only by the New Year celebrations. Those
of the New Style coincide, of course, with our New Year,
and were .marked by a huge official banquet at the Palace,
following on a general review of the Kansu troops. All
the sommités were gathered on the verandah at the top
of the parade ground, and proceedings began at an unearthly
hour of the morning by no means welcome to those who
had done the New Year the honour of seeing itin. Between
lapses into irrepressible slumber I feebly murmured answers
to the various officials who came up to me and made talk
in the inner room where the more select personages awaited
the arrival of the Viceroy: the one bright spot was Mr.
Post Office, who had donned, by way of official attire, an
unhappy-looking venerable frock-coat and an ancestral
top-hat fluffy as a Georgian relic. And outside, all this
time, thousands of trim khaki-uniformed soldiers were
manceuvring to the braying of bands.

Then after what seemed hours of waiting came a crescendo
of noise beginning from afar and swelling nearer and nearer,
His Excellency was arriving: out we all went on to the
verandah again, the soldiers in dense lines made a vast wide
lane of emptiness down the length of the parade ground :
minute at last in the distance of the vacant vista, appeared
the Viceregal sedan, glittering in gold and green, advancing
rapidly in magnitude up towards us at a trot with many
bearers and attendants. At the foot of the stairs it was
set down, and out stepped His Excellency. A most superb
figure of a man this time, in full uniform of blue and gold,
with blue and golden kepi, from the front of which stiffly
aspired one of those foot-high blue shaving brushes which
must assuredly be of such vital usefulness in war. Having
saluted us and various others, the Viceroy took his stand in
the middle of the verandah, and the Review proceeded.
It was of interminable tediousness, as all such functions
are: by hundreds the battalions and regiments defiled before
us, eyes-righting abruptly to the Viceroy as they passed,
LANCHOW LZ

and goose-stepping with a most ridiculous precision all the
time. Yet an imposing sight too: and not one expected
in popular conceptions of China. It went on and on till
at length there came a pause, and in a series of stentorian
staccato shouts the Viceroy began delivering an allocution
on patriotism to a knot of officers assembled beneath the
verandah. We seized the opportunity to slip unobtrusively
away, with some difficulty found our carts among the assem-
bled multitudes of others, and so returned home to rest till
3, when it was time to get up again and dress for the party.

This, as I say, was a huge gathering: dinner was half
foreign, and served in foreign fashion, with me, in foreign
fashion also, on my host’s right hand. It turned out
really, despite my leaden anticipations, very gay: I had
the greatest fun with the Viceroy, who by this time seemed
quite an old friend. He revealed his full skill in drink: but
foreknowing his determination to triumph over mine, I was
able to elude all his cunning wiles. No serious talk on this
occasion: except that he had at last had news, in which
he was much interested, of a big letter I had written to
Yuan Shih Kai, his cousin, about the state of things on the
Border (Weltpolitik up there is a small immediate thing,
but it completely fills one’s view, and one cannot keep one’s
hand from it). So we laughed and ragged together: and
in the intervals I scanned the guests on either hand, down
the long narrow length of the table. Some I knew and
some I didn’t, but all, I supposed, were important: I
wondered, therefore, here and there to see a little meek
person, unspeaking and unspoken-to, perfectly silent
except for the sonorous gulps of deglutition with which it is
Chinese etiquette to advertise your enjoyment of your
dinner. This moved my curiosity, and at length I discovered
that they were, indeed, “ ghosts,’ not personally there at
all, but only officially, so that they were not supposed to
be noticed, or even seen,

For in China, it seems, if you have accepted an invitation
to dinner, and then are unable or unwilling to go, you send

Cc
18 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

your secretary or your valet to take your place. He prevents
your seat from being empty by sitting in it, and your share
of the food from being wasted by eating it: but otherwise,
in himself, is non-existent. At least they enjoyed their
dinner, these shadow-people : and a good dinner it was, and
seemed to last till midnight, though eight had barely struck,
in fact, when the cups of rice appeared. This is the end
of a Chinese feast, and on this signal you immediately rise
up and say good-bye. So out we all came, and down through
the various courts, lovely in the dark with the illumination
of crimson lanterns everywhere : and home along the streets
now also all aglow with strings of lanterns, shining like
ruby balls down the long straight perspectives.

The real Chinese New Year comes much later, in the
middle of February. I found it a depressing time, as it
lasts a whole fortnight, and all the shops keep shut through-
out, so that one’s English sense of cut-off-ness at Christmas
and Easter is here multiplied to fivefold. Moreover I was
now alone, for Bill, with that indefatigable kindness which
reduces all I can ever say of him to a pale nothing, had gone
off Southward, over the frozen world, back to Jo-ni and
Ardjei, to bargain on my behalf for various treasures of
Tibetan copper: and in particular for two of those great
cooking vats which you first heard of “‘ On the Eaves of the
World,” and which are prizes so difficult to attain that none
have as yet ever come to Europe. However, Bill had long
had his mind’s eye on a pair of these which, in the break-up
of a family, he thought there was a chance of securing.
So off he rode one afternoon on an iron-cold day of greyness
with snowflakes falling drearily : with only his pack beneath
him, and alone except for a brace of very smart khaki-
clad mounted soldiers from the Viceroy’s own bodyguard,
a special tribute which I hailed with satisfaction, because
it would certainly give him much higher “face” on the
road than the solitary ragamuffin that he would otherwise
have had from the City Governor.

Bleakly I remained behind, with only proofs and various
LANCHOW 19

tedious works of the sort for sole company and occupation
till he should return. Not, indeed, that I was really quite
so solitary: for by now I was harbouring in my house a
brisk little American journalist, a born nomad, who had
drifted down into Lanchow again from Si-ning and the
remote North. But he came as the friend of the Post
Office, and with Mr. and Mrs. Post Office he fed and lived,
only returning home to sleep : so that it was little, in reality,
that I saw of his round cherubic head, bald and blue-eyed
and gold-spectacled, the image of a chubby little innocent
pink Monsignore—though with more pinkness than innocence
in his character.

Time hung heavy, and the war hung heavier. Long
since, in the common expectation that it would soon be
over, I had concluded best to stay where I was and complete
my contract—having come so far to do it, and at such a
cost of time and peril—but nothing could alleviate the
leaden oppressiveness of sitting there all that agelong
winter, in forced inactivity, the prey of fears and hopes
that one could do nothing to prevent or further, and of
-anguishes long since settled and dead by the time one read
of them. The reading of six-weeks-old newspapers was a
double oppression in the winter of 1914, and even the
telegrams we received, by arrangement, up-country, only
served to keep one oscillating in an agony of impotent
anxiousness. I sank myself hard in work during the
mornings, and dutifully patrolled the shops in the afternoons,
clothed in a quilted blue gown of cotton-duvet and black
velvet Wellington boots lined with lynx: on my head a
beaver hat, and about me, when the day was extra cold,
a black satin dolman lined with soft black fur. And in the
evenings I went to bed as soon as was decent.

Not that the shops in Lanchow are of any merit: but
to wander round them and sit and bargain and joke with
their proprietors was always fun, and something to fill the
radiant winter afternoons. The only shops that interest
one are, naturally, those of objets d’art: these are chiefly
20 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

to be found down one side of the big open market-place
in the centre of the city, immediately outside the palace.
A forlorner assemblage of more wretched rubbish was seldom
seen, however: though by the prices asked for each sham
bronze or third-rate picture you might imagine yourself
to be bargaining for pearls and diamonds. They are
open to the day, these shops, without frontage or door,
separated each from each by only a partition: you wander
in and sit before the counter, and send your glance roving
round until such time as the proprietor intrudes on you
with something specially hideous that he hopes you may be
got to buy. In the meantime what you see all round you
crowded on the shelves is the strangest jackdaw-collection
of odds and ends: the glittering brass of incense-burners,
fire-pots, openwork chaufferettes for the hands: bronzes,
lumbering and spurious, odds and ends of indifferent
china, official necklaces and derelict official hat buttons of the
dead Imperial days: terrible pictures on glass: roots of
ginsing like withered tiny human atomies, framed and
glazed: European handbasins of tin, painted gaudily with
pansies and roses : lampglobes to match : and other flotsam
and jetsam of foreign introduction higgledy-piggledied
up with wild brass devils down from Tibet, and bland
Bodhisats and Madonnas.

But nowhere anything of beauty or value: unless the
owner, on a later day, mysteriously takes you into an inner
room and there shows you a really good piece of bronze,
or a picture, or a screen of panels encrusted with fruits
and flowers made of precious stones, jade and jasper and
topaz and cornelian and chalcedony, that he has got in
from a friend to sell on commission. Or it may be, perhaps,
that in the glass cases on either side the entrance, among
the rubbish of lockets and buckles and old spectacles and
snuff-bottles of no account, you may now and then happen
on one of carved coral, a treasure of former days, such as
I never saw in Peking later on, being the official present of
the Sovereign to the great viceroys on the high occasion
LANCHOW 21

of a birthday. But in no case is the buying done then and
there: nor must you even show a spark of attention for
anything you want to buy. In fact, the more you mean to
have it, the less must you seem to notice it at all. I am
very bad, myself, at disguising appetence: so that after a
few initial disasters, which had the effect of making Mafu
growl like a bear, I always used to take him with me on
my walks, following at my heel, to preserve me from any
impetuous imprudence.

To him, then, when I had found anything I wanted, I
would point it out: round to my house it would ere long be
brought, and then would begin the real serious business of
bargaining, often protracted over months, with feigned
advances and retreats, and histrionic indignations, and the
laughter of assumed derision, and hands of silent protest
thrown to Heaven over the rapacity of one party or the
parsimony of the other: culminating, of course, in the
triumphant surrender of the merchant to a price which,
. however much I may have beat him down, was always at
least three times as much as he would ever have got, or
tried to get, from a compatriot. I used to believe that
if the purchaser gave double what he offered at first, and
half of what he had been asked, he would be doing none
so ill: long experience in Lanchow and Peking have taught
me now that even if one pays as little as a tenth of what was
first demanded, one is giving the seller, by Chinese standards,
nothing short of a walk-over.

All this applies to those more showy shops in the market-
place, where the more important things arefound. And here
I always had Mafu to safeguard me. But scattered rarely
in the minor streets there are other little rubbish shops
where I used to poke and pry alone, secure in the knowledge
that even if I did pay a dollar for some small jar or danglet
that wasn’t worth half, no very great harm was thereby
done. And it was much more fun to roam alone. But in
particular, all round the outside of the wall between the
South Gate and the East Gate, above the moat, there
22 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

runs an unbroken series of wooden shops, accumulated with
the most fascinating chaos of trash and old clo’. In the
winter the moat is frozen and the clamour of its summer-
time stenches is stilled : so that in the afternoons, when the
long lane is flooded with sunshine and sheltered from cold
winds by the towering height of the city wall behind, I used
to wander very happily from shop to shop, chaffering and
laughing with their owners. One shop was my special
favourite, and indeed was the public show of a dealer who
kept a much more ambitious private store in one of the
streets beyond the South Gate : from him, the Long Brother,
I gradually made many purchases, my culminating triumphs
being four fascinating little old sages of painted stone and a
cracked powder-blue plate which after weeks of higgling I
secured at the price of two empty bottles without earning
reproaches even from Mafu.
CHAPTER II
THE NEW YEAR

And now, suddenly, all this came to an end, and every
shop was shut for an interminable fortnight. Each family
was keeping up its New Year’s Beano, and commerce was
wholly inabeyance. The only diversions of those days were
the various festal ceremonies that one met in the streets.
One has always, indeed, the chance of seeing an almost
life-size pink paper horse and paper people, standing outside
a doorway to indicate that its owner has just ‘‘ mounted
on high,” leaving a mourning family behind : but during the
New Year special festivities occur. One day it is an expul-
sion of evil spirits : going out into my street I found myself
submerged in an excited mob, in the midst of which a
gaunt painted woman, with a face grey with frenzy, surged
drunkenly this way and that, while behind her followed a
rhythmical chorus of some dozen long black drums. Their
bearers would beat fortissimo in measure, BOOM BOOM,
BOOM BOOM ; then swinging round, sink to a pianissimo,
boom boom, boom boom : and so da capo and da capo all up the
street, with the Sibyl swaying her wild course ahead. And
the brisk monotonous alternation of noise, in its relentless
rhythm and rise and fall, ended at last by having a quite
hypnotic effect, which has haunted my memory ever since.

On another occasion I was crowded almost off my feet
by another mob of enthusiasts: a parcel of bedizened
painted people, in tinsel jewels and tinsel robes and crowns
and flowers pranced Menadically down the streets on
stilts, and after them followed a corybantic procession,
with crackers and drums and gongs in pandemonium.

23
24 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

Or yet again, a still mightier crowd, and a still louder
clamouring, in attendance on a mob of many little boys
caracoling down the street on paper hobby-horses, escorting
an immense and wildly-agitated paper dragon with terrifying
mask of papier m&ché: while behind there came paper
fishes flashing gilt and colour, and a great cardboard kylin
of blue and gold with a body all of straw fringe, looking
like a colossal poodle gone pale. But these are rare diver-
sions of this close season, and in the meantime I turned
my attention perforce to the beauties of Lanchow and its
environs. Do not grumble at me if I make you linger
there also, and along the preliminaries of my travel. For,
if you are to share its flowers and fun, it is only fair that
you should share its delays and dullnesses too, so as to
gather a complete notion of what that country and that
northern winter: and spring are like, and how our life went
by there, in long slow slabs, prefacing the hurry of the
working-time.

Lanchow, among big Chinese towns, is my dream city.
It is precisely what I had seen Sian-fu, in visions which
Sian-fu entirely declined to fulfil. It lies in a flat plain
with the Yellow River flowing round its Northern wall,
at the foot of the high crumpled fells of desolation that are
called the Golden Hills and dominate the city with the
theatre and pagoda on one of their nearer lesser peaks.
It is a very steep scramble up any of those heights, over
slippery tracks of pebble and smoothworn loess hard as
marble and treacherous as glass to the tread. And all
this is a land of death and the dead. This country is so
old that the dead are everywhere: from each bank or
scarp nameless earth-coloured bones protrude from the
dead ages, and in weatherworn clefts or scoops of the loess
you can see skulls. There are few acts of merit higher
than to re-bury these exposed indelicacies of the past, and
leave them reverently covered once more: just as to the
Chinese mind, there are few offences more ugly and disastrous
than to remove any abandoned bone, or disturb the sleeping
THE NEW YEAR 25

dead. But the valleys and dry ravines concealed among the
Golden Hills have by no means even yet lost their sepulchral
value: and as you go, the squeal and scurrying flight of
disturbed kites will make you suddenly aware that their
focus, under that bit of dull red rag among the stones, is the
derelict body of some forlorn outcast child.

On a prominent brow, high, high above the river, are
the pagoda and its theatre. Beneath your feet, across the
Hwang Hor, the city lies mapped out completely, and in the
middle the forested park of the palace, and the waterwheel
outside the city wall (the Northern boundary of its precinct)
which lifts a constant rill from the Yellow River for the
Viceroy’s electric light and the irrigation of his garden.
On the far side of the city stretches a plain of orchards, and
the distance beyond is closed by a long high mass of fell,
on which summer-houses and pleasant pavilions perch, for
the villeggiatura of Lanchow’s wealthy ones during the
summer heats. In summer, indeed, the scene is opulent
in a surf of green, but in winter a clear cold ochre-coloured
death is the universal note. Scrambling down the scarp
at last, you come to a specially steep fall of the hillside
to the river, and up this, like swallows’ nests plastered up
the face of a cliff, more summer-houses and curly-roofed
pavilions lodge and cling and alight wherever foothold is
possible. And in winter it is hard to imagine the delicious
airiness of them in the stifling August heats, as you sit
here, perched in vacancy amid a blessed concourse of
draughts, open on all sides to the air, and commanding the
whole enormous prospect of the orcharded landscape below
you away and away to the distant dry hills, with the river
down below you, and the city like an island in the ocean
of green, and its gate-towers like cliffs emerging high above
the surf of the trees.

But the winter here has its uncanny charm, too, when
all the world is unimaginably dead and arid, a strange
wonderful view of corrugated fawn-colour, with the jingling
floe-ice racing down the river at your feet, and the far
26 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

hills blue and filmy in haze. The Yellow River, here
a mere trifle of a few hundred miles from its birth, up on the
Roof of the World, between the Oring-Nor and the Tsaring-
Nor, magical lakes of magic names, that few eyes have
ever seen, is already as broad at Lanchow as the Thames
at London. But a vast mud-coloured water it is, boiling
down from the snows of Tibet ; soon after leaving Lanchow
it takes its wild northward sweep up into the inhospitable
deserts of the Ordes, and round the North in fierce rapids
that make it untamable for traffic, before it curves South
again straight along the hard line of the Shansi hills, till at
length at the weak angle of their junction with the Tsin-
ling Alps, advancing across Shensi, the Wei Hor and the
Hwang Hor join forces to make a push for freedom, and
unite in their devastating downward break to the sea.
At Lanchow the Hwang Hor is smooth and swift and silent :
as far as Ning-Hsia you can descend on rafts, and there are
even navigable stretches: but this river is always sinister
and terrible.

In winter, of course, it is in leash: the Tibetan highland is
fast-bound in frost, and its rivers are starvelings accordingly.
But even so, the Hwang Hor isa portent of weight and power :
one never wearies standing on the European iron bridge that
links Lanchow to the Golden Hills across the river, and
looking down on the surreptitious velvety violence of that
brown swell creaming in concentrated malignity round the
piers. By mid-December the ice packs are already coming
down: gradually a crust forms along either bank, and
day by day encroaches on the central current, till at length
there remains only quite a narrow channel of furious racing
water curding up a crested hedge of ico on each side as it
tears its way. And then, a few days later, there is no
more water at all, and the mighty Hwang Hor, tamed by
winter, is imprisoned fast under what is now a huge flat:
expanse of glacier, wild and tumbled and rough as an
instantly frozen sea, across which you can save the troubles
and tolls of the bridge by taking your strings of carts and
THE NEW YEAR 27

camels in every direction from bank to bank. For a month
or more the glittering white chaos imprisons one of Asia’s
most imperious rivers, and then towards the end of February
the carts turn cautious and begin to resume the Bridge:
a streak of darkness gradually dawns and with a crash
the river is loose again. Within a few hours more channel
after channel has opened, and the broken packs of ice
and flat cruel bergs come tearing down with silvery crashes,
battering the ice-banks, and piling up over each other,
and battering and swirling again, until more bergs are
cracked off and more packs go hurtling down. And in a
few days the ice is wholly gone : though the end of February
brings an odd relapse, after all the radiance of winter, into
a strange feeling of dark ominousness, when the air seems
full of pale cries, heralds of fluttering dust-storms on the
wings of incessant flaws of wind, from which you wake one
morning to find the whole world gone dead again in cloud
and an unrelieved whiteness of snow.

But, apart from such brief relapses, and occasional
snaps of dark weather and hard steely cold, no words can
do justice to the glare and glory of midwinter in Northern
Asia; its vast and pure serenity, its flawless light, its colour,
its feeling, its atmosphere. There is hardly a day when
it is not like champagne to take the air in Lanchow. There
are strange old temple courts to visit in the city, yards of
grey quiet filled with a moss-grown ancient silence, so
solemn under the venerable trees that the cloisters and the
dark vacant theatre seem haunted, and the towering old
bronze incense-burner to be on guard. Then there is the
Mahomedan Mosque, out near the Western Gate, with its
fantastic many-storied tower flashing with tiled roofs of
emerald and turquoise. The building is of a rich and
elaborate Chinese type, but the carved and latticed ark of
the interior, duskily fragrant, is all that is properly Islamic.
A beautiful and benevolent old greybeard presides: the
certainty that the Mahomedans would gladly murder all
the Chinese of the Inner Empire, and fully intend to do
28 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

their best at the first possible moment, only lends ironic
point to the presence of this gorgeous fane in a Chinese
capital, and to the large Olympian kindliness of its minister,
whom, as you see him, deep in the shadow of the smooth
great columns in the approach, with his hand on his little
grandson’s head, you would take for an Adept in some
cult of pure affection. But all this country swarms with
sons of the Prophet, and though the alien race has modified
its lines into some vague general resemblance to the Chinese,
yet you very soon learn to tell them apart, and easily
recognize the heavier, dourer, more sombrely built faces and
figures of the Mahomedans, even if it were not for the six-
sided little silly cap of satin that here replaces the fez.
It would take long labour to explore the many corners of
beauty in Lanchow: each suspect alley may lead to some
vast abandoned building, derelict examination-hall, or
tower of coloured tiles. The real examination-hall, though,
of old Imperial days, has now entirely disappeared and
nothing remains of it except the solid arch of the entrance
just outside the West Gate of the city. The park-like
expanse within has been swept clear of buildings and turned
to the uses of the garrison. Old and new meet here;
for standing under the arch you look back out of a modern
camp to the immemorial Gate Tower of Lanchow with its
rows of square windows painted with sham cannon mouths :
and above on the descending laps of the hill are the square
guard-fortresses of former times, without any door on the
ground, but you sent up your garrison by ladders to a door
half-way up the wall and then took your ladders away so
as to obviate any risk of your garrison following suit.
And farther yet, out beyond the little beck that comes
down into the Hwang Hor from the southward hills, remote
on a sloping plateau above, stands utterly deserted the
big walled city where once the Manchu population of
Lanchow dwelt in arrogant isolation, till the Manchurian
Line came crashing to its end in 1911 and brought down the
Dragon Throne in its fall. The little beck beneath is a
THE NEW YEAR 29

very little beck in winter, meandering sadly among wide
stretches of sand; busy housewives beat their clothes
there, and pile their stacks of carrots and melons in summer.
But it is spanned by one of the sights of Lanchow—the
famous Camel’s Bridge—so called because no camel ever
crosses it, of course, but its arcaded passage has a high
hump-backed look. And on the far side round over the
bend there is a specially beautiful new Taoist Temple, ample
and stately amid sombre forested cloisters frescoed all
round, Its sumptuous roofs gleam azure and emerald above
the heavy black-dark plumage of the Cypresses that envelop
them ; and here in the sunny angles of the yards viburnum
fragrans, in enormous bushes, covers itself with blossom in
spring ; and here in spring there is a famous picture-sale
at which even the Viceroy condescends to bid.

But now into the laborious quiet of my days there came
a diversion, for a note arrived from Bill, saying that all
was well indeed with his expedition, but that those two
smart soldiers of the Viceroy’s guard, the loan of whom
we had taken as such a compliment and comfort, had, in
point of fact, turned out quite the reverse, so misbehaving
to the country people and innkeepers down the road, beating
them and bullying them (as soldiers have the unenviable
name for doing in China, and are popular accordingly),
that at last Bill had sent them back to the city with a
note to their commanding officer explaining their misdeeds,
but in such a way as to mitigate the affront to the Viceroy
involved in returning his escort. Pondering this unpleasant
news (for, quite apart from the general moral objections,
it is very undesirable in China to get mixed up, however
remotely, with any ill-treatment of the people), I concluded
that the soldiers ought certainly to be visited for their
sins, and that, as certainly, they would not have been such
fools as to present that card to their officer. For though,
of course, they could not read it, they would obviously
have understood that it gave the reason for their dismissal.
No, assuredly they would have torn it up, and given some
30 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

cock-and-a-bull story instead to account for their return.
And it was intolerable to me that they should so cheat
justice. I consulted with Mr. Li, but found him disinclined
to meddle in the matter between such eminences as myself
and the Viceroy: so finally, with the most nice elaborate
elegance of language, I wrote direct to His Excellency,
recounting the tale. After which I sat with folded hands,
complacent in the certainty that honour would be satisfied
with a touch of the stick or a few days’ imprisonment.

Alas for my little comprehension of the East, and my
forgetfulness of China’s veneration for the written word, so
deep-seated that nobody will ever destroy a piece of paper
with writing on it. A few days later,as I sat at work, Mr.
Li came rushing in, pale with the excitement of high and
urgent matters. In a voice that tottered with emotion he
implored secrecy and then unfolded the matter. Those
luckless soldiers, after all, it seemed had duly presented
Bill’s card to their commanding officer: on reading which
he immediately ordered their trousers down and had them
spanked within an inch of their lives. This was already
much more than I had meant, of course, and had happened
before any move on my part was known.

But now, hardly had they begun to congeal again, than
my letter arrived (translated, too, no doubt, into much too
heavy terms, as there was nobody with any command
of English at court). Whereupon he towered instantly into
an Imperial passion, counted the beating a mere bagatelle,
and insisted that both men should be shot forthwith.
Nothing else would serve him: nothing could deflect him.
Glamour was general in the city, and mutinies were rumoured.
I was speechless with horror when I learned what a storm
I had unwillingly aroused. Quite apart from the iniquity
of killing the men for so small a crime, their death would
certainly get all foreigners an evil name in the province,
and destroy my own chances of getting on happily, as before,
with the people. Acertain feeling of insecurity was already
abroad anyhow : some Honan soldiers had already achieved
THE NEW YEAR 31

a burglary with violence somewhere outside the city, and
a few of them had been executed for it; with the result
that the troops were grumbling and fractious. It was quite
on the cards (on causes so small do great events hinge, as I
fancy some capacious mind may have observed before)
that another execution at my behest might prove the danger
spark to a general explosion that might shatter the Viceroy
and me, and the foreign residents in Kansu, and the peace
of the province, and the stability of its Government, all in
one devastating cataclysm.

So I was fully penetrated by the alarm of Mr. Li and
addressed myself instantly to the writing of another letter
to the Viceroy, pleading for mercy as urgently as Portia.
This I meant to go round and present in person that it might
have even more weight. But appointments could not be
made to fit, messengers went fruitlessly to and fro, and
in a constant fret of anxiety the day was frittered away.
Next morning Mr. Li returned to the charge, with Mr.
Post Office, too, this time to back him. I needed no incite-
ments: off went the letter and the Viceroy acknowledged
the receipt of it immediately, as the etiquette is. And then
nothing happened. More hours passed and still nothing
happened : I spent the night in figuring the hapless offenders
as clay-cold corpses by this time with a general insurrection
brewing round their graves. Till the morning brought a
little note in the oddest English from the Viceroy, announcing
that he consented to let off his ‘‘ humble soldiers,’’ and how
lucky they were to escape his execution. So that was all
right, but what a comfort! I vowed that never again would
I play a lone hand in the fearful game of Chinese diplomacy,
with other peoples’ life and death for the stakes.

Mrs. Li, all this time, has been absent from the scene,
and there were no more parties in that pleasant little semi-
foreign room in the shady courtyard. Mrs. Li, in fact,
was having a baby ; and when the baby appeared, it was a
girl. Mr. Li must certainly be very exceptional among
Chinese, and, indeed, among fathers of any nationality :
32 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

for, though he already had one daughter (and no doubt
desired a son as ardently as all reasonable people must,
all the world over, but in China most notoriously and
especially), he yet greeted this new “ guest” with such
enthusiasm that he proposed to celebrate her arrival in
the world with a resounding festivity.

The appointed day dawned cold and dreary. I myself
felt ill and disinclined to the prospect of sloppy food and the
warm nastiness of Chinese wine. All the morning I awaited
my summons, but it did not come till nearly 4. Mr. Post
Office and I then clambered into carts, and off we set,
across the city and down towards the South Gate to where,
up an alley to the left, you find the stately temple of Tseng
Tso Tang. Tseng-Tso-Tang was the soldier-statesman quite
unknown to Europe, whose fame in China is so illustrious
that he ranks almost as a saint (though only dead within
memory of man) and has temples to his glory all over
Northern China. For it was he who succeeded at last
in closing the bleeding wound of the Mahomedan Rebellion
that was still draining inland China white when the Grand
Dowager began her reign. His temple in Lanchow is one
of the city’s finest buildings to-day, and is the special
place for giving banquets of special splendour.

Such as Mr. Li’s. When I entered I found myself in an
enormous room, cold and draughty, like the nave of a church,
with sturdily-pillared aisles up either side to the end, where,
instead of a chancel, there rose a stage, on which the most ap-
palling pandemonium was proceeding, braying of gongs and
crashing of cymbals, and long-drawn squawks and wailings
of the bedizened actors who were performing their unending
evolutions quite unheeded by the crowd of black-satin
gentlemen who filled the body of the hall. For this was
indeed a party—crowds and crowds of people, so that
I almost got writer’s cramp with handshaking. Mr. Li
had cast his net far and wide. Ma-y had actually been
asked—a mighty jump into social recognition: and at the
other end of the scale, though Mr. Li had not aspired quite
THE NEW YEAR 33

as high as the Viceroy, his son, a pleasant slim pale boy,
Mr. Li’s particular friend, was present, besides the City
Governor, and most of the other sommités of Lanchow,
civil and military. But it was weary work, standing about
on our hind legs and waiting for the food. For, to make the
probation keener, there it all was, plain to view. Up and
down the body of the hall were a dozen large round tables,
in three ranks: while aligned up the red-pillared aisles to
right and left were rounds to fit them, already set with all
the fittings and apparatus of a Chinese feast, the tall tazzas,
and the low saucers and dishes, stacked with many-coloured
pyramids of candied fruits and sweetmeats and savouries
that make a well-set Chinese dinner-table even more fas-
cinating to sit down to than an English one. But still more
guests were coming, and the feast could not begin: we
circulated, and marked time, and chatted as best we could
for the devastating din on the stage.

However, at length there came a sense of imminence and
an electric pause in the buzz of talk. From all sides atten-
dants now came swiftly forward, carrying the round table-
tops: and in a trice the twelve tables were set with their
burdens. Immediately the draughts seemed to diminish,
and the fire-box to give more warmth, and the huge hall
to look much brighter with its many rosy lanterns beaming
down on that triple row of opulently furnished tables. Mr.
Li and Mr. Lo began urging us to our places, each guest
to his appointed position at the table foreordained as fitting
to his rank. To my horror I now found that for me there
waited the foremost place of all, at the central table up at the
top, immediately under the cataclysmal cacophonies of the
stage. However, there was nothing for it but to “ suffer
in silence, with a smiling h’eye’’: I took my seat, and
we all—six at each table—fell to on the dessert, browsing
from pink pyramids to green, and from green to gold,
slices of pear and stuffed jujubes, and forcemeat, and
strips of chicken mayonnaise, and ruby bars of fruit jelly,
and sugared walnuts, and slices of ancestral eggs, and the

D
34 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

gleaming little golden candied oranges that come up from
Szechwan and are as delicious as anything produced in
Nice. Rapidly the mounds of delight before us dwindled
and crumbled: and then came the long procession of the
real dinner, not necessary, by this time, to repeat to you.
Piles of apricot kernels served the purposes of bread, to
nibble and play with, but I cannot find a reason for the
universal popularity of melon seeds in the same context
—flat little hard dry ovals, which you have to split with
tongue and teeth, and then spit out the two halves, keeping
only the thin flake that lay between them—a very poor
reward for so much trouble. However, the Chinese do not
think so, and eat melon seeds at an amazing rate, and in
the most amazing quantities all day, indoors and out of
doors and everywhere.

This was a feast, too, served by sirens. Not only did
the busy attendants run diligently round with drink, and
others come and go in a pitiless procession of foods, but the
tables were particularly haunted by queer little damsels,
proffering love and wine as they doddered round on tiny
feet—a most unappetizing pack of small drabs, curiously
infantile and pudding-faced, and like Eskimos, with the
brown bright eyes of baby rabbits and their front hair
flopping on either side of their face. Not one of these
dingy fledglings of Aphrodite seemed a day over fourteen,
and their prattle had, I imagine, something of a child’s
soft charm, to the sophisticated, in these inappropriate
circumstances. Not that I could judge of it with any
equanimity : the din above me was so deafening that I
could hardly hear myself think. It was always pande-
monium, of course, but with periodical explosions of extra
noise that made the intervening stretches seem balmy by
comparison. The play interminably proceeded: the same
nothingness appeared to happen again and again: the
same people, archaic and rigid in their magnificent robes of
tinsel, again and again to come forward and make their
protracted wailing querimonies, to the accompaniment,
THE NEW YEAR 35

jangled and chaotic, of all conceivable instruments of
torture by sound, dominated by violent outrages on gongs,
and a criminal cruelty to cymbals.

And yet, through all the anguish, there was a certain
hieratic charm about the performance. The stately figures
and their sumptuous slow movements got a hold of one’s
imagination, and so did the fantastic wonder of their vest-
ments, and enormous crowns and head-dresses of glittering
vacillating quivering tawdriness, and the stoles and long
lappets of dazzling embroideries and colour, blatant all
over with gold, and bedight with bits of mirror. It is
curious in Chinese art, the cult of the beard, so little seen in
Chinese life: these cautious-moving compilations of rickety
splendour were all venerable in long beards that waggled
and went up and down when they wailed. But old men,
kings and sages were by no means the only persons in the
play. What it was all about I could not tell you, but the
leading réle was that of a lady, nymph or fairy. She was
played, inevitably, by a man: I did not need to be told
that here was the central point of the whole performance,
and that I was seeing the Divine Sarah of Kansu.?

It was an amazing performance. He was a slim thin-
faced lad, painted and powdered to an almost uncanny
degree of elfin moth-eyebrowed beauty: and he was a great
actor. He had a square mobile mouth, made for emotion,
and dark wild eyes, in which he did marvels of flashing
love and fear and hate and cdlinerie, till we were quite
caught by the sinister haunt of his charm as he came and
went in his many exquisite mincing feminine disguises,
and postured and posed and swayed and swam and swooped
and swung in time to the clashing blare of the gongs and
cymbals, and the leaping of his own trilling cries and wails
like a fairy bird. And finally he descended from his strange
heavens, and came down among men, circulating round
the tables (as the star-actor’s habit is, to collect financial

1 This, I am told, requires elucidation: the allusion is to a certain
Madame Bernhardt, a French actress of repute,
36 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

evidence that he has pleased his audience), as elaborate still
in his slender grace, and the penetrating dart of his pro-
found liquid gaze, as the perfected Japanese Geisha whose
cultivated charm he so poignantly recalled in his willowy
movement, and sweetly condescending inclinations, and
trailing kimono of pale colours, and high-puffed coiffure.

So the long loneliness of the winter went, and insensibly
the frozen world began to stir. The Yellow River by now
was once more a vast and dirt-coloured tempest of muddy
water, and the North Water-gate was turned to a sop and a
slough. A kindlier feeling came into the clear air: a
hinted promise of green began to suffuse the black haze of
the willows, and among their branches the buzzard wheeled
with faint sweet whistlings, and high overhead the air was
crowded with children’s kites, dragons and butterflies and
enormous paper ogres, but dwindled to mere gnats in the
blue vault where they hung motionless, while high again
above even these the cranes went honking North-westward
in a V-shaped tail of black specks. Even the desolation
of the hills grew tenderer: towards sunset looking up or
down the Hwang-Hor from the iron bridge, the distances
were very lovely in Egyptian lines and softened Egyptian
colours of fawn and ochre, misty in a haze of mauve and
pale blue tones, with a brighter yellow effect of fog now
blurring the willow-forests along beneath the hills into the
utmost distance, and above all, ghostly and diaphanous,
a harvest moon mounting slowly up, as golden as a guinea,
and as big as a plate behind the veiled atmosphere of blue
and dun. And when one came home at night, the air was
no longer cruel, and it was a joy to walk up the silent
cobbled street, pale and empty beneath that same glorious
full moon, now high in the zenith of a breathless cloudless
vault of stars.

Work was all done, and the end of waiting was at hand.
As symptoms of coming movement, fresh members swam
into my staff, one by one, like the heralding swallows of
spring. Out of the South from Jo-ni, came Lay-gor, the
THE NEW YEAR 37

good donkey-man, and a little later my. eyes were gladdened
unexpectedly by the sight of Gomer, that stalwart, jolly
lad of the Border whom I had last so sadly seen dwindling
Southwards on the road from Taochow back to Jo-ni, and
had never hoped to see again. He came, with an elder
brother, a notable figure of a man, on an errand of propitiation
to us, bearing a present of elk’s feet from the Prince of
Jo-ni, now so perturbed by the troubles raised for him
by the Viceroy that he himself was now actually to come to
Lanchow—and wished, therefore, to deprecate further
hostilities on our part. But indeed it was time that China
looked into his suspect movements with the monasteries
and the Mahomedans: it was notorious how he had taken
bribes from the monks of Chago, and given them to the
Mahomedan general and the Chinese inspector : the winter
appeared to have gone very troublously down on the Border.
But I no longer had any quarrel with those storms, for I
was to owe to them one of the sturdiest props of my second
year’s expedition. Quite suddenly there dawned on me one
day the Wicked Wa-wa.

He dawned, indeed, slowly, and it was some time before
I realized his qualities. When first I saw him, he was a
very grubby little rosy-cheeked Tibetan-looking urchin of
about twelve, in greasy old quilted breeches and jacket of
Chinese blue, with a round cap on his head, and a pigtail
hanging down unkempt behind. This was a chrysalis of no
special promise. But at first his tender years and forlorn
condition made me look on him as an injured innocent,
and rejoice in the chance of shielding him. He was the
son and heir of Lay-gor the donkey-man, and there was a
wonderful story of a battle for a water-mill at Nalang, in
the course of which it unfortunately befell that a Chinese
had his head smashed in with a stone. Of course the
Wa-wa had had no hand in this; oh no. But at this
point the tale grew hazy, and all that clearly emerged
was the fact that that spotless infant was maliciously
denounced, and fled away by devious tracks into the North,
38 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

to seek his father, and take shelter under my wing. I
glowed with benevolence: the poor child had evidently
endured much, and used to wake up in the night screaming
with nerves. Food and peace and comfort restored him ;
he grew plumper and redder-cheeked every day: I used to
see him about the yard, but he was too abject a creature to
be allowed any approach to my presence or hand in my
service. He was supposed to do odd jobs for the servants,
but nothing much came of it.

But with returning security the Wa-wa began to wax
once more into his native wickedness. The screams in the
night began to be screams of rage, not nerves. He slept
on the cook’s kang, and he declared, with sobs of passion,
that the cook beat him, whereas I now believe it was he that
beat the cook. In any case the staff developed storms, and,
though it seemed ridiculous that trouble should ascend into
our calm circle from so small a speck, so far beneath our
notice, I at last began to wonder what to do with this
useless grubby little dour Tibetan blockhead, sullen and
tempestuous and stupid. And then, one night, a miracle
was certainly wrought. For the American Monsignore,
fired by a climax of cordiality, pursued the shrieking Wa-wa
round the moonlit courtyard, seized him by the pig-tail,
hauled him hither and thither by it, like Melisande, but
protesting a great deal more loudly (indeed he yelled like
a stuck pig in the certainty of a stuck pig’s fate), and finally
sawed it asunder with a Turkish carving knife. I now hold
the theory that it was in his pigtail that the Wa-wa kept his
stupidity.

For on the next day, surveying the mournful relic, I gave
order that he was to have the rest removed and his head
cropped a anglaise. And immediately on this the miracle
began to happen. Dirt gave way to perfect spick-and-span-
ness, slouchiness to smartness, stupidity to needle-sharp
intelligence, and abjectness to a most soaring insolence. He
began to take charge of everything and everybody, would
even lecture Mafu himself on how to do things; and as for
THE NEW YEAR 39

poor Go-go, in quite a short time he was down and out of my
presence, completely second in command to the Wa-wa,
who by this time, having vertiginously climbed the ranks
of service by sheer audacity, was now my own particular
guardian and attendant, filled with just such a supercilious
superiority, bland and brazen, as that of some chubby little
smart buttony page at the Savoy, of whom the wicked one
was the living image.

The entire household crept in terror of his tongue: even
Mafu withdrew into silence, and poor goggling Go-go was
nowhere. And, as for his good meek father, the way that
graceless infant scolded him, and the exhaustive command
of unprintable language in which he did so, were such as to
raise the hair of the household, and cause even his masters
to meditate the propriety of a corporal protest. Only
Gomer defeated him with the radiance of his twinkle, and
the bubbling bursts of his jolly laughter, proof against the
Wa-wa’s most volleying Billingsgate and shrillest, subtlest
insult: he would just smack the Wa-wa’s bullety little
black head, and laugh at him. And the Wa-wa would
laugh too. But as for the Mahomedan cook with the
Christian smile, he pulled down the fur flaps over his ears,
and went,

It was time: we no longer wanted him. For the road
called. Bill had come back, laden with rich treasures out
of Tibet; and now the house was being dismantled, and
everything being got ready for the start. Out towards
the still-frozen North the chubby little Monsignore at last
winged his forlorn way, all alone as usual, with his worldly
goods in a pack across a small white pony that went quite
loose ahead of him, and alternately bolted aside into the
inane of the desert, or ran ahead irrecoverably into distant
cities. His departure was the herald of our own. All the
loose ends were tied up, and the formal farewells accom-
plished.

Accompanied by Mafu in black satin and a Trilby hat,
and by Go-go in his khaki suiting, I paid my devoirs to the
40 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

Viceroy. Wehada most enthusiastic interview in his private
room, and he showed me some of the lovely things, pictures
and china, in his collection ; we giggled and laughed a great
deal, and exchanged vows for future meetings and future
feastings: then he saw me ceremoniously out, conducting
me down through long courtyards of hideous new blue-brick
buildings in course of construction, to where, at last, he
stopped and bowed good-bye on the threshold. A moment
later I glanced back. He still stood there on the step, but
the chuckling smile was quite gone, and he loomed more
enormous than ever, in his huge habitual sternness. It was
like a great grey monolith, from which the glow of sunset
has abruptly faded. And so good-bye, for the time, to
Lanchow : home I went again, in highest heart for the new
adventure of the year, after all these months of inactivity.
And two days later we were off.
CHAPTER III
THE START

The evening had closed grey and ominous, but though
March 28 dawned grey, it soon cleared and grew glorious.
We rose, as usual, early for the start, and as usual had a wait
that seemed endless, sitting about in the stripped and
littered yards, while still the string of mules contracted for
with Ma-y gave no signs of arriving, till at length, in the pre-
sence of Mr. Lo and Mr. Li, and to the open satisfaction
of Mafu, I diminished his great ruddy smirking face by asking
if we might expect the promised animals on the morrow.
However, at long last they did turn up and were loaded.
The procession filed out of my deserted yard about 11.30.

It was a noble cavalcade, for in China the fashion is for
all one’s friends to speed the parting guest for some distance
on his journey; and the more friends you have to swell
your tail, the higher your rank and estimation in the eyes
of the admiring multitude. We resorted to no illicit
methods of hire, such as often increase a Chinese procession
of farewell, but our cortége consisted, besides our own eight
mules and two of Lay-gor’s wise little asses, and Mafu and
ourselves on three ponies, of Mr. Post Office and Mr. Li
(very brave in silks and furs and velvet shoes) on ponies
also, and Mr. Post Office’s Mafu and Ma-y following
behind on a cart with Mr. Lo. The high officials, of course,
could not be expected to derange themselves in person, but
honour was satisfied, and “face” amplified, by formal
messages from the Viceroy and the City Governor regretting
deeply that affairs of state prevented them from escorting
me forth.

41
42 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

Down into the thronging crowds of the main street we
proceeded, and cut through the Western Gate and the Wes-
tern suburb with its long line of grain shops and basket shops
and shops for all sorts of neat wooden implements of agricul-
ture and husbandry. Then down across the hot dusty
beck-bed below the Camel’s Bridge and up the other side,
through more seething streets. And now we were fairly
out of Lanchow, advancing Westwards through open country
once more up the stony desolations of the Hwang-Hor vale,
towards the mysterious Alps of the North. The procession
tailed off homeward: Mr. Lo and Mr. Li returned to their
post office duties, and soon there was only Mr. Post Office
left, of our long winter life in Lanchow. Even he, in time,
deserted us, after some seven miles of the torrid trail, at a
point where a rib of spur descends from the fells with a
sumptuous temple clambering round its aréte. And after
this the joy of the trek was complete, the hopes and hunger
of springtime and the hills.

The way grew firmer and less dusty now, advancing up
the broad flat orcharded stretches beside the huge and
shingled Hwang-Hor. That first day’s stage is more nearly
thirty miles than twenty : endless level bay of road followed
on endless level bay interminably under the fierce glare
through which we dreamily moved between the little arid
hills that enclose the plain of the river. Nowhere was
there any sign of green life, but there were uncounted flocks
of white woolly sheep and lambs on the stark stony downs,
where there did not look to be even as much provender as
might have provided a mouthful for a slug. And beside
the river at intervals there rose the huge Earl’s Court-like
irrigation wheels that are such a feature of this Sahara, and
indeed its one artificial means of redemption from complete
lifelessness, whirling the Yellow water up to a height of some
thirty or forty feet, and then by long troughs and channels
distributing it across the pebbly hopelessness of the plain.

Dusk of dark brought us into Newton (Hsin-Chung),
so mouldy and crumbling a little old place in the twilight
 

INN.

E

zs

A VILLAC
THE START 43

that it seemed as if many a long age must have gone by since
it was first justly so called. We were a long way ahead of
the caravan by this time, and had a weary hunt for an inn,
which, however, at last we found in the dark out beyond
the town wall, in the Western Gwan. There was trouble at
first about rooms, but ere long, when night was well down, we
discovered that the big raised hall at the back of the end of
the yard had two fine kangs, one in each wing. So in its
bare gloom we awaited the mules, and when they arrived
had the usual first day’s eternity of delay while the packs
were taken off and the muddle of bales undone in the night,
and the various necessities of life run to earth in their
unsuspected corners of each bundle. After the first day, of
course, every one knows where everything is, and unpacking
becomes a quick light job ; but on the first stage, chaos and
uncertainty prevail at the trail’s end, and must be allowed
to settle. However, we were very merry in the triumph
of travel really begun, and so long an initial stage
achieved : Mafu ceased to curse delinquents, and set to on
showing how good a dinner he could cook on how short notice:
and, having dined hugger-mugger, we were very glad of a
hugger-mugger bed in the crowded obscurity of the barn.

The night was one of sweet short sleeps, broken by bells
and packings and startings of other people’s mules. We
rose at length very early, to a grey cold day, and I walked
out ahead of the caravan, up across the flat bare fields in
the bend that the river here takes, under the enclosing fell,
to where the ferry barge awaited us. And on the way I
admired to see how they fertilize their fields in these unfertile
parts. For in each plot they sink a well, with a windlass,
and out of it, from the lower strata beneath, they pulley-hawl
up supplies of shingle silt, with which they so universally
mulch their ground that hereabouts the face of the earth is
pocked with the little pebbly ulcers of these silt-wells.

It was still chilly, the sky flocculent and leaden: the
country Arabian and colourless. Not even later would there
be a difference : for all the promising-looking orchards that
44 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

fill the flats are really only of thorny Zao’erh (jujube-trees),
a crabbed spiteful witch-tree of desert-places. By the
placid river Go-go-and I and the pony had to await the
arrival of the main procession, as the ferryman not unnatur-
ally did not want to make two traverses of it in his huge
primeval barge. Very calm and vast and broad the Hwang-
Hor surges along. On the near side towered great water-
wheels, and on the far, above the sharp red rim of the bank,
the plain was filled with a dark haze of Zao’erh, and then
bounded by a line of convoluted dull grey fells, arid as dead
bones, with here and there a crumbling old fortress tower on
a spur, profiled pale against the pallor of the sky; while
nearer, down the right, the sun kindled to brilliant red the
long battlemented wall of one of the many blind little gate-
less Cities of refuge that stud this region, and made it stand
out vividly against the Zao’erh darkness from which its
wide rectangle and fortalice towers emerged.

Now the caravan arrived, and there began much further
talk and haranguing about making two trips of it instead
of one, seeing what a crowd we were. But Charon was ob-
durate, and vowed he would get us allsafeacross. Soin we
pavidly packed, as best we could, hoping for the best, but
removing coats and boots for caution as we squatted in our
places, and watched the mules and ponies being got into
theirs. And gradually they all were got in, and gave no
trouble—except Spotted Fat, who kicked and fought like
ten devils: men and beasts were tight as sardines in a tin
by this time, so that now a mule could hardly have kicked
if it wanted, but had any of them grown obstreperous the
worst must assuredly have happened, as the barge was
gunwale-laden with this unusual concourse. Smoothly
and gradually she swung out, though, into the vast sinister
quiet of the Hwang-Hor, now luckily low and comparatively
tame, yet rolling rapidly as an express. Insensibly the
paddles bore us on and the river bore us down: the near.
bank dwindled behind us, and the far one swelled before us.
Without misadventure we made our landing-stage, and
THE START 45

without misadventure got all the mules and all their packs
ashore: disembarked even Spotted Fat without pro-
test, and with real relief stood firm again on firm ground.

We were to cut across the angle made by the descent,
higher up, of the Sining-Hor into the Hwang-Hor. So now
was good-bye to the Yellow River: our way was to be
straight Westward, up the Sining-Hor, while the Hwang-
Hor fetches its wild backward sweep here, from out of the
far South, off the Roof of the World. From the bank we
began to breast a steep ascent of gullies filled with salt-
pools, and thence came out on to a wide open plateau, with
the Hwang-Hor curling away into the left-hand distances
far below : then dipped to the level again down a crimson
gulch of ruin conspicuously riven and ghastly even in this
rent ghastly country, and turned up to the right at last
between dull low hills, and cliffs half red, and half dead-
grey in a rigid stratum-line, into the wide flat rise of the
Sining River’s valley, now perfectly naked and smooth and
bare in its broad expanse. On and on I slowly rode, far
ahead of the caravan by now, and in a huge slow rise the
level of the vale ascended, more and more completely stony
and arid. The sun had conquered the clouds, though, so
that there was warmth and a pleasant air.

On and on still: unattainably remote, scarp after scarp
came into sight ahead up the distance, and then insensibly
dropped away behind, revealing more and further and further
limitless stretches of plain. On the yellow despair of the
downs on either hand, broad smeared streaks of smooth
whiteness like high-roads indicated the marching-routes of
the sheep-armies that invade them: and at length, learning
that our destination was only forty li farther, fifty having
been now achieved, I alighted to await Bill and the mules,
on a wide torrid expanse of pebbly bareness, veiled in a
peppered scrub of a tamarisk so cropped and tiny that it
might have been new-burnt heather on a starveling moor.
Here, stretched upon a warm hummock in the glare, I ate
my luncheon of toast and honey and cold tea: and then lay
46 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

out deliciously, pillowed on tamarisk, while the little green
lizards frolicked about me so tame that they flirted in between
my knees, and came to peer into my tumbler between sips.
But oh, the utter dead immortal hopelessness of this pale
shallow land: so grisly and uniformly colourless in the grey
ungenial brilliance !

When Bill at length appeared with the mules, we lingered
awhile to contemplate the scene: then pursued them in a
pleasant leisure. Our way now made another cut: we
topped another bluff at a bend, crossed another high level :
and so came down to the river-flat again, by a very magnifi-
cent double cliff and undercliff of red ruin, immediately
overhanging the mud-coloured brabble of the Sining-Hor
far beneath, while beyond a featureless monotony of reclaimed
shingle plain and jujube orchards melted flatly away to the
lifeless ravinated hills.

Then came another long stretch of levels: while the day
darkened awfully to storm and rain driving blue and violet
across all the congregated peaks and high masses on either
side, till at last, while we were resting in a sad little lorn
hamlet over wooden bowls-ful of floor-sweepings tea, the
anger of the gathering dark burst in a furious dust storm,
with rare icy drops of rain in the squalls. After this it
cleared, and the day was yet young when we rode into
Blackwaters, where Mafu, riding ahead, had got us a good
broad-yarded inn, It was a pleasant small place, poor and
bare, on the grey plain in which these little clay-walled towns
and occasional towered farms are peppered, away and away
into the fading perspective, like red islets becalmed on a
lifeless ocean. The people were a jolly crowd too: there
was a Beano raging in the village street when we rode in,
with European photographs revolving in a show. We our-
selves soon became the main exhibit, however: the yard
grew packed with sightseers, and there was much noise of
fun and laughter, especially when a well-directed burst of
the siphon sent some too inquisitive householder staggering
drenched away into the crowd again, amid the delighted
THE START 47

yells of all his friends. So the chill dusk came, with the sky
threatening grimly for us ahead over the hills: in view of
a dawn start on the morrow, we were glad of an early bed,
and hoped the next day’s stage would not prove quite so
arid and Petraean.

The brewing storm erupted during the night in bucketing
deluges, and when we rose it was to a cloudless day of cold,
with new snow transfiguring all the scarpy hummocks of
hills. But the day’s journey was like its predecessors: yet
longer, though, and yet duller, without any grandeurs at
all. Never was there so heartless a land as this is in spring,
surfaced universally in shingle—not well-drawn silt, but
pulverized dead bones of bygone rivers, strewn over the face
of the earth—and with the young green crops barely begin-
ning to peer among the pebbles. But the soil begins to
grow a little better here: no longer is each little rill-marsh
hoar-frosted with salt, as on the preceding day. Chortens!
begin to appear too, advance guards of Tibet that make
one’s heart gulp with sudden pleasure of anticipation. For
a long time I sucked godly emotions, and a glow of pious
fervour from certain big battlemented towers of loess,
square and broadening to their base, that at certain intervals
of the stage rise more or less proudly near the roadside,
according as they are in a less or more crumbling condition
of disrepair. Each of them has five baby towers on the same
model, clustering at its angles or aligned in front of it: I
felt certain they must be the shrines of Bodhisats or Arahats,
with the ashes of their disciples in lesser shrines before them ;
and rejoiced over the evident prevalence of piety in these
parts. Until I ultimately discovered that these little colonies
of towers only mark the stages of the road; and are, in
fact, nothing more august than milestones.

The hills, as you go, become yet more dumpish and dish-
covery: and still the long ascending tracks of the sheep-

1 These, it may be mentioned, are big whitewashed structures,

like a reversed wine-glass, containing relics or ashes of some Saint
or Bodhisat. You will see a picture of one at Tien Tang.
48 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE =

routes, like deep terraces, wind whitely about their flanks,
and broadly sweep to their summits. These began the day
by looking alpine. But as the snow melted, they all returned
to their proper proportions, and their native drab and
destitute dreariness. However, at last there dawned a
vision of hope. From behind the dull lines of fell on the
left, there slid and gradually unfolded a real alpine range,
serrated, peaked and wild and high—the first genuine
mountains I had seen since Lien Hwa S’an faded down the
backward distances of 1914. With hat in hand I saluted the
Kweite-Salar Alps and the hopes that their emergence
aroused. They cheered the long last worst of the way. For
the li appeared to lengthen out telescopically as I advanced,
and Gomer ahead of meon Spotted Fat could hardly coax a
movement out of that cosseted animal. And then, quite un-
expectedly appeared our day’s destination—a village hardly
a mile away sitting in the plain, under a high and rather more
lively-looking range of hill on the right. I congratulated
myself on having reached our stage so soon in the day.
Not a bit of it, only wait. For instead of advancing
placidly up the plain and into the village now immediately
under our hand, we diverged unintelligibly to the right, by a
shoulder with a fine colony of milestone towers, and up and
up and around about among a set of ridiculous irrelevant
hills and gullies. It was as maddening as the approach to
Minchow. And then, when the summit of the sharp little
pass was attained, the reason of these divagations became
clear. For now we descended vertiginously downwards
upon a quite unsuspected river, cold-looking and clear and
dark, flowing down from the right in a splendid deep black
gorge that clove its way through the hills and revealed,
above, in the gap, a country of more hills and higher, with
wintry woods and a real suggestion of heights and alpine
vegetation not so very far away. Deep in the dark chasm
of the gorge the river slept and rippled from pool to pool,
and a wooden bridge gracefully spanned the depths with an
ample high-flung arch. I did not know it, but this was our
THE START 49

first sight of the Da-Tung-Hor, here falling to its junction with
the Sining-Hor, not so many miles’ journey since it received
the beck of Wolfstone Dene up there in the high Alps.

But the river’s lovely past was hidden from me, up ahead
in our own future. We crossed the bridge and ascended
again up the shaly slope of the gorge on the other side, and
over the brink, and round the shoulder, and so at length into
Shan Tang, which had seemed so near such a long time ago.
The next day brought us into the gorges of the Sining-Hor.
The early part of the stage offers no such diversity as that
of the previous day, which begins, on leaving Hei Shuidz’,
with a long footwalk beside the river’s very edge, cold under
the shadow of red crumbling cliffs. Instead, it meanders
up and down along the bare fell-slopes, past many a group of
ruinous castellated mile-towers, with the Kweite-Salar
Alps more and more magnificent on the left. Our track
rounded a corner and traversed an alluvial lap, richly fertile
for a change, with orchards of pear and cherry, every trunk
picked glove-smooth of all old bark that could harbour
noxious bugs, and looking, therefore, unnaturally neat and
naked and pale. Embowered in these orchards nestled a
village, which, though not as ruinous as yesterday’s country-
towns, all smashed and slaughtered by the last Mahomedan
rebellion, was equally perking once more into prosperity
to be smashed in time by the next. Ere long we turned
up to the right, and the valley narrowed, after we had lost
sight of another rich promontory opposite on the left. Far
down beneath us lay the mapped-out plain of the river,
where a tributary beck runs down into the Sining-Hor from
the Kweite-Salar Alps, very splendid now to see, at the head
of their country. And then, after preliminary ups and downs,
we found ourselves in the famous gorges of the Sining-Hor.

These are steep and dark and granitic ; enclosing and deep ;
but rarely precipitous and never magnificent. The valley of
the Sining-Hor from this point is like a string of sausages: a
stretch of amplitude and then a constriction, and so on
repeatedly. The hills are still dry, though; the chief

E
50 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

pleasure is to watch the big rafts come undulating down the
river, each built of some twenty to thirty enormous inflated
yak-skins, containing goods as well as air, and looking like a
bound-up phalanx of dead bloated cattle-corpses. Down the
surging rapids of the filth-coloured river they are sinuously
piloted by a pair of men with big paddles and then swim
easily over the swift smoothness of the pebbled expanses
below. They sometimes bump and ground, but can never
upset : in a trice they can be dismantled or diminished. In
the gorges one of them was good enough, indeed, to stick on a
rock while we were sitting to a snack of food: it was being
lengthily heaved off by its men, and by chance assistants,
all in waders of yakskin or sheepskin, inside out, that sagged
and bellied oddly as the wearers emerged from the water.
The way through the gorge is arduous and tiresome, up
and down. Though much narrower it suggests the Tao
valley near Jo-ni. But the dark hot rocks yield flowers :
nothing was in bloom yet, of course, but these were the first
real plants of my second year—a rock lilac, the Tibetan
Androsace, the sere suggestion of last year’s Adenophora
and Dracocephalum, and abundant in between the torrid
sombre stone as we clambered in the sun-trap narrows, the
fresh green sproutings marbled with milkiness, of Aquilegia
viridiflora (but I always think of this fascinating elf of a per-
verse Columbine as a “ viripeculia”’). A little later the
torrid inky rocks of the gully must be quite gay, but when I
ascended it there was only wreckage and promise, and hard
iron-coloured walls that reverberated the bleak and barren
sunshine in a sweating stuffiness of heat. And all the world of
the wayside in these parts is sheeted in swathes of Iris ensata,
now pushing up in speary dense hassocks of greyish green.
Finally the first gorge reaches its climax in a steep, very
steep, sharp climb over rocks. And on the other side we
drop suddenly into a quite new world. No more pebbled
wastes, no more drab desolations, or dreary simulacral
orchards of Zao’erh, but a fresh wide vale of loess, filled with
real orchards of fruit-trees, and densely set with poplars,
THE START 51

and rich with fertile fields, and studded with happy little
fat clay villages among the trees: and with the Sining hills
(or rather, the hills towards Dangar and the Koko-Nor)
very far away at the end, a serration of bare low ranges
crumpled and corrugated. And water now abounded.
Beyond the first hamlet stretched a line of small bone-dry
hummocky fells, but their base was simply oozing moisture
in a succession of green spongy slopes of marsh. Onwards
we rode, well ahead of the tired mules: and gradually the
Salar Alps came into sight again.to cheer the dull billowing
lines of the pale tawny hills on our left, across the valley.
And here we were joined at last by evidences of civilization.
For round upon us from the right coiled out of the hills the
big main road (capable of carts) and escorted by a line of
telegraph poles from Lanchow to Sining—a branch of the
Great Road through Ping-fan and the sand-blown cities of
the far North, to Kashgar and Samarcand and Holy Moscow.
But ours is the road to Holy Lhasa : and down it the Lord of
Lhasa himself has come. For long you have noticed how all
the little road-arches and gates are broken along the road,
and wondered why the damage is so universal. It is because
the Dalai Lama has passed this way. The sanctity of the
pontiff is such that he must never go under an earthly gate.
Not that one would suspect the importance of this road,
or give it a better name than a cart-track. Onward we
pursued its course through village after village, while the
Salar Alps slid away out of sight. At one point we had to
weather a string of camels, nightmarishly advancing upon
us in a processional vista as interminable as that of Banquo’s
descendants : I anticipated the worst, knowing how ponies
abhor camels, and bolt for miles on the sight or smell of
them. However, anticipations of ill, like watched pots,
very rarely come to the boil : and though I was on the brisk
little iron-grey beast we had bought in Jo-ni, he stood quite
sedately while the camels drifted by in their grotesque and
silent undulations. So without misadventure we came into
Go-Miaodz’, and in time discovered a good inn, new and clean
52 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

and neat, pleasantly fresh, as all recent work is in this con-
valescent country. And here we had a very long wait for
the coming of the caravan that meant the coming of our
dinner : I went up and sat on the flat mud roof, and watched
the ugly greyness that was now beginning to film the
distance in the direction of the Alps.

On the edge of dusk the mules trailed in, and by dusk we
had dined. Suddenly, in the inn yard outside, a violent
noise of smacking and hammering and wails. Amid a
crowd of onlookers, the landlord of an inferior inn upstreet,
which we had first looked at, but decided against, was now
helplessly kneeling and being pummelled by Mafu and Go-go,
who pranced passionately round him and his friend, plant-
ing blows where they saw fit. It soon appeared that the
pair of them had stolen, or connived at the stealing, of one
of our horse-pads, and was now being practically cross-
examined. The sight was too much for the wicked Wa-wa :
dropping the dinner plates he bounded forth to battle, seized
an enormous long-handled wooden spade of about twice his
own. height, and magnificently banged the criminals with
resounding thwacks, in between the more methodical
punches and slaps of the Mafu. All doubt as to the Wa-wa’s
previous career now faded completely: he clearly held no
priggish scruples about murder. To prevent the worst
accordingly, Bill immediately sallied out upon the scene.

In an instant all was uncanny calm; wailings died into
businesslike supplications. The occasion was considered so
important as to call for my own presence : so out I haughtily
stalked, deploying my fullest majesty, and stood with awful
sphinx-like rigidity while the kneeling sinners beat their fore-
heads in the dust before me. Ultimately things got satis-
factorily settled, and we accepted a new pad in pledge for the
restoration of our own, which was to be recovered by the
military authority, on pain of a worse thing. But in this
country of confused clamour and intricate responsibilities it
is always very hard to feel sure that you have got the real
facts of any story : and all I could get certain of in this case
THE START 53

was that there had undoubtedly been a theft committed upon
us, for which the landlord was properly liable.

The next day’s stage for many a mile repeated yesterday’s,
through the wide alluvial plain, red-soiled or loessed, but
always rich with poplar and willow and orchards of apricot
and peach. Then out of the hills on the right, what look
like titanic palaces begin to emerge—clean-cut vast cliffs,
fluted and red, with double horizontal strata topping them,
till they look like colonnades and architraves of porphyry,
hewn in the living hill-front for the entrance to some dead
king’s cave-temple of Egypt or Persia. And at this point the
journey traverses the one real walled town between Lanchow
and Sining. This is Nien-Bi-Hsien, and quite a large place,
both within the walls and outside them, though only half
come to life again from the long agony of the Mahomedan
rebellion. Here we waited to send in cards to the Laoyeh,
and get an escort on to Sining’; and when this was achieved
proceeded outside the city to pause and eat toast in the sun
beneath a high bank of loess from which we were watched by
a gay bevy of women, smiling and comely, with hair done up
behind in an upstanding oval knob, like that which prevails
at Siku, though here it is more flattened out into a duck’s
bill shape.

They lied, however, in saying we only had another 20 li
to go; but they always do. Not remembering this invari-
able rule, we rode on in good heart, through string after
string of unregarded camels, but it was 50 li at least before
we reached the end of the vale, threaded a short little dull
defile, and found ourselves then in a new vale, mostly of
loess, duller even than the later stretches of the last, and
hedged by hills yet dumpier, drabber and uglier, with the end
of the Salar range looming upon us nearer to the left, and
beyond it other snow-ranges, peakier and more jurassic : and
then yet more still, away and away, fading into the dull grey
distance of an afternoon gone steely and filming. And even
now it was still goodness know how far : a feeling of frustrate
crossness began to fill me, as bay after bay of the river
54 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

revealed no village. However at long last, and quite sud-
denly, we did discover our destination, and were blown for-
ward on a stern gale, into a sad little squalid hamlet that
squatted close under a chain of dumpling-like downs, studded
copiously as a pudding with currants of black conglomerate
boulders.

After the last defile, the houses begin more and more to
approach the flat-roofed, box-shaped Tibetan type: but our
inn was Chinese, and poor. It was long before the mules
arrived, as usual: and then we settled drearily into the damp
horse-puddled rooms. But then there arose a rumour of
more rooms and better ones that might be had: we set out
to explore, and very soon found court behind court of
beautiful clean new-timbered buildings aswarm with neat
wives and innumerable little gay babies playing, all appar-
ently of the same age. I thought it must be a Chinese
kindergarten ; but now we penetrated into the main room
and found a noble apartment like nothing I had yet seen on
the road—large and light and airy and high, of fragrant
bright wood work, all hung with pictures and red-satin
banners and scrolls, and with a dais of state, and big latticed
paper windows, and an altar and a reredos of black and gold,
and a full set of ceremonial furniture.

And there, on the dais, sat Paterfamilias himself, busily
impressing a Tibetan visitor with his importance. He wasa
most superior person, in fact, thin and old, with a thin white
beard and a narrow scholastic expression; he treated us
with the greatest discourtesy and many a dishonouring little
breach of etiquette, trying to impose his rank and erudition
upon us, as his excuse for fobbing our party off with an out-
house, while he himself retained these palatial quarters.
But Mafu would have none of this nonsense and so yelled
down his haughtiness and insolence with derision that at
last his batteries were all hammered out of action, and he
gave place to us in crestfallen resentment, none the less
bitter for the obvious pleasure of the Tibetan friend.

So out he cleared and I was duly ensconced for the night,
 

N INTERIOR.

A
THE START 55

amid beauties and comforts and luxuries such as never
before or after did I meet with on the road. The evening
slowly advanced: as the last slants of light began to die,
a door in the far court opened, and in trotted strings of
sheep, come home from their arduous day’s pasturing ; and
then their shepherds, and then whole troops of skipping
tumbling tiny lambs. In a spate they came bucking and
bounding in, to play with the playing babies, and butt into
their supper-bowls of sop, and wrestle with them round the
yard, till babies and lambs and all were one undistinguish-
able scramble of fun. And so, on this Arcadian little scene,
the icy dusk closed in, and the blizzard that now shrouded all
the distant ranges in grey advanced rapidly on the wings of a
shrilling gale that augured illfor the morrow. However I gave
small thought to this as I sank to sleep, quite awed and dazzled
by the pin-new splendour of the decorations around me.
The promise of evil was fulfilled. Snow lay thickly every-
where the next morning, and all the hills were lost in dark-
ness, and the air was grey and sullen. Gloomily we rode out,
upon: a journey even duller than its predecessors. At one
point though, we were cheered by a reminder of how. near
we were getting to Tibet. On the right, almost impending
over the road, jutted ahead a mighty fluted bluff of red
precipice ; and tucked into a cranny near its base neatly
gleamed the windowed square white walls and flat dark
roof of a tiny monastery. Steeply from the foot of the cliff
a high slope of boulders fell away to the plain beneath, and
at one point of the holy path up to the shrine, a crude
colossus of the Buddha, beneath a roof and painted pale
blue on a creamy ground, was carved in relief from the face
of a rock. This is Bei Ma Ssi, which means White Horse
Chapel. I saw no horses there, though, white nor black,
but congregations of camels clustered at rest in the plain.
The day gradually lightened and the snow departed. At
length we crossed an unexpected bridge over the Sining-Hor,
traversed a third defile, last and least of all, and emerged into
the final plain, with the city wall of Sining in a straight low
56 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

line across the distance very far away, and crumply pale
shallow fells in all quarters of the huge wide prospect, and
nowhere the smallest suggestion of an Alp. My heart sank :
the little American Monsignore had spoken of Sining with
such a warmth of affection and longing that, taking for
granted a uniformity in our tastes, I had expected a city
beautiful as the home of dreams, nestling deep and pictur-
esquely into the roots of enormous rugged snow mountains
overshadowing it all round. On my love and longing for
Siku, in between the toes of Thundercrown, I had, in fact,
built up an image of Sining as even more magical, in a cirque
of mountains even more overwhelming : and now here was
nothing but the weariful monotony of yet another dull flat
plain, with yet more corrugated dead dull hills meandering
round the horizon; and ahead of us yet another dull flat
grey city prone across the vast tedium of the prospect.
And still so far away.

We rode and rode: and the city seemed to draw no nearer.
But even the weariest cart-track winds somewhere safe to
town: in due course we found ourselves advancing up the
chaotic desolation of the Eastern suburb, only just beginning
to revive from the ashes in which it was laid by the Mahome-
dan rebellion. And so through the noble double gate into
the city. Here there were ambiguities and ridings to and
fro: but at length we worked our way to the best inn of the
place, and found it very dark and tiny, with a tiny inner
yard which we proceeded to occupy. There we unpacked
and unfolded in the complete fatigue of relaxation after the
strenuous and successful achievement of these first five
days on trek, though, really, I must hope that my com-
placency was physical, and not at all mental: for what is
there so creditable in merely sitting on a horse and going
steadily and uneventfully forward through five long days of
placid dullness, without the slightest hardship or exertion ?
All the same, the arrival at Sining marked the end of the
preface to our year. For now we were once more close upon
the scene of work.
CHAPTER IV
SINING-FU

The inn was a dank unhealthy stinking hole. Our first
care was thoroughly to clean, re-paper and whitewash our
quarters, and to evict the other occupants of the yard—a
rogue-faced fat bull of a doctor-man who lived in the corner
room, and really was a rascal of the worst, with a comely
“sewing woman” (this is the conventional name) in the
opposite room, in whose company he obviously solaced him-
self with love, in the intervals of consultations. For it
became clear that our stay in Sining would have to be a
long one: no chance of getting away to the hills in a day or
two, as I’d fondly hoped. There were the various high
authorities, in the first place, to be visited and consulted
and conciliated, the Governor of the city, the Military
Governor, the Viceroy of the Koko-Nor : and then the distant
ranges must be prospected, to find a likely base for the
summer’s work.

All this would take time: while they were white-papering
the inner rooms (leaving the side cloisons of dark wood
panels as they were—a most modern effect), I took refuge
from the decorators up on the flat mud roof. And there
indeed, there really were mountains—though very far away
in the West, up towards Dangar and the Koko-Nor, a low
remote ruffle of gleaming snow-peaks. And, as I scanned
yet farther, from different elevations of the universal
boundless mud roof that gives you a complete open walk
over every house in a block of Sining between street and
street, I came into view of yet other snow ranges, just
appearing over the high loess crumples that fill the North.

57
58 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

I roamed the roofs, indeed, hither and thither, only
deterred by discretion, as every now and then I would find
myself lookmg down into some neat little deep inner house-
yard, with its central well full of lilac-bushes and viburnum,
and under its verandah the lady of the house unsuspiciously
sewing shoes. When she glanced up to see a foreign head
intruding over the skyline, her expression clearly indicated
disapproval of such tactlessness, and I bashfully retired,
across the undulating mud-stretches with chimney pots
towering here and there, and the occasional shallow surge
of what you might almost call a gable, until I reached the
unquestionable territory of my own roof, fronting upon the
street, with the splendid square wooden tower, and green-
and-azure tiling of the Confucian Temple rising just across
the way.

Sining-fu lies in an open vale, at the tie point of a cross
where four valleys meet. At right angles one broad valley
runs down to the Sining-Hor through the Northern hills ;
and on the South confronting it, another comes straight
from the South, out of the Kweite-Salar-ranges. Just West
of the juncture the city lies expanded, within the irregular
precinct of its walls: up above on the West, several pale
tower-structures on the plain commemorate the repulse of a
Tibetan invasion, and the many miles of rolling slopes that
ascend to the hills on the South below the city are mole-
hilled universally with innumerable myriads of graves,
blurred and obscured in immemorial antiquity. The reason
why the city wall violates the Chinese rule of the regular
rectangle is both curious and pathetic. For while the wall
was building (and still, therefore, damp and malleable), it
appears that there came by one day a dragon. And he was
tired, and lay down along the wall, and found it comfortable
to his back, and so snuggled against it as to bulge it all
out of shape. So that now it has a wavy line, instead of
four precise straight ones with a gate-tower in the middle
of each.

Otherwise Sining is just such another town as Lanzhow,
SINING-FU 59

though smaller, more squalid and crumbling, more remote
and provincial. It has notable buildings, though, the Con-
fucian Temple for one, and the Dung Ling Ssu for another,
a very spacious and stately fane, with ample expanses of
cobbles, and parcelled, pebble-hammered pavements, and
stone lions, and very solid Pailo gateways, and an elaborate
carved theatre-house, and low solemn buildings with tiled
roofs. And the whole grey quiet of the place, lions and
roofs and cobbles and all, is clothed in a lichen-like rust of
golden bronze.

Outside the Northern wall, close under its cold shadow,
there falls away a steep slope, wooded delicately with poplars
and willows, and threaded by bubbling little rills as clear
as diamond in their beds of marsh and lawn, unexpectedly
emerald in April among the sere tawny of the scene: here
there are toy-pagodas, and walks, and little pavilions for
tea. This is the Rosherville of Sining : and down below, by
stony stairways from the Northern gate, you descend into
sparse suburbs where the peach blossom is brilliantly pink
by the end of the month, and so across fields and flats of
loess, perking with drifts of Iris, you come at last to the sandy
shingles of the Sining-Hor, a very broad stretch of pebble
and strand, with silky Oxytropids flaring violet from their
silvery tuffets among the dark stones, or on the pale sand, and
in the middle the river flowfhg, an exiguous thread of
water in April, spanned by a wooden trestle-bridge with
quaking causeway of straw and mud compiled along the
top. But the bridge is only temporary : for that exiguous
thread of water becomes a roaring waste of waters when the
snows of Tibet are loosed in summer ; and no bridge would
have a chance of surviving.

Of all these beauties I had ample time to make the
acquaintance. For Bill declared that he must go off now
on a prospecting tour: and that, as he would want to travel
very quick and very light, and as all his toil (or much of it)
might be fruitless, it would not be worth while for me to
accompany him, with the staff and all the cumbrous para-
60 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

phernalia of the caravan. So I was to stay in Sining, under
the guardianship of Wa-wa and Gomer and Go-go, while
Bill and Mafu, saddled on their bedding, were to fare wildly
forth in pursuit of Alps. Not till his return did we mean to
begin our visits to the Mandarins, so as to have our plans
ready cut and dried to lay before them. So we rested
content with seeing the City Governor, a bead-eyed little
gentleman in furred silks and a bowler hat, with whom we
exchanged a deal of bowing and smiling. And then, on a
glorious day of sunshine, Bill went cantering out of Sining
on the bright little brown pony we had newly bought,
followed by Mafu, touching his hat as he went with the
** Good day, sir,’’ which were his only three words of English,
and reserved for most special occasions.

The days that followed were long and empty, but nearly
always vibrant with the crystalline loveliness of the Northern
Spring. Gradually the earth began to awake, and a clean
thrill of new life fooded my veins after the Winter. Morning
by morning I used to stroll over the expanse of the roofs,
to see how the lilacs and viburnums were advancing in the
little courtyards, On the viburnums there sat myriads of
busy sparrows: no doubt they must have been at work on
some toothsome bug in the branches, as they never seemed
to peck the young buds. And in the afternoons there were
the streets. Being a big city, and so near the border,
Sining is the special centre of the four races—Tibetans,
Mongolians, Mahomedans and Chinese. So that the flow
of street life is very varied and gay.

Not that the streets have the solid prosperous-looking
neatness of the main streets in Lanchow. On the contrary,
Sining High Street is comparable only to a minor lane in
Lanchow : its houses are low and scattered and ramshackle :
big trees overshadow the wider space in front of the decaying
entrance to the Yamen, and the little stalls of curiosities
that occur here and there offer only the saddest old trash.,
But the moving crowds are more brilliant : for besides the
flow of Chinese and Mahomedans, you here have also the
 

THE WALLS OF SINING.
SINING-FU 61

musty red of monks, the rich yellow of high ecclesiastics,
or magnificent strapping Mongols with peaked caps of
fur and scarlet, and scarlet robes, and great square reliquaries
of silver flashing on their breasts. There are numbers
of miserable dusty beggars, too, whom you meet returning
in a flood from the city’s weekly dole of bread. Once I
met a man with hair and eyebrows matted solid by that
curious disease of Plica Polonica: and in particular there
was a tall gaunt maniac or idiot, who always used to appal
me with his resemblance to some wild prophet, some John
the Baptist, stalking down the street: mere skin and
bone, with swollen joints, almost naked but for a sheepskin,
with face thrown up in a wild sibylline glare, and a
dense shaggy mat of hair standing out in a shock all round
behind, like an unkempt and clotted black fleece, all greyed
with dust.

My favourite walk was to the South Gate, from which
one climbs by a long stairway-slope, to the ramp of the
wall. I had never managed to get on to the city wall
at Lanchow, and even at Sining there were sentries on
guard below, and all along the wall itself, a succession of
little guard houses. But no objection was made to my
afternoon strolls, in which I came to take much delight.
For, from this high causeway, you have all the city and
the country unrolled before you, and in the big square
buttress-bays or seated between the battlements, you
can sun yourself deliciously. On the inner side there are
no battlements, and you look straight down into long strips
of garden that flow to the very root of the wall. They are
very pleasant gardens, too, with tall old trees, and dark
spruces, and jungles of flowering shrubs at their feet, and
sumptuous bushes of Viburnum, and winding paths, and
summer-houses lurking in the shady places. And all round,
in the clear distance, roll the hills, and the flat stretches
of the valley: every day the peaks towards the Koko-Nor
seemed to grow bluer, and the crops and orchards of the
four converging alluvial plains perceptibly grew greener.
62 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

April was trailing towards its third week when Bill quite
unexpectedly arrived one afternoon. He had had a very
strenuous time, and returned with nerves strained by hard-
ship, and with fear of failure for the year’s work. For
he had many terrible days of traversing high bare lands, and
arid hills and valleys without any promise: and, when at
last he had come into a big Alpine Chain, it was only to be
confronted with prospects of a fresh Chago-affair at Tien
Tang Sst, where the monks were hostile and unapproachable.
However, as usual, he had succeeded in making friends,
had found a likely centre, and now had returned over a
high Alpine pass, bringing with him clumps of three dormant
primulas.

But now followed yet more delays before we could be off.
An unprecedented snap of cold and snow shut all the country
up again in winter: and Bill, too, needed rest before taking
the road again. We could not even manage the three
days’ journey over the Southward hills to the famous
Abbey of Gumbum, where lives the miraculously-charac-
tered holy tree of Ligustrina amurensis But after all,
many people had been already to Gumbum: perhaps even
the Fathers Huc and Gabet, though their pictures throughout
are of such pure Canton tea-tray style as to set one wondering,
And in any case, one big Tibetan Abbey is very like another:
I should have liked to see Labrang with its Egyptian-looking
square mansions, but Gumbum offered no special attraction
beyond the Holy Tree, and the tombs of eight unfortunate
Buddhas who fell on an evil fate. For the Abbey was once
raided by a barbarous unbeliever: he had the eight sacred
bodies haled before him, and mocked them with a sinister
question: ‘‘ You, Blessed Ones, who know all the past
and all the future, foretell me, then, the day of your own
deaths.” To which, with a perilous pessimism, they
infelicitously answered, “ To-morrow.” ‘ Quite wrong,”
he pounced at them, ‘‘ To-day,” and the eight holy heads
were stricken off on the spot.

But the days dragged for me in that boring little burg.
SINING-FU 63

We filled them with social activities, and on the afternoon
appointed rode out in state to visit the Chang Gwan of the
Koko-Nor. The Viceroy of Koko-Nor Tibet is not really
supposed to have his residence in Sining at all. His proper
seat is in a crumbling and utterly deserted walled town,
out near the dreary borders of the Dark-Blue Sea, Ching
Hai the Holy, the vast and mournful Koko-Nor that gives
the name to his viceroyalty. But Koko-Nor Tibet is a wild
and dangerous land: untameable nomad tribes sweep
across its undulating plains of grass, and very long ago the
Viceroys concluded that they would be a great deal safer
and more comfortable inside the walls of Sining. So to
Sining they retired, and in Sining they have stayed ever
since: only going out once a year to their deserted Viceregal
seat, for a fortnight or so of pomp and state, to receive
China’s due of homage and tribute from the Mongol and
Tibetan princes. But they are not officially resident in
Sining: they are officially invisible and unknown there,
without standing or existence—though in practice, of course,
their prestige far overtops that of the City Governor, who
is actually subordinate to the Viceroy of Kansu.

Off we all rode in pomp, and round to the rather squalid-
looking small Yamen in a side-street. But it proved
surprisingly big: we were led along from court to court,
till we came out into a very spacious garden, with tall
trees, and a summer-house on a mount, and a muddy moat
with a bridge and many little plots. Here in the verandah
there met us the stumpy little bowlered figure of the Chang
Gwan, a stout, heavy-faced gentleman, with very long
drooping moustaches. For, alone among the Viceroyalties
of the new Regime, that of the Koko-Nor was still in the
hands of a Manchu.

Ceremoniously he conveyed us indoors, to a magnificent
square stone-paved apartment of state, the finest I had
yet seen—with three of its sides all light with glass panes
and paper lattices. Arrayed up and down it were white-
clothed tables and chairs, each table adorned with boughpots
64 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

(in horrible European vases) of forced viburnum in its white
form, as lovely and sweet as the best white lilac. At a
table, prepared with chalky sweets, candied pear-slices,
and biscuits, we sat and highly conversed : until, on a ques-
tion from the Chang Gwan, Mafu let it be known that we
entertained no evangelistic views about the bottle, such
as are proclaimed by Protestant (but not by Catholic)
missionaries. A thimbleful or so of wine all round
accordingly cheered up the party considerably : the Chang
Gwan blossomed into a charming and childlike joviality,
putting questions of a devastating indiscretion to the
missionary who on this occasion was our chaperone. He
became, in fact, quite intimate: studied the cut of our
hair and the make of our clothes, and came closer to me to
find out how my moustache was fixed, so as not to flop
forlornly like his own; and then observed that my nose
is not, unfortunately, as straight as my character. Upon
which discovery he delighted the assemblage by remarking
that the poor thing was “ sick.”

Then, when the entertainment and the catechism was done,
the Chang Gwan took us out to see his garden, with rows
upon rows, in successive yards, of lilacs, potentillas, vibur-
num, peonies and roses and jasmine in pots and vats.
Evidently the Viceroy of the Koko-Nor followed the Manchu
tradition, and was as keen a gardener as the Grand Dowager,
his late mistress, that ‘‘ worthy gentlewoman, and notable
lover of these delights.”” He even had cold-houses, too,
for his plants, to winter them; and warmed go-downs to
force them, full of jasmine and viburnum blooming softly
in the soft white glow of the paper walls. He gave me a
bush of the white form, seeing my enthusiasm; and I,
in return, seeing that he also had European pansies and
stocks in pots, promised to get him more seeds over from
England. So at length he saw us out, down through the
garden; and showed us yet another sight as we went.
For there, beneath a noble tree of Ligustrina, stood a noble
tame elk, with magnificent antlers, and his elegant wife

 
SINING-FU 65

close by. After which we departed, feeling we had laid
good foundations for our summer, though the plan-talk
had hitherto been only a vague pleasantness, the limitations
of territory and authority being so very uncertain on the
Border that no Chinese Mandarin will ever commit himself
beforehand about letting one go to this place or that.

The very next morning we were thrown into a flurry by
news that Ma Da-ren the Military Governor was on his way
to call. However, it was not till 11 that he arrived. Hoe
turned out to be a Mahomedan—a huge tall voluminous
fellow, with a pleasant heavy smile, escorted by a whole
tail of followers including some smart uniformed soldiers.
He was perfectly amiable, but rather unhelpful in talk.
I felt him a guarded cold personality, not in the least like
the gentle little jovial Chang Gwan. But he was quite
as much interested in our things, though critically and
acquisitively as well. He examined the siphon, the rifle,
and even the flower-sketches. But the field-glasses appealed
to him most of all. Nothing would serve him but to try
them. He bunched up his satin skirts and climbed up
the ladder on to the roof: much to my terror, lest the
yielding insecure mud-plateau should collapse beneath
his weight. However it held good despite its tremblings,
and with grunts of enthusiasm he viewed the prospect
o’er through the glasses, highly appreciative of their military
value. He sent for his own to show us, and they helped
to account for his enthusiasm, being a flimsy gimcrack
pair of opera glasses. I had, in fact, much ado to evade
his proposals to buy mine: and only did so at last on
promise to wire to England for another pair. And so at
length got rid of him after a two-hours’ visit that left us
pale and wan.

Spring till tarried, and the winds continued glacial: I
thought I saw a film of green appearing on the low range
outside the city on the South : so sallied forth with Gomer
across the dumplinged millions of graves up the spur,
where a grand red temple sits, in which people give parties.

F
66 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

But when I got there, I found only a tight-packed carpet of
Oxytropis, and the tiny gorse-like Caragana, in bushes
nibbled almost flat: and there was no other sign of life
whatever, except two enormous Roman-nosed old ravens
ona bummock. So home I came, and on the way, by mere
chance, came upon my first flower of the year. For, down
in a hollow of the loess sheltered and warm, there was a
small flat plot of turf, all glowing with the lovely little
pale intelligent faces of Viola Patrinii.

But even this delight was ere long put out of my head
by the bustle and fuss among the staff at home on news
that the Chang Gwan was on his way to call. It seemed a
small and squalid place in which to entertain so large a
potentate as the Viceroy of Koko-Nor Tibet: however, he
was perfectly happy and pleased with everything; and
though he did also stay for a couple of hours, he was always
such a simple jolly old gentleman that I never found him
anything like so heavy in hand as the rather malign
massiveness of Ma Da-ren, the Military Governor. We
showed him all our tricks, the field-glasses, the siphon, the
sketches : it was characteristic of the difference between the
Chinese and the Mahomedan outlook that whereas M& had
been bored by the sketches and thrilled by the glasses,
the Chang Gwan was only politely interested in the latter,
but became absorbed in the sketches, particularly in those
of the flowers. He chortled and chuckled copiously : but
was still much upset about my poor nose. It continued
evidently sick, and he was anxious to know if it hurt.

But, above all, things of the toilet appealed to this vain
old charmer: he was very desirous to have some turn-
down linen collars like mine, and there came a quite ecstatic
moment when we waxed the enormous droops of his mous-
tache for him, and turned them up in long thin tails. A
mirror was called for : into it he deeply gazed for a moment ;
and then His Excellency, the Viceroy of Koko-Nor Tibet,
began giggling with delight, as coyly and consciously as
any schoolgirl.
SINING-FU 67

A few days later Ma gave a party for us, a vastly cere-
monious Beano. We walked to it after lunch, when the
summons came; and the horses were led in front of us in
state, so as to-save our “face” from the shame of going
afoot. We found his palace a huge and solid structure, and
the decorum of our reception was to match, entirely un-
Chinese in its regulated and formal magnificence. Through
a long vista of courtyards we had to proceed as majestically
as we could, with hands at the salute, up a ranked avenue of
soldiers presenting arms: and as we crossed the threshold
of the last gate towards the verandah (where MA, as massive
as a mountain, stood awaiting us) the band burst suddenly
into a braying blare of music. M4 now led us into the main
hall, and thence aside into a lateral room, all tapestried
round with scrolls of gold and scarlet-and-gold. There
were treasures of old bronze, too, and a lovely carpet,
and all the chairs and state-seats were frocked in vermilion
silk caparisons, elegantly broidered. Installed on the
main throne, I sat and nibbled the usual zakoushka of
nuts and sweets: gradually the select few fellow-guests
gathered: and in due course we moved out on to the
verandah again, for Bill to take a photograph of the
gathering.

In the middle of the group the General loomed gigantic,
with his scarlet umbrella of state upborne behind him.
Half-way through the proceedings, though, he must needs
go and don his uniform. This took a long while, but he
certainly looked no less magnificent when he reappeared
in it, and the state umbrella in the background, like a
deep-flounced table on a pole, pointed an effective contrast
between the old style and the new. Meanwhile the whole
household and all the hangers-on were gathered densely
in the courtyard to see the fun. And among the crowd
M& spied the nurse, and the hope of his house, a fascinating
little urchin in scarlet. He, too, must of course be immor-
talized: and this put dinner further off than ever, for
neither bribes, persuasions nor cajolements could prevail on
68 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

him to face the camera. However, at last all was accom-
plished, and we moved in to food.

This went by rote; and Bill, as usual, sustained our
reputation by intrepidly luxuriating on all the gristles
and soused elastic of la haute cuisine in China. I myself
acquired much credit by drinking the health of my mother,
whose birthday it was: but when, on further inquiry,
it appeared that she was by no means yet a centenarian,
my credit correspondingly declined. There is nothing
venerable in China about having sprightly parents of half
a century or so: veneration dawns only upon the eighties,
and increases by geometrical progression year by year.
I myself felt almost reverend, in fact, with age, before the
course of a First Class Chinese dinner (there are three
grades, and woe betide anybody who offers you the wrong
one) had unfolded its full length. It was a relief when the
bowls of rice appeared and Ma rose up and escorted us all
the way down the courtyards to the outermost gate, amid
awful bursts of braying from the bands, that made the
ponies bound wildly about in terror.

I feared the worst, but Go-go held Big Grey tight, and
I clambered up, and made my bows, and rode forth straight-
backed in conscious pomp through the admiring multitudes,
amid an eruption of brazen blasts like pandemonium.
Then, round the corner of the street, we dismounted, to walk
humbly home. And, though it was now half-past six, and
the day filmed with cloud, the air was soft and balmy to
breathe, as I had never felt it since leaving beloved Siku.
The spring was really come at last: we dined out of doors
in the yard, under a night now glorious with stars and
moon, in an inexpressible tranquillity of warmth.

And the spring in Sining floods the whole city in a sudden
sea of pink peach-blossom. Ma Da-ren’s garden is a noble
sight then. It is a very big open park in the heart of the
town, and now, on invitation, we went one afternoon to
see it. There is no residence attached, but through the
gate you find yourself entering a series of wide courtyards
SINING-FU 69

with weedy plots and irrigation runnels: there are com-
plicated rockeries and pavilions and pagodas perched
about, and a big high gazebo on a mount, and spacious
derelict cloisters, and summer-rooms, and empty pools.
And all of it enforested in the shade of huge spreading
poplars, high over the tangles beneath, of peach, and plum,
and lilac and rose, and barberry and viburnum, and aged
masses of tree-peony.

In the end of April it is all a haze of shell-pinkness, with
the blue blur of bare poplar-branches beyond, and then,
in the Westward distance, bluer than all, the Alps of the
Koko-Nor. It was the first time, too, that I had ever
seen Viburnum fragrans blooming in its full magnificence
out of doors—an epoch-marking instant in anyone’s life.
Gasping with the loveliness of that sad abandoned ground,
we roamed and sauntered, climbed the outermost wall to
look down alternately into the city and the garden through
the veil of peach-bloom, and wandered among the desolate
cloisters and corridors and grey old pleasure rooms crumbling
to decay. And then, out of nowhere, as it seemed, the
little M&’s appeared, with a withered patriarch acting as
nurse. Boys and girls, they were a very friendly crowd,
and played with us, and escorted us round, and helped
us take photographs of the viburnum, but bolted wildly,
with squeaks and squawks and giggles, whenever we turned
the camera in their own direction.
CHAPTER V
OVER THE ALPS

Peach-bloom in the plains ought to herald the unlocking
of the hills; so now we felt we could fairly ripen matters
for the start. Everything went on oiled wheels; mules
and men and mandarins were all amenable; we even
succeeded in selling Spotted Fat, and replacing him by a
sprightly little beast with a good “dzo.” For Sining is a
notable place for horse-coping, and here, for a price, you
can get special specimens of ‘“ dzo-ma ’’—that is, ponies
trained to a very rapid amble, quick as a smart trot, but
perfectly smooth and effortless, and easy to the rider as
if he were sitting in a Pullman arm-chair. Even from
Peking do horse-fanciers, foreign as well as Chinese, send
for amblers to Sining. As for Spotted Fat, clotted in incor-
rigible laziness, one-eyed, sullen and demoniacal, I was
determined to have no more of him at any cost, even if I
should have to give him away, or bribe somebody to accept
him. So that I was agreeably surprised to find a somebody
actually simple enough to purchase him for nineteen taels,
which is about £2 18s.

It was, then, in sound and perfect delight that we saw
the mule-packs corded and got on to their cradles and
these duly lowered on the mules. In a morning of clear
dazzling brilliance we rode out of Sining on the 3rd of May.
At first we went back Eastward again down the valley :
but soon turned leftwards to the river, and crossed by a
double bridge to its far side, along which we continued
among willows and poplars, now growing green, and amid
orchards gone dingy by this time towards their fruit. But

70
OVER THE ALPS 71

everywhere the double peach-bloom was still in the climax
of its almost intolerable loveliness, pink as no rose is ever
pink, in a furious clean glow. And now, about 10 li down
the Sining-Hor, we turned at a sharp right angle up to the
left, into the valley of the Wey-Yuan-Pu-Hor. The valley
of Officialton River is very like that of the Sining-Hor,
except that it is not so wide, running through just the same
(if rather ruddier) Saharan dry ranges of hummocks.

But always, ahead of us at the top of the far distance, we
now had the Da-Tung Alps to cheer us—an amazing appari-
tion after all these miles and months of mere loess desolation.
This whole country runs so high, of course, that the peaks
themselves by no means have their proper height-value
in the view. The wide open vale of Sining and its encom-
passing shallow downs suggest nothing in the world less
than an Alpine country: yet Sining itself could look down
on the Mont Cenis. For its elevation, though variously
estimated, is about 7,000 ft., and the crumpled hills attain
another 1,000 feet; you are well up here already on
your way to the Roof of the World. But here the slant
of the Eaves is so enormous and so slow and smooth,
that you have little sense of rising, and none at all of
the height you are at: when you have reached the
Koko-Nor itself you have still no realization of height, and
the Sacred Sea, the highest of the world’s lakes, lies so
vastly expanded in so vast and dull a country of low undula-
tions and simple-seeming shallow ranges, that you might
be down on the level of the ordinary sea itself, at an uninter-
esting part of its shore, instead of 12,000 ft. up on the
Tibetan highland, with Alpine chains all round you, camou-
flaged as downs and dunes.

The Da-Tung Alps belong to the Northern, not to the
Southern mountain system of Asia. Round the South
run the Himélya, and thence Northward the Tibetan
highland breaks down into China in a huge succession
of mountain chains, roughly parallel. And up these the
Himalyan Flora continues, gradually modifying. But
72 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

the Min S’an and then Lama Ling and Lotus Mountain
are the last fading efforts of the Alps, and from Didao
North to Sining there is nothing more but fells of gravel
and loess, till North of Sining you meet the advancing
surge of that other mountain system which corresponds to
the Himalya, sweeping in a gigantic curve round Northern
Tibet, splashing isolated ranges downwards, from the
main breakers of the Kwen Lun, the Ala S’an and the
Altai, right across Turkestan, Siberia, Mongolia to the
Long White Mountain of Manchuria, and the Yablonoi
chain right away up to Kamschatka.

And this northern sweep carries the Northern Flora,
repetitions and cousins of old Alpine friends. Diminishing
as they come South, the northern races fade out in the
downward-dying ranges above Sining, just as the ascending
Himalyan Flora dwindles up to the Min S’an and Lotus
Mountain. So that, between the two systems of Alps and
Alpines, there here comes a real hiatus, across which some
of the races succeed in shaking hands. The Da-Tung
Alps, in fact, are a meeting-point of Northern and Southern,
both weak at the extremity of their stretch. A few ranges
higher up the world, or lower down, and you would be in
the bull’s eye of either North or South : the Da-Tung gives
you neither the one thing nor the other, but a strained
attempt at combination.

This, however, is to proticipate. That May morning, in
that clear pale valley, the Da-Tung Alps ahead were the land
of promise, suggesting the Maritimes as you see them from
La Napoule—a long line of serrations and snowy pyramids,
utterly (and had I stopped to consider that difference further,
ominously) unlike the Dolomitic castellations of Thunder-
crown and the Min S’an; rising from crumpled unwooded
fells of lovely mauve tones, Very gradually the valleys
mount in an ample leisure to the leisurely lines of the
foothills: the whole country forms so huge and high a
pédestal for the mountains as almost to diminish them.
From North-West to South-East descends the corrugated
OVER THE ALPS 73

complicated mountain system of the Da-Tung Alps. Behind,
in the deep trough of them, runs the Da-Tung-Hor, but up
their Western front the Alps decline on to a cushion
of foothills, running out down the long slope of the high-
lands below in ribs like breakwaters, between which, from
out of the Alps, descend vast fan-shaped deltas of long-
dead rivers, stony moorland wastes now, with only a trickling
rill and an abundance of boulders to suggest the remote
ages when those mountains must have expended their
substance so furiously in such furious volumes of water.

The rise of the lowland valley is very long, dull and flat
(though steadily, imperceptibly ascending) over tracts of
loess and levels, with irrigation runnels in the track, thread-
ing the expanses of white-stemmed poplars, now beginning
to shimmer with green. But already there began to be
flowers. On all the torrid downs the goat-cropped tight
little dumps of Caragana were golden as gorse: densely
crowded masses of Iris Ensata were spearing up in the
levels, and at one point, on the edge of a kloof, a vinous
flare of purple gave me my first sight of Iris tigridia : while
at the very entrance to the Officialton valley a metallic
yellow Adonis had paradoxically appeared in the dry
lands.

And before us, and behind, the distance was filled with
mountains. Higher and higher in the South-West unfold
the Kweite-Salar Alps, as you advance North-East towards
the developing masses of the Da-Tung Alps. Flatter and
flatter goes the valley, though, less and less poplared, but
advancing steadily towards the foothills, until at length
it fades out into a wide irregular sea of plain, curving
beneath their slopes. More often than not we were in the
expanded shingles of the river, now flattened out into a
convergence of many stony little becks. Officialton was
very coy: long after we had divined its presence far ahead,
in the upmost flat of the river-bed, in one of the many
poplared divergencies towards the foothills, it eluded us
steadily ; and village after village brought us no nearer,
74 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

though the mountains now rose more and more immediate
in front of us in a wide semicircle, very dark and wild and
rugged, powdered with snow, and suggesting the Cottians
without the Viso.

Ever upwards we advanced, in the indefinite valley-
head, and at length, about 4.30, turned suddenly, and
saw a seeming rampart of loess ahead of us, and a curly
tower, ensconced beneath a little green-and-red promontory
that here jutted into the highland plain.

It was Officialton at last: into it and round about and
through it we rode, in search of the Yamen, and Mafu,
and the inn that he had ridden on in front to secure. The
smart Mahomedan soldiers whom Ma Da-ren had given us
for an escort secured us everywhere the most respectful
salutations : but still there was no inn, and the Yamen was
shut, and the Lao-yeh away. Never was there a more
concealed little tumbly place, too, with complicated loess
walls, and inner walls, and Gazebo-towers at their corners.
But as we rode in and out it showed as a very prosperous
townlet, full of fat shops, and oddly abundant in flowers and
plants in pots.

But I was glad at length to discover our inn, long, and
narrow-yarded, with a good gabled mud roof all round,
on which I immediately climbed up, to sit and watch, over
the scattered crumbling loess roofs and gables of the town,
and the black poplar fog beyond, and the high purple hill
behind, how the slants of sundown deepened bluely in the
sharp corrugations of the Kweite-Salar chain, now pale and
cold in the opalescent twilight under the arch of a grey
sky, with yet another range showing dazzling white in
sunshine, very far away over a low depression, against the
clear gentle gold of sundown that filled the arch, while
along to the right the range seemed to continue to another
“massif ’’ by a dipping bridge of lesser hills, from which
one point in especial stood violently up, in a solid beak of
purple all by itself.

Officialton contains many Chinese, but it has its name
OVER THE ALPS 75

from being the central borough of the aborigines. Like
pebbles scattered in a flood, there occur all over China,
here and there in the ocean of Chinese, Mahomedans,
Mongols and Tibetans, these queer little outcrops of dying
races forgotten from of old. And on this Westward fall
of the Da-Tung Alps you come on this territory of the
Tu-ren, the Children of Earth, as the Chinese call them ;
which is nothing more nor less than “ A’royOoves,”
aborigines. Their central point is Officialton, and they
pervade just this one small spot on the face of China, a
curious race, wholly unlike the Chinese, the Mongols, the
Tibetans, and the Mahomedans, if only in the fact that they
are very dark, and very dense with curly black hair.

As for their women, these are in a much more magnificent
style—stalwart stately ladies, who stride over the country
in sweeping draperies of red and blue, with swinging chains
of silver, and square silver reliquaries on their bosom, and
two broad leathern stoles, before and behind, adorned
with large round plaques of white porcelain. On their
heads they wear a gigantic superstructure, exactly like that
of the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland, or the head-dress
in which Queen Isabeau de Baviére accepts the tome of
Christine de Pisan—a swelling edifice of scarlet, rounded,
with a dip in the middle, over which is draped a deep
valance of blue fringe, and a blue veil behind. One would
not think the court costume of Queen Isabeau conducive
to rural activities, but these medizval-looking matrons
ply their businesses unimpeded, and can even show an
undesirable activity ; for while they are quite friendly and
curious, they are also incurably coy about the camera,
and the moment you switch it in their direction, take to their
heels, and become a mere blur of red and blue, flapping
across the face of the world with the agility of Atalanta.

Officialton was a friendly pleasant place too: even the
people of the town brought presents of corn and beans,
and a general amiability prevailed—perhaps because the
little town specializes on the kindly gift of Bacchus, and is
76 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

famous, far and wide, for the purity of its spirit. With this
we took steps to stock our cellar for the summer: it was
clean and dry and pure, and clear as white water and hot
as white fire, inexpressibly nasty, like quintessential paraffin,
but violently and immediately prophylactic against cold
and wet in the mountains. No wonder if Officialton is so
beautifully bonhomous : even the air of it is as if “ a passing
fairy had hiccoughed, and had previously visited a wine-
vault.” A deep joy pervaded me that evening, to be so
close at last to the hills, though not in sight of them, and
still with the barrens all around. For the main Alps have
long vanished behind their children before you reach
Offcialton: and round behind the town the children rise
so abruptly as wholly to usurp one’s attention—a sweep
of high corrugated craggy purple peaks, dark and splendid,
and, on this, their Western face, entirely bare of woodland.

But the barrens are more varied here, with stretches of
sward: the next morning Bill rode away ahead with the
Wicked Wa-wa, on some pretence that thinly veiled his
real purpose of getting things perfectly prepared for my
arrival in the mountains, and I was left to a quiet day of
sauntering in Officialton.

The morning was dark and filmy, but the afternoon
cleared to perfect glory. Into the dancing air I sallied
forth, attended by the Go-go and two of the Mahomedan
soldiers, (But the remaining seven of the dozen with which
we had been favoured we had now sent back, for want of
food for them in the Alps: taking care to keep two Mahome-
dans, so as not to damage the “face”? of M& Da-ren.)
For hours we wandered round and about: rarely have I
known a day of such dazzling sparkle, with such wonderful
clouds and colours, and floating films of rain occasionally
drawn over the dark sapphire crags, and the air keen and
virginal with freshness as a boy’s laughter, except when it
was winged with wafts of stale wine, dull and musty, from
the town. Outside the walls there are wide patches of
culture, interspersed with stretches of grave-bummock
OVER THE ALPS 77

sward as fine and green and close and springy as the most
perfect tennis court, with dead walls and boundaries here
and there, melted down under a lacquer of the same vivid
turf.

Wide yards of it, too, are made of a tiny matted Edelweiss,
serried in thousands of minute silver-grey rosettes, soft and
silky, on which sits tight a stemless galaxy of fluffy silver
stars. This is Leontopodium F.740, and if it will only
keep its neat ways in richer soils and cooler moister climates
I foresee it as a wonderful turf-plant over here also, and
especially desirable if you can contrive to get the purple
chalices of Crocus speciosus to come perking through its
silver floor. So in a warm ecstasy I wandered, and finally
lay out on the grass of a ruined tower, rapt in the marvellous
rich colours of the nearer ranges, and the diaphanous blue
loveliness of the far ones. The Perrier-Jouet air crowded
me with beatitudes, and the mood lasted through the
evening, though the night came down muggy and dark in
a uniformity of cloud that promised ill for the morrow.

And handsomely was the promise fulfilled. Agog with
the joy of actually going up into the mountains, I spurned
my truckle-bed at 7, and leapt out into a dark chill morning,
as dull and gloomy as if the world indeed were feeling last
nightish from its raptures of the day before. The darkness
deepened, denser grew the clouds, as packing proceeded
for the culminating stage. Hope bubbles in me always
irrepressible, though, and the joy of going by far outweighed
the fear of pains in the process. My only worry was for
nine poor white hens, tied in two pendent bunches by their
collected feet, upside down on either side of a mule.
I tried to urge other methods of conveyance, but Mafu
was quite firm, and I had long since learned better than
to interfere with things in China.

So I mounted up on to the Grey, and off the procession
started. A wild flow of large raindrops immediately began
driving at us on a bitter gale, and the cloud deepened towards
night, and the hidden mountains bellowed afar in rolling
78 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

thunders. We rode along and along for an hour or more
beneath the red promontory that juts upon the town. And
we rode now in the blind white obscurity of a dense snow-
storm that blotted out almost everything. But I could just
see that culture soon faded out off the flat vale of the beck
(but not on the hill) giving place to a dark-soiled marish
expanse of green, grass and sedge, on which ran strange
big partridge-like birds ; while on the far side rose a range
of violently red ferruginous bummocks. And ahead, dimly
looming, were the mountains : as the snow gradually thinned
and ceased, at last they came out profoundly dark in wet
violet, almost black. But now we turned up sharply to
the right, and over the promontory by a steep pull,-and
down as steeply on its other side, into another flat moorland
stretch. Crossing the wide vale we entered a long winding
ravine, where the loess expanses were clothed in Iris
Ensata. The Alps were nearer now, our direction slanting
towards them, over successive breakwater downs and their
intervening deltas.

It was all steely and cold and dark, but soon the snow
returned, and in a blinding white flurry we climbed a very
steep slope of red earth, and rounded a high bare breast of
down towards a col. Here, in such weather, there could
be no question of riding, for the track was a mere porridge
of slimy slush, some six inches wide on the brent face of
the fell. So I alighted and toiled up as best I could through
the blizzard ; and underneath my feet, and all about me on
the slope, were carpets and cushions of Androsace tibetica,
astonishingly broad in leaf, and always of a lovely pinkness,
wherever I saw a rare early bud beginning to open its
round fascinating face on this snowy world.

Now from the neck in dense and denser snow we descended
into a bare little glen as white as midwinter, in which a tiny
flat-roofed village huddled. I hoped that this might be
Weston-of-the-Pass, which I knew occurred on the journey.
In the desperateness of the day I almost meditated calling
a halt here, instead of attempting the passage of the Alps.
OVER THE ALPS 79

But the difficulty of travelling was not so great as it might
have been, for the wind and snow were driving down on us
from behind. So on we went, and the place was not Weston-
of-the-Pass at all. And now suddenly the darkness lessened
and lightened, and in a few minutes more the snow was
over, and we were debouching, under a clear sky, down into
the very wide flat vale of a river. Here we turned sharply
up it to the left: and there, only a mile or two in front of
us at the top of the plain, rose the craggy fastnesses of the
Alps, virgin in new snow, and toweringly magnificent, even
though these were not really the main Alps at all, but only
their foothills and buttresses still.

In quiet relaxation we moved easily forward, over the soft
springy sward of the delta, strewn with many rounded
boulders that spoke of bygone ages when a real river lived
here, and not merely one small beck: until we were within
two miles or so of where the glen of the pass came coiling
out of the Alps, and widened into the plain. On the left,
along beneath the projecting spur of downs, now appeared
Weston-of-the-Pass, crouching and crumbling in its poverty.
For all this country runs so high, and its conditions
are so harsh and Alpine, that this is the very topmost
limit of possible cultivation, and even so, the grain only
ripens here in one season out of three. So that Weston
hangs on to a bare livelihood by the skin of its teeth,
the last and poorest village up towards the Alps.

We did not pass through, but kept away to the right, over
the plain. By a big square grain-fortress out in the flats
I got off to eat, and wait the arrival of the mules and the
two poor little donkies,t now labouring far behind. They
were so long in coming, in fact, that at last I strolled forward
again up the turfy levels that stretch two miles or so to
the mouth of the gorge, with the mountains impending on
either hand. Tucked into a high fold of the fell on my
right, there appeared the neat church and monastic buildings
of Bread Abbey—Mo-mo Ssu in Chinese, and Manto Ssu

1 Hands off, critics; this is the spelling of the Divine Jane.
80 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

in Tibetan—but otherwise the scene was perfectly gaunt
and lifeless and Alpine, with many a promise, I thought,
beginning to dawn in the elastic Alpine dampness of the
sward, which reminded me most vividly of those high turfy
stretches below the Clear Lake on Moncenisio.

The caravan was very slow in overtaking me. I was
almost in the mouth of the defile by this time : so turned to
stroll back and meet it, with a wonderful new prospect
now facing me, of the vast upland fall to Officialton, sombre
in green and blue, and beyond it, most imperial under
the wild sky, in violent purples, the long distance of foot-
hills, and the crested sweep of the Kweite-Salar Alps.
Hardly had we joined forces and turned back and entered
the gorge, than there met us wayfarers descending. And
these, though I did not recognize them, proved to be the
Tibetan interpreter, lent us by the Chang Gwan, to talk
straight words to the monks of Tien Tang, returning with
a friend. They both produced notes from Bill, in which he
advised me, if the weather promised ill, to halt for the
night at Weston, as the pass was very steep and high and
hard. However, the day looked as if it had now definitely
broken into decency, and my own inclinations are always
against leaving a job half done. I took counsel with
Mafu, and found that his opinion was the same. So, as the
day was still young, we concluded to proceed : with smiles
and bows we parted from the interpreter, and sped him
on his downward way to Weston.

Soon we were well into the throat of the defile, between
steep slopes of Rose and Barberry and Daphne, all still
as mere an undecipherable blur of deadness as if it were
mid-December : except for the glossy dark evergreen of the
Daphne, in its rather straggly little bushes. And hardly
were we safe caught in the toils of the ravine than the day
darkened once more, and soon a third snowstorm, even
heavier than its predecessors, was softly enveloping us in
its embrace, and wholly wiping out the prospect in every
direction. It descended on us windless, silent, with an
OVER THE ALPS 81

uncanny relentlessness of calm: we climbed and coiled
in a numb lethargy, drifting through a white dream. At
one point, indeed, on a scree-slope we were crossing in a gully
I caught a flare of purple on the snow and the dark wet
shingle ; and leapt from my saddle to the first primula of
the year. This made sunshine: otherwise only dim ghosts
of peaks, dolomitic and fantastic, far above me, at first
suggested themselves: and soon even these faded, and all
was nothing but a blind whiteness of dark, in which we
perpetually toiled forward, without knowing how or where.

After a long time of this I was sensible that we were
coming to the pass itself, the work growing harder, the rise
of the ground, the loops of the track becoming steeper.
And then, looking up through the universal snowfog, I
was appalled to see that vanishing dim ladder of coils,
serpentining up above me so fearfully steep and high, till
it melted into the vague, with no suggestion of ever reaching
an end. I got off to climb: the snow was very deep, the
ascent of the severest: across the whiteness scudded
whirring coveys of that big fat snow-grouse which is called
the Blood Pheasant, because it is neither bloody nor a
pheasant. In the obliterating silence of the dark these
made the only sign of life, until far up out of sight came an
elfin jangle of bells. And then, emerging like ghosts,
descended on us Bill’s mules returning down to Weston.
We met, and passed: their men told us we were nearing
the crest. And in that same moment the hopeless darkness
broke, the snow ceased, the clouds ravelled out by magic,
and there was the sun supreme in a Heaven of blueness and
whiteness unbelievable.

In all the days of all the years you might never have the
luck to be on Wolvesden Pass in such conditions. My heart
thumped, agonizing with height and ecstasy, as I toiled up the
remaining yards, and stood on the actual crest, some 13,600 ft.
above the sea, delirious in the vista of marvellous peaks all
round me, swimming among silvery vapours, and blinding in
the unmitigated glory of virgin snow. Over the brink,

G
82 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

deep down below, lay the head of Wolfstone Dene, and its
course was soon diverted by the whole splendid panorama
of the main Da-Tung Alps, the cruel needle of Omos, and
the stately gables of Achthos, Axeinos and Thanatos. To
right and left, guarding the pass, soared up the peaks of
Kelainé and Keraun6, the one as white now as the other :
while down the way we had come lay the curves of the
gorge, deep under the crags and pinnacles of wet blue and
violet, gleaming in the sun; and out beyond, beneath
straight heavy layers of purple cloud and golden horizon,
lay the plains and rivers, very remote and sullen. It was a
vision of crystal fairyland, a transformation scene in some
Olympian pantomime—cruelly vast in scale, cruelly blue
above, and cruelly white all round in the glare, with only
here and there rock shadows as black as jet, and dark
fantastic pinnacles of dolomite jetting up from the slopes
in phallic towers with streaming flanks of wetness in the
sunshine.

The mountains being all new to me, were as yet, of course,
nameless: now was the obvious moment to immortalize
them in a photograph. But I was high ahead of the toiling
caravan; out of the white depths below, its line of minute
black dots came slowly coiling. At last, after half a crowded
hour of glorious but impatient waiting (for the sun was
going quickly westward, and imperilling every moment
the portrait of Kerauné) Go-go appeared, flopping to and
fro on a mule, with those tragic hens hanging stark on
either side, mere bunches by now of dead white feathers,
stiff and staring. And it then came out that it was Lay-gor
who that day had the privilege of carrying the camera.
And Lay-gor was the very last of all, in attendance on his
own two little donkies, still far away down at the tail of
the caravan. So there I still had to wait another hour,
while the mules went jingling on, dropping out of sight
down the Eastward wall of the pass. Every moment the
light on Kerauné got more wrong, as the day began quickly
dying. Warmth and radiance sank into a solemn twilight,
OVER THE ALPS 83

and the snows turned coldly blue. I kept life in my feet
by prospecting for plants in the reef of rocks that is the
actual crest, and for seed-vessels perking from the snowfield
of the slopes and aréte. But there was evidently nothing
new : the Poppy was the Harebell one, and the sere Primula
pods were certainly Woodwardii. And now Lay-gor was
really approaching, and in. a few more minutes had arrived.
I snatched the camera in a passion of pent-up energy.
But the ardours of the journey had jangled its innards out
of gear. It was useless.

In a speechless annoyance I renounced the struggle and
started to run down the Eastern wall of the pass. For
an actual wall it looks to be from the top, a sheer precipitous
drop to the valley-head beneath, so abrupt that you cannot
see, from above, how it goes. And almost a wall it really
is: in very short zigzags the track winds downwards,
among precipices and projecting bluffs. It was all dark
and cold in shadow: the sun only lingered in the valley,
where I could see Mafu and the ponies, very tiny, awaiting
me. Down the coils I picked my way, and as soon as the
diminishing snow allowed, pelted and tore, exhilarated as
I went by lovely lavender heads of Primula that smiled
at me amid the icicles, in ledges and cavities of the cliffs
lower down. It is a long descent, fearsome and far: but
in time I found myself at the foot of the pass, in a quite
new world of cooler glens, scrubby with small Rhododendrons,
and, lower yet, with coppice of a dark ugly little aromatic
Cypress on their drier-hotter folds.

So here I mounted again in the last sad slants of sundown
in the mountains, and we set forward down the glen, straight
towards the overpowering mass of Omos-Thanatos. I had
been told it was no great distance from the Valley-head to
Wolvesden. On the contrary, it was the worst stretch of
the day, very long, and cruelly trying. For now the dusk
swooped, and it was soon dead dark. Round bay after
bay of slippery little invisible track we proceeded, along the
lip of dim cliffs above the beck; or else across stretches
84 . THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

of rounded granite boulders, overlaid by new mushy snow
that concealed the cavities ; till, in the enveloping blackness
of the dark, our progress was only a blind miracle, and
the tired ponies were perpetually stumbling in the holes,
or scrabbling for foothold on an unexpected face of rock.
On and on we groped: now we were evidently deep in
gorges, overwhelmed in blank midnight by mountains on
either hand; and water roared below, and wet boughs
across our faces emphasized the woodland in which we
were now engulfed. Apathetically we crawled through the
blackness, almost too tired to speak. My heart was gnawed
for those poor hens, and the two brave little donkies, left
far behind: and still we went, deeper and deeper in the
bowels of the Alps: again and again we had to wrestle,
saddle-high, through the brawling cold of the river; and
again and again skirt warily along the cliffs, above unplumbed
abysses of night.

It seemed as if we were never to arrive: Mafu himself
was hopelessly surly and monosyllabic with fatigue. Even
when I did at length, round another shoulder of brushwood,
catch a spark of light ahead in the gloom, I dared not give
it any credit. No doubt it was a mere pixy-glimmer,
luring us to doom in some deep ghyll among the rocks.
But no; gradually out of the night there dawned two of
our own people with a lantern. Down by slippery coils
they escorted us to the river again: one more surging
plunge through its depths, and in ten minutes more I was
alighting before the threshold of an invisible building.
Into this I stiffly tumbled out of the blank dark, into the
brilliant light of two tiny and ravishing rooms like ships’
cabins, papered all over with virgin white, illuminated
by a constellation of candles, the warm glow of a stove
and the sizzle of sausages on a plate, with which the Wicked
Wa-wa now came running. Weak with the long labours of
the day, I could almost have wept with mere gratitude
for the elaborate forethought of the welcome Bill had pre-
pared me, and the apple-pie delightfulness of the summer
OVER THE ALPS 85

home he had come ahead to make me. So that in the very
highest feather I concluded this memorable achievement :
the little donkies arrived also, in due course, and none the
worse for wear, and even of those nine wretched hens it
turned out that four were still alive, though not unnaturally
stiff and poorly and upset.
CHAPTER VI

WOLVESDEN HOUSE AND WOLFSTONE
DENE

What a thing it is to arrive in a new place after dark, so
that all its actualities burst sheer upon you the next morning,
Hardly had my little white room begun to glow with filterings
of light than I could bear my bed no longer, slung on my
gown, and was out into the yard, and out into the glen,
in less time than it now takes my mind to revisit the scene.

I found myself in an open high Alpine valley, as it might
have been outside the Chiabotta del Pra. The air sparkled
with a cold Alpine brilliance, and over the bank of mountain
across the beck in front, so high that it cricked one’s neck
to look up at what seemed its top, the sun was already
slanting powdery shafts of gold into the blue gulfs of air
that filled the valley. Wolfstone Dene coils East and West,
being the bed of the mountain beck that gathers tributaries
from the lateral glens all along, and ultimately descends
into the Da-Tung-Hor at Bridgehead about twelve miles
down from the pass. It is the main mule-track connexion
between Ping-fan across the Eastern, and Sining across the
Western fall of the Alps: and I do not fear blame from even
the most austere for giving it the name of Wolfstone Dene
(with Wolvesden House and Wolvesden Pass for variants),
since Lang Shih Tang (or Lang Shih G6) means exactly
Wolf Stone Valley, neither more nor less. And having this
importance as a channel of communication, its course is
set with tiny mud-roofed refuge-houses or mule inns, some
ten in all to the foot of the pass.

Wolvesden House is the third of these, as you descend.

86
WOLVESDEN HOUSE AND WOLFSTONE DENE 87

On the open Western side, the Alps rise immediately from a
vast sloping highland already reaching a considerable
elevation: on the Eastern the Alpine valleys, amid the
complications of the range, have much farther to sink,
and in much less distance, to the deep hot channel of the
Da-Tung. So that here the elevations run higher, in view
of the swifter fall, than they do on the Western descent
of the pass: my heart, my aneroid and the Rhododendrons
of Wolvesden combined to assure me that Wolvesden House
must indeed stand at some 11,000 feet above the sea.
This, even in the Tibetan Alps, is Alpine, and if I tried to
render you the rapture of that first blue-and-golden morning
there under the dark mountain wall of woodland, I might
this time indeed rouse the animosity of such tail-less foxes
of criticism as nurse a cabbage-gardener’s contempt for the
more flamboyant flowers of speech that deck the mental
parterres of the enthusiastic.

Let us speak of Wolvesden, then, and its flowers, in grey,
dusty terms of cabbage and groundsel, rather than in the
dewy radiant language of rose and lily. And, indeed, I
could not well trust myself with livelier colours, for fear
they should blur and overflow. The affections of one’s
memory move strangely; and the scenes of life have a -
love-value quite different from their apparent one. Wolves-
den and its dull Alps sometimes held me bored, and often
disappointed : yet now it is with eyes veiled in the anguish
of longing that I go back across the darkness of the years
to Wolvesden and Tien Tang, and the noble tranquillity
of Chebson—more often indeed, and with livelier pains of
memory than even to Siku and the Gorges and the Pink
Temple and the great precipice of Thunder-crown, with
its snow rills wavering down in gusty golden veils of sparks
from the heights above. Perhaps it is that Wolvesden was
my last scene of intimacy with the Alps, while the Siku
summer still saw promise of another ahead. Anyhow,
Wolvesden lies very close to my heart; I love the place,
and hope never to see it again, and know I never shall.
88 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

The Dene is here about a hundred yards wide, and at this
point is rounding the toe of the Omos-Thanatos mass,
completely out of sight, and so very high overhead that
outside the door of Wolvesden House you crane your
vision arduously up a heaven-kissing wall of Rhododendron
and rare fir, towards a great snowy buttress of precipice
impending dizzily overhead, upon a wild torn couloir.
And even this is but the merest bastion of Crest Royal,
out of sight above, which itself is merely the fading spur of
the Dome and Omos.and Pope’s Nose, which in turn are
only poor cousins of Achthos, Axeinos and the culminating
bulk of Thanatos.

All these, though, are unguessed and unguessable from
Wolvesden House, which snuggles into the sunny slope
of a much drier, lower, hotter range, inhospitable with
torrid rocks, and mangy with copse of arid dusty-coloured
cypresses. And the House is yet further protected by a
flat high breakwater of lawn descending into the Dene
from Southerly Valley, immediately behind the only con-
siderable glen that Wolvesden beck receives from the
Southward-facing range. In front of Wolvesden House
stretches a flat bouldered lawn, rich, in due course, with
iris and globe flower and Gentians straw-coloured and
ultramarine, and the big pink faces of Pylzow’s geranium.
Then you arrive at the beck, brawling fiercely among the
boulders of its bed. The boulder-bed is very wide, with
stranded islets of soil where the little blue Rhodo lives, and
Potentillas, and many another treasure ; and its stones are
of all sorts you can conceive, granite (though I never found
where this rolled from), shingle, shale, conglomerate, dolomite.
Then you plunge through the cold clearness of the water,
or pole-jump from boulder to boulder and find yourself
immediately~in the cool and mossy darkness of damp
Alpine woodland, at the foot of the Rhododendron slope,
with miniature glaciers still lingering from the winter
along the shaded swirls of the river under the rocks, offering
fodder, far into the summer, for the ice-cream machine
WOLVESDEN HOUSE AND WOLFSTONE DENE 89

that was one of our most popular magics in 1915, till the
dog-star left the Siphon and the mincer in undisputed
supremacy again.

Wolvesden House, as you see, is a flat-roofed, low building
round four sides of a small square yard, with a little hutch
built out by the door, and an additional line of stabling
along its western wall. The roof was of beaten mud, a
little depressed and untrustworthy in places with time:
its more solid walls were of raw poles laid horizontal on
each other and plastered with mud, its less important ones
of mudded brushwood. On the top side of the yard ranged
the kitchen and woodshed and servants’ quarters: the
southern side was taken up by an open arcade of mule-
stabling. My own two rooms and the main gate and two
black dens that were to be the dark room, made up the
lower side of the square. Then came the door out into the
stable annexe: then the west side of the square, where
Bill had his apartment, and we also kept, like Mrs. Norris,
a spare bedroom for a friend. All the rooms were floored
with hard mud, and in Bill’s and in both of mine (to say
nothing, of course, of the servants’) were mud-beaten
kangs for the muleteers. It was, in fact, a most superior
place, the only inn on the way to the pass that catered not
only for the mules, but for their conductors also. And
this select abode we had now chartered for six months, at
the rent of half a crown for the whole time, thus diverting
all passing traffic to the inns above and below, and relegating
the cheery little half-witted Tanguei to the cabin-lodge by
the door, where he lived very happily in the dark with his
little black pig, among the coffin boards that he had dutifully
provided for his father.

But Wolvesden House needed much fitting up to make it
habitable. On our first coming, it squatted quite contentedly
in a slough of old manure: the slope of the yard was a
pigsty, and the house itself lay becalmed like an island
in a trackless bog of dung all round, culminating in the
high peak of an almost prehistoric midden by the front
90 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

door, to which we gave’ the name of Hill 60. On Hill 60
we planted our flag to dehort other travellers from seeking
entrance: but with the rest of the muck we dealt firmly.
Channels and drains were cut, the yard itself swept clean,
and then shingled with clean pebbles out of the beck bed,
with causeways up it, and across, and other causeways
outside, leading to the front door. Within doors, Bill had
already taken steps: matting on the mud floors, white
paper everywhere, and tin stoves from Lanchow, safely
encased in loess all over, with their mud-cased chimneys
piercing the brushwood of the roof, and perking naked
high above its mud surface.

The problem of illumination had next presented itself.
The rooms, being meant merely for tired muleteers to pile
themselves upon the kangs and sleep, had no other light
at all than that which came in through the door. But we,
of course, to live there, had need of more. So Bill had
removed two cr three courses of poles from the outer walls,
and covered the long gap thus made with paper. This
admitted a soft white glow of daylight into the little cabins,
but not enough to read by. Accordingly, spoiled camera
plates now came in handy: they were washed clean, and
inserted ‘as panes all along the paper window-gaps. With
these and the demolition of the kang in the drawing-room
to make more space, our quarters were complete. In
the bedrooms the kangs remained. Bill slept flat on his,
and on mine my camp bed (the room just held it) was
superbly enthroned: had I slept convulsively and rolled
out, I should have had a far fall to the floor.

This was our installation for the summer: with boards
slung on strings for bookshelves, and our goods and chattels
unfolded on various tables, we could feel handsomely at
home in the hills ; and with feet put up in the evening,’ one
pair on each side of the stove, we could savour the warm
delights of domesticity a deux after the hardships of the
day. And now the local nobility came to call: up from
Bridgehead rode the Chinese landlord there, and down from
“ASNOFT NUASUATO AA

 
WOLVESDEN HOUSE AND WOLFSTONE DENE 91

her villeggiatura in Southerly Valley came Grandmamma
Aoo. The landlord of Bridgehead was an exile from Shansi,
for what crime in his native country driven to so remote
a nook of the Empire I never discovered. But down at
Bridgehead, in that warm fertile widening of the Da-Tung-
Hor, China has characteristically achieved a little colony,
amid these inhospitable fastnesses of Tibet. For, let no one
mistake it, the Da-Tung ranges are as purely Tibetan as
the Satanee Alps, though bravely included in Kansu on the
maps. .

But here the Gwan (Sovereignty) of China is much tighter.
For these Tibetan chains fill up the void of the great Y
made by the two main Chinese highroads that diverge at
Lanchow—the one running North to Kashgar and Russia,
the other West and then South, to Sining, Koko-Nor, and
Lhasa. Held in the grip of these two roads, with the
complete machinery of Chinese Government active on both,
like two jaws of a pincers which are the Viceroyalty of Kansu
on the right hand and the Viceroyalty of Koko-nor Tibet
on the left, the Tibetan monasteries and villages that fill
the pinch are in no position to be as free and savage as they
would like, after the fashion of the Chagolese, or Siku’s
evil neighbours, or the Black Tepo’s, fronting immediately
on the last faint fringe of the Empire, with only the lawless
Roof of the World behind them. Thus, though the crumbled
frontier walls of China and Tibet meander sadly over these
Alps at different points, they are a mere symbol: the
whole country is now China, but the whole country remains
Tibet. (And may I here say, in the interests of rhythm,
that I maintain the accepted pronunciation of the sacred
and mysterious name ? Let no one, in my pages, aspire to
the austere correctitude of reading it as “ Tibbit.’’)

Therefore the rare Chinese settlements in these ranges
hold a privileged position, and the Tibetans are glad to use
their enemies as ambassadors to persons of importance. It
was in this capacity that the landlord of Bridgehead now
arrived upon his donkey. He had been, indeed, Bill’s first
92 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

friend and point d’appui in these parts, and came laden
with presents for us on his own account—eggs, and hens,
and a keg of wine. But it was as the emissary of Tien
Tang that he now had special importance. For on the
goodwill of the big Abbeys depends, as we had soundly
learned, one’s whole chance of peace and prosperity in the
Tibetan Alps: and at first the monks of Tien Tang had
shown a surly and evasive attitude that promised ill. But
by this time, it seemed, they had realized the error of their
suspicions and the danger of their ways. Official and
Viceregal letters had satisfactorily explained our presence,
and now, by the Bridgehead landlord the Halls of Heaven
(which is Tien Tang Ssii) sent up messages of apology, and
good intentions, and welcome, making us free of the Alps,
and offering us all hospitality.

This was a load off our anxieties: we sent back our
cards, and a special scarf of blessing. For of these, in
Sining, we had prudently laid in a good stock, much superior
in quality to the ragged little web of white that I had
received the year before from the Living Buddha of Nalang.
Indeed, it is impossible to travel successfully in a Tibetan
country without these kataghs, which really take the place
of visiting-cards, and, when exchanged, seal one into the
friendship of household or Abbey, covering one with its
protection, and making one free of its hospitality. Ours,
in 1915, were so fascinating that I could never part with
one without a pang. They may be of various colours
(and all made, as I told you, in the far South of China),
but our lot was exclusively of the very palest eau-de-nil, in
shimmering soft silk, exquisitely fine and frail, with Buddhas
and Bodhisatvas throned in glory, flickering and fading
in their fabric as one crumpled them or flung them wide.

So away went the Bridgehead Tanguei with his burden of
thanks and compliments: and now came Grandmamma
Aoo. Grandmamma <Aoo really was the local noblesse.
Like Sidonia, she was a lady of castles and lands, owning
most of these Alps, with grazing rights and stinting rights
WOLVESDEN HOUSE AND WOLFSTONE DENE 93

and gaits, and court-leet and court-baron and all the glories
that swelled Maria Bertram’s heart to the point of turning
her into Maria Rushworth. And in personal presentment,
too, she was very like Sidonia in her outcast days—a
charred little withered old witch of a woman, very small and
bent and wrinkled, brilliant-eyed between the thin strings
of ringleted elf-locks, like the strands of a poodle’s mane,
that fell on either side her face from beneath her round
cap, so dense with grease and eld that one could hardly
tell if it were felt or leather. One ancient leathern petticoat
and bodice was the rest of her wear, with silver reliquary,
rings of silver set with turquoise and coral in her ears,
and down her bosom a swinging cascade of silver chains.
On her bare legs, crusted with the mud of ages, she
wore, this being a visit of ceremony, an ample pair of
leathern buskins like enormous Wellingtons.

She brought her husband, too, a comparatively insig-
nificant person : and two grandsons, tall, strapping, splendid
fellows. All of them were to be our constant visitors, for
Lady Aoo and her family were now in residence up in
Southerly Valley, where the two higher glens converge, in a
large low tent of woven yak-hair. They were never weary
of our magics—the siphon, the clock, the cameras, the
mincer, and the legendary marvels of the ice-machine.
From the first moment we had a succés with Lady Aoo
in particular, which pleasantly resulted in her feeding us
all the summer through with the most delicious milk,
and bladdersful of golden butter from her Alpine steading.
Milk does not, indeed, usually move me to such epithets :
I incline rather as a rule to the Chinese view that it is an
indecent and unclean fluid out of an animal. But when
you get milk that is the result of a cross between cow and
yak, even the most jaded milk-teetotaller may relax his
strictness. Milk of the pure yak, indeed, is too heavy and
rich to be borne, but from the almost infinite series of
intermediates between cow and yak you get a milk more
sumptuous than that of any cow, yet not excessive for the
94 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

frailty of human stomachs. Such quality do you get, in
fact, and such a flow, that I now never see the sad moulting
yaks at the Zoo without seeing them also with a mystical
eye, as possible forbears of new blends of milk-bearers
that will revolutionize farming, and double both quantity
and quality of our milk, as soon as some sage soul shall have
either caught my own enthusiasm, or independently con-
ceived the obvious notion of intercrossing cow and yak.

The first few days at Wolvesden passed in exploring the
nearer reaches of the Dene, and in finishing the fittings of
the House. But if further evidence as to altitude were
sought, it might be found in the fact that, as late as the
first week in May, this high-Alpine valley still lay sere and
brown as if it were December. Of all the tuffets and
tussocks among the shingle stretches of the beck-bed,
only a little golden Draba yet showed colour, and in the cold
mossy rocks that overhung the other side of the stream
the promises of Primula were still undecipherable. We
rambled far and wide, but the one treasure of the moment
was within a stone’s throw of Wolvesden House itself.
I climbed behind, up the flat of the sheltering delta-bank
that Southerly beck has accumulated at its debouchure, into
Wolfstone Dene. I crossed the green lawn, humpy with
emerging hassocks of Iris: and hopped from boulder to
boulder among the splashings and clear cataracts of the
beck, towards the hot dry spur of rock and cypress-woodland
that descends immediately upon it, and juts out into the
Dene. This slope is a true sun-trap, fully sheltered and
fronting the South : here, if anywhere, the first heralds of
spring should be awaking. And here, sure enough, I soon
saw gouts of blueness from afar, and all over the bank,
among fallen leaves and under grassy tussocks, the first
primula of the year was gladdening the sunshine with its
fragrant lavender bunches, no longer pinched and weazen
with snow as I had seen it down the Pass, but now ample
and serene in its expanded happiness.

My first primula of the year: it brings me to a stop.
WOLVESDEN HOUSE AND WOLFSTONE DENE 95

Oh readers, patient and impatient both, let us now pause to
perpend. I do not wish to rouse either party to unseem-
linesses of indignation, but my previous experiences on the
Eaves of the World have shown me that my attempt to sit
gracefully between two stools was even more desperate than
I had feared, and less successful than Thad hoped. Criticism,
in fact, of that immortal work, resolved itself into two
definite streams, as irreconcilable as the Rhone and the
Saone. ‘“ Such a delightful book,” said one party, “if it
hadn’t been for all those beastly plants,” : “ Such a delightful
book,” said the other, ‘if it hadn’t been for all those
boring people and landscapes and things.” No via media,
evidently, had been found: nor do I believe that any
exists. Even now, with all my good resolutions, and in
the illumination of criticism, I am sure that to some people
this book, too, will seem overweighted with plants, and, to
others, underweighted.

In no case, however, let either party expect from me, in
dealing with either plants or scenes or people, that jejune
and dust-coloured dullness of expression that alone, I gather,
passes current as sincerity among those who have no
emotions to render, or no words to render them with if they
had. In sum: criticism here, criticism there, it is all
helpful and guiding, but I must remind myself, as I here
remind you, that I am writing this book for the relief and
release of one person only in the world. I am strenuously
re-living, in fact, the dead years, in order to win free for
a while from the present; and, out of my own memories
and stored emotions, spinning a rainbow bridge, far-flung
over black depths, towards the golden irrecoverable past.
As the need is greater now, and the gulfs deeper and darker,
and the distance farther, this bridge must be higher and
stronger, of firmer texture and closer construction than that
which first took me back on to the Eaves of the World : but
the material must still be the same—my experiences, my
pleasures, observations, ardours and achievements, with “ I,”
“T,” “1,” for the inevitably recurring rivet of the whole.
96 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

Those, then, who think that this rainbow bridge of mine
will carry them also out of storm, back into a forgotten
country of calm, are very welcome, indeed, to make the
journey, step by step, with me as I build; but they must
always remember that it is with myself, and my own colours,
that I build my own rainbow, and that therefore the risk
is theirs if they stub their toe against some lump of opinion
they dislike, or find themselves puttied up in some purple
patch of Primula or Poppy, when they don’t in the least
know which is which, nor care, nor want to know.

I, meanwhile, must go forward steadily, casting no glance
right or left at possible opinions. On the perilous tight-
rope of creation, it is vital to concentrate entirely and
undeviably on one’s own footsteps, and on keeping one’s
own balance true to itself, unmagnetized away to John on
one side or Jane on the other. No real book is ever written
for anybody but its writer; first and foremost: and only
afterwards, by the chance of Fate, for the greater or lesser
multitude of other people, who reflect his various facets
and react to his personality.

Be patient, then, you who don’t like plants and do
like prattle: and you others, bear up against the prattle
for the sake of the plants: I am not writing exclusively for
any set of you among the lot, and in my rainbow bridge there
are many colours, of which you must accept those you don’t
like as the price of enjoying those you do. And if you
like none of them, you are very welcome to stay at home
and not set foot on my bridge at all: and if you come a
certain distance, and then find yourself really helpless—
well surely there is always an Aunt Lottie to whom you can
give the book for Christmas.

So now, unabashed, I assert to you Primula stenocalyx,
under the more appealing name of Clusterbeauty. Not
that even this will save skippers from here having to skip :
for I intend to present to you the Clusterbeauty in her habit
as she lives, on all the dry warm banks of loam and loess
in these parts, and on the scantier fringes of the woodland.
WOLVESDEN HOUSE AND WOLFSTONE DENE 97

Her green, ground-hugging rosettes are so exactly like those
of any common daisy in a lawn that had I had the naming
of the plant, and were not the epithet already occupied, I
should certainly have called it Primula bellidifolia. But
then up come sturdy little stems of three or four inches,
unfurling a head of some five or six large and lovely lavender-
blue flowers with a white eye, and the clean dry scent of
their group.” For, though no one could guess it from the
size and amplitude of its blossoms, P. stenocalyx comes into
the group of P. farinosa. Indeed, if its character becomes
established in cultivation, I should put P. stenocalyx and
her other Wolvesden cousin right up at the head of that
group.

Unfortunately the test has not yet been as successfully
passed as I had hoped. About Wolvesden, and all the
country over, from 11,500 down to the hot dry 9,000-ft.
levels about Tien Tang, Clusterbeauty abounded so lavishly
on all the crumbly banks and braes of loess and gravel
and loam as to make me feel quite sure that in cultivation
she could not possibly have any fads. But hitherto, in
England, I am sorry to say that Clusterbeauty cannot
stand corn. She has, in fact, a tendency, like Jeshurun,
to wax fat and kick the bucket. Rich soil in summer dis-
poses her to grow so_lax and luxuriant as not to be able to
withstand our winter wet. Out of very many plants in the
open but very few have survived with me: and I already
see that starvation and fullest sunshine alone will probably
acclimatize Clusterbeauty in the paler conditions of our
cooler, moister country.

I mentioned her cousin. For a long time I thought the
two main Wolvesden Primulas were forms of one species,
but now, with further experience, I grow certain that despite
their amazing likeness they are really two quite definite and
distinct species, though both the same in rosette, in stem,
in shape, size and colour of flower. But the one only begins
where the other leaves off. From Wolvesden downwards,
limp-leaved, green, entirely powderless, single-crowned,

H
98 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

Clusterbeauty monopolizes the ground completely ; and after
flowering in a tight fat head, that seems to have no pedicels
at all, the seed-bearing footstalks lengthen out surprisingly
into a most fantastic spidery effect. This, then, is typical
Clusterbeauty, and the genuine, as I believe, P. stenocalyx
(P. St. genuina of my articles in the Gardeners’ Chronicle).

But from Wolvesden upwards to the pass, and on all the
Alpine heights, Clusterbeauty never occurs at all, and her
place is taken by a twin cousin, with stiffer leaves, and pedicels
that never, even in seed, lengthen out in the Procrustean
way of P. stenocalyx. And the stems, and calyces, and
the underside of the leaves of this are all heavily coated
with white powder, thus notably enhancing the loveliness
of the lavender blossoms. Otherwise the two plants are
identical to the gardener’s eye. But the differences are
constant and, I am sure, specific. The high-Alpine, which
we may call Lavandine, is, of course, even more fascinating
than Clusterbeauty : its flowers are perhaps a trifle-bluer,
its stiffer leaves are conspicuously mid-ribbed and regularly
toothed, as the limper dust-green foliage of P. stenocalyx is
not. It also grows in clumps, whereas Stenocalyx never does.

But it is only on the high tops and the Pass that you
find Lavandine : as you descend the northern slope, and
down through the scrub and coppice of the Dene, gradually
the leaves seem to get flabbier, and suddenly you are in the
undisputed territory of P. stenocalyx again. Lavandine is
P. St. dealbata of my articles, but must certainly now be
promoted to specific rank. And it so happens that Prof.
Balfour has given the name P. leptopoda as an invalid
synonym for P. stenocalyx. (P. Biondiana is another vague
name in this connexion, too, as is also P. cognata.) But
P. leptopoda is described as being powdered, whereas P.
stenocalyx as definitely is not. Therefore, out of the
confusion bred by their very close general resemblance, I
think that P. leptopoda must emerge once more as a sound
and definite species from under the shadow of P. stenocalyx.

But in early May Lavandine was still abed, or barely
WOLVESDEN HOUSE AND WOLFSTONE DENE 99

stirring: and far down in the Dene it was only on the
summer banks that even Clusterbeauty was beginning to
appear. The only other sign of life was a thing most
paradoxical to find up here, in Alpine solitudes so austere.
For on the hot bank lay sprawled out the ample rosettes
of Incarvillea grandiflora ; and among them, huddling, but
soon to rise up on lengthening stems, the glowing rose-red
flowers like Dipladenias, or wrong-coloured Allamandas,
culled from the stoves of the very rich, and here strewn
callously upon the Alpine mountains cold. Indeed, one
can hardly believe that these blossoms belong to a real plant
actually living here; so tropical-looking a thing it is, so
floppy and flimsy in the overdone magnificence of its
enormous flowers, to be really native to such bare spartan
places as these, at altitudes so stern.

I browsed to and fro in the Dene. Above Wolvesden
House, towards the West rounding the river-cliffs, you come
on another shingle-coppice in the flat of the beck, hazy
with alder and willow: and on opener places of the Bank,
among the Cypress, colonies of Clusterbeauty shone already
radiant. But there was nothing else as yet, and on a lap
of the hill above, in a fold, a Tibetan dog disliked my presence
vividly from a little Alpine steading there. Below Wolves-
den, again, round the bend, you look into the farther
reaches of the Dene, with the fourth inn about a mile down,
and the blue-grey river roaring below on the right, deep
in a forest of willows and a chaos of boulders. But there
were no flowers here either, not even in a delicious fairy-
dell down from the track, where, in a cup of turf as fine and
springy as velvet and as green as emerald, a diamond-clear
spring welled sluggishly into a wide pool, so tranquil that
the brown fur of mosses on the boulders in its depths was
never stirred.

And when I adventured up Southerly Valley, I very soon
found myself in midwinter again. The rise is smooth and
easy and gentle, but rapid and definite. You wander
easily up the grassy floor of the glen, and before you have
100 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

realized the height, you are among patches of snow in the
tangles of the cold Cypress wood, with Clusterbeauty only
beginning to glimmer bluely here and there, in a world all
dank and dark and sopping. Down behind you Wolvesden
House and the Dene are sunk out of sight in the depths,
and already the vast mountains above them are beginning
to unfold. The topmost peaks, indeed, are still out of sight,
but the Buttress which impends so awfully over Wolvesden
is now dwarfed to a mere basement of the high jut that
stands out from Crest Royal, still higher: and above Crest
Royal, Pope’s Nose and the Dome are coming into view.
And all as white and frozen still as the Ortler.

In the opener places of the coppice, and all about, such
masses of the Harebell Poppy give signs of life as to
show very plainly how high you are. Farther South, on
Thunder-crown and Chagola, and the Jo-ni Alps, Meconopsis
quintuplinervia is only an outlier, on the fringe of its dis-
tribution: and so it is, too, away in the Tsin-ling. But
the Da-Tung Alps are evidently its main home, and here
it abounds in bewildering profusion everywhere above 11,000
feet, universally prosperous, and notably delighting in dank
damp slopes on Northerly faces. But in the early days of
May, one could only tell the Harebell Poppy by the gaunt
skeletons of its seed-stems ; and there was no other indica-
tion of life, or recognizably interesting plant.

And so at last I came to the top of the glen, where it
bifurcates on either side of a mountain spur with a huge peak
soaring high. ‘The beck comes round from the right, where
a new mountain wall comes into sight, far above a long
slope of coppice. It was still a glacier, and the coppice
perfectly sere. I turned back, and there, up the left-hand
glen, I saw a large low gable of black and white blanketing
and minor tents, and trodden paddocks with wooden rail-
ings, and demon-averting flags on sticks, and a small fluffy
puppy tethered on a midden-heap, rending the air with
barks. It was Casa Aoo: Grandmamma herself came forth
to wave a friendly hand, and her grandsons ceased their
WOLVESDEN HOUSE AND WOLFSTONE DENE 101

labours, to grin and shout a greeting. So, disappointed of
novelty but bewitched by the vast view of the mountains
opposite, straight in front of me as I returned, I came down
again to Wolvesden, and strolled the river shingles in the
sad calm twilight (for the daylight dies very early in the
close depth of Wolfstone Dene), and great eagles, perched
on boulders of vantage, watched my approach with careful
but not timid glance, until they could no longer turn their
heads straight back to look at me. Then they would fly
off a little way, wheel about, and very soon return.

But it was now clear that even May was much too early
for these frore elevations. We decided, after adjusting the
household, to move down for a few weeks’ exploration of
the big Abbeys and the lowlands. The staff, in fact, was a
fluctuating quantity, but had to be reduced, owing to the
difficulty of getting up sufficient provender for a crowd
into so wild a mountain valley. Indeed, had it not really
been a highway, of a sort, we could never have solved the
problem. As it was, we felt bound to reduce our numbers.
This was a nice question, for our personnel included Mahome-
dan soldiers lent us by Ma D4-ren, and the perfectly useless
old opium-soaked “interpreter’’ lent us by the Chang
Gwan to cope with the Tibetans. And how, without
damaging the Chang Gwan’s “ face,” were we to return him
his interpreter, and at the same time retain, as we wished,
the best of M4 Da-ren’s soldiers ? Even as far as Ma Da-ren
was concerned this seemed a little invidious. However, by
dint of cautious and cunning letters the work was success-
fully accomplished.

The carriage of letters was yet another problem. The
Chinese post does not run in the wild Tibetan Alps of the
Da-Tung. Accordingly we had to make arrangements for
a private post of our own, to bring up our mail from Sining.
Fortunately, there happened to be a very respectable elderly
gentleman there, who had had the ill luck to marry a shrew.
This lady so embittered his existence, and made his home
such a hell, that he was being steadily driven into evil
102 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

courses abroad, drinkshops and gaming-houses. Those
interested in arresting his downward progress now, there-
fore, hit on the happy notion of saving him from his home
more wholesomely, by keeping him constantly on the trot,
with a five days’ trip to Wolvesden, out and back, with our
mail. He accepted this plank of rescue with gratitude, and
once or twice a week would appear in the distance, advanc-
ing down the Dene on a little white donkey, burdened with
packages. Anyone could have seen that he was crushed
under the load of life: he was a gentle, sad and philosophic
old person, white-haired and silent: for the day after his
arrival he would sit and rest among the servants, and then
on the morrow set off home again with my answers to the
letters he had brought.

But I cannot say that his appearances were wholly welcome
to me. Letters and newspapers, all packed and quivering
with far-off and bygone miseries, did not so much give
pleasure, as burst, in a quite unprofitable bomb-explosion,
through the cloistered calm into which one had succeeded
in secluding one’s mountain life. All was peace and work
and concentration on it: then would come these shattering
mails, and for two or three days one’s brain would be kept
uselessly bombinating among anguishes one could not help
nor hinder nor heal: and by the time it had quieted down
again, another mail would be very soon arriving.

Our own staff was more complex than it had been in the
previous year, owing to the introduction of the Wicked
Wa-wa, whose forceful little personality altered the com-
position. He was now the dominant figure, snubbing
everybody right and left, and allowing no one to wait on
me but himself. At the top of the hierarchy, of course,
still loomed the Mafu. But a change, like a film of rust,
was coming over the Mafu. Even the best of Chinese ser-
vants, it is said, eventually reach a stage in which their
master has to fight against becoming their slave. Mafu
was evidently reaching that point. The old simple alert
resourcefulness and personal energy were’ under a cloud:
WOLVESDEN HOUSE AND WOLFSTONE DENE 103

he was grown a little grand: his surliness intensified, and
there was no longer quite that unremitting zeal with regard
to our comforts and interests. So that he counts for less in
1915 than in the year before. But nothing, of course,
could ever alter the ingenuous devotion of the good Go-go :
and there was still the charm of Gomer, that beautiful
radiant creature, brimming over with the joy of life, always
interested and amused and eager, no matter how odious the
hardships he was enduring.

But others appeared on our staff, supplementary hands
necessary to the upkeep of so stately a palace as Wolvesden.
We clearly realized the need, on seeing Wa-wa’s face, set
in a sulk like an unbaked bun, when he was pulled down
from his high estate and made to do coolie work with the
others, fetching baskets of shingle from the beck to make
a floor for the yard, with paths across it. We already had
MA, of course, the Mahomedan soldier, a trim smart gentle-
man of excellent effect: and stray serving-men mysteri-
ously appeared, and as mysteriously faded away. But the
first permanent novelty was the Sa-wa Wa-wa, a small and
stolid-looking Mahomedan child, with broad pale face and
wide baggy trousers. At least a child I called him, and as
a child I always treated him : even after I had been brought
to realize that he was, like Mr. Elton, an old married man,
a highly respectable householder of standing, with at least
two wives and a family of children. But to see him meekly
submitting to being hectored and bullied by the real Wa-wa
was to lose all possibility of considering him anything but
a child: and as for the Wicked One himself, his bristly little
black head seemed visibly to expand with self-importance
at having this raw young savage to “‘ form.”

We had, by now, a very pretty collection of religions
represented on the staff : to complete the set Bill introduced
Black Buzzler the Tu-ren. The Child of Earth justly bore
his name: he was a dark stocky little man, stained with
mud and coal, whom we detained in our service from a
string of coal-mules going on their way over the pass from
104 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

Ping-fan to Sining. The coal comes down from the North,
one enormous glittering block slung on each side a mule.
It was by stray purchases from these caravans that we kept
the home-fires burning—indeed, had it not been for them,
life would not have been possible in that Alpine glen—and
it was thus we acquired the Autochthon. Even when
washed he was like no one we had yet met. He was not in
the least degree Chinese, not in the least degree Mahomedan,
not in the least degree Tibetan. He was most of all like a
perpetually grinning Chimpanzee out of a chimney, lost in
a haze of sooty wool, short and curly as a retriever’s, though
not so dense. Keep him shaved no matter how carefully,
his face always looked as if it were masked with coal-dust :
and out of it gleamed two limpid brown eyes, with the
devoted doglike look of a retriever. Now the Chinese are
egg-smooth, the Mahomedans and Tibetans only less so:
and their hair invariably as straight as honesty. Judge
then the strangeness of thus coming on a little knot of
hairy curly folk secluded up in these mountains from the
dawn of time, like a little islet in the hairless ocean of
Asia.

Our settlement acquired fame. Indeed, had it not been
for the Viceroys of Kansu and the Koko-Nor, I doubt if our
occupation of the one livable mule-inn of the valley would
have escaped active expressions of unpopularity. As it
was, the mule-trains had to pass by in the dusk up towards
the little higher inn, or else camp out in the boulder-meadow
beyond our door, where their jangling and jinglings and
chumpings kept one awake all night. The climax of exclu-
siveness, however, was reached one evening, when, through
the stormy twilight of the gorge, a Living Buddha came
riding up in glory—and had to pass on. Many, perhaps,
have entertained angels unawares: but to how few has it
fallen to turn a Living Buddha from their door ?

But little Tanguei rather relished the change: he now
had very light work, helping the servants with odd jobs,
instead of catering perpetually for hard and rapacious mule-
WOLVESDEN HOUSE AND WOLFSTONE DENE 105

teers, generally Mahomedans: for the rest of the time he
could sit happy in his dark little lodge by the doorway,
among his coffin-boards, along with the tiny black pig that
had previously been the only sharer of his solitude. But I
am sorry to say that our advent destroyed the harmony of
this union, and distracted the pig from its allegiance. For
it now, with paradoxical violence, fell into a quite unpro-
fitable passion for the brown pony. Wherever the brown
pony went, the black piglet would pursue him, with ears
streaming upon the wind; and, on his down-sitting or
uprising, would always be found entangled in his feet. The
pony, however, reciprocated these attentions with a mild
friendliness: work, and family affairs, sustained the
Tanguei.

For now came up his uncle, pursued by the usual charge
of murder, to take refuge beneath our shelter. I began to
feel that, what with Uncle, and Wicked Wa-wa, my caravan
was rapidly taking on the aspect of a gaol-delivery. Even
about Sa-wa and Black Buzzler, there hung dark suspicions
that they had somehow stumbled, like Antigone, against
the high pedestal of justice. However, when I saw Uncle,
all fears for my own reputation were laid to rest. Quite
obviously the murder-charge must be a fake. A milder,
neater, more petrifyingly respectable person was seldom
seen—a pew-opener could not have been more overpowering.
So far from bringing suspicion on my household, I felt that
Uncle conferred on it an air of solid worth that it had pre-
viously lacked. Indeed I looked on Tanguei with a new
wonder, as having such a relative, and felt like the Duchess
about Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns, that “I had no idea
Mrs. Tomkins had such respectable connexions.”’

The only other inhabitants of Wolvesden are the mar-
mots. At the mouths of their countless holes they sit,
large black-and-brown beasts, with an expression of fat and
aldermanic importance: or perk erect like begging dogs:
or lope across the lawns, with their tails jerking up and down
behind, like those wooden cockyolly birds who make antics
106 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

on the end of a string when pulled. They are all over the coun-
try, and wherever you go your advance is shrilly heralded
by the whistling of the sentinels. In the evening, when
darkness is brimming deeper and deeper in Wolvesden, while
overhead the peaks are still flooded with light, they sit like
monuments on their mounds. And then the glorious starlit
night unfolds, and the enormous silence of the mountains,
broken only by the silvery brawl of the beck, and by strange
muffled rumblings and bumpings, which for long we thought
might be the dim noise of avalanches or remote stone-falls
up in the Alps, but realized at last were only boulders churn-
ing in the bed of the stream. It was very pleasant, after
days of exploration in the wintry combes and glens, to sit
in the evening over the stove in our snug little cabin, relaxed
in the comfort of a Chinese quilted gown, with the cold
Alpine night outside.

Not but that the Chinese gown has its disadvantages.
Water having failed to destroy me (in 1914), fire now had
its try. Bill was out with Mafu and the Go-go, exploring
the white enwintered snowfields of the great Alps above,
and I, having done my tasks with the specimens, was stand-
ing with my back to the stove, in grateful enjoyment of the
warmth. ‘‘ How very, very nice to be so hot.” I felt the
heat glowing up my legs. And there seemed a specially
pleasant glow of, light, too, beginning to suffuse the room.
I basked in beatitude, till a sudden movement showed me
the facts of the case. Heat and light were both being
emitted by myself: my padded petticoat was in a vivid
blaze. To shed the garment promptly seemed a prudent
course. Easier said than done. Chinese gowns loop under
the arm and down the right side. And now not a knob
would part from its loop, no matter how I wrestled and
strove and tore, like Herakles helpless in the fatal shirt.
Flaming and cooking, a pillar of fire and smoke, I whirled
forth into the yard, emitting sounds of protest. Where-
upon shrieks arose from all quarters: both the Wa-wa’s
and Gomer and the Buzzler all converged upon me pas-
WOLVESDEN HOUSE AND WOLFSTONE DENE 107

sionately and put me out with buckets. A fine tale they
had to tell the others when Bill at length returned, red-eyed
with the bitter Alpine winds up above, but cheered by the
promise of huge peaks and lawns and basins and Alps, though
all was still perfectly dead and white under unbroken snow.
CHAPTER VII

WOLFSTONE DENE AND THE HALLS OF
HEAVEN

On the Eve of the Anne-Queen’s death-day, by which
the merest schoolboy will easily recognize May 18, our pro-
cession formed to ride down Wolfstone Dene to the Halls
of Heaven. It was also the anniversary of our intended
flight from Satanee the year before: but now how different
a scene, how universally peaceful and prosperous. It was
a steely pale-sunned day: we got off brisk and early,
leaving Tanguei and the pig in charge, under the super-
vision of poor Go-go, omitted perforce from the procession.
Down the reaches of the Dene the caravan proceeded : long
grassy bays and projecting buttresses of cliff succeeded each
other, with dry copse of Cypress, and the river roaring below
us on the right in its forest of willows ; and on the far side
the cooler slopes descended from the Alps in a vast volumin-
ous wall of the Red Birch, soon beginning, but not ascending
as high as Wolvesden, nor, anywhere in these Northerly
ranges, as magnificent as on the flanks of the Bastion and
the Felsenhorn by Satanee. None the less it was in over-
whelming beauty here, up the filmy forest to the pinnacled
points far above, across the river.

Gradually the buttresses grew rarer and less abrupt: the
bays longer and blander. We were getting down into the
quieter stretches of the Dene, past various Tibetan stead-
ings and the successive mule-inns, each more ramshackle
and decrepit than the last. It is a very long way, down the
forests and coppice and open stretches of Wolfstone Dene.
And still it was too early for flowers, nor did the copse

108
WOLFSTONE DENE AND HALLS OF HEAVEN 109

suggest anything better than wild rose, Berberis and Ribes,
—except for a pretty little tree-Prunus at one point, with
shell-pale flowers profusely pendent all along its flattened
sprays. Everywhere in the brushwood there was promise
of peonies, and Iris ensata promising too, in a Sargasso sea
of glaucous foliage, in every open reach of loess. But brown
winter still reigned, and the heralds of spring were all old
friends—Clusterbeauty flickering in blue multitudes on the
banks and, in the woodland, drifts of a golden Fabaria that
made the effect of Onosma ; and here, too, an older friend
still, from far across the world, in the person of well-beloved
little Maianthemum bifolium, whose delicate modest charm,
it seems, is just beginning to be appreciated by the learned.
The only novelties were things of small moment—an anemic
creamy Lousewort, and in the lawns the violet and lavender
stars of Adonis ccerulea, among the splayed-out ferny
foliage. But let no one scream out in rapture, at either the
name or colour of the Blue Adonis. She is only called blue
because her blossoms go turquoise-colour in drying: in
themselves they are of a pale silken purple, but not nearly
large enough for the foliage, which spreads out, rank and
coarse, enveloping the rather squinny stars in an over-
whelmingness of greenery.

One big valley comes down on the right from the high
snows, soon after you leave Wolvesden: and another a
very long way down, bringing a dwindled beck in a vast
boulder bed, from the huge white Alps that here come into
sight, up at the valley head. Otherwise Wolfstone Dene
has no tributaries, and no variations of any moment, and
no sight of the snows anywhere, as it coils its way deep
among the enclosing wooded ranges, until you are far away
down, in warmer, drier regions, well below reach, now, of
the Red Birch. And then, right out ahead, over interven-
ing crumpled ranges of lesser hills, open and arid, there
comes into sight, across the distance, the stark white wall
of the Gadjur range.

Often you are in the beck, or crossing it. At one point
110 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

there is a brushwood bridge. Hard by is a holy place, a
lawn of tussocked Irises and big boulders, nestling under
the wall of a rust-coloured precipice that here stands boldly
out across your way. Pools of clear silent water well from
under it, and over the Holy Spring presides the Buddha,
frescoed in dim fading tones of red and green and gold, on
the wall of the cliff. Clusterbeauty shines on the ledges,
and the Fairy Bell rings her elfin chimes here in little ghostly
carillons, and the holiness of the spot, the smile of the Per-
fect One, have their influences even on the vegetation.

But by degrees you are down the Dene, out of the harsh
heights and the cold Alpine air, into the hot dry lands of
the lower valley where you sweat, and breathe warm delicious-
ness. On the sunny side the ruddy cliffs and bluffs are
quite like those of the Riviera: you expect to see them
clothed in Cistus and rock-rose. And indeed they are dense
with the thorny little dunes of the small gorse-like Caragana
and in their time hazy with the rose-red airy featherings
of Hedysarum multijugum. Now comes a last stretch of
woodland, bending to the right: a final curve, and, round
the corner of the last fell, the stream and the track run
gaily down towards the vale of the Da-Tung, following the
bend of the hill to Bridgehead, past the blacksmith’s shack,
and a few decrepit houses.

The vale of the Da-Tung-Hor is a smiling open basin of
fertility, undulating up towards rolling low hills. Being
rich and prosperous and sunny, it is once more China, its
houses and inhabitants Chinese, and Chinese the hands that
have tilled its laps of culture. There is nothing rugged or
Alpine anywhere in sight here to suggest the neighbourhood
of high inhospitable peaks where demons dwell. The river
roars royally down upon the scene here from the left, at a
right angle to the debouchure of Wolfstone Dene—a mighty
volume of turbid snow-water, emerging violently from a
dark defile, and broadening out over vast shingle-flats all
a rose-red fog of Hedysarum. And as you gently ride along
the iris-flats towards Bridgehead, the fine velvet of the lawns
WOLFSTONE DENE AND HALLS OF HEAVEN 111

is gemmed and threaded with the pink little heads of the
Tibetan Androsace, in such abundance that the green is shot
and filmed with a veil of rose: and on the earthy slopes
away to the right, across the Irises, climbing the flanks of the
hill, Clusterbeauty abounds as never yet, in the hot low loess,
acurtain of blueness in the shady corrugations of the bank.
Full in the middle of the scene rises the Great Bridge,
soaring high and far over the breadth of the Da-Tung, in
so brave and magnificent a span that surely this may well
be the finest Tibetan bridge in Northern Asia. It is the
erection, care, and property of the monks at Tien Tang
Ssii, and at either end there is a little lodge, with a holy
man inside to take toll. As Mafu, on a former visit, had
made trouble about paying this, and put the monastery
thereby in a fluster, we anticipated to-day the possibility of
an unfriendly reception, and accordingly, for the proper
impressing of the refractory, I now, on Bill’s advice, mounted
my steed, and rode forward up to Bridgehead with all the
majesty I could muster. For the Bridge starts its flight
from a knoll of rocks and lawn above the river, and here, on
the height, the Shansi landlord has his ample dwelling of
loess, neat and clean and spacious. No monks were to be
seen, in fact, but out he came to welcome me, and induct me
ceremoniously to rest in a parlour behind the wide yard.
Nor was the monastery in sight either. After the Bridge,
the river swings away in a fierce bend, round under a series
of red precipices, above which rise a series of huge high
downs, bare and grassy, with rare woods in their folds, and
a deep ghyll of woodland at their foot on the near side.
And because of those impassable precipices, and the river
battering along their base, the road to Tien Tang has to
climb out of that ghyll, and round and about over the whole
height of those downs, before at last it can drop arduously
down to the river-level again on their far side, and round
under the fells to where, quite out of sight from Bridge-
head, the Halls of Heaven bask under their amphitheatre
of sun-flogged cliffs, fronting the broad Iris plain and a
112 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

swing of the river outwards again from the sunny to the
cooler side of the vale.

The Tanguei of Chao Tor has wisely chosen his post. He
is the trade-centre of all the countryside, the agent and
contractor for all the Abbeys hereabouts. Even while I
sat there he made some eight or nine pounds out of orders
for paper and so forth, from various local monasteries. He
was thoroughly a friend of ours, too, and his influence had
evidently radiated in favour of us in all directions. For
now the cavavan proceeded cautiously over the quivering
span of the bridge, to be received, and passed with the
utmost cordiality by the guardian clerics in their hutches
at either end. I myself lay resting on the lawn on the
knoll-top, among the Androsaces, and watched the proces-
sion defile along the far side of the river, till it was lost to
sight in the ghyll. And there, far away above, across the
brown-green crown of the fell, a raw streak marked the
aspiring track to Tien Tang, so near in distance yet actually
so tantalizingly far in travel. The delicious place it was,
and the delicious day, and the ecstasy of my heart, almost
irrecoverable now, even by the long arm of memory !

At last I rose from the scented velvet of the lawn, to
continue after the caravan. A golden Star of Bethlehem
shone in rare jewels from the green, and a freak-faced
amethystine violet of intense fragrance and clawed leaves,
in which I did not then recognize a very old friend that I
need by no means have come so far to find, seeing that
Viola pinnata is as happy in the European Alps as in the
Tibetan lowlands. With bows and smiles to the monks I
clomb the arch of the Bridge to its topmost span, which
rocks and quavers ominously to the tread. Down on the
other side its poles are piled up from a massive buttress of
stone in which sand-rats skulk, and little hopping things
like jerboas. And then you come to meadows again, with
Stellera beginning to push ; and along above the river and
its shingle banks uneventfully, till at length you turn away
to dive into the darkness of the ghyll.
 

THE BRIDGE NEAR TIEN TANG.
WOLFSTONE DENE AND HALLS OF HEAVEN 113

Tien Tang Ghyll is very lovely, deep between high rugged

precipices, full of coolness and moisture and shadow, with
Clusterbeauty on the ledges very brilliant, and peonies
promising, and the Purple Adonis really beautiful, and, on
the higher reaches, a small bush cherry in clouds of delicate
clear pink. Up the fantastic stretches of this fairyland I
toiled in a perpetual rapture at its perpetually changing and
unfolding pictures, each more wild and noble and sombre
than the last: and then we turned abruptly up into the
wall of woodland on the right, and by harsh violent zigzags
mounted fiercely and far through the forest, up and up, till
suddenly the forest ended, and out we came, round a bare
corner, upon the bare front of the down: and away below
us lay the river and its vale unfolded like a map, and the
bridge and its hamlet bird’s-eyed and minute; and away
beyond it the dark wooded ranges, and the debouchure of
Wolfstone Dene, and the long coilings of its course, to where,
all along the horizon, built up in a gigantic wall of white
magnificence across the world, ranged the whole massive
line of the dominating Alps.

We were now at a powerful height already, but the path
continued climbing among the folds of the open fell, winding
upward in the bays of what might have been a gigantic
Sussex Down, with the dwarf Caragana for gorse, in sheets
of prickly little hummocks, all showered with golden blos-
soms. Now and then the hot air was stabbed and set
quivering with a hot violent scent of violets, almost unbear-
ably delicious. For a long time I could by no means trace
this to its source: but at last realized that it was the breath
of a rather feeble spidery-flowered purple Iris, that now
and then peered among the coarse brown tussocks of the
grass.

In and out we wound, along the down-top, with the
backward view more and more magnificent at every bend,
but by now too steely in the thunderous warm greyness
of the afternoon to be photographed. And then began the

1T. Bungei.
I
114 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

descent, down and down and down, by a steep and craggy
tumbled way, among tumbles of red stone and raw red
earth and fantastic rounded strata of red rock like the
rankest Pulhamite or concoction of cement. And all the
rocks and earth-slides were ablush with the Tibetan Andro-
sace, in cascades of colour almost too virulently pink for
their setting. At the bottom we were in a glade again,
descending back into the river plain. On the steep rocky
banks Clusterbeauty blazed in abundance, and the Fairy
Bell was more profusely chiming than anywhere else,
even in this, its region, evidently, of main abundance.
Here, indeed, for the only time in my experience, it had
overflowed from the rocks to which, as a rule, it so rigidly
adheres, and had come down into mere steep earthy banks
of soil among the Primulas.

And, close though I now be to Tien Tang, I needs must.
loiter here a little over the loveliness of the Fairy Bell.
Some people may not find Lloydia alpina sufficiently
“striking ” for their taste: to me its phantasmal bells have
a quite special charm, as they swing out and float and
hover, like glassy bubbles, along the stern dark lines of the
cliff, the thinly-touched streak of mahogany down the
outside of each silvery segment contributing a curious look
of elfin transparency to its already elfin grace. Much
more sparse and pendulous and ungettable in the Min
S’an and Satanee Alps, Lloydia alpina riots in the most
massive abundance on all the rock-faces in the Da-Tung
range, whether limestone or azoic, and its lovely stems
carry three or four flowers, and its triangular pod stands
out erect. But nowhere is it in livelier multitudes than on
the cool wall of the ghyll that opens out on the Plains of
Heaven.

For now, like a level sea, the green ocean of Tien Tang
lies before us, flat and vast as a race-course, with here and
there the crumbled bones of dead Abbeys lying in long lines
of green, and the skeleton of a chorten standing forlorn.
Its far horizon is made by a long band of poplars bounding
WOLFSTONE DENE AND HALLS OF HEAVEN 115

the river, now all budding and making a rolling cirrhus
cloud of amber, sulphur, crimson and vividest pale green,
against the dark fir-forest that clambers to the very tops
of the high craggy fells on the other side. And in mid-May
that whole plain is a pale-blue rippling sea of Iris ensata
in its loveliest Tibetan form, of freaked creamy fall and
china-blue standard, sweet as hyacinths, and filling all
the air with a scent as if one were in Holland.

Oh, you dyspeptic people, who despise the pleasures of
others, and with peevish pens depreciate rapture into
rhapsody, it is already clear that you must not come with
me to Tibet. For there is loveliness and glory everywhere
on those far hills :, I cling with all my zeal to their memories,
I will not deny them, and I could not exaggerate them. So
stay at home in the suburbs, good people, and cultivate
calceolarias: I, and my little band of the elect, will fare
forth unashamed across the Plains of Heaven, swishing
through that soft blue surf of fragrance, with every nerve
tense in the intoxication of delight: and on the gravelly
open bank along the track the Tibetan Androsace ripples
and falls and cascades in tumbling sheets of colour, as
brilliant as Saxifraga appositifolia on the Western face of
Penyghent. All notable joys in life should be prefaced by a
grace of gratitude: those scented flower-fields inspire a
fitting prelude to arrival in the Halls of Heaven. For
now, only a few more hundred yards up the plain, under a
high hot hill of barrenness and stone, with rare barberries
and caraganas drooping under the cliffs, and we are riding
round a bend; and there at once, snuggled into its hot
bay beneath an amphitheatre of great red precipices, in
which the slanting sundown is cutting folds of deep blue,
lies Tien Tang Ssu, a serried town of low, flat-roofed white
houses, with big churches rising massively from among them,
and their golden finials flashing.

Huddled into its bay of warmth the Halls of Heaven
fronts the South. No cold winds can ever visit it, no
snow lies: winter never comes near it. The cliffs embrace
116 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

it, and keep off all cold, and concentrate all warmth;
in front lies the broad sweep of the Iris plain, and then
the poplar belt of the river, and then the fantastic pinnacled
blackness of the fir-forest, the only one in these ranges, and
the cherished property of the Abbey. Even on first sight,
my heart went out ahead of me to Tien Tang—though
nothing in the world could have been less like one’s notion
of a big Tibetan Abbey, the vast cliff-palaces of Lhasa,
the squared Egyptian barracks of Labrang, than this
dense flat-lined accumulation of whitewashed houses
filling the bay and clambering up the steeps towards the
foot of the precipice, with a holy pilgrim-path yet higher,
circling the entire precinct and set at intervals with
invocation-wheels, relic-houses, chortens and stations of
devotion.

In the powdered gold of early sunset I rode leisurely
into the Halls of Heaven, and in and out among its tortuous
streets to where a crowd, gathered in the doorway of a white
wall, indicated our quarters. Amid general bowings and
smilings I alighted and passed in. I found myself in a
long narrow court, with flat-roofed buildings on either
side and at the end. On one hand the servants’ rooms
and kitchen, and across the way Bill’s suite of two wood-
panelled parlours opening on either side of the entrance
room. And at the top you went up by a flight of steps on
to the high verandah of the main building. Locked store-
rooms took up most of it, but at one side, opening down on
to the verandah by more steps, was my own little panelled
wooden parlour, with big square window of latticed paper,
and shutters to close at night: and at the other end of the
verandah you could look through the ‘latticed doorway
into the owner’s oratory, with altars tended and furnished,
and Buddhas and Bodhisatvas smiling from their thrones
in the fragrant dimness along the shelves, with flowers
in front of them perpetually renewed, and little gleaming
brass tartlet-pans of holy water.

Amid a mighty buzz we settled in. For all the rest of
WOLFSTONE DENE AND HALLS OF HEAVEN 117

that day, and the morning of the next, passed in entertaining
the conflow of holy people who came crowding to see this
unique peepshow of foreign Lords and foreign devices. It
was a select throng, though, for while the supreme authorities
would not, of course, make themselves so cheap, the monks
and students of the lower grades were not judged worthy
of calling on us. So that it was only the more (and not
the most or the least) venerable dignitaries who appeared,
a stately handsome type of man in their voluminous swathings
of dull purple, attended often by disciples and acolytes.
Scarves of blessing again came and went between us and the
higher eminences of the place : at length the Prior or Almoner
of Tien Tang made his appearance in person.

The Gwan-ja of Tien Tang is one of the finest men I have
ever seen—or rather, he was, since the office is held only
by the year, and my old friend will long since by now have
sunk back into the lower ranks of the Abbey, with nothing
of his former glory but the envy and animosities that are
always bound to attend on one who has held the public
purse-strings. For the Gwan-jas of these Abbeys are the
link between monastic meditations and the outer world.
While the Abbots and Living Buddhas lurk in august
seclusion, the Prior has charge of the Abbey’s secular
affairs, its rents, its contracts, and the entertainment of
its guests. In fact, so large are the labours involved that
there are usually two officials, Prior and sub-Prior, to dis-
charge them: and our friend was only the humbler of the
two. But you could not easily conceive of his having a
superior, so stately a figure he was, well over six feet,
magnificently built, alike in limb and body, and that bold
splendid architecture of face and skull which makes a
fine Tibetan head such a satisfying thing to contemplate.
He was ‘like.some statue of a great period come to life,
moving superbly in draped lines of musty scarlet, and sur-
mounted by that massive and marmoreal Roman head,
round and close-cut, and lit by big soft eyes of brown
velvet.
118 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

From the first the Gwan-ja was our friend, though con-
fessing that for some time there had been a party in the
Abbey hostile to our coming. Meanwhile, we were going
through all our hoops, again and again, to successive
“houses”: the siphon squirted, the mincer minced, the
cheap little clock we had bought in Lanchow repeated
its fallacious chimes to general enthusiasm (you never knew
what hour it was going to strike, except that by no possible
chance did it ever strike the right one). After reverend
eld now came.enthusiastic youth : the throng of dignitaries
became suffused with younger faces: every make of monk
was now surging round us, from the tallest to the tiniest.
Evidently the children were not forbidden—such gleeful
gay little mobs of monklets, acolytes, novices and students,
with keen clean faces and vivid eyes, as lithe and spry as
sticklebacks under their purple folds: all hungering to be
photographed, yet twinkling about on their bare white
legs in such a restless enthusiasm of curiosity that they
could hardly be got to stay still for long enough. Finally
there arrived the babies of the place, a brace of microscopic
pontifis, about two feet high, in pleated capes of scarlet,
as solemn as two Popes beneath enormous crested yellow
mitres as tall as themselves.

But now, with twilight gathering, the crowd diminished
for the day, and we strolled peacefully down out of Tien
Tang and across the Iris plain to where the poplars tower
over what proved to be a vast park of soft bare grey sand,
soundless as a vale of the dead, with Oxytropids in clusters,
flaring violently purple from amid their huddles of feathered
silver foliage. Then round, down all the length of the
lawn, and up into the glen again, to look at the Primulas
and Lloydias. Here we came up with a red-skirted little
bare-leg monklet of about eight, telling his beads on his
homeward way from lessons in the Abbey. He was as
bright as a button and as friendly as a kitten: we lay out
upon a fine lawn starred with a tiny pale-blue Gentian, and
had fun and laughter with him, hearing about himself,
WOLFSTONE DENE AND HALLS OF HEAVEN 119

and answering his questions and teasing him a little about
the photograph that it was now his chief earthly ambition
to get. So, when he had got it, he departed up the glen,
padding softly on his bare feet, and devoutly telling his
beads as he went: we came back down the other side of
the clear beck, and thus home to Tien Tang.

The dusk was green and balmy and bland: we went up
on to the flat roof, and had the deck chairs brought up,
and lay in luxury. And then, over the profile of the undu-
lating down-tops that crown the precipices round the abbey
there appeared first one strange diabolic shape, and then
another, and then another. We gazed incredulous through
our glasses at these horned blacknesses against the shrill
pallor of the sky. There was no doubt of it, though:
despite the fact that those hills are only hot and low and
arid, not more than 10,000 ft. at their highest, these were
the real Big Horn Sheep of the high Alps, coming forth
to browse within a stone’s throw of the Abbey, secure, for
all their shyness, in the immemorial protection of the Holy
Law.

I need hardly say that the sight of them immediately
set Bill’s manly heart aglow to violate it: my own heart
jibbed, not only because I hold the Holy Law myself, and
have no lust for the blood of the confiding and unoffending
innocent, but also because I feared that so flagrant a con-
tempt of the Buddha and His Dharma might well give a
handle against us to the hostile party in the place. However,
now came in the Gwan-ja for a private visit, and was reduced
to shivers by our introductory letter from the Magistrate
of Ping-fan, threatening the Abbey with mighty mulcts
and extortions if its hospitality should fail to give us perfect
satisfaction. Then, when we had explained how we had
deprecated all these dangers and quieted all the alarms of
authority, he grew quite melted with gratitude and, on the
question of shooting, declared that, though it was, of course,
officially forbidden, he was sure, after the assembled dig-
nitaries had heard the Ping-fan document read, we should
120 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

safely be able to shoot anything we pleased, even in the
very gardens and temple-courts of the Abbey itself. So
away he went with it, and now an aged monk with a frail pale
old concentrated face like carved ivory came into the yard,
and craving permission, mounted up on to the verandah,
unlocked the chapel doors, and lit the lamps devoutly before
the Buddhas, murmuring prayer. I contributed a bough
of lilac, and then retired to the roof again, to expand once
more in fatigue and tranquil success, crowning the long
sweltering day of bland and varied delights.

Nullus in orbe sinus Tien Tang prolucet amoenis :
Nowhere is there such a basking bay of delight, and no
stars in the sky are so big and blazing as those that shine
down on Tien Tang out of the sapphire velvet of summer
nights. The next morning the yard was again a-buzz with
monks, and I found that Bill wanted me to prove my
innocent dilettantism by publicly going out to make a
sketch, on the spot, of the Iris plain. So forth I fared
accordingly, in proper state, with Lay-gor carrying the
paint-box, and Go-go the sketch-book, and Sa-wa Wa-wa
promoted to charge of the brush-case. Immediately the
crowd, as was foreseen, rose up and came also: in a horde
of holy persoris I took the field, crowded upon by red and
purple skirts, and an ancient holy odour of rancid butter.
Out we poured along the path round the bend, till, where
the ione poplar dominates the wide blue sea of Iris, beyond a
little beck as clear as a kitten’s eyes, I sat down on the turf
and fell to my task. All the crowd sat down around me in
thronging rings: we were joined by the schoolmaster-
monk and all his flock of tiny Lamas, murmuring prayers
methodically in the intervals of pushing for a good place.
In acute discomfort the work of art proceeded with tolerable
success: prayers were very soon forgotten, in the fun of
watching how the brushes went, and conversation was
general, assisted, from me, by bows and smiles and fragments
of Chinese. The expedition handsomely achieved its pur-
pose, and I felt that I had really thoroughly purged all
WOLFSTONE DENE AND HALLS OF HEAVEN 121

suspicions of secret and sinister motives in my coming to
Tien Tang.

All continued to go well. Bill had an interview with a
superior Prior to our Gwan-ja, and learned that a Living
Buddha was expected on a visit ; and the stream of monks
and little purple people never ceased in our court. Tien
Tang is a “town” of many streets and winding ways:
and takes time to learn. Between the low blank walls,
white or washed with pink, you blindly meander in the
cool shadow: sometimes a dark wooden door afar gives
you a glimpse into a sunny court, and a verandah of latticed
woodwork, with a small son of the Church sitting in a corner
chanting his lessons from the broad shallow strips that are
Tibetan books. The big churches tower here and there over
the flat lines of the town, noble and stately places, standing
apart in wide open precincts, and mounted up on flights
of stone stairs: or verandahed high in shady courts all a
jungle of lilac and peony and Ligustrina. The topmost one
is the newest—a bold square white block of a building,
aloft, up a steep climb, close under the precipice behind.
Inside it is bare and neat and clean, frescoed all round
with Buddha-scenes in no contemptible style. Above,
under the rocks, clambers the pilgrim-path, and below rises
the big rose-red Church of Our Lady of Mercy, with lovely
arching roof of turquoise and emerald tiling and gaping
blue dolphins for finials, and all the dark woodwork and
galleries carved and painted in bold and various colours of
crimson and green and white and blue. Round it runs a
deep verandah, set at intervals with clanking invocation-
wheels, and down below in the well of the courtyard are
huge old bushes of tree peony, and a tree of lilac one solid
mountainous fountain of lavender blue, and holy Ligustrina,
silvery and dapple-barked as a cherry, with heavy bright-
green foliage and pyramids of white foamy blossom like
a twelve-times-magnified privet.

On holy days the main doors are opened, and the Colossal
image of Our Lady smiles out upon the world from her
122 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

high throne. She is all of gilt, gigantic, crowned and
jewelled with fantastic magnificence: and across either
end of the building two minor majesties sit looking on her.
In the middle, at her feet, the altar is furnished with fresh
flowers, and in the doorway sit prelates in swathings of
golden silk, telling beads, and chanting, along with devout
worshippers come in from the country round in their Sunday
bests. Along the verandah, down the wooden stairway,
and in the garden, the choirboys frolic and riot, and scramble
for cash if you throw them, but it is a holy day, and speech
is taboo, so, whatever you say to them, they only put
their fingers to their lips, and wriggle and look roguish.

Devout women, too, are on the scene, going the rounds of
the verandah, over and over again, turning the clanking
invocation cylinders as they come. They, also, are in
their Sunday clothes : round felt caps and elf-locks hanging,
and silver chains and reliquaries on their breasts, and broad
leathern stoles over their purple skirts, adorned with the
usual big white plaques of porcelain. A different rule
from ours obtains in Tibet: it is the lady who removes her
hat in passing a holy person or object. Accordingly these
visiting women uncover devoutly each time they pass the
open door of Our Lady, or meet with an eminent prelate on
the street.

Hard by is the storehouse, filled with many thousands of
scarves of blessing, hanging densely in every degree of
dinginess, dirt and antiquity, down to the pure eau-de-nil
freshness of our own. And down below again, in the centre
of the town, is the main church of all. This is a very big
building, long and low and massive in outline, standing
superbly at the top of a long expanse of pavement, with a
gabled smoke-black cookhouse slinking on one side, set
out with row over row of noble brass-bound tea-buckets.
Long flights of stone stairs lead up to the deep arcade of
its triple entrance: inside it is cold and dark and high,
filled with the icy scent of old butter invariable in Tibetan
churches. The seats, or kneeling-stools, do not run in
WOLFSTONE DENE AND HALLS OF HEAVEN 123

transverse rows like our pews, but in widespread parallel
bars across the length of the building: and at appointed
places under the huge dim red pillars are pulpits and lecterns
with the altars and the Buddhas aligned along the gloom
of the distance.

Services are frequent in every sense ; even in the grey dawn
your sleeps are penetrated by the long sad wail of the
conch. For when church-time approaches, a monk, wearing
his high yellow mitre like a crested cocked hat, mounts
up on to the roof, and in the centre of the parapet calls
three several times to prayer, at long intervals, in blasts
upon his white silver-looking conch, so sustained and
drawn-out and unvarying that it seems a miracle how he can
hold out with his breath. Some five times a day you hear
that mournful hollow-sounding summons, persistent as life
itself in its drab undeviating melancholy. Gradually the
novices and monks gather at the foot of the steps. They
all have their mitres, either towering on their heads, or
folded flat beneath their arms. But are not at all oppressed
by the solemnity of the occasion or its pontificals.

In fact it is the great game to pluck off somebody’s
mitre unawares, and cuff him over the head with it, and then
throw it down the steps in a general scramble of squeals
and giggles and twinkling of frisky bare legs from among
their reverend wrappings of purple. So the fun rages,
eyed by the Wicked Wa-wa with an expression of sublime
and bun-faced scorn, just like a page-boy at the Ritz con-
descending to despise the antics of guttersnipes in the
street. But now the appearance of the monks restores a
fair decorum, though still little spurts of laughter erupt.
One by one, or in knots and groups, the purple-clad con-
gregation gathers under the steps: across the square, hand
in hand, come the two wee mitred toddlers, like a pair of
severe Popes through the wrong end of a microscope ;
suddenly the three doors are unbolted and thrown wide
from within.

Instantly the congregation floods into the glacial dimly-
124 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

scented dark, the youngers in a chaos like a beck, the
elders in a staid and orderly stream. Everybody squats
down cross-legged in due order, on his flat cushion. When
the rows are filled and settled the service begins. And first
of all emerges the Gwan-ja to do his part, looking more
superb than ever. For now he has discarded the usual
folded red drapery and cocked-hat mitre: straight from
his broad shoulders falls a pleated cloak of scarlet, in long
austere folds, almost to his knees, and on his head there
aspires a new form of mitre, like a gigantically-crested
Greek helmet, carried out in cardboard covered with
citron-coloured silk. He looks, in fact, exactly like an
actor rehearsing Julius Cesar at His Majesty’s. Majestically
moving to match, he goes his pontifical way, up one row
of kneeling monks and down the next, bearing an enormous
trunk of incense, like a section of the largest church-candle.
Holding it horizontally he inclines it this way and that,
so as to envelon all the worshippers in the swirls of its
sanctifying savour. When he is nearing the end of his
stately progress, there follows a lesser dignitary, who, at a
feverish trot, runs up and down the rows, aspersing them
from side to side with holy water out of a glorious old
brass urn, with wrought spout in the likeness of a spewing
dragon.

And then the service proceeds, with ringing of bells, and
chimes and chanting, litanies, antiphons and psalms:
and a stout ecclesiastic, flat-faced and whiskered like a
butler, is predicating from the pulpit, to an occasional
obbligato of his bell. On he goes and on, sitting cross-
legged and hieratic in his place: but as soon as attention
seems likely to flag, devotion is opportunely sustained—and
in a manner that Christian Churches might very profitably
copy. For now, out of the depths of blackness far away
in the left-hand distance of the dark, there arises a bustle ;
a door is thrown open, and on a shaft of light there pours
in a procession of novices and acolytes from the cook-
house adjacent, each bearing one of those sumptuous
WOLFSTONE DENE AND HALLS OF HEAVEN 125

buckets full of tea. A new liveliness perks up in the con-
gregation : everybody produces a wooden bowl : the shaven-
headed Ganymedes go round, administering sustenance
to each from his bucket. Contentment shines, and the
sound of sipping takes the place of sacred song: after
which the bucket-bearers retire again to replenish their
store against another later interval in the service, and the
holy offices are resumed with revivified attention.

There could be no doubt that we were liked in Tien
Tang. Day by day the stream of Lamas and Lama-lings
never ceased, and our stock of marvels never seemed stale.
They loved looking at picture-books and sketches, too.
Murray’s Japan, with its reproductions of Buddhas and
temples, aroused the enthusiasm of the old schoolmaster-
monk and his flock of pupils: he wrote me their Tibetan
names, and his own, with my stylo, as a thrilling change
from his own clever pen of wood, cloven like our nibs at
the end. They had a very sharp eye for the flowers, and
looked at the sketches long and carefully, with one eye
telescoped through the hand as their habit is. Gurgles
and snores of satisfaction followed, and an astonishing
aptness of recognition. Not only had they their own names,
in fact, for the wild flowers, but also a smart instinct for
relationships and differences between them. ‘“ Nig-munk,
nig-munk,”’ they nodded approvingly at Primula stenocalyx ;
and when they saw Androsace tibetica pictured, they knew
that that also was “ Nig-munk,”’ and said so—thus making
my heart clap with delight, after many years of worthy
people who can never be got to see that all Pansies and
Violets are Viola, and all jonquils and daffodils, Narcissus,
to say nothing of such a further flight of perspicacity
as detecting, at a glance, the essential identity of Primula
and Androsace.

The sheep-stalking duly came off: I was able the better
to dissemble my relief that it resulted, as usual, in no
victims, by the fact that poor Bill, besides the disappointment
of a fruitless day, had also had the aggravation of its being
126 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

avery wet one. He had, however, sighted big rams abound-
ing on a near ridge, within sight of the Abbey, and was
able to report the country up behind it hot and arid and
barren and wholly without promise. Hardly had he
returned to bed, sleepy from his dawn-start, than judgment
descended on him for his nefarious intention. For now
behold the Lord Abbot himself come up in high pomp
to call. Bill must needs emerge sulphurously from his
blanket, to assist me in condignly receiving the pontiff,
attended by acolytes, and very stately in bowings and
ceremonial courtesies, and exchanging of yet more scarves
of blessing. He also brought presents: bladders of butter,
and bowls of Silverweed tubers, little nutty things, so
delicious (like young asparagus or new potatoes) as to make
me feel that one’s greed need never flag in England, so
long as Potentilla anserina abounds by every wayside, one.
of our loveliest and most odious of weeds. However,
the visit was brief and formal: the big-headed smiling old
ecclesiastic (so typically such) had hardly got through with
all his bowings and compliments than the summons of
prayer-bells sounded afar in the church square: where-
upon, with yet more bowings, the Abbot rose up and departed
to pontificate, leaving Bill at leisure to go back to bed.

It seems to me now that rains and storm never interrupted
the torrid serenity of Tien Tang. But it was not really
so: often the sweltering glory of the day accumulated
thunders that broke at dusk ; and winds perpetually drove
down the ghyll where Lloydia lived, and perpetually ruffled
her multitudes. It took half the monastery to accomplish
the portrait of the Fairy Bell, gathered in a semicircle
under its cliffs, with purple skirts held out to quiet its
unceasing sarabands. But not even these holy influences
could quell its pervicacity : it danced and fluttered to the
lightest flow of air, and when one group of its bells was at
last silent, another would immediately set up a chime.

While this task was achieving I myself rounded up the
remainder treasures of the ghyll. For here, under a light
WOLFSTONE DENE AND HALLS OF HEAVEN 127

scrub of briar and barberry, big crimson peonies lurked
by now, and in the fine green velvet of the lawns there
appeared a pink-faced slender Primula along by the runnels
of the beck, and in the marshy laps where it overflowed.!
Yellow Fabaria was beginning to glow in drifts across the
Iris plain now unfolded to its fullest blueness: Stellera
was bushing up in domes of blushing white, and among
the rosy cascades of the Androsace on the sunny banks
and lawns of the small crumbling bluffs there stood up
here and there the metallic golden star of Gagea.

The Primula was heartening and pretty and clean as a
modern nursery frieze, like a little Cinque Cento flower
jewelling the lawn of an Angelico heaven with its pure
innocent round faces of pure pink: but an even more
precious vision was the rare Iris that peered coyly from
under a bush higher up the glen. Iris tigridia is quite a
small species, with glaucous leaves in a refined tuffet, and
stems of three or four inches. But each of these supports a
single flower-de-luce of singularly perfect build and balance,
a boldly upstanding exquisite bloom in blended tones of
soft blue, with lavender, and fawn and dove-colour and
bronze, thunderously haunting the purple of the falls.
In the hot bay of Tien Tang it dwelt all round, hanging
beneath the scrub and brushwood, over the lip of the
little banks and braes and bluffs. But it is an early species,
and now only lingered in blossom here and there in secluded
corners. The Columbine, on the contrary, was now in full
bloom. From its delicate volumes of foliage, marbled
exquisitely with white, as if some one had sprayed it from
the milk-jug, aspired its many brave and airy stems of
fantastic flower.

Aquilegia viridiflora has a monstrous charm that yet is
not evil. Alone of its race, so far as I know, it loves only
hot rocks and torrid exposures ; and there it flaunts with
a curious self-assured beauty of its own, that seems at first
to evade notice rather than to miss it, and so ends by

1 P, Wardii.
128 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

capturing the attention completely. Not that the flowers
are large, and certainly they are not lovely or alert in
colouring: the cup opens of chocolate black, with long
curl-horned petals of hyaline green: and gradually the
whole bloom passes to a glaucous pale-jade colour with
fluff of golden stamens standing out. Not, therefore, at
all a showy or “striking” species: yet once you have
been caught by its subtle and refined fascination, you will
not be able to escape it again. And at first, having heard of
its fragrance, I was disappointed to detect none. But, by
degrees, with the plant sitting in front of me for its portrait,
I fqund the air dimly haunted with sweetness: I put my
nose to the flowers, and still they were quite silent, but
there could be no doubt that the Columbine was somehow
mysteriously emanating its message—a charm of scent
as consciously coquettish and elusive as the charm of its
restrained beauty. The monks would give me no name for
it that I could catch ; the Iris, on the contrary, was Hsiao
Ma-Lien, the Little Horse-Lotus—‘“ horse,” I suppose,
being used here in the same sense of sham or inferior substi-
tute that we also give the word in “ horse-chestnut,”’
*“horse-mushroom ” and “ horse-godmother.” (‘‘ Horse-
sense,” too, is mock-modest for that quality which would
like to be cleverness, but isn’t, so takes refuge in piquing
itself on plain bluffness.)

I made another discovery in etymology, too, that set my
mind at rest on a matter that had agitated it. Somewhere
in these parts, we knew, there lay a large monastery known
to Przewalsky, and marked on his maps as “ Cheterton.”
Now by all the signs, even to memories still surviving of
the Russians’ visit, ‘“‘ Cheterton ”’ ought to have been no
other but Tien Tang itself: yet inquire where I would
(like Mrs. Norris) I could neither make Cheterton out of
Tien Tang, nor hear of any other Abbey in these parts
bearing a name at all like it. So ‘“‘ Chesterton,” as we called
it, was rapidly becoming a mere myth in my mind. But
one evening I sat out in the serenity of sundown on a
WOLFSTONE DENE AND HALLS OF HEAVEN 129

hummock in the Iris plain, engulfed in flowers and fragrance.
Around me sat some dull-crimson monks, telling their
beads, and making a remark now and again. In front of
us the Abbey basked in its bay, above the sea of blueness :
devout people, small as emmets, could be seen streaming
steadily along the higher reaches of the pilgrim-path behind
it, round towards a deep little chine between the cliffs
where a Chorten shone white. It caught the eye of a monk :
“Chorten Tang,” he meditated, ‘ Chorten Tang.”” As he
said it, quickly and easily, I saw at once that this was the
original out of which, by an obvious transposition, Przewalsky
had made “ Cheterton.”’ And sure enough I now discovered
that Chorten Tang is indeed the Tibetan name of the Abbey,
as Tien Tang is the Chinese alternative—the former meaning
the Halls of the Chorten, and the latter, the Halls of Heaven.

The pilgrim-path is in full activity at the end of the day.
As the sun begins to sink over the amphitheatre of cliffs,
the Iris plain is dotted with venerable figures in sad scarlet
sauntering over their beads in the tranquil end of the day :
and in the limpid water-runnels that thread the lawn and
turn the mills of flour or invocation, the bare-legged school-
boys scutter and splash. And all the time the procession
of the devout continues. For a mile or so, in front of the
Abbey, the pilgrim-path curves uneventfully among the
Irises : seated on hummocks of the green, scattered monks
watch the passers with dispassionate eye. There are many
ways of doing the round, and many motives. The monks
themselves go round methodically, sauntering at ease,
and pausing at the stations of devotion, and sitting down
in groups here and there to have a chat. And all the
time their hands are busy with their rosaries, and in an
uninterrupted rumble as they go the Invocation of the
Jewel drones from their lips in such a rapid monotone that
you cannot detach the syllables of Om’ Mani Padme Om, so
blurred together in the aspirant’s zeal to get as many
thousand of it as possible done within the hour.

Then there comes along perhaps a woman of the neighbour-

K
130 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

hood, discharging a vow or trying to get a benefit. She
is in her bests, a-glitter and a-clank with silver chains, and
her white plaqued leathern stole depends over her violet
skirts, and her round felt hat is on her head. On her
back she carries a volume or two of the Scriptures strapped,
roughly like two drawers out of a mahogany chest of them
—long thick baulks of stiff paper strips, bound between
boards of varnished wood. Strajning forward from her
burden she goes slowly, performs due rites at each station,
and often sinks to her knees and then straight forward,
flat on her face on the grass, with hands outstretched before
her. Rising again in a quick spring she proceeds; and
now comes a little choir-boy who has been naughty, and
has to make the pilgrimage of penance, with the good little
boys giggling and poking fun at him, in groups alongside.

This is a serious process, for the pilgrimage is accomplished
wholly in prostrations. Standing, you fall forward flat,
stretched as far as you will reach, with your arms straight
out in front of you, as far as they will reach. Then you
rise, stand on the extreme point where your finger-tips
rested, and fall straight forward again, repeating the process
indefinitely till your bourn is attained. It is on record
that an offending monk once had to make this penance-
pilgrimage all the way from Urga to Lhasa to placate the
Sovereign Pontiff. Imagination staggers at the thought
of what it must have been to journey by unbroken pros-
trations over those appalling Alpine-passes between Litang,
Batang, and Tachien-lu. The toil took six months, it is
said; and on his arrival the Dalai Lama refused to see
him, and the doors of pardon stayed shut, and home he had
to go again, inexorably prostrating himself still, all the way
back from Lhasa to Urga. But the bad little boys of Tien
Tang have no such rigid rules ; so long as the severe eye of
some old monk, squatting on a hummock, is fixed on their
performances, all goes faithfully and well, and each pros-
tration duly starts from the precise point reached by the
last. But now comes a stretch of sward with no one sitting
WOLFSTONE DENE AND HALLS OF HEAVEN 131

by, and the other boys have tired of the fun and fallen
away to a new game among themselves ; the penitent looks
furtively round to see that no one is watching, and then,
with feet together, takes a mighty jump forward before his
next prostration—and then another, and then another,
so that a deal of ground is covered with a celerity most
suspicious to anyone who suddenly looks up and sees
him much farther on than he had any right to be, unless
a miracle had sped him forward.

But when the Iris plain is ended, and the path turns
round the far corner of the Abbey and begins to climb into
the cirque of cliffs behind it, the process is no longer so much
impeded by prostrations as by the points of devotion.
The path scrambles up, and then runs level under the
precipices : tucked into corners of rock there are invocation
cylinders to be turned, and, by the track, square white-
washed hutches, man-high; and at length the path coils
round into the little ghyll at the back. Here there are
more cylinders, and more holy hutches, and a flagstaff of
prayer standing starkly up out of a base of boulders. And
here, close under the gloom of the gorge, embowered in
golden cascades of Caragana, the Chorten itself looms
pure and pale, bulging upwards from its four-square pedestal
of straight tiers. Over the foreground impends an abrupt
jumble of cliff in vast blocks fantastic as a compilation of
sham rockwork, violently scarlet in the slanting sunlight,
and hanging out from its blazing red crevices dense valances
of Polypody in blazing emerald: and, behind, the Chorten
is embraced in the cool deeps of the Chine, between straight-
sided walls of cliff. On its swelling face it wears an arched
panel containing a Buddha outlined and framed in cobalt :
otherwise it is all of cold white, but for a touch of cream
in the steps on which it rises. Some holiness rests here,
some relic of sainted Abbot or Living Buddha; it is the
culminating point of the pilgrimage, and here the monks
sit down again to have another chat.

After which the rest of the circuit is brief and easy:
132 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

round behind the Chorten into the combe, and out again
by the flagstaff: and so off the hill-side and forth into the
Tris plain again, on the other flank of the Abbey. The
holy circle is accomplished, and now the sun dies down off
Tien Tang Ssi, and the sad blue wail of the conch calls to
vespers, and the little old monk comes up into my chapel
to light the lamp before the Buddha, and on the darkening
down above the topmost lingering flush of the cliffs, the
curly-horned heads of the big sheep emerge in black silhou-
ettes, one by one.
CHAPTER VIII
TIEN TANG TO CHEBSON

Meanwhile the work of exploring the ranges round Tien
Tang was diligently proceeding, nor need anyone think
that churchgoing monopolized my days. In a cloudless
crystal day we started off one morning up on to the summits
—Mafu, Gomer, Wicked Wa-wa, and Ma the Mahomedan.
The air was full of joy and spring after the storms ; it was a
day of high festival, too ; most of the monks had gone up in
procession to the topmost summit of the downs, there to
“Nien Jing,” with crackers and gunshots going off before an
obo-pile on the apex, like a bonfire of long poles built up ina
sheaf. And, down below, the Monastery itself was filled
with parishioners and devouts from all the country round,
and the shrines stood open, and holy musics abounded.

Very serene and heart-free I jogged up the long climb to
the grassy saddle on the down-top: but here dismounted.
Mafu took the ponies onwards down to Bridgehead, to be
shod, while Gomer and Wa-wa, carrying my various para-
phernalia, accompanied me up the grassy breast on the right,
rosy with Androsace in the lawn towards its culminating
crest. In these latitudes and at these altitudes climbing is
not the lightfoot affair it ison our own smaller-scaled Alps
where, at 6,000 ft. or 7,000 ft., you already have all the flowers
you cando with and in no circumstances need ever go higher
than nine. But Flora, here, flies a much higher flight ; from
9,000 ft. to 10,000 ft. you toil arduously up braes com-
paratively barren, with a heart so burdened and bounding
that what looks from below like a bank, becomes a volum-
inous Alp in the ascent, up which you cannot go more than a

133
134 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

very few yards at a time before pausing yet again, to pant
apoplectically against the unfolding glory of the world.

From that high crest, indeed, when once I had attained
it, the view was superb; but I was even more grateful to
the views from the lower reaches, as giving me such sound
excuse for my frequent rests. The tops of the down are
surfy with a small scant scrub of Potentilla davurica, among
which peep the soft blue-purple butterflies of Iris goniocarpa
—an old friend from last year, but always welcome. Above
Siku, on Thundercrown, the Butterfly Iris so violently
differed (according as you found it on the Alp, dwarfer, large
flowered, brindled and blurred in blues; or lower down,
among the coarse hot grass on the hot flanks of the spurs,
fine-drawn and smaller-flowered with wax-white falls
peppered densely with violet velvet round their rims) that
I long distinguished it as two definite species, feline and
pardaline. The Da-Tung, however, gives you unvaryingly
the exact median type of Ir. goniocarpa, not quite so large
and blended in the flower, or so stocky in leaf and stem as
the feline, not so élancée, little-bloomed, thin and vividly
varied as the pardaline. But in all its forms the Butterfly
Iris is among the loveliest and kindliest of the smaller Irids,
and the only thing about it that I deplore is its weakness in
the pangs of pregnancy. For hardly has the pod waxed
fat, and begun to pale with the promise of ripeness, than her
stem grows correspondingly tired, flags by degrees and
ultimately flops down completely, among the grasses which
by now have grown up into a towering jungle, compared to
the neat sprouting lawn from which the Iris had sprung in
blossom : so that hunting for seed of Iris goniocarpa is a
really desperating business, indeed like questing needles in a
world of hay. The pods are practically undiscoverable, in
fact, till at last, discharged of their burden, they stand up
again stiffly, pale bare skeletons, mocking the eye everywhere
with their blatant visibility. For it is by the cruellest of
ironies that when you do ultimately see them you no longer
want to: for all their seed is shed.
TIEN TANG TO CHEBSON 135

From that high crest all the distant snows lay clear in the
clear air, and on the North, through the topmost fringe of
the coppice that clothed the cooler slope, a lesser pyramid
looked unjustly Alpine'and magnificent in a vesture of new
snow. I made towards the coppice : far off, on a green hill-top,
I could see the monks, dark crowds of specks pontificating
round the pale sheaf of the obo, and through the golden
tranquillity of the morning faintly came the blares and
explosions of their music, muted to sweetness like fairy horns
in the distance. Then I passed from the warm grassy side
of the crest into the forest on its farther side. Down and
down I plunged; it was beautiful and fresh in dawning
green, wonderfully English. Neither in the opener glades,
nor in the woodcutters’ clearing, nor in the mellow obscurity
of the woodland did I see any new thing. But the irradiating
loveliness of the day and the scene was such that this made
no matter, and in placid delight I descended the fell, by this
time down in open glades of turf, drifted deep in Irises, till
at length, quite unexpectedly, I came immediately upon a
cosy little folded Tibetan steading, securely concealed in a
lap of the glen, where a number of horses were grazing in its
paddock. Great dogs vociferously disapproved me: I
diverged from my course, and soon found myself dropping
into the depths of the Tien Tang Ghyll. Down its arid
bouldered beck-bed I proceeded, under stony banks ablaze
with the rose of Androsace, and through the gorge, and
round in the open by the bend of the river till I came to the
bridge. Here I paused awhile to make friends with a pigmy
hare who lived among its stones—a pleasant person, like a
wee short-eared rabbit with a dark brown face—then crossed
the bridge, to sit out on the bummock above and take my
nuncheon.

After this, having passed the time of day with Tanguei, I
strolled along the track towards the smithy, hoping to see the
horses shod. But the smithy was too far, so I turned back
at the corner of the bend (high over which the budding
poplars of the impending forest were all a coppery flame),
136 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

and returned, above the drifts of storm-dashed Iris, under
the immediate shadow of the hill, where Clusterbeauty
abounded in colonies of quite bewildering loveliness, in the
steep rippled banks and earth-fans. On the knoll I then
rested in the sun, and scanned the distant heights of the
down, and pondered the waste of labour and time in toiling
all that way, when there, much nearer, along the cliffs at
the curve of the river ran that short cut which would bring
me immediately round again into the plain of Tien Tang.
It is true that as I lay and scanned the precipices through my
glasses, I could discern no trace of any track at all, but only
blank russet-coloured walls of precipice with the river at
their feet. However, there the short cut undoubtedly was,
and nobody in the neighbourhood ever dreamed of going
by any other way, unless they had horses or mules in
charge. Where monastic limbs could go, surely mine. could
follow. So I descended upon Bridgehead Tanguei, and
catechized him as to where, precisely, the short cut ran,
along’ those formidable faces. He pretended to show me:
I pretended to see. “ Little-road, good—not good?” I
inquired. “Good,” said Tanguei. ‘‘ Easy—not easy ?”
I precisified. ‘‘ Easy,” replied Tanguei, faithful to China’s
invariable courtesy in giving the pleasant and obviously
desired answer.

So, reassured, I returned across the bridge, with Gomer
on my heel: and round to the mouth of the glen. Here
amid fierce hot shafts of violet fragrance shot up from
clumps of Iris Bungei that peered between the big coarse
tussocks I diverged from the track, and addressed myself to
the steep fell-slope on my right. Steep, it soon became
steeper, and much steeper: slippery and treacherous, it
rapidly became much more slippery and treacherous: till
suddenly I climbed round a sharp brow, and found myself
immediately above the river—high on an open cliff, going
furiously hand over hand for fear I should fall off if I stopped
to think. It was a hectic climb: Aquilegia viridiflora
mopped and mowed at me out of the burnt dark crevices:
TIEN TANG TO CHEBSON 137

with a gasp of relief I at last surmounted a shoulder, and
saw a real track, though tiny, coiling on the level, placidly,
round a deep chine in the fell. Glory be, the worst of that
fearsome Hsiao Lu was over. I panted with a self-compla-
cent sense of achievement. What a mercy: for, if there
had been worse before me, and it had become a case of going
back, down over that grisly cliff I had just scaled, assuredly
I could never have done it. And otherwise there was no
choice: overhead the chine towered up to the down in
terrible bluffs, below it descended in yet more terrible ones,
starkly to the river. But now there was no more to do but
saunter leisurely round the corner, and up to Tien Tang.
I sauntered, I came to the corner, I came round it.

I saw nothing before me any more but a blank bare
wall of rock, far and sheer to the bird’s-eyed fury of the
Da-Tung, darkly roaring below, in its wildest rage, round
the bend of the cliff. The path had wholly vanished, and
in front there were only more naked precipices, and more
beyond, rosy in the fierceness of the sunlight. My heart
became a petrifaction, and did not by any means thaw when
at last I perceived a very small crevice, about four inches
wide, slanting obliquely down the bald sheerness of the cliff,
with dim slots cut for foothold, long since worn faint as hope
and smooth as ice by generations of bare Tibetan soles.
For them, or for string sandals, that way would offer small
terrors, and evidently it was down there that the Short Cut
continued. But I, cumbrously booted, was in quivering
stresses, between the Devil of a backward descent down
that first cliff (with an accompanying sense of defeat, and
all the high downs to do in the end after all) and the deep sea
of that river, roaring so far down, straight beneath the
precipice across which, apparently, I was meant to adhere
like a fly. Ss

Between the choices I wavered, but Gomer now came
along with his radiant air of everything always being such
fun, and ran a little way down that cranny like any cat,
and smiled up at me reassuringly to say it was all quite
138 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

easy. Easy, indeed! short cut, indeed! I peevishly
reflected that a short cut indeed it was likely to be for me to
the Halls of Heaven, supposing I could so far presume on
the blamelessness of my past as to count on such a destina-
tion. Hoping, therefore, that I was not too sanguine even
in my pessimism, I gritted my teeth to the adventure, seeing
that no other way lay open. Unluckily Gomer had already
things to carry, and could not be further burdened with my
boots: and I myself depended on the freedom of both my
hands. So down I sat, and deliberately began my down-
ward journey over the face of the cliff, from slab to horrible
smooth slab of the cranny, with Gomer backing down below
me, arranging my feet with nice precision wherever foothold
was dimly indicated. Had I worn nails that day, my death
it would assuredly have been; as it was, I put the very
smallest trust in my boots, and went as nervously as any old
maid in a marsh, levering myself down inch by inch on my
seat—a method of progression that makes up in security
what it undeniably lacks in grandeur, seeing that one’s
posterior curves, in such moments of difficulty, develop a
quasi-prehensile and adhesive quality, which no doubt
derives from radiating ancestral memories of the tail. No
such high anthropological considerations, however, occurred
to me then, to distract the caution of my going: bit by bit
I slithered and sat, down and down along the crevice, until
at length I was safe among a brawl of boulders at the base,
hard on the river, with nothing more before me but a
scramble over and among them, and then a languid easy
saunter up the-levels to Tien Tang Ssu.

I found Bill very busy amid a crowd of monks, developing
photographs and printing plates. For the camera was a
very considerable social asset in Tien Tang, where everybody
was anxious to have a portrait of himself. One monk, too,
possessed a most special treasure, which all the others
coveted. This was nothing less (here in this remote heart’s
heart of Asia!) than a picture-postcard of the Potala at
Lhasa : and above the vast square bulk of the castle-palace,
TIEN TANG TO CHEBSON 139

there hovered aloft, amid woolly little sham clouds, the thin
pale face of the Dalai Lama. We were accordingly able to
make ourselves generally popular by re-photographing this,
and supplying as many replicas as there were eminent
ecclesiastics to desire one; and there were also copies to be
made of the Abbey’s most cherished picture, a meritorious
effort, in hieratic convention, with mitred Saints and
Buddhas embedded in a dense multitude of smaller fry,
segregated from them by haloes, and circumnavigated by
coils of polychromatic cloud.

After this, I myself strolled round with the camera,
catching corners of the Abbey and groups of mitred little
choir-boys. Then into the dark of the church again, and
up on to the roof, to find a long cold vault here, with a big
bell. The balcony outside immediately overlooked the yard
below: I watched the congregation gather to evensong, all
dight in their cocked-hat mitres, and singing psalms rather
disorderly distracted by intervals of horseplay. Finally
all got in, and I descended to join them. The laity consisted
only of me, Mafu, our two Mahomedan soldiers and a local
Child of Earth who came in at our heel. The whiskered
bland dignitary, who is like a sainted butler, declaimed his
litany from the ambo, followed by a gabbly chorus, the
acolytes and choir-boys woolgathering in every direction ;
but the two little wee, wee people sat motionless as images,
with great eyes fixed, an entrancing spectacle of rapt
uncomprehending solemnity.

When night was down, Bill and I embarked after dinner
on a hair-raising adventure. In the inebriating balmy light
of a moon three-fifths to the full, we sauntered artlessly out,
as if without any aim in particular, and in a careless-seeming
leisure made our way deviously over the scented sea of Iris
in the plain. We were, in fact, bent on securing clumps of
two special forms, and were anxious to avoid any suspicion
or enmity that we might incur from the monks, by openly
putting spade into their sacred soil. Personally I believe
that by that time we might have carried off the whole plain-
140 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

ful by cartloads without comment, if we had liked : however,
it was huge fun, feeling so surreptitious and conspiratorial.
One might have been going secretly, by night, to disentomb
some hallowed corpse. On the bank, just above a particular
albino, I remembered two monks were sitting, in fact,
drumming and chiming and chaunting in the starry stillness :
but we crept past them severally, unobserved. I discovered
my plant pale as a phantom under the moon. Trepidating,
and in a breathless hush, for fear any rash noise should
distract those two devout dark blurs on the bank to noticing
our sinister attitudes and activities, we successfully got up
the clump unnoticed, and made off through the scented surf
to the other. This, too, without suspicion, we achieved, and
so triumphantly returned across the grassy plain, toward
the sleeping white smear of the monastery, cold and dead in
the moonlight, under the cold ghostly pallor of the enveloping
cliffs behind.

Disappointed, on the whole, with the floral possibilities
of these lower ranges, we now had the fir-forest opposite to
explore. Seeing that, from the river-shingles hardly ten
minutes down from Tien Tang, one could almost throw a
stone across the river to its farther side, it seemed a night-
mare of irony that to get there we should have to go all the
way back down the plain, all the way up on to the fells, all
the way down to Bridgehead, and then all the way up the
far side of the river again—six arduous miles at least, to
reach a goal immediately in front of our starting-point,
which a bridge would have turned into a traverse of some
five hundred yards. But so it was: no bridge existed here,
nor even the pulley-haul basket on a rope which, it was said,
the monks occasionally rigged up in later summer. Nor is
the Da-Tung a stream to be forded: as we found in many
probings out into its turbid furies. So off went I and M&
and Mafu, riding over the downs, while Bill and Wicked
Wa-wa went round by that grim Hsiao Lu along the
precipice, ultimately to be rejoined by my procession at
Bridgehead. And thence we all came uneventfully back-
TIEN TANG TO CHEBSON 141

wards again, up the green flats on the other side of the river.
It was very tantalizing to see Tien Tang so close over the
way, unfolded beneath its cliffs ; so close and yet so unattain-
able. I could not help laughing, the irony was so acute as
to be comic: but Bill fretted at it all day, and made many
furious attempts to find a ford, riding Out into the river
wherever a broad race of ripples seemed to promise a passage.
But it was nowhere any good: sooner or later the violent
water roared belly-high, and soon the pony would have
been swept off its feet, and engulfed, and carried away
even if it tried to swim across, for the Da-Tung-Hor is no
river to be lightly treated : even in the end of May, when its
full volume has not yet been released by the loosing of the
Tibetan snows.

Along and along we drifted, under the sun, till at length
we came into the shadow of the forest, round a deep curve of
it where woodcutters had already begun their devastations.
For the forest of Tien Tang Sst is one of the most important,
if not the most important, wood-supplies of Lanchow. The
revenues of the Abbey owe much to this almost inexhaustible
resource: contractors bid high for its timber, and float it
down the Da-Tung-Hor in rafts, and thence down the Hwang-
Hor to the capital. As for the Viceroy, he commandeers as
he pleases, on nominal prices or none, and woe betide any
grumblings. It was, in fact, for some Viceregal work that
the felling was now going on, as we rode round amid the
heavy boscage that so soon springs up in a clearing, and
climbed an ascent, and found ourselves on. what now seemed
almost a carriage-drive, broad and level and smooth, and
white in the hot black shadow of the firs. Now we were in
the heart of the woodland: in a vast wall it impended
unbroken on the right, and on the left as we went, or in front
as we rested, the river rolled beneath, under a deep pre-
cipitous fall of cliffs or chalky-looking ghastly soil. Be-
yond it rolled the rounded cirrhus wave of the poplar-
belt, and then the Iris plain, green from here, and level
as an unrufiled sea: and then the low white stretches
142 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

of the monastery, huddled beneath its bay of precipices.

Delicious was the day, and delicious the balmy breath of
the moth-eaten spruces, and delicious the occasional glades
that starkly clove the flanks of the forest. Up some of these
we explored : it was like going up a topless stairway, till
at last the clearance faded upward into the eternal midnight.
But it was all bone dry, dry as no woodland I could have
imagined, and far too dry for any flowers, besides being far
too deep-sunk in unbroken blackness of dark. So down we
came, sending Mafu upward still, to see what might be to be
seen over the invisible crest of the ridge: and threaded the
greener jungles at the foot of the climb, where the firs are
not so dense, and slants of sunlight, filtering through,
engender the vivid green of shrubs, and the lesser world
of Peonies and Anemonies in their shade. But even these
were rare and poor and well-known—the magenta crimson
peony of these ranges, that lacks alike the roseate soft tones
and the roseate soft sweetness of its cousin on Thunder-
crown : and the spidery ugly tangles of Anemone obtusiloba
that starts with small five-pointed creamy stars sitting tight
in the grass, and ends in lanky spraying fountains, as rank
as Geum urbanum (and very like it in effect, but for the
colour), with heads of hooky green seeds that catch on to
your clothes like burrs.

So in vain search we wrestled among the tangles, and
explored the frontage of the fell, till on the lower slopes the
forest thinned out, and became a mere occasional outbreak
of firs, above green lawns. We got quite clear of the trees
at last, to where, round the corner, a stony beck-bed comes
down through the fell in a deep chine, with a fantastic high
peak of russet-red precipices towering beyond, dark in a
vesture of firs up its skirts, and outlined delicately with firs
along its crests. Here, among the boulders, deep in a shady
hollow of the beck-bed, we rested awhile and drowsed,
beneath the murmurous music of poplars, silverily rippling
overhead in the dance of the wind. Then slowly we returned
along the carriage-drive.
TIEN TANG TO CHEBSON 143

Below, immediately above the river-cliff, was a secondary
lap of grassy glade, open and grilling in the sunshine. And
here, picnicking alfresco, were two dear old pontifis at their
lunch, attended by a chaplain, with their palfreys grazing
in the background. “My Lords, My Lords,” they
rapturously cried up at us with nods and beckings, “‘ Come
down, come down.” So down went Bill and I and the
Wa-wa, and made salutations, and took our seats on the
grass while the chaplain served us all to a lunch of buttered
tea in broad shallow bowls that might have been of boxwood,
and large square sippets hard as marble, out of a bag. We
lapped and supped and munched as best we might: but,
even when sopped in tea the sippets defeated my dentures
and endangered them: apologies had to be made for my
general defectiveness of construction. The two old gentle-
men, however, were perfectly genial about it, and beamed
upon us through their round horn-rimmed spectacles. They
were evidently dignitaries of high degree, robed in red and
purple, with important rosaries, and one wore an enormous
red-lacquer hat exactly like a Cardinal’s. The chaplain,
meanwhile, assisted by the Wa-wa, inconspicuously
attended, in the background, to the iron tea-porringer
simmering over an improvised tripod of stones and a picnic
fire of sticks.

And so we said Au revoir, till they also should have arrived
-at Tien Tang (to which they were on their way): and our-
selves continued homeward ; stopping only to descend the
cliff into the boulder-bed of the river, where, in a placid
emerald back-water, we ate our own lunch, beneath the filmy
shade of the poplars that here make just the same forest as
on the far side, like a phantom park in the underworld. And
when we got home it was still quite early : and early were
the sheep, too, in emerging from their lairs. So that, lying
on the roof, we could clearly study their shape and colouring
through our glasses—the straightish out-bent horns of the
rams and their black bell-tuft ; and the mousy tone of all,
with creamy bellies, the colour lining the thighs and the back
144 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

of the hind legs, and rounding the blackscutted rump. This
will show how close they come down upon that holy spot.
Finally, we spotted a ewe, squatting tight beneath a sunny
cliff just beyond the Chorten in the chine, so near that we
could not refrain from going out to try a preposterous snap-
shot from the pilgrim-path, watched by monks and pilgrims.
And then, to crown all, came down the wonderful night : in
the cold intoxicating glare of the almost full moon we roamed
along the flat roofs, while the cliffs above looked perfectly
Mediterranean, luminous and ghostly, with the ranges of low
white houses huddled beneath.

But by now the Irises were gone dashed and dingy in
death, like fading daffodils: the Lloydia was blowzy in the
rocks, and Androsace tibetica weeping to its end with a
blurred eye of blood-crimson: all present work at Tien
Tang was accomplished, and it was time to move on, however
sad we were to be leaving so delicious a haven of peace. In
a morning almost too cloudless to be trusty, the caravan
packed up and shouldered its burdens, and rode out of Tien
Tang, amid many promises of a quick return: and with us
tumultuously in a crowd poured the monks and acolytes,
these last in brand new petticoats of deep violet, brief and
bunchy as a ballerina’s, which, under their equally new upper
swathings of bright scarlet, made them look just like old-
fashioned fuchsias. At the debouchure of the Lloydia-Glade
they fell away, with cries of good-will and farewell : Bill and
M& went up over the downs to Chao-lo, thence, on their
ponies, to make the rough wild trail along the gorges and
gullies immediately above the Da-Tung-Hor, but the rest
of the caravan had to take a much longer detour, in order
to get down to the river again, at its crossing-point. For
Chebson Abbey was now our destination; and Chebson
Abbey lies far out on the Western side of the range, whereas
Tien Tang snuggles close under the Eastern : so that a long
traverse of the chain lay before us, and a transit of the river.

Up the long glade accordingly lay our present course,
into the hot dry hill-country behind Tien Tang, but winding
TIEN TANG TO CHEBSON 145

perpetually leftwards after the first few miles. Between
fantastic red ranges of pulhamite, rounded and eroded, the
valley coiled, with scrub of rose and barberry on either side.
The little stream was pure as crystal, and made pleasant
noises : but ere long the way grew very monotonous and dull.

These open Tibetan vales, in the uneventful foothills of
the Alps, are strangely oppressive in their sinister yet un-
assuming sameness : they are very high, and they seem very
high, close up under the immediate lid of the sky : but there
is nowhere any sign of it, so that their pretence of being
mere lowlands seems an evil sham, and with an evil magic
their very dullness, hot and sterile, seems haunted, and the
marmots themselves are a magic population, imprisoned by
a spell in their present gollywog shape. As I rode slowly
along in the ominous silence of the sunshine, I chanted
snatches of song to charm away the weight of that watchful
stillness: but the only fragment that survives is a Words-
worthian line to the effect that ‘“‘ A marmot’s life has few
amenities.”

All this time, though, the way was gradually rising: and
at length we came to a point where a little beck came down
another valley on the left, at right angles to our own, now
hardly more than an extended saucer sprawling along
between the downs. And here, so high we already were,
the open slopes were sheeted in a little Rhododendron,
occasionally sighted in cooler stretches on the way up, but
here for the first time seen in mass, and beginning to clothe
itself in colour. This is the universal representative, in the
Da-Tung Alps, of that small, grey-leaved, blue-flowered
group that has already rejoiced our gardens with Rh.
Fastigiatum and Rh. Imbricatum and Rh. F. 119, off
Thundercrown. But here the habit is light and graceful,
and the foliage minute and almost silvery, so that the
shrubling of two feet or so has a special airy charm of its
own, even without’ the comparatively large little flowers,
that open in pairs all over the plant, in such profusion that
the whole bush goes blue, and the mile-wide stretches of it

L
146 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

in the upland moors of the Da-Tung are a sheet of lavender,
which fills the farther distances with a film of grey haze.

Up this right-angled turn it was now our time to proceed,
at first through coppice of cypress with Primula stenocalyx
glittering on the bank, but ascending so rapidly that quite
soon we were in the cooler air of an almost Alpine woodland,
splashing in mossy pools of the beck in successive laps and
hollows of the hill, as we ascended steep over steep. Along
one shoulder there was a clearing, and grassy glades with
burnt black stumps upstanding, and Iris goniocarpa
beginning to glow among the tuffets in more abundance and
brilliance than ever I saw it elsewhere in the Da-Tung Alps.
And here, among the rest, gleamed two perfect albinos,
fairy flowers of an almost flagrant purity, with even the
deepest purple frecklings faded into a faintest memory of
green. These were most preciously collected, and wadded
up in moss: it gives me a special thrill to record that those
two plants, after being carried sultrily round all the length
of this tour on which we are embarking, with its long sojourn
in Chebson, arrived undaunted back at Wolvesden, were
planted in the little garden that I made there in the shingle
of the yard, and there bore fertile seed (a mouse picked it
before I did, but no matter): that then, in due course,
replanted in empty biscuit-tins, they came all the way down
across the blazing distances of China to Peking, wintered
there in a yard of the Legation, and then, in my own hand
and steam-heated sleeping compartment, all across the
frozen wastes of Russia and Siberia to Petrograd, up the
lagoons of Finland, down the flanks of Sweden, over the
fjelds and along the fjords of Norway, and all across the
mine-strewn estranging seas to Hull: and are now, one of
them at least, thriving as happily at Ingleborough as they
ever did (except for the unanticipated attentions of slugs,
which bewilder them),

Their immediate neighbour there has an only less romantic
history of travel, too: this is that very plant of Androsace
mucrenifolia which, four years ago, was making pats of
TIEN TANG TO CHEBSON 147

hawthorn-scented snow, 15,000 ft. up, on the high tops
of Ardgen, and was there photographed in situ, and will
be found immortalized in the first Eaves of the World.
But her Odyssey had not the dramatic touch of being
personally conducted : she travelled home to England com-
paratively prosaically, all the way from the Tibetan
highlands, by post, in a biscuit-box. Anyhow, so much for
the ridiculous old legend (even now still lingering) about the
perils of taking up a plant in flower: why that is the very
moment of moments to take it.

After this blissful episode, the path climbed steadily, high
and far, up a coppiced fold between great fells, towards a
distant neck. Gradually the woodland thinned out, and
scant Potentilla-scrub took its place, with coarse tussocky
grass forming its foundation. All, here, was still drab and
pale: only Primula tangutica, from its cabbagy crowns,
was unfolding, on its lanky stems, its tiers of miserable
squinny chocolate-coloured stars, that make it, as a rule, so
really hideous as to bring shame on the august name it bears.
And I also saw here, one beautiful tuffet of Adonis coerulea,
concise in the foliage, large and silkily purple in the flower.
By now we were toiling up bare moorland toward the high
neck before us, and on the right hung dark heights, with
scrub of Potentilla and burnt emerald ghylls of grass between
them. Here from afar I spotted a series of mysterious
blobs, large and rounded and pale up on the flank of the fell,
on a green strip where boscage was beginning to sprout. I
could not believe them to be anything but baby donkies ;
when I got near it was the Lampshade Poppy, pallid and
preposterous in such a place.

On the pass itself I noticed a track, ascending still higher,
by coils, up the left-hand peak. But as our own path still
continued, broad and unmistakable, down the other side, I
had no hope of better things, and went straight on, past
bays of brown scrub crowded with the sulphur-pale orbs of
Meconopsis integrifolia. Still downwards, a broad comfort-
able road, cypress copse beginning, and beyond, far over
148 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

the tumbled distances of wood and moor, a noble range of
Alps, ominous in the new brooding gloom of the day. But
kardly had I come on a new aster at the path side, than
Gomer came running after with the news that the upward
track from the crest had, after all, been the right one. So
back we turned, Go-go, and the stupid-faced pony and I,
and laboured up to the pass again ; and thence up along the
aréte still, to the culminating point, which was a bare dark
shingle and shale and rock, with nothing of beauty or interest
either appearing or promising.

And here we emerged suddenly into sight of our own
Wolvesden Alps once more, expanding very magnificent
and white before us, high over the black crumples of the
lesser hills. Very steep and very far and difficult was now
the descent towards the river, down a precipitous wide
gully of moorland, dead and brown and sopping, with
tussocky marches, and large loose track of wet stone and
shale, empty of hope, with only the little Trollius beginning
to appear in buttons of gold. Lower yet, we came under
crags into a ghyll full of a big white rhododendron that was
in flower, looking like lodged lumps of snow in a thaw, all
over the wet-looking glossy foliage of the tangled bushes.
But I grew a little leaden, in the leaden overcast thunderous-
ness of the afternoon, to find no new plants. It was a
tedious descent, too, the donkies and ponies stumbling
cautiously down the steeps among the boulders and pitfalls.
Safely, however, we all at length attained once more to the
lowest levels, where at once the Iris resumed, in drifted
backwashes, filling each bay of the hillside. There was still
a long descent before us, though, to the river, with the
marmots now for sole diversion, scuttling about, fat, great,
bandy-legged teddy-bears, with their perpetual ridiculous
jerking up of their tails at each pause: or sitting up inquir-
ingly at us, with a goggle-eyed plutocratic expression.

But now we did at last got down to the Da-Tung-Hor
again, and thence continued easily forward, along the bends
of its turbid tide, till, among open meadows, we arrived at
TIEN TANG TO CHEBSON 149

the rope ferry, with a mountain slope of birch-copse opposite,
and a brightly white-flowered rowan hovering in the coppice
beneath. Into the ark we packed, and across the river it
was pulley-hauled by the whole staff, sliding along the wire
hawser on a ring. Now up and down along the ribs and
gullies of the birch-copse we continued our progress up the
river. The wood was very luminous and green and lovely,
but soon the Da-Tung-Hor came round a wild coil from the
right, while our own way ran straight away from it, up an
open beck vale with a village, towards high Alps ahead.
There seemed a choice of tracks by the stream; we chose
the most convenient—and thé inhabitants immediately issued
forth and howled at us. We had got onto one of those taboo
tracks, that’are closed to caravan traffic during the time of
springing corn, when demons, if offended, could blast the crop.
Remembering Chago, we hastily retraced our steps, and
tried another way—only to find ourselves on a yet more
forbidden track, wedged in with walls and prayer-flags.
The howls increased in number and volume, dogs bayed and
guns went off. However, we continued undaunted, and
gradually the unpropitious noises died out in the backward
distance, as we jogged quietly through the rural calm of
the evening. The glen by degrees grew narrower and
deeper : till at length we came into an Iris plain deep down
between the fells, with lovely cloudy poplars all ruinously
cut and cleared and prone. And above this, high on the
flank of the fell, clung Gan Chang Ssi, our night’s destination,
packed on the steep slope. From far above, Ma called to
us: we knew that Bill had duly arrived, and prepared our
welcome. By a bridge close by we crossed the beck, and
very steeply up into the steep streets of the neat little clean
monastery—there to find Bill, indeed, gone out for a stroll,
but the people quiet and friendly, and a beautiful new yard-
compound allotted to us, in which I was glad to settle for the
night, after sustaining a visit from a nice little round French-
faced Gwan-ja, who had been to Lhasa, and was accordingly
delighted with a present of the post-card photograph.
150 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

Gan Chang Sst is not a large religious house, nor a
wealthy : it has neither the homely bustle of Tien Tang,
nor the stately calm of Chebson. Along the steep hill-side
it clings and clambers, looking across at another steep fell-
side opposite with the beautiful park of the slaughtered
poplars lying deep in the vale between. I visited the main
church, square and white and solid, but no rival to those of
Tien Tang ; and in a side-room of my own lodgment I came
on rood screens and other decorations in coloured butter,
stored away for festivals. In all these parts coloured butter
is the staple of religious adornment: in the composition
they make it is hard and firm and enduring, susceptible of
infinite twisting and carving and moulding. At Gan Chang
there were merely conventional flowers, roses and peonies,
sculptured in pink and red and yellow butter amid green
butter-foliage and mounted on frames, but one of the most
celebrated festivals in all Buddhist Northern Asia is the
Butter Fair at Gumbum Abbey, whither, in the opening of
the year, uncounted multitudes flock to see a show of
tableaux and holy scenes, episodes in the lives of saints and
Buddhas, all carried out, with the most marvellous artistry,
in sculptures of coloured butter, modelled and tinted to the
life. These are new every year, each exhibition trying to
rival the last, but in the ordinary run of things, the lesser
monasteries keep their butter ornaments stored in some
loft from year to year, as here at Gan Chang, to be produced
in due season for decorating the church at Harvest Festivals
and. such-like.

But I cannot tell you more of Gan Chang Ssi, for at grey
of the next morning we were up and out of it, with a tremen-
dous day before us, of crossing the Alps and descending upon
their Western slope. High as we already were, we had yet
to go much higher, up and up the windings of the valley,
with the willowy little blue Rhododendron now abounding
in beauty on all the banks; and another one also appearing,
a size larger, like Rh. (azalea) amcenum, with much bigger
flowers of a similar lavender blue, but dying magenta. By
TIEN TANG TO CHEBSON 151

this time, too, the prevalent Daphne of those ranges was in.
bloom, and proved in general to be, or to fade, of a rich
ivory white. And still we climbed: up on open moorland
‘now, with a pass ahead of us, by many coils, at the end; and
behind, in the cloudless morning, a noble backward view
over the whole Gadjur range in the far distance.

When we topped the crest we saw ahead of us the
track continuing, level and broad and white, round a vast
open flank of mountain, that fell away below in a smooth
moorland sweep, towards a tumble of valleys and hills
mapped out below, filling the leftward distance to where,
high up the sky, the Wolvesden Alps themselves now reap-
peared in all their candid splendour, though too switchbacked
in outline for anything approaching the wild ferocious beauty
of the Satanee Alps and the Min S’an. The road ran flatly
along, half-way up the mountain : on the right, above us, the
moorland ere long died into savage screes of naked russet
stone, descending from savage naked peaks and pinnacles
far overhead, that sometimes also wept themselves away in
wild couloirs cutting deep grooves down the flank of the fell
and widening away to the valley below. And so we went—
another breast, another wide level sweep of bay: another
breast, another bay: it was like a marvellous gigantic
Bindelweg, but with even more sense of exaltation, of vast
openness and freedom, suspended half-way up in space with
the world mapped out beneath, and those massive snowy
pyramids deployed in procession across the sky above it,
and in the middle of the leftward distance, above the tumble
of hills and hollows intervening, a pale high saddle, from
which, on the feet of thought, I saw clearly that one stepped
straight down upon Casa Aoo, and, farther still, on
Wolvesden in its Dene. And on all the banks around us the
powdered blue Primula glittered in the brown moorland
edges in unbelievable abundance, and in the deep-scored
“rovine”’ that we again and again had to circumnavigate,
in the couloirs streaming starkly from the imminent red
shingles and savageries up above.
152 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

Few Alps have given me so memorable an “ easy ”’ as this.
But at last our skirting of the Red-Peaked Range was
accomplished, and we reached the culminating neck of all,
a scrambly little pass of gleaming shale-shingle, on which,
in one solitary lavender-coloured dome of loveliness, there
squatted close and tight the rounded stemless head of an
Erysimum scented like a clove. And from this, round the
corner of the range, we descended upon a much duller world,
clearly leading down into the lowlands by a long, long drop
of soggy dead-brown moorland vale, with eruptions of marsh
in which a little Draba thing was beginning to promise
sheets and hassocks of shrill yellow. And over the lower
fells the willowy blue Rhododendron was in such drifts of
colour that all the hill seemed veiled in a haze of cold grey.
The track was steep and wet and bad and dull, with only
dull high rotundities of fell enfolding it, and no more Alps:
but at last, at the bottom, we came out into the flat wide
shingled bed of a river, which had torn its way from the
heart of the peaks up behind. Into this our own little
half-born beck converged, and down the shingled levels we
proceeded, sometimes under eruptions of impending cliff,
and all the time more obviously advancing out of the
mountains towards the upland plains on the Western slope.
On the edge of these the river drew near to a “ klause”’ of
cliffs, so that the path deserted it, and climbed out along a
rolling fell of grass and Daphne and Potentilla scrubbage on
the right. Here, to surmount the rib that terminated in
those cliffs, we had to cross a small moorland saddle where
among the tussocks the golden Gagea reappeared rarely,
in such magnified form as almost to suggest a starry golden
tulip. And on the far side, human life at last reappeared.

For now we were looking out over a vast champaign of
cultures and dead river deltas, the Westward fall of the
Da-Tung chain, such as we had already seen at Officialton.
And away below us to the left, about a bummock on the
moorland, there was a lively crowd gathered, and the little
red mud wall of a crumbling fortalice beyond. Guns were
TIEN TANG TO CHEBSON 153

going off in disorder, and flags waving and gongs and crackers
contributing their quota, round a dark central figure per-
forming pious evolutions. At first I thought it was a Living
Buddha pontificating, but soon it appeared that it was only
some Chinese ceremony being discharged by an official :
disillusioned, I continued my way, and the Beano, mean-
while, also moved on, but not before the din of it in the
distance had so terrified a brace of enormous shaggy yaks as
white as milk and tethered together like cuff links, who had
previously been advancing quietly over the brae, that now
they tossed up their heads and wildly bolted down upon me
like a discordant pair of earthquakes, barging tempestuously
this way and that, and plunging in all directions with their
terrific horns. So we judged it best to dismount and get up
off the track, while the twin cataclysms surged by, and their
pavid attendants trotted after in the background, with useless
shoutings that carried no conviction even to themselves.
After this we were out of the mountain country, down in
an endless vista of rolling cultivated lands, all the breakwater
spurs and vast river deltas from the Alps being alike dili-
gently cultivated to the last inch. Over spurs and across
deltas we alternately toiled and jogged, with our faces set
steadily away from the mountains that lay behind us, up
to the right, with only lovely clouds to diversify the dullness
of the way. This is so very huge a country, so leisurely and
ample in its naked lines, that the distances seem almost as
great as they really are. I paused upon a stretch of river
sward to dismount, and to unhook the bag at my pony’s
neck, and sit down among the pale little starry gentians to
take a snack upon the brink of a pellucid brook, there brab-
bling. But not even this Arcadian diversion succeeded :
for the honey, with characteristic malignity, had come out
of the pot and flooded everything in a morass of stickiness,
and the sardine-tin would not open, and altogether I felt too
empty and empeeved for any thought of food, mounted my
steed once more, and joggled forward again across the
sunlit world, raising myself above earthly rubs as I rode,
154 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

by the reflection that no matter with what mishaps I might
meet in the way of robbery, murder, massacre, martyrdom,
or even the misery of an effusive honeypot, by no possible
malignity of fate, at all events, could I here meet with Aunt
Albinia.?

In a high chaunt I proclaimed this uplifting consolation
to the four winds: I proceeded with lightened heart, and
the sun once more resumed its brilliance. For, dull and
long though they may sometimes seem in the going, how
_ infinitely golden, really, and in retrospect, are those days of

effortless uneventful abstraction, drifting across the enor-
mous immemorial smile of China, in perfect openness of light
and air, in perfect openness of freedom from all earthly
cares, duties, ties and domesticities, with nothing to think
about at all but when one will reach one’s destination, and
what one will eat when one gets there. You might fancy,
indeed, that such days of untrammelled mental leisure would
lead one to a course of high and holy thinking, solid reflec-
tions (like Mary Bennet’s) and wise resolutions: instead of
which (I personally find) the vacancy of one’s mind, sunk in
a hebetude of happiness, dwells, exclusively, with what the
incomparable Elizabeth justly calls “‘ a shameful persistence,
on the succulent and the gross.”

In such an elevating train of thought, accordingly, I now
devoured the distances. Isolated, far ahead of us, above
the undulating hills of tillage, a huge high hog’s back of
purple down dominated the view: towards this we made,
across yet another delta of two or three miles width, parcelled
out to the last inch, in a patchwork of culture. Here there
was a factory of yak-dung fuel, with cakes of it baking in
rows on boards outside, and a new Iris suddenly flared blue
on a red loam-bank that was not loess, and in places the bare
earth was exploding oddly in humps of glossy greenness and

1 Not an absolutely certain consolation either: does not the
proverb say, ‘“‘ Although mankind numbers a million millions, and
although the desert of Shan-Tz’ be boundless, yet there did Li-Hing
encounter his mother-in-law” ?
 

 

CHEBSON ABBEY.
TIEN TANG TO CHEBSON 155

big chocolate-purple bells of blossom. And on the rise we
passed, without notice, a little crumbled wall of loess, grass-
grown, negligible, melted almost back into the downs again,
but running, if you look to right and left, indefinitely up and
down the distance, over the downlands Westward, and East-
ward imperturbably up across the Alps. And this poor
relic, that a crippled child could now almost take at a stride,
is no mean symbol. For it is neither more nor less than a
boundary wall of China and Tibet. Since the days of its
building the tide of Empire has ebbed and flowed, and far
beyond her actual limits China pervades. But this
mouldered rampart still remains to show a line where once
she cried halt for a while.

And even now you are definitely in Tibet on its far side.
For on crossing the rise you see below you yet another of
those vast deltas, expanding fanwise from the mountains
about six miles up to the right ; but this one is not cultivated,
like those in China: it is a moorland plain of rough virgin
pasture, grazed over by herds of yaks that look like emmets
on its vast brownish expanse, and dotted here and there with
the yurts of the nomad tribes that keep them, and shift
their pasture from place to place. Below the green downs.
across the delta (one of which showed a dark fringe of fir-
forest from its farther slope) the untilled pasture plain vastly
continued: and the great hog’s-back fell was now close at
hand, closing in the distance below the plain. How much
farther we still had to go, I neither knew nor recked : what
was my amazement, then, when Mafu indicated the forest
fringe with his finger and said, “ That wood under, Chebson
Ssi.”” We still had the delta-flat indeed to traverse, but it
seemed a, trifle, and I marvelled at the rapidity with which
our destination had burst upon us. However, no trifle was
the delta-flat after all; it was at least two miles across.
And it was some time, therefore, after my first rapture of
relief, ere we were breasting the green rise on its far side,
had topped it, and found ourselves immediately riding down
on Chebson Abbey.
CHAPTER IX
CHEBSON ABBEY

Chebson Abbey lies closely hidden in the last green hollow
of the downs, and you come upon it abruptly, lying unsus-
pected at your feet, with a shock of surprise at finding
such a hive of humanity lurking in the face of this enormous
featureless land. The downs descend in a long spur from
the Alps, some five miles back in the West: and at their
end they widen into a cup or pincer-shaped hollow from
which a little open vale sinks down to the pasture plain
beyond. And in that cup lies Chebson Abbey, facing due
South, secure and snug in that hollow of rolling hills as
open and green as Sussex Downs. Behind it, a steep breast
black with a copse of cypress fronts the sun, and on the
corrugations of the fell that forms the leftward rim of the
cup, there are rather mangy strips of fir, above the Potentilla
scrub: otherwise the scene is wholly bare and treeless,
until you come to the big hog’s back across the plain below,
whose dry flanks and chines are similarly scattered with
parched-looking firs. So much for the mighty forests in
which the pages of Przewalsky had made us expect to find
Chebson Abbey richly enveloped.

It is a noble place, though, huge and serene—a very
select and exclusive foundation, with only some seventy
monks, all of the “ best’ people, living each in state alone
in a wide-yarded low white house. Here and there rise
big churches, and full in the middle the main church of all,
a splendid great block of soft crimson, roofed most gor-
geously in gold with golden dragons spouting off the rain-
water; golden dragons are the finials on the roof, and

156
CHEBSON ABBEY 157

golden stags and wheels and pillar-boxes adorn its parapet.
This resplendent structure stands isolated in a vast
quadrangle of lawn, which is walled all round its four sides
with a spacious frescoed cloister, whose inner railing is set
with hundreds after hundreds of invocation cylinders that
you set clanking one by one as you make the circuit. Up
behind the blank red outer wall of the cloister stands a
small sumptuous church all by itself: and up above this
again, close under the steep of cypresses, are the guest-
cloisters.

These match with the scale of the whole Abbey. Even
the lower one, where guests of lower distinction are accommo-
dated, is wide and solid—a big square, lying on a slope,
with a big raised causeway of cobbles descending down the
centre, with living-rooms all round, and even lesser lateral
yards on either side. At the top of the causeway you pass
into the upper guest-cloister, and find yourself in an even
nobler square, a cobbled empty yard of spacious silence
with an arcaded cloister all round, and the living-rooms
cool under its shade, and above, by stairways from the
four corners, upper galleries of rooms, which, at the two
frontal ends of the square, project out in square roof-loggias
that command an untrammelled view over the whole Abbey
and its downs, and the plain below, and the hills beyond.
These belong each to a small suite of rooms that faces
upon it, cut off by doors and steps from the first-floor
gallery of apartments behind. They consist of a little
central hall, and two panelled rooms opening out on either
side—delicious sequestered suites of tranquillity, open to
all the air and sunshine. These are reserved for Living
Buddhas on a visit ; but even our own quarters down below
left nothing to be desired in the way of comfort, constructed
on the same triple scheme (which obtains all round the
quad.), roomy and cool and dark, panelled all over in wood,
with kang and table and cupboard. And up behind the
upper guest-cloister again, you pass into ramifying stone-
walled yards and court of yet another church, with yet
158 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

another up behind it under the hill—trim gawcy buildings,
both of them, high and square and white, with bold hard-
browed Egyptian windows, and, close under their eaves,
that band of beautiful decoration they make here, of brush-
wood packed together, and then all cut off evenly in a flat
surface. This makes the effect of a deep belt of brown
velvet, on which great monogrammed bucklers of gilt and
other gilded ornaments flash sumptuously.

A huge collegiate calm and solemnity broods unbroken
over Chebson ; its atmosphere compares to the bustling
popular pieties of Tien Tang as a wealthy old Oxford
college’s to the stir of an urban parish. When, on my
entering the cloister, the Prior came forth to greet me,
and induct me to my apartments, he also continued the
comparison, for, though everything that was friendly and
courteous, he had the assured calm, the gentlemanly
sufficiency and ease of any Master or Bursar—not curious
or effusive or aloof, but taking himself and us for granted,
with a proper unconscious sense of his own competence.
He looked the part, too, to perfection, a portly old body, of
immense dignity, voluminous in his crimsons, with a huge
powerful head, and like a Tibetan Coquelin in his mobility
of feature. He had a little the presence and port of a
magnified Mr. Asquith, but with elephantine ears like the
handles of an urn, and dense luscious jowl and lips, and
dense black eyebrows almost too artificial looking to be
true, that waggishly went up and down, and worked as hard
as George Alexander’s.

In an easy flow of compliments and mutual admiration
our talk proceeded, and he told us details as to the age and
population of the Abbey. It is not an old place, in fact
dating back only about a century : but handsomely endowed
and handsomely built, though run up in a hurry, with a
regrettable scamping of solid work. It does not even, for
all its wealth, and the sumptuous furniture of its sumptuous
buildings, appear to possess a Living Buddha of its own,
though at the moment of our visit it had the borrowed
CHEBSON ABBEY 159

glory of one on loan, a Manifestation from far parts, and of
such importance that he had with him a bodyguard of
soldiers from Peking, a trim, well-set-up lot of fellows in
their tight grey uniform, strangely modern to see, in the
somnolent vacancies of this sedate place. He was, indeed,
so big and holy a person that we were most unlikely to
forgather with him: and had his abode apart, in a neat
square Church-house, walled away in an orchard-paddock
up at the top of the hamlet. Where the Abbot lived or
whether we should see him, did not transpire: meanwhile
our friend in charge was the Prior or Bursar, no mere
temporary appointment, as he of Tien Tang, but as permanent
an established dignitary as Mr. Bidder himself.

But these passages were put a stop to by anxiety about
the lateness of the mules. Evidently they must have missed
their way. I myself had laid them open to doing so, by
riding ahead with Mafu. And missed the way they had:
and only at long last were discerned from the col above
the Abbey, a scattered string of mites, proceeding far away
down across the bottom of the plain. Mafu rode down the
Abbey-vale between the horns of the down, to intercept
them, and we returned to our quarters. And there, as I
walked up and down the quad., I became conscious of a
waft of unconsciousness shooting most oddly up through
my heels. At first I diagnosed mere emptiness, and then
a set of earthquakes, but ere long joined on these symptoms
to the strained staggers I had had in my eyes during the
last part of the journey, and realized that the brilliant
light in this high altitude must have given me a touch of
the sun.

Poor Bill, too, was under a cloud, with an ill-tempered
tooth, which had already begun grumbling and growling at
Tien Tang, but by this time had risen to a real roaring
rage that defied palliatives. Sterner steps were tried. Bill
lassoed the offender with a piece of string, of which Mafu
held the other end and pulled. But from this grisly tug-
of-war only howls and agonies resulted: the tooth would
160 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

not budge. So it became plain that he must ride away
over the hills to Sining, and have it removed. The next
day passed in preparations. The sky was steely and stuffy,
with a pale blurred sun: it was not till dusk that I went
out, and up on to a green bummock of the down above,
from which I had a full view of the Abbey, mapped out at
my feet: and, turning my back on it, a panorama of the
Alps, now some seven or eight miles distant, still pale
and sere as if it were winter. Then down I came into the
town again : for so Chebson Abbey really is, with wide ways
and open spaces. No one ever seems to be about: few
noises break the comfortable grey calm, and rarely do the
resident prelates pervade the sleepy streets and alleys of
whitewashed walls. It was almost a shock, on going up
into the outer court of the big church, to find the Buddha’s
bodyguard sitting about, and playing, and mending their
uniforms. Then through one of the three gateways (the
main one, in the middle, is kept shut) I passed into the
arcade of the cloister, and in front of me, beyond the railing
and its line of cylinders, lay the smooth expanse of lawn,
and the rose-red mass of the square gold-lidded edifice itself,
looking, but for its colour and gilding, astonishingly like
some big English country house, with wide-spaced windows,
and drive running up to an especially ample portico. Yet
how much more beautiful by virtue of that colouring, the
husky rich rose, with windows heavily outlined in square
belts of white, and above, under the gilded eaves, the
deep-brown velvet band of brushwood, set with plaques and
clasps and hinges of gilded metal, and the gilded curve of
the roof, over all, with its flashing dragons on the angles,
and golden stags and wheel and pillar-boxes crowning the
frontal parapet.

Across the silent emptiness of the precinct I advanced
to the verandah, and tried one of the big painted doors in
its depths. It yielded: a wave of solid butter-scented
black cold came out to meet me, in an exhalation of icy
wind. Into the enormous gorgeous gloom of the interior
CHEBSON ABBEY 161

I cautiously peered, but, in the distance of the dark, shouts
of warning reverberated at me from a lamp-lighting monk
on one of the altars: so, fearing to be tactless, I retired.

When I got back I found Mafu in one of his wild
gorilla furies, and the court re-echoed with his shattering
shouts. It appeared that we now had a fellow-guest,
some quite small official up from Mao Be Hsien: and this
plebeian person had actually had the audacity to come and
peer, uninvited, into our apartments. However, Mafu
soon “ showed ‘im ’is error, plain ” : away he slunk into his
own, and the evening concluded in a long visit from the
Prior, who brought two keen-faced English-looking friends
to see us. They were all most affable, but cast such marked
glances at the Chartreuse bottle, and made so many leading
remarks about “ foreign wine,” that I became torn with the
desire to offer them some, as they so obviously desired.
Bill, however, restrained me : it would be taken as a shocking
insult if we tried to tempt them from their vow of abstinence.
I could not, myself, feel that they were quite so morbidly
sensitive as all that about their vows: but Bill must always
know best. So I continued stony to their hints, and at last
those holy ones went sadly away, with many backward
glances of longing, and grievous waggings of the head;
murmurs about ‘‘ Wai-gwe Jiu, Wai-gwe Jiu” dolorously
re-echoed as they drifted out.

But, in my grief at their disappointment, I reckoned
without the universal ingenuity of the priestly mind,
which never fails to find a sanctified road to the desired
end. For now, in a little, they all came drifting in again,
much more alertly, and with a radiant look. This, however,
must have belied their real feelings: for they had all, it
seemed, in the last five minutes, developed painful stomachic
affections, for which, after the Apostolic prescription, a
little wine was indicated by the Faculty. And they had
heard that the foreign variety was specially efficacious :
might they try some, in the interests of medical science ?
Mrs. Crupp and her spasms find strange echoes all the world

M
162 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

over: we poured them forth each a dose, and down it
went, with such instant good results that the exhibition of
another was declared desirable. The Prior, in particular,
justified his bonhomous aspect, by absorbing this new
medicine with flagrant gusto, though also with gurglings
and gaspings of depreciation, and pantomimic pouting and
pulling of faces and wild agitations of the eyebrows and
resounding slaps of protest upon the purple bow-window of
his belly.

Bill got up early, and I rose late, to a leaden-lidded day,
stifling as a Turkish bath. Hardly had I got to work on
a sketch of the big church, than the Prior came heaving
round to take me down on a visit to it. And a huge sombre
hall of darkness and magnificence it certainly is, filling the
whole ground-floor of the building, then contracting, to
rise high in a central clerestory, which thus leaves room
for the quadrangle of galleries on the upper floor, and
also lets shafts of daylight down into the gloom of the
great hall below. The enormous altars stand aligned
between the distanced columns all up its farther side,
fronting the three doors. They are chapels in themselves,
or giants’ pews: up in the depth of each a colossal Buddha
Saint or Bodhisattva sits enthroned, securely boxed off
from the rest of the church by wooden panellings and
stairways, but out before him, along the broad frontal.
barrier which is really the altar, arises such a congregation
of lesser holy figures, together with sets of altar vessels,
and flowers, and flat convolutions of coloured butterwork,
that when near at hand you can hardly discern the closeted
golden colossi behind, dimly glooming above, from the
seclusion of their huge magnificent shrines. Dimly, too,
the slants of light from the clerestory filter down into the
solemnity of the church, and fade into the further darknesses
among the flat-faced columns that stand like trees in an
ancient forest. From capital to base these are densely
hung and flounced and valanced with streamers and lappets
and pennons of old embroidered brocades, and on each
CHEBSON ABBEY 163

high altar, in front of the gilded Buddhas their altar vessels
are of cloisonné or, wrought metal-work, or Kang-Hsi
blue-and-white: and scattered pavilions and pulpits of
woodwork look like pillar-boxes in the vast expanse: and
high overhead the daylight in the clerestory strikes straight
on brilliant rolls of fresco hung all round, and then dies
downwards to lose itself in the cavernous fragrant darkness
among the columns in a vague haze of sumptuousness and
colour, filled with a sense of long-established splendour,
august and sacred and serene.

I won permission to throw wide another of the big doors,
to get more light, and try a photograph. This did not turn
out well, but photographs of Tibetan church-interiors are
by no means things you come by every day, and anyhow
the vague amorphous blur that the camera produced
gives, after all, no such bad impression of the blurred and
vague impressiveness of Chebson. Then, when this was
achieved, in a remote corner of darkness we came to a
stairway, and climbed to the upper roof. Here we found
ourselves in a flat quadrangle, with the clerestory rising
in the middle to its golden roof high overhead. Into this
we were not able to get, but peered along, through its
latticed and wire-meshed windows, down into the well of
the church below : then turned our attention to the galleries
of libraries, shrines and relic stores that wall in the quadrangle
all round. And then again up by another stair on to the
roof of these, which is the flat rampart frontage of the
building, with the golden-roofed clerestory still rising high
in the middle. But here you are very close to the glittering
splendour of it, and the dragons come mouthing down upon
you at its corners: in all this gorgeousness there is one
homely touch of modern times. For the effective gutters
and waterspouts are of plain European lead piping.

So, on this level white causeway we roamed awhile and
examined the strange colossal gilded pillar-boxes that stand
at its corners, and along the front, with the golden wheel
and the golden stags (or whatever these hieratic beasts may
164 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

be, that squat in a pair, on either side of the wheel along
the high parapet of Tibetan churches). And then retired
down to earth again, to go and see other shrines, which,
however, proved a bathos—new, and garish, and dull.
So now I turned my attention to flowers, and fared forth
with Gomer on to the downs. At Chebson the loess has
reached its end, and only seems to lie in hollows of the main
formation, which is a hardish reddish loam. But the
flora does not alter very much, and over the green undulations
of the grass Stellera dances everywhere, and the hill-sides
have a chintzy quattrocento prettiness of flower-bespangled
lawn. Among the rest, however, there is the new Iris.
And this is a lovely thing, forming in the course of time
huge old hassocks of coarse mahogany-coloured fibre,
like old bass-matting, the desiccated wreckage of years,
from which sprout grassy fountains of foliage, and large
flowers of limpid blue, with a white throat and a golden
flame down the fall, suggesting absolutely in colour, and
approximately in shape, a bright but thinly-built form of
I. sibirica, though only springing from the earth on a stem
of four or five inches. At least so it looks: but that stem
is a delusion ; the bloom of I. tenuifolia, in fact, not only has
no stem at all, but actually begins underground. All
that you see is its throat and its style: the ovary lurks
‘half an inch below the soil, embedded tightly in the hassock.
If you quarry with a penknife, you can enucleate the pods
not only of last year, but of many bygone seasons, still
lingering perfectly sound and good in the mass of the plant.

How this astonishingly inconvenient system can result
in the abundance with which Iris tenuifolia is seen all over
these grassy downs wherever there is no loess, I have no
idea. It looks as if the plant laid itself out never to be
distributed: yet distributed. it is, very widely, from the
remote hills of Quetta, away to these fells of farthest North-
Eastern Tibet. Not only, though, does its seed take no
apparent steps to get itself scattered, but it also, good and
fat though it seems, has no alacrity in germinating. In
CHEBSON ABBEY 165

due course I collected large quantities: but not a single
seedling have I raised myself, nor have I heard of anyone
else doing so. ' Alas, then, for Iris tenuifolia, still uncom-
municatively blooming in little spurts of cornflower-sapphire
on the green downs of Chebson, without chick or child in
England to prove my tale of its beauty. However, for
a consolation, I do not believe that either child or chick
would have done so. For despite that massive cheerfulness
and immortality it shows round Chebson, I. tenuifolia proves
to have no generous nature. There exist in cultivation two
small plants, from its Quetta kingdom: and these sulk
obstinately and wholly refuse to make headway, never
grow, never thrive, never increase, never flower.

Below the -Abbey the right-hand horn of the enclosing
down is bare and voluminous and green as Wiltshire, with
white Chortens perched in its flanks, but never the trace
of a tree. On the left side, however, up each successive
groove of the high hill-side, the grass gives way to a dwarfish
moorland scrub of Potentilla, and then to a more or less
wretched streak of spruce-wood, which at the top coalesces
into a: small forest close and dense and pitch-dark inside,
with an undergrowth of the stark and spiny drum-shaped
gooseberry throughout. I hoped from afar for flowers,
and mounted the slope. Immediately I drew near the
Potentilla heath it became alive, all over the hill-side, with
big hares loping and leaping in all directions, with rather
long black tails, heavily outlined with white, sticking out
straight behind them as they ran. And in the dumpy
Potentillas themselves the azure-blue Corydalis peered
forth, in glints of turquoise. The elusiveness of love is
nothing compared to that of Corydalis. I made the most
solemn vows and vigils to get seed of this lovely C. curviflora,
and of the almost unbelievably beautiful C. melanochlora :
but never once could I catch the propitious moment as it
flew. Come too early, and the pods are hard and green:
turn away your head to sneeze, and, when you next look,
the pod has burst open like a popgun, and shot out all its
166 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

little glossy black bullets far and wide. You have to wait
upon a Corydal as a gourmet waits upon the ripening of
his pheasant: with the further disadvantage that, whereas
the pheasant, when it has fallen off its tail, lies inert on
the floor, the corydal-seed, in the twinkle of an eye, is over
the hills and far away.

On the cooler side of the fold there was now the woodland,
scurvily beginning, and in its lower reaches cruelly cut.
Moss and promise filled it, and a fat’ Primula unfolding like
a cabbage. But all was still so wintry and unrevealed that
I could well believe the aneroid was right in putting Chebson
at almost the same height as Wolvesden. And the Primula
was clearly only going to be P. tangutica, an entirely
contemptible plant, rank and robustious in growth, mean
and squinny in flower, muddy and morbid in the dull
chocolates and greens of its colouring, even when you get
the very best forms, where the livid greenish-yellow of the
starved-looking star stands out in good contrast to the
mahogany-crimson of the tube. Nor did I find hope of
anything better, though by degrees I thoroughly ransacked
each groove of the hill-side, and the moorlands and forest-
fringes along its crest, from which, on the one hand, you
look down upon the Abbey with four big white Chortens
sitting in a row at its lower end as a sort of entrance-gate,
and other Chortens lodged here and there on the verdure of
the enveloping hill-sides: and on the other, out over the
delta-plain, sweeping round below like a great sea, into
which Chebson fell stands out and sinks, like an enormous
cloven promontory with a chine in the middle. But Chebson
is too far from the Alps, in fact, for a rich or an Alpine
flora.

The brooding calm broke in storms, and the weather
turned clear and cold, with new snow on all the peaks.
I took an early opportunity of going up into their immediate
roots. Attended by Mafu and Wa-wa, I rode over the
saddle above the Abbey, and down into the delta-plain,
and up its enormous vista, towards the distant disgorgement
 

ON THE ROOF OF THE ABBEY CHURCH.
CHEBSON ABBEY 167

between the hills, that never seemed to come any nearer.
Miles wide and miles long, the delta is flat as a frozen sea,
one unbroken sheet of moorland pasture. Here and there,
on its vast face, we passed various encampments of nomads,
and their dark round yurts (yurt is the mongol tent, a drum-
shaped affair), with herds of cattle at pasture. This they
take by stints and stretches : different families have different
“ gaits’: when one is finished with, the tents are struck
and the clan and all their kine come farther down the plain
to another. Higher up, we now entered at last into the
hills, and found ourselves in a deep narrow glen, squeezed
closely in between bare grassy bulwarks of mountain, so
topless and enormous that they seemed positively to bulge
over above us on either hand, holding the ghyll in a breathless
grip. Right away ahead, between more moorland masses,
loomed a distance of jagged white peaks; the glen
bottom was a flat stretch of tussocky marsh, threaded by
clear runnels and pools from the main beck: and on its
far side, a deep steep ghyll towered up in the face of the
right-hand fell. Everything here, in the beginning of
June, at some 12,000 ft., was still as dead and sere and
pallid as you would find them at the same date upon
Moncenisio at 7,000. But though the rise from Chebson
had been so smooth and gradual as really to be imperceptible
a very genuine rise it had been. We could judge of it
better now, looking back over the delta, to where the spur
of Chebson dwindled down into the distance, like a ship
hull-down over the rim of the sea. And we could judge of
it as well by other evidence nearer at hand.

For now that we were in the gorge the vegetation was at
once perfectly Alpine, and all the three poppies, unknown
round Chebson, immediately reappeared. There in the
bushy bog-hummocks flared the lemony orbs of the Lamp-
shade, the Harebell was pushing buds of green from the
brown pats of sodden silky mess, and in the shingles were
showing the thorny grey leaves and black-dead seed-
spires of the Celestial. At least, I hoped that this time the
168 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

prevalent thorny Poppy of these parts might mark a change,
and that here we might at last be coming on Meconopsis
racemosa. I had a reason for my hope. The original
specimen of all on which the description of Meconopsis
racemosa as a species was built, is one of Przewalsky’s
collecting, and is said to bear “ Chebson”’ on its label.
Now, round Chebson itself clearly there was no Poppy
of the Celestial group: therefore it seemed reasonable to
suppose, on finding one of the group in the Alps behind, that
this must be the missing M. racemosa—which I will hence-
forth be familiar with as the sapphire Poppy, seeing that,
while M. Prattii has blossoms of clear light blue with creamy-
drab anthers, M. racemosa tends to a deeper tone, with
orange anthers gorgeously contrasting. It is in fact, if
our present knowledge about the original description of
type-specimens be adequate, a mere variety of M. horridula,
which has a special habit of often sending up its flowers,
not in a spire, but each on what looks like a single stem of its
own, all these “stems’”’ springing at once from the base.
The true spire is as it were squashed down and telescoped
under ground, so that its feet stalks have to come up in
a fountain, each apparently independent of the rest, even
as the common Primrose seems to carry its flowers separately,
while all the time the common stem which holds them all
together is hidden safely below stairs. When the stem
lengthens and becomes apparent, the primrose becomes a
Polyanthus: so, in the same way, when Meconopsis
horridula (which is the real species) sends up a spike, it
becomes the racemose variety ; and, M. horridula racemosa,
when it gives way to its odd habit of obliterating the spike
and flowering altogether from the base, passes back towards
M. horridula in a manner quite unknown to M. Prattii,
which in some forms has very long strict footstalks, and,
in some, quite short ones, making a mace-like effect instead
of an airy spire, but never, by any chance that I have seen
in many myriads of specimens, suppresses the main stem
altogether, though in the Ardjeri Alps it does, very rarely,
CHEBSON ABBEY 169

send up such a number of basal scapes as almost or wholly
to obliterate the central one.

Let us not, however, anticipate. For dead winter still
ruled in these depths, and vegetation was so little advanced
as to give no hint of the glories it would probably unfold by
late July. Across the beck I splashed and plunged, and
up into the riven mountain-side above its far bank. Here
another tiny rill came dancing and bubbling darkly down to
join it, between the pale brown turfy hassocks that overhung
it, in which the Globeflower was already just beginning to
unfold, in little stemless clusters of huge golden buttercups,
huddling close as yet into the pallid deadness of the turf,
on which they flared like dropped splashes of sunshine. Of
other life there was none, though, as I climbed the steep
of the ghyll’s cold Northern face, I found it all a soggy wall
of deep ancient moss masses, ice-cold and indeed half ice,
in which the roots and branches of the Little Rhododendron
straggled and sprawled. And here the whole mountain-side
was curtained with cushions of the harebell Poppy, coagulated
so abundantly in every moss-fall as to show me not only
that here, in the Da-Tung, we have the very central point
of the plant, but also that, above all other Meconopsids, it
thirsts for moisture and abundantly repays it.

I clambered high upon the fell-side, to where the ghyll
died out into the vastness of the open moor above: but
clearly there was no use in exploring any farther as yet. So
round the bay of the hill I made my way, and down under
hot little cliffs that impended over the sunny Southward
slope. But even here there were only old friends—
Lloydia still in being the Lavender Primula, and Androsace
tibetica only just beginning to open her eyes. So back
I came into the marish flat below, and thence, after a snack,
homeward down the delta again, pursued by sleet-storms
out of the violated angry mountains, sent after us on the
wings of a wind as cold and keen as winter.

And on the way we met with a wee woolly white yak-let,
no bigger than a lamb, who took so violent a fancy to us,
170 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

that nothing could prevent him from adding himself to
our company. We could not beat him :away or throw
stones at him, he was such an innocent little engaging beast,
with his bulging black eyes full of a naive enthusiasm, and
the glossy blackness of his cold nose, and the curly white of
his coat, and the endearing knock-kneed awkwardness of
his amblings and plungings. Yet desist from us he would
not, despite our persuasions: if we stopped, nothing would
induce him to go home: if we put our ponies to a canter
to get away from him, he cantered and galloped also,
among our cantering hoofs, and death bade fair to be his
portion. And already, from the yurts now diminishing
to pinheads up the distance, faint howls began to come
floating, and the baying of dogs: though it is as well to be
hung for a sheep as a lamb, it is no part of prudence to
reverse the process. If we were to die the death for cattle-
lifting on a Tibetan moorland, it seemed absurd to do it
for so minute an object. So I detailed Wa-wa to sit down
firmly, with the yak-let in his arms, and there hold him
until the ponies should be well away beyond reach of his
wambling little legs. And away we rode: when I looked
back Wa-wa was making a perfect Academy picture,
kneeling down strenuously embracing the reluctant yak-let
in both arms. It only wanted “Tronger zan ’o00” or
“ Tuggy-Tug ” or “ Pitty Ickle” or some similar touch of
domestic pathos, by way of a title, to qualify immediately
for a Christmas Number. But all the time the baby yak
was refusing to play up, straining wildly to be after us and
sending. despairing bleats down the distance, derelict like
Dido.

However, his self-immolated phantom did not come
gloomily to meet me, when under the deepening grey lid
of the afternoon, increasingly cold and bleak, I rode down
the vacant streets of-Chebson, and up into the outer stable-
yard of the cloister, where, on the roof of the inner gateway,
a big black hound, perpetually chained, so fearfully bayed
and bounded and clanked and strained against his bonds
CHEBSON ABBEY 171

at every entrance into the yard, that I was always glad to
be safe under that perilous portal, and inside the vast
tranquillity of the cloister.

Mafu now rode out again, down the lower plain towards
the defile between the two great hogs’ backs, on the chance
of meeting Bill returning, while I myself sat out in the
noble facade of the upper cloister that faces down upon the
lower, to watch in awe-stricken delight the magnificent
storms that were brewing up across the South. Such
splendours, terrible in gloom and violence, always make one
think of God or gods: a lingering relic in us of the Cave-
period, when all these huge and inexplicable terrors of
Nature had to be given an explanation in some personal
source that could be propitiated. To this day, sunny skies and
smooth prosperous scenes arouse no specifically “ religious”
feeling in any normal mind (I exclude, of course, the Saint,
who is very far above the normal : and also the professionally
devout, almost as far below it) ; amid typhoons and tempests
and the titanic terrors of Nature-alone it is, by the released
furies of fire, earth, air and water, that the God-notion
re-awakens in us out of the irrecoverable past. The inner-
most mind of man, in fact, takes joy for granted, but fear
is its god. Worship is no appreciation of the pleasant, but
deprecation of its reverse.

Upon these exalted meditations there now advanced two
stately figures that immediately dispelled them—a notable
husband and wife, Prince and Princess of their tribe,
swinging up the causeway of the lower cloister from their
devotions in the big church. They were six foot tall at
least, the pair of them, and with that sumptuous Red
Indian handsomeness, hard and high, which so plainly

_. gives away the provenance of the Red Indians themselves :
on their heads were huge turbaned coils of woolstrands, and

they moved majestically in long coats of scarlet lined with

sheepskin, upon the breast of which hung square silver

reliquaries of special size. And then “ When these had gone
by with their splendours” what rested to me then, and
172 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

remained, was the return, before dark, of Mafu, without
Bill, indeed, but bearing a big bale of flowers.

Most of these, indeed, were comparatively uninteresting
pink peonies and barberries: but out of the bundle at
last unfolded a bunch of something so beautiful that it
made me jump. An Isopyrum—but what an Isopyrum!
All the previous season I had been moving under limestone
cliffs, hung with wide grey maidenhair cushions of I.
grandiflorum, besprent with big golden-hearted wood
anemones of white or palest skim-milk blue. And all
that season, beautiful as I. grandiflorum certainly was, I
kept wondering over the shouts of ecstasy that it had aroused
in previous collectors. It seemed a lovely thing enough,
but not really anything to lie awake at night about. And
now there turned up unbeknownst, in Mafu’s anthropoid
fist, an Isopyrum that simply sent grandiflorum supperless
to bed—with foliage larger and more voluminous, like a
much handsomer sea-blue maidenhair, from out of which
came dancing great silken blossoms of sheeny lavender
purple, like some glorified anemone nemorosa Allenii, with
a fluff of golden stamens at their heart, and five orange-
coloured nectaries set round. If that other pretty thing,
anemic and pale, was indeed I. grandiflorum, what then was
this full-blooded noble beauty of twice the size? And
how could any other Isopyrum be called “ grandiflorum ”
with this one in existence ?

Throughout the season I doubted if I might not have
misplaced the names, especially as I remembered how
Mr. Elwes had told me of a lovely purple Isopyrum yet
farther North in the Altai: indeed, it was not till the
first Haves of the World was passing its final proofs for
publication that at last, in 1917, I learned that the Da-Tung
Isopyrum was not, as I had modestly called it, I. grandi-
florum, but a brand-new species, in whose beauty my own
mortal name was to be immortalized. For indeed, I.
Farreri leaves I. grandiflorum away out of sight—an
introduction so important, so vigorous, hearty and superb,
CHEBSON ABBEY 173

that in itself it would have been well worth the whole
year’s expedition. At the time, though, I knew nothing
of all this: even so, nothing would serve me but to ride off
immediately through the night, or at crash of the next dawn,
to see where Mafu had first seen this marvel, hanging from
a cliff in the defile between the hogs’ backs. But Mafu
restrained me, and on the morrow the beauty of the flowers
themselves decoyed me into sitting down to paint them :
and then Bill returned, successfully relieved of the tooth,
and laden with a present of blue-ribboned sailor-hats for
the servants: and the Prior took poorly and lay groaning
upon the Kang? in his dark venerable quarters across the
yard from ours, inviting us urgently to massage him.
So that, amid these distractions, I never got down to the
first home of the Isopyrum, but lived, instead, in lawful
hope of seeing it often up in the Alps.

1 You remember: the hollow bed-platform of every Chinese
and Sino-Tibetan house, which is kept stoked up, like a stove.
CHAPTER X
HOME AGAIN

In the meantime the Prior’s symptoms yielded perceptibly
to Chartreuse: though even under this treatment I must
confess that they recurred, and clamoured for repetitions of
the cure. So that we took an early opportunity of telling
the holy man he was well again ; and, to be certain that he
should stay so, made preparations for a speedy removal of
ourselves and our bottle back to Wolvesden. And, after all,
the old man was not there to see us off. It turned out that
he had had to go down to another Prior, who lay in such
extremity of sickness that it had not been thought worth
while to worry Bill for medical advice. And now, the sick
man lay dying, the Living Buddha had gone down to him in
state, to give him the last consolations of the Church, in
presence of the abbot and the other high ecclesiastics of the
place. So that with our Prior we had no word of Au revoir,
and even with his deputy there were difficulties. We had
settled up all our dues for fodder and provender—these
being all they let a visitor pay for, lodging, in these holy
places, being free—when out came the sub-prior again from
his room, staggering beneath a burden of perforated pence on
strings. We were not only to go away as grateful guests, it
seemed, but the European practice was to be reversed, and
we were to go away heavily tipped into the bargain. Proper
pride, as well as improper, startled a little at the notion:
also one felt that the indignity—so to call it—might be
fraught with danger, supposing the tale spread and ulti-
mately came within reach of the scandal that breeds like
maggots in the mission stations. Taking bribes and robbing

174
HOME AGAIN 175

the country would be mild terms. However, there was
nothing for it, unless we were to affront the Abbey and hurt
the feelings of our hosts. So the long strings of copper-
sausages—amounting to perhaps half a crown in total value
—were slung across one of the mules, and, with deep bows of
gratitude, we rode out of the yard, attended by our train
wearing their new blue-lined and blue-ribboned sailor-hats
from Sining, all rather small in the head and rather short in
the brim. We felt as if we were taking out the school or the
choir on treat to the Crystal Palace.

Out across the delta we rode, and then past the yak-dung
factory, away South-Hastwards, over swards of finest lawn
all jewelled in the clear sunlight with constellations of the
little skim-milk gentian, like some small Cerastium close
into the turf. It was an astonishing thing, too, to notice
now, in every cultivated place, the eruption of Scopolia
tangutica. This already challenged our notice on the last
stage into Chebson, but by-this time it was much more
evident everywhere. For its cabbagy noses first break the
soil asunder in great clods, just as Eremurus thrusts up the
solid earth in a fractured star like a stone sent through plate-
glass; and then up its lucent masses come huddling, almost
as you watch, like some uncanny green gnome popping up
from the cellars of the world. From this, however, it in
time develops a stature, ample and even coarse, of two or
three feet, with coarse ample foliage of vivid green, and
large urn-shaped capsules: but in spring it squats close to
the soil, unfurling immediately among the huddled volume
of its leaves the enormous bells of its blossom, luridly brown
and green. This sinister plant is, like the nettle, a persistent
follower of man; rarély will you see it far from a farmyard
or a paddock ; and it even ascends as high into the Alps as
Wolvesden House, and the slopes of Southerly Valley up
behind, on the way to Grandmamma Aoo.

Then, through the mouldering boundary wall of China and
Tibet, we rode down into the next plain, which, being
Chinese, was cultivated to the last inch ; and South till we
176 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

were within some five miles of Officialton. And now we
kept away to the left South-Hasterly, over more ridges and
intervening flats, all barefaced and open as a German lie,
till a penultimate rise brought us up once more close under
the Alps, whose course we had so long been following. And
very magnificent now loomed their complicated procession
upon the left, swept from time to time by violent sleet-
storms, while all the rest of the world was in brilliant sun.

From the col the backward view was very Cumbrian
and wide—far and far over the unfolded undulations, to
where, out against the Western sky, the long hog’s back of
Chebson Down rolled in diaphanous purple. From this
point we had a very steep drop, over a curious bare slope
wildly corrugated into rents and hollows and ridges, down
into yet another river-vale, but narrower than its prede-
cessors (being nearer to its beginnings), hand-flat as they,
and heavily cultivated too, but also rich with avenues and
woodlands of the white-stemmed poplar.

Indeed, all along this country they are trying both to
bind the barren slopes and shade the torrid ways by sticking
in bare poles of the poplar, straight sticks like walking-sticks,
with a blob of clay on the top. No further care is taken,
either in planting or in tending: but if fortune favours,
these dead staves bud and burst like Tannhauser’s, and in a
few seasons the face of this bare land may be as beneficially
changed as that of Hsin Jang, the New Province of
Turkestan, up in the North, once as forlorn a wilderness of
sand and death as that which now mummifies the glories of
Turfan and Khotan—until a Chinese Viceroy took the
problem in hand, and by prudent and persistent planting
has, in half a century, so wholly changed the climate and
condition of things that the former desert now blossoms as
the rose and produces crops and fruits incredible before,
including the finest raisins in the world.

But now we had really come to the last breakwater-spur
of the foothills, and on its other side rode gently down into
Weston-of-the-Pass, which we had left on one side of us
HOME AGAIN 177

when first we rode up into the Alps. Weston is a poor little
place, straggling along the flank of the spur with the moor-
land green of the delta below ; and moorland slopes of green
come sloping down into this on the left, from the gleaming
crags and gaunt precipices of the Alps, whose chines and
ghylls now tower up overhead. The houses in Weston are
neat and clean and square as a rule, carved and moulded out
of the clean loess: and on their walls round plaques of yak-
dung are plastered in rows to dry for fuel, and on their roofs,
and on ledges cut in the little bluffs of loess cliff from which
they are built out (and into which their cellars and stables
and store-rooms are hollowed), little gardens of flowers glow
daily with Iceland Poppy and China Aster. It is a haunt of
the Turen, too, and in its lanes you may often come upon
some of those fantastically splendid ladies, in their panoply
of plaqued stoles and silver chains and enormous heart-
shaped blue head-dresses, valanced with red fringe. But if
you turn the camera upon them, they flee at once, with loud
squawks of mingled laughter and terror.

The house to which we ourselves went was, however, the
smallest and poorest of all, but belonged to an especially
friendly host whom Bill had discovered on a previous visit.
The House of Many Babies consists only of a small muddy
yard with a flagstaff on the middle. There is a stable on one
side and miserable ramshackle sheds down the other, and,
at the top, a block of three rooms, with a door from the
central one upon the raised verandah. Yet here, in the
peace and happiness of perfect hugger-mugger the proprietor
pigs it with a huge wife, various slatternly stray females,
twelve children, three daughters-in-law (including an enor-
mous hodge of a woman who is wife to his boy of thirteen), a
prehistoric-looking grandfather of ninety-eight, like a piece
of grimy old ivory, and a wee Hampdenshire Wonder runt,
with nothing of a body, and tiniest pipe-stem limbs, but a
head as noble and large and wise as a Buddha’s, with
Buddha’s calm solemn eyes of endurance and understanding.
Add to this population a whole other one of pigs, hens,

N
178 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

yapping dogs, donkies, a cat, and a pet lamb, and you may
well wonder at the elasticity of the House of Many Babies
in being able also to put up our whole party, of nine people,
six horses and two asses. Shake down, however, we all at
last did: but it was a tight fit. Bill went behind, and laired
in the hayloft carved in the cliff; and even the cat had to
go to bed on top of the pigs, moulding for herself a hollow in
the heaving fatness of their black backs, as they lay piled
upon each other in their loess kennel.

But the House of Many Babies was a pleasant place. A
general friendliness pervaded it, and you could see that it
held a happy family. The babies peeped and played, and
nobody scolded ; the large daughter-in-law looked dourly,
but that was only because she was so very large that her
face had settled heavily into the massive immobility of a
dough cake. But all the other ladies were cheery, and, in
particular, one whom I had looked on as a cretin (because
she had a goftre, and a chinless profile like a teapot, and a
slavey’s haycock of hair that sagged and flopped to each
footstep as she bustled about), proved, on the contrary, the
most alert and helpful and intelligent of them all. As for
the venerable head of the whole clan, Lao Dada was now so
old as to be past hearing, past sight, past understanding,
past almost everything. A dim blurred consciousness of
existence alone remained, and a physical satisfaction in the
sunshine.

Of course, in any civilized country he would long since
have been put away in the workhouse by any family of such
a condition as this, so poor and populous: or harried out of
life by shrewish tongues, for the sake of the bite and sup his
continuance subtracted from the household resources. But
these benighted barbarians have other views about the
sanctity of years: and Lao Dada was being shepherded
through his last feeble days with every observance and
comfort that the crowded struggling family could muster.
Among the vats and pans he had his Kang, in the cupboard-
like store-room off the central entrance-room in the verandah
HOME AGAIN 179

(my own bed just fitted into the opposite one, clean panelled
all round with new-looking wood, and papered with texts
and pictures of saints and Buddhas). Here he slept, and on
a wet day or a cold one, drowsed through it in the dimness
of the tiny room: a vivacious little granddaughter of six or
seven lay there with him also, to see to his needs in the night,
and fetch him his bowlful of sop in the morning. Then, if
the morning were sunny and fine, he would slowly rise up,
and come hirpling forth upon the verandah, supported by a
staff in one trembling old white claw, and by the small girl
on the other. With his patient ghostly face, lined and
lifeless as a carving, and his dead pale blue eyes, and his last
white hairs gathered up into a little topknot on the crown
of his ivory skull, Lao Dada might have served for a picture
of the very spirit of old age, or of some ancient sage out
of the past incarnation of China’s unnumbered exons of
wisdom. Bit by bit, he would grope forward to where the
sun struck into the verandah, and there squat down against
a pillar-post: and so, almost without motion, sit all day
till sundown, in a fading haze of consciousness, broken only
from time to time by gentle little pale croonings to the
granddaughter, or to the other multicoloured babies now
tumbling round him at play, along with the hens and the cat
and the vociferating piglings.

But the sinking fires were not yet quite dead. Uncon-
scious, to all seeming, of general life, Lao Dada began
perceptibly to take notice of our arrival. A mysterious
thrill seemed to vibrate through his abandonment: he sat
up with more of an air, turned his head this way and that,
and with his dim sunken eyes apprehended faintly the siphon
and the clock. As for the rest of the family, it was very
merry with us: we photographed all of it, privatim et
seriatim, and gladdened the hearts of the little girls with
presents of scarlet cloth which, we insisted, were to be for
them, and for them alone, instead of being diverted to the
use of the already sufficiently spoiled little boys, as we know
they certainly would be, unless we definitely forbade. And
180 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

so we retired at last to a happy night in that happy tumbling
place, and rose in a radiant morning to be off on the last
stage of our return to Wolvesden.

Bill had ridden out earlier still, for a copious variety of
reasons, among which I was supposed not to see the only
real one, which was that he wanted to go ahead and get
everything comfortably arranged for me at home before I
arrived there. Down into the delta I rode, and up its turfy
moorland. Here I was immediately cheered by the aspect
of a new little Trolius that shone here and there among the
tussocks in starry sparks. For, indeed, I had expected no
new flowers, and my spirits were further overlaid with gloom,
to think of the correspondence now awaiting me at
Wolvesden. It was long since we had had letters, and I
trembled to think of the accumulations mounting up for me
there all the time. Poor innocent unoffending me, what an
avalanche of pent-up disasters, anguishes, and anxieties
should I not have to undergo. It is, in fact, no easy thing
to launch a successful letter across many miles of the world,
to an addressless correspondent (at the far end of most
uncertain unrealized posts), of whom you only know that he
is somewhere up in the Alps of the Tibetan Border. Chit-chat
dies at prospect of such a journey; even the war, I found,
instead of stimulating people to a fevered output of comment
and reflexion, crushed even the most intelligent into an
inarticulate dullness by the mere weight and enormousness
ofitshorror. Of this Inow quiveringly dreaded the infection
that would surely envelop me at Wolvesden in its accumu-
lated miasma: and anyhow, the gift of transmundane
letter-writing is not one possessed by many except Sara
Priceless—and the particular Fair One I happen to be
addressing at the moment.

Meanwhile in its rare sparks the Globeflower glittered in
the marish bouldered hollows among the hummocks of
Potentilla—a smaller frailer thing altogether than T. pumilus,
and of a paler gold. And then, in the mouth of the defile,
the ivory Daphne bushes were all aglow, and in the levels
HOME AGAIN 181

Stellera sprouted in shell-pink domes of fragrance. Whereas
before, all this had been black-and-white, arctic, alpine, it
was now all brown-and-green, torrid and lowland. The
gorge; I could now see, is a deep cleavage between huge
fantastically uptilted beds of fired conglomerate, dark and
barren: the hotter moorland slopes, as we mounted its
curves, were covered with a wiry little delicate bushling of
silver grey, like straight sprays of some very refined hoar-
frosted Rosemary, all springing together, unbranching, from
the neck of the plant. What this might be I could not tell:
but I had already come upon it in the shingles of Wolvesden,
graceful and springy as the spirit of youth : and found that
it exhaled the very scent of Lemon Verbena and Eucalyptus
citriodora. Above the steep slopes there rose, on the right,
high-close volumes of moorland, and on the left, cliffs over
sombre cliffs towards the big peaks above. Down in the
middle, among mossy boulders, the beck brabbled through
golden sheets of Draba: Potentilla and Ivory Daphne sat
humpily about on the unfolded lawns, and ahead, there
towered out enormous cliffs and fantastic pinnacles of what
looked like Dolomite.

At this my heart lightened : the appearance on the scene
of limestone is always a sign of hope to the gardener, and my
soul had too long sickened at the unvarying igneousness of
these mountains, and the unvarying pyramidal outline of
their summits that offered no prospect of anything more
lively higher up. Cheerfully I ambled up the windings of
the vale: true, it was not all so awfully magnificent as last
time, but then it was by no means also so awfully uncom-
fortable. The Go-go led me carefully on a string, for when
my mind is on mountains roaming far slopes after flowers,
the rest of me is otherwise too much at the mercy of sudden
movements, stumblings and stops on the part of that incal-
culable engine, the horse. Like the White Knight, I drift,
and like the White Knight I have a liability to tumble out
of my dreamland over the pony’s head if it puts its foot into
a marmot’s hole.
182 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

Thus, in safe tutelage, I reached the slopes at the base of
the limestone cliffs, rounded their base, and came into sight
of a dark little ghyll, deep in their heart, unfolding upon a
wide sweep of lawn, with big yaks feeding. And the pre-
cipices from here were fully displayed in their enormous
mass, corrugated wildly, crumpled, tumbled, hideous: but
rosily flushed with promise. I alighted, and made my gradual
way upward over the lawn, across the beck, and up the steep
rippled slope of white silt, filled with the lemon-scented
silveriness, and rose red with the Androsace in between.
On the pale walls overhead the Incarvillea flared in splashes
of crimson, like any Peony, and at length, up above me, the
faint haze of vegetation on the rock defined itself into here
and there a spot of yellow, and a misty purple unseen before.
And after a moment of scorn for the accustomary dinginess
of Oxytropids, I realized that I had come upon a new Iris.
Iris Potaninii is a queer little species. I have only seen it at
this one point, squatting in tight wads of bluntish grey-green
leaves on the ledges of this sunny limestone precipice, and it
bears (from the same tuft, very often) flowers of clear sulphur
yellow and flowers of a dull husky purple, sitting close upon
the cushion. It is a true flag-Iris with golden beard, and
fall tucked sharply back beneath the blossom : and wonder-
fully suggests I. chameziris as you see it rambling along the
ledges of 8. Raphael. The purple form, indeed, is rather
dim and ugly, but the clear yellow one (which is alittle larger)
is really attractive, when you see it ina goodclump. But I
am not going to pretend that Iris Potaninii is anything to
write home about in red letters.

I now climbed down the bank again, this time keeping
close under the cliff, till I came into the ghyll, where a small
yak-byre of stone walls keeps the entrance. Into the cool
obscurity of the chine I turned, up the course of the beck,
where it darkly gurgled among the grimy crusts of lingering
snow-pats. And in the cold shade a new pinkiness at once
illumined the sombre ledges of moss and moisture. Instinct-
ively the flower-trained eye detects a fresh note of colour,
HOME AGAIN 183

be it near or far. There is no possibility of mistake and I °
gasped for a minute in the delight of a Primula that was not
P. stenocalyx—a Primula that in another instant I recog-
nized as P. urticefolia. P. urticefolia I had known of asa
peculiarity of these parts, but the Paxian description had
been so brief and pallid, and the specific name, with its
suggestion of leaves like a nettle, conjured up such a picture
of coarse rankness, that I had felt no wish to come on P.
urticefolia at all. But here she was, beyond a doubt, and
atrociously wronged alike in description and specific name.
* Nettle leaved,”’ indeed! why, her foliage is so wee that
you hardly see it for the lovely great rose-pink flowers that
sit close upon it all over the tuft. And when you do see
them, they are the most dainty delicate little objects, gashed
so deep into five or seven strips that they give a fringed curly
effect of brightest green filigree, no more like the large dank
dullness of a nettle than the finest moss is comparable to a
cabbage.

The plant’s real parallels are two. Far away from here,
along the high summits of Tsang Chan above Tali Lake, lives
Primula bella, in cushions of loveliness; and much further
away yet, along the moorland ridges above the Glocknerhaus,
and all over the Southern Dolomites and Austrian Alps,
P. minima runs riot in a carpet of colour. And at first, so
vividly do the flowers and leaves of P. urticzfolia resemble
those of P. bella that one looks at once for the fuzz of white
hair in the throat that is the distinguishing mark of all the
bella group: until one realizes that memory, not imagina-
tion, can best give the match, since here is simply P. minima
come over into Asia, and got a little solider in the star and a
little more purely pink in the face. True, this is a soft and
tender plant in texture, it has a tiny stem that sometimes
bears two or three flowers on long thready footstalks of an
inch or so, and it does not run or ramp, but sits quiet in small
concise tuffets. Yet its whole effect, lying in blushing
blotches along the moss-wads of all the cool and shady alpine
cliffs of this region, wherever limestone breaks out, is just
184 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

that of a less ragged and aniline minima, as minima lies in
vinous drifts along the ghyll-ledges of the Glocknerhaus.
Imagine a hybrid of minima and bella, in fact, and you will
have no such bad notion of the Pretty Primula—as I propose
in future, more justly, to speak of P. urticzfolia.

There are no joys in life, I suppose, more restfully
rapturous than the discovery of a new lovely flower. I have
expatiated on this often, and will not do so here again-
Embalmed in bliss, I climbed about on the ledges of the
Primula, savouring the charm of it at leisure. And then
pressed forward through the dark narrows of the chine, to
where, beyond, it widened into a sort of cauldron, with cliffs
of topless vastness impending everywhere, and two narrew
gullies of precipitous grass descending into it from above,
one of them bringing down the beck, and the other merely
leading up over the top of the right-hand cliff, towards the
moorlands overhead. All the herbage of the hills was still
quite dead and pallid as in March, and no sign of life seemed
to stir yet in the black-brown tracts of deep sodden moss that
covered the dark slopes on either side. But the rock-face
that fronted me did take the morning sun, and here, accord-
ingly, plastered tightly into all the crevices of its overhung
concavity, my Isopyrum was already unfolding its huge
purple silk Anemones over the sea-blue filigree of its foliage.
This was the first time of my seeing it at home: and_.of it I
will only say that then, as ever afterwards, wherever I saw
it, its beauty was so overwhelming as always to hold me
spellbound in front of it, almost ill with the delight of its
loveliness. Of saxatile plants, haunters of sheer cliff faces,
I have known many famous beauties, and no new friend can
make me disloyal to Daphne petraa in rose-pink sheets
along the blank roseate frontage of the Tombea, or to the
King of the Alps in silvered pin-cushions of turquoise on the
black walls of Colbricon. But Isopyrum Farreri has a
glory equal to theirs, and superior, if only in being different,
in combining exquisite grace of foliage and habit with a
sumptuousness of colour no less than theirs, to say no more.
HOME AGAIN 185

And luckily my Isopyrum has no fads about rock in the
garden, but thrives in open soil like any Anemone.

Was not this enough? In front of the Isopyrum I said
my Nunc Dimittis, and cast the wearied eye of repletion
round the rest of the ghyll. What mattered those golden
buttons of Globeflower here and there, and the heads of red-
purple stars that Primula Woodwardii was unfolding above
the pale tussocks on its eight-inch stems? I had had my fill,
and could feel no further frenzy for any such familiar fry.
And in that instant, on the far bank, deep in the shadow of
the cliff, where the springy floor was still black and sodden,
I saw upon the darkness something new—a delicate white
stem and wide ghostly bells hanging. In the calm of com-
plete rapture, I solemnly stepped across the beck, and up to
the spot where my latest treasure flickered on the gloom,
amid the blue flickerings of the Lavandine Primula above it
and below, and occasional furious flares of red-violet from
the Imperial Primula. But here was something quite
unknown, I could see at a glance, to science—a Primula in
the group of P. Nivalis, with a typical nivalis neck-stock,
fat and deep and tunicated as a leek’s, and a big cabbage of
leaves, richly green and glossy, and pure white beneath with
powder. And the flowers! On a stout white stem of six
inches they unfold above the leaves, half-hanging in a bunch
of half-a-dozen or so. And they are of a loveliness singular
and phantasmal in their family, very large and ample and
round-faced, of a faint blue lavender so subtle as to be almost
a French grey, gradually suffused with a white radiation
from the misty bull’s-eye of intense black-purple at their
throat, which continues down the tube inside and out. And
their sad and startling loveliness is echoed by the keen sad
sweetness of their scent. There is altogether, despite its
stalwart growth and size, something ghostly and tragic about
this wistful splendour, so Quakerish in its combinations of
colour.

Long I knelt before that isolated specimen, adoring its
perfections : then rose and swept a glance of re-awakened
186 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

keenness round the walls and floor of the ghyll, high and low.
And there, far up on impregnable ledges of the dark cliff
opposite, I now saw the pale heads of My Primula nodding,
larger and richer than in the lone stray specimen seeded down
at my feet, like phantoms in the gloom, in the cavities and
crannies, and up the inner rim of the knife edge in which the
precipice curved round over the chine. And, as I saw it
then, so I always saw My Primula henceforward—always in
the gullies in the coldest shadiest aspects, usually on the
limestone, and always (typically) wedged fast in crevices of

“the sheer cliff, so small that it seemed a miracle how the
plant could find room for its stout leek-like trunk, or nourish-
ment for the very few thick fat roots like stiff spaghetti, that
emerge from its butt.

The geological confusion of this range is quite grotesque.
The beck-beds are all of rounded granite boulders, whose
source I never found, the base is of conglomerate as hard as
hate, black shales far overhead on the peaks suggest the coal
that the district yields, red shales suggest iron, grey shales
more granite, the main mass is purely igneous and azoic :
and then, at a wild tilt, up comes the limestone, violently
bursting aloft in gigantic reefs and spars and slanted towers
of Dolomite, on the slopes that lead up to the Pass, and the
long aréte that climbs to the summit of Kerauno. And it
is here, among the dark combes and on the cold sides of
those tqwers, that Primula Farreriana first shows her face ;
while here, too, and only on the limestone, with a far more
rigid preference, the Pretty Primula glows. But Mine put
all other’ thoughts from my head: in “ singing, dancing,
exclaiming spirits ’ like Emma, I scrambled out of the ghyll,
up over its buttress of cliff, on to the open moorland, and
there while Go-go and the pony, minute specks in the glen
below, advanced slowly part passu, to keep level with my
adventures, I explored beck-runnel after beck-runnel in the
successive folds of the fell.

In the banks the Lavandine Primula was an almost
enraging loveliness of blue profusion, and beside the bubbling
HOME AGAIN 187

swirls Globeflowers glowed. But otherwise there was
nothing yet alive, except that occasionally above the drab
pale deadness of the turf hassocks, sombrely flared the
intense violets of the Imperial Primula. But P. Woodwardii
of the Da-Tung differs now and then so oddly from what
seems to be the identical P. Woodwardii of the Min S4n that
Professor Balfour even dallies with the idea that they are
specifically distinct. Completely the same in every respect,
to the gardener’s eye, P. Woodwardii here differs from the
completely hairless, downless and powderless P. Woodwardii
of the Min San, in sometimes wearing powder on its stems,
and often (if not always) having its leaves clothed in a
microscopic fur of glands that makes them dull and finely
velvety, instead of perfectly smooth and shiny. The flowers,
too, are here, as a rule, of a fiercer, hotter red-violet than
the deep imperial purples that are invariable in the Min
S4n plant. But invariable in both forms is the eye of ashen
black that forms the centre of each flower; which makes
it one of the standing miracles and problems of plant-life,
‘why P. Woodwardii should infallibly develop, in cultivation,
a clear eye of white round that central blackness of the
tube’s throat—a development which exquisitely increases
and illuminates the loveliness of the flower, but which is
entirely unknown in the wild state—at least so far asI myself
can speak, from the hundreds upon thousands of specimens
I have seen on field or fell of the Da-Tung or the Min San.
And now back again to the path, over the braes and gullies,
to meet its ascending coils. Immediately overhead climbs
the pass in coils and zigzags and long ascents. Fierce and
long and high it is, but to-day all coming green and alive,
with no speck of snow remaining: a stiff toil, but without
the dark whiteness of mystery and storm that had made it
so marvellous on my first traverse. The last twenty yards
up to the actual crest are a scramble and scree of red earth
and stones. And here the whole scene was blue with the
incredible multitudes of the Lavandine Primula, glimmering
from a groundwork of the little yellow Oxygraphis, in equal
188 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

multitudes over the bare soil. But I do not much like this
last. It is quite a small thing, of two or three inches, with
many-rayed stars of blossom, like washed-out buttercups in
colour, but tainted with the metallic greenish shrillness of
Adonis. They huddle in abundance close over the tuft of
fat dark-green foliage, and in the middle of each pointed
narrow petal the yellow suddenly dies out into a sodden
transparency which gives each round saucer of blossom the
look of having a wide dusky-coloured eye. Otherwise on the
crest of the pass life was still very young: the Imperial
Primula and the Harebell Poppy were only just beginning to
stir, and in the rocks of the aréte the tight wads of Androsace
mucronifolia were still like a dead rust of lichen.

Down on the far side I plunged, with the led pony stum-
bling cautiously behind. In no season or circumstances could
one ride down the Eastern face of Wolvesden Pass, so very
sheerly does the scree-like track descend what looks from
above like an unnegotiable series of cliffs, between which the
path has to tack to and fro in short violent zigzags, to make
its way down among them at all. In the upper rocks there
was no new thing : and when I came into the Rhododendron
zone, and found big cool moist bluffs cushioned and
pedestalled on depths of moss, the only novelty still was
that same promising cushion of Porphyrion-looking saxifrage
that I had seen the year before, in the topmost limestone
cliffs of the Ardjeri Alps. But now it turned out to be only
a most measling Kabschia, with tiny moth-eaten ragged
flowers of unclean white, sitting close in the delusive pretti-
ness of those tight tuffets of wee silver-margined rosettes.
So that really there was nothing to distract me from the view
in front, as downwards I plunged and scrambled by short
cuts and divergations into gullies and under cliffs very superb
and high ; the Omos-Thanatos mass towered ahead over the
valley beneath me, filling the scene: and I could now see
how this gigantic barrier deflects the Dene, which has to cut
deeply round Northward to the left, beneath the cruel needle
of Omos, far on high, the last outlier of the massif.
 

DOLOMITE VALLEY.
HOME AGAIN 189

Without ill-event we reached the foot of the pass, where
valleys and beck beds converge. HereI resumed the pony
and went forward. And this was my first sight of the Dene
by daylight. At its very head there comes down into it
from the left the blind vale that is born up above between
the converging screes of _Kerauno and the dolomite tumbles
opposite. Behind, the ridge of the pass leading up to the
peak of Kerauno: in front, a huge wall of Dolomitic lime-
stone, enclose Dolomite Valley. Never were such wild
precipices, stark and perfectly naked, towering up and up,
in bulges and smooth faces, and the most frantically con-
torted crumplings and corrugations of the strata: blankly
terrible, and apparently childless, by rights, of streams, yet
with deep crazy ghylls at intervals, tearing down from the
cliff foot, through the high rampart of the fell in front into
the floor of the valley itself.

From the junction of the two streams that meet at the
Dene head, the path leaves Dolomite Valley on the left, and
continues mildly along above the beck beneath the tame
cypressus coppice that here clothes the lower flanks of the
Dolomite range in its South-Easterly extension. And all
the time the big mountains up ahead of you bulk larger and
larger, like things in a nightmare, graceless but magnificently
enormous heights, nameless for ever (for Chinese and
Tibetans are at one, in giving no identifying names to the
various peaks, fathers of thunder and terror that Chinese
and Tibetans are at one in hating and dreading and only
generically recognizing as far as they must), unless it be for
the names by which I myself came in time to know them 1—
Omos the Ferocious, last and least of the line; Achthos the
Burdensome, Axeinos the Inhospitable, and Thanatos the
King of the range, the very accumulated bones of Death

1 Since I do not care to follow the fashion so prevalent among
explorers, of naming new peaks after personal acquaintance: by
which Kerauno, for instance, would certainly appear as ‘“ Mount
Etherington-Hunnybun,”’ after my dear old friend, ‘“‘ Mrs. Ether-
ington-Hunnybun, of The Hunnybunneries, Hockley in the Hole.”
190 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

himself. And behind us now, aspiring high, but not so high,
the two horns of the Pass-ridge, profiled aloft in the blue—
Kelaino the Dark and dull, and pale Kerauno, the home of
Lightning, standing out over the lowlands, the advance-
guard of the mountains.

Now there is a fording of the stream to its other side,
where the most trying stretch of the Upper Dene ‘begins.
This is a long expanse, a series of bays, of very soggy marshy
emerald turf, jewelled indeed with the bright pink prettiness
of Primula Wardii, but jewelled also a great deal more
densely with round granite boulders of every degree of size
and unsteadiness, often piled into a solid wilderness of stone.
It was this stretch that had been so cruel when traversed by
night, and delusively masked by snow: even by day, how-
ever, it is always a trial, and always the bit I dreaded in
going up to the pass or down again. It lasts for about a mile,
and every step is a torment, with the ponies scrambling and
floundering and stumbling, their hoofs scrabbling and slither-
ing off a smooth rock, or plunging helplessly with an
unbalanced one. But at last relief is reached: an open
grassy vale descends from the right along the base of the
Omos-Thanatos range, from where, away up there, the
Pass-ridge and the aréte of Kelaino die dully and indeter-
minately into other downs, away round the vale head,
against the knees of the Thanatos-mass. This vale brings
down a beck, in a wide tract of stones that ends the slough
stretch, and on the other side yet another beck converges
among shingles, from the back side of the contorted range
that walls in Dolomite Valley. :

So after this, though the going is still very rough and stony,
it is at least firm and easy, over a long flat stretch of grey
and white shingle, half overgrown by now with alder and
slight willow, but also with open expanses where flowers. of
the Alps have seeded down, sky-blue poppies and purple
Delphiniums flaring on the pallid greyness of the pebbles.
But the comparatively level descent that has brought us so
gradually down from the foot of the pass is soon to deepen
HOME AGAIN 191

to something more abrupt and violent. For now we are
under the immediate shadow of Omos, developing overhead .
in slope over tremendous slope of coppice and then Rhodo-
dendron, to where you have to crane up your neck to see the
fierce tooth itself looming into the air, so far aloft that you
despair of ever reaching it: and the Dene accordingly has
to sink down into the narrows of the gorge. Here again you
ford the beck, and on the far side come upon the topmost
of the mule-inns, so small and derelict a place that you
would never guess it a possible place for human shelter.
And from this, in deepening brushwood you descend the left
bank of the beck, by now, with its various confluents, a
creditable torrent: and in among the pebbles of the way
sit clumped leaden-looking humps of violet leaves, illumined
all over with bright golden violets that shine like sunlight in
the sylvan dimness. And in the rockwalls on the left the
Fairy Bell begins to swing, and round a bend of bluffs that
comes next, my Isopyrum also appears in glory.

Below, on the right, the stream is roaring away down,
close between cliffs and forested bluffs and boulders, in a
succession of shattering ice-grey cascades hidden under the
quivering green. You are deep in the throat of the Dene
now, descending along the bankside through copse of briar
and Ribes and Barberry, all of them spiny, and all of them
ugly. In the difficult deviosities of the descent, there are
crossings and re-crossings of the torrent, giddy skirtings of
cliffs, and vertiginous scramblings down beneath them.
More and more you feel imprisoned and shut in, sinking ever
deeper in the grip of the gorge, with Omos towering more and
more terribly high immediately overhead. Indeed, when
the Dene has fairly swallowed you, the mountain itself passes
out of sight above, leaving you to be throttled by its lowest
slopes—only to reappear again lower down, where a
momentary widening of the glen reveals it again, culminating
the crushing mass of the woodland wall that shuts out day-
light across the river. At one point, from under a cliff with
such a waving purple cushion of Isopyrum as makes it
192 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

impossible to think of anything else, the horse has to make
its own sweet way accordingly, floundering breast high
through the clear foaming green of the torrent and its deep
swirls, across to a long line of limestone precipices: and on
the lower side of this projection, in the cool and the shadow,
the Pretty Primula reappears on the ledges with Isopyrum,
But almost at once we have to re-cross the stream and down-
wards again, on the sunnier bank, and then along the
rim, and then beneath the base, round bay after bay
of the convulsively coiling stream, under cliffs that are
igneous again, and either too low or too uninteresting for
anything but the Fairy Bell, which here swings out in
multitudes.

The gorges are nearly threaded now, and you are so deep
between the hills that there is no longer any more hope than
from Wolvesden of seeing the high tops themselves, or even
Omos, their youngest born. Here there is a bridge to cross
‘by, a springy span of poles and mud and brushwood ; and
then a breast of woodland and copse, sparse and dull as all
the rest, with only peonies here and there for promise : next
comes a long bay of emerald turf beside the stream, and
then you rise again, scrambling round a coppiced spur that
sweeps straight down in a taut aréte-line from the mountains
up above: and dip among the Rhododendrons on the other
side, with little pale orchids peering among the mossy under-
cut at the path-side like ghosts of green-white flies, and the
Harebell Poppy beginning to flutter purple banners: and
so along with difficulty, but no variety, past the second
mule inn across the stream at the top of the widening vale
(a better place than the upper one, but not a Ritz) to where a
last bend brings you out into the open upper reach of the
Dene, released from the gorges. And there at the end, just
before the Dene sinks deep again into its second set of gorges,
is my own dear little house once more, just discernible as a
new-mudded flat roofline, huddled under the green tongue
of bank that sweeps out behind it from Southerly Valley :
with the white flag flickering on Hill 60 in front of it, and
HOME AGAIN 193

the ponies grazing, and Wa-wa doing Sister Anne on Hill 60
to see if we are ever coming.

And so, a last smooth stretch through small low copse of
Daphne and the purple Rhododendron, and then long open
lawns, and a drop to the river, and a final fording of it, and
there we are triumphantly riding over the bouldered Iris
flats again to our own front door, there to be welcomed by
Billand the whole rejoicing staff, and a bale of correspondence
which, like this whole memorable day itself, falsified all my
dumps of the morning by containing neither dullness,
empeevements nor ill news: besides bales of information
about that sinister but supreme genius, who solved all the
hitherto unsolved problems of murder by his brilliant new
device of drowning a succession of Brides in Baths. And
up behind the house the lawn level from Southerly Valley
was now all a sea of golden Globeflowers like gigantic butter-
cups in an English field: and from the little bluff of rocks
above, the Androsace floundered in cascades of round-eyed
pinkness. So no wonder, with all these glories and triumphs
put together, if this apical day left us both quite birdwitted
with pleasure and excitement and relief, unable to settle
coherently to anything, in the well-rounded completeness of
our satisfaction with everything.
CHAPTER XI
SUMMER WORK

The Dene was indeed awake by now: every day the lawns
round Wolvesden House, or the beck-shingles down in front
of them, revealed some new flower. The little blue Rhodo-
dendron was a-bloom on the islets amid the stone tracts, and
day by day the blobby whiteness of the big glossy one visibly
climbed the mountain-wall of jungle opposite, like an ascend-
ing thaw. And in the swirls of the torrent, where it lashes
round under the bends of the cliff, beneath a canopy of the
pink-flowered Caragana’s thorny arms of voluminous emerald
foliage, the ice-crusts were daily diminishing to their end,
so that when ice-cream was in request, Gomer now had to
ride right across the torrent to the darkest lairs beneath the
rocks, looking splendid as a young Centaur, as he fought the
grey horse, caracoling and reneging through the deep brawls
of the water.

Work, therefore, went busily, varied by photography,
reading, writing, and the joys of society. For Grandmamma
Aoo and her brood were constant visitors, dropping in daily
with birch-bark buckets of milk, and bladders full of matured
but excellent butter, of which the only doubt was whether
the hairs it contained were those of yaks or of Grandmamma.
She even brought her own grandmamma, the “aieule”’ of
all the Aoo’s, a twinkling little old crone, as old as the world
but infinitely more cheerful. And there were casual visitors,
too, dropping in on their way up or down the Pass. These
were of all sorts and degrees, from small local officials and
jolly coal-carriers, to a quite dotty Lama, who came capering
in one morning with bell and bowl, and, having been charm-

194
SUMMER WORK 195

ingly ragged by Gomer, was in course of being put out by
the two unfriendly Mahomedan soldiers, when he was rescued
by Bill, brought in and made much of, and sent at last on
his way rejoicing. The menagerie, too, kept us lively. The
six surviving hens had now entirely recovered, and proudly
pervaded the place: when a new lot arrived from over the
hills the old lot would at first have nothing to do with these
parvenus, and haughtily went out walking with the pig
instead. However, in the course of time they coalesced,
and fell to picking the Primulas in the yard, leaving the pig
to pursue, undistracted, his hopeless passion for the little
brown pony.

Wild life was also round us in abundance. I say nothing
of the fat-bodied brown moths that used to come flapping
in at night, and whizz round the little room in almost invisible
humming gyrations that destroyed all possibility of sitting
at peace: nor of how I revolted against having them seized
and cast into the stove. Birds were a pleasanter feature of
the yard: there was one in particular that rejoiced me—a
thing like a very large missel-thrush that has fallen breast
forward into a dish of raspberry ice; so that all his front was
of bland soft pink, with crimson splashes among the decent
mouse-coloured smoothness of his head and shoulders.
Then there was a pair of big brown-and-chestnut flycatchers,
who, to my delight, had a nest of babies in the roof-beam of
the stable, just above where I used to sit out in the shadow to
paint my flowers. The morning being favourable, and the
flower alluring, forth I would sally into the little shingled
yard. ‘“‘ One bowl water, two plates,” was the cry: forth
came the Wa-wa running with the required paraphernalia,
to set out chair and table beneath the eaves of the arcade,
just out of the direct sunlight, close beside the little garden
potch we had made, with sand and soil from-the river-bed,
on the hard floor of the yard, to grow specimens of special
plants on and ripen their seed, and gauge, too, from this, when
they should be ripening overhead on the mountains. So
there, when I had got the table at last as level as it would go
196 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

and propped up with pebbles from wobbling, I sat at work :
and above, in the eaves, Mr. and Mrs. Flycatcher whizzed
and whirred and chittered, coming and going perpetually,
with a constant supply of flies and moths for the babies.

Until, on a sad day, the babies having grown older, the
servants thought it would amuse me to have them more
securely under observation, so removed them from the nest,
all four of them, and hung them up in the same place in a
box, with a mesh of string across its open frontage. All
seemed quite happy and prosperous; the servants were
pleased and I was pleased, and even the imprisoned family
and its parents seemed pleased. And Mr. and Mrs. Fly-
catcher showed no remission of zeal in feeding their children :
constantly hovering, in a twittering poise of wings, in front
of the’cage, administering dainties to clamorous little open
beaks. But one morning a tragedy appeared. Three of
the fledgelings still perked and gaped, but at the bottom of
the cage the fourth lay stark, completely bald in the head,
but otherwise without sign of hurt. The death I deplored,
the baldness I pondered. What could be the cause of this
mortal mange? More days went by, though, and a few
mornings later I became aware that yet another of the
captives was looking rather lethargic, and on closer inspection
was found to be developing the fatal baldness. Appalled, I
set myself to watch, and the yet more appalling truth was.
gradually revealed. Under cover of bringing nourishment,
the parent birds were pecking their babies to death, one by
one, to save them from the horrors of captivity.

In a passion of remorse I seized my scissors, and cut away
the string-mesh, and shook the prisoners out of their box.
Tailless, fat and unfledged, they floundered to the earth;
and I then had new remorses that their tardy release had
only landed them helpless within reach of the rats. How-
ever, they hopped about, and soon perked up, and preened
themselves, and finally disappeared ; to be discovered a few
days later, sitting on logs and tree trunks, and so diligently
absorbing the victims that their parents now brought them
SUMMER WORK 197

with redoubled zeal that they swelled visibly, and sprouted
feathers as vigorously as the Press sprouts rumours. My
reward was complete when, about a week later I met one of
my. late guests sitting on a beam, the picture of prosperity :
he cheeped at me cheerfully in recognition, and then flew
away, as strong on the wing as any scandal.

Not that rats were the worst of our neighbours by way of
fere nature. All round the house those fearsome marmots
sat up and squeaked and scuttled, hardly now condescending
to avoid as one passed by. And there was always something
sinister about their cod-fish-expression of pursy self-import-
ance. But I wondered all the while about the name of the
Valley. There were the Rocks all right, unmistakable and
abundant: but where were the Wolves? The whole place
seemed peaceful as a parsonage without the parson. But
one wet day, as I sat over a book in the gloaming of my little
room, I heard a mighty scatteration, and on coming out
into the yard, saw that all the local flocks of sheep and goats
had come pouring down over the bluff above in a unanimous
cataract of confusion, out of the cypress coppice higher up.
Evidently there had been an alarm. I could discern no
cause for it, however, and no result, until I noticed one poor
little goat, who seemed to ail: and on studying him through
the glasses, found that his paunch was bitten out, and
hanging. <A wolf, big and grey and bushy-tailed, had leapt
down upon that placid flock as it browsed among the bushes :
and the valley was justified of its name. Excitement raged
among the staff: in uncomplaining meekness the little goat
stood and then lay, impeded by his paunch from movement,
and disarranged for feeding. And the rest continued chump-
ing unperturbed, having by now forgotten all about wolves
and the misfortune of their fellow. But I could not bear it,
and sent forth the Sa-wa Wa-wa. With all the unholy glee
of his age and creed and kind, he shinned up the impending
bluff, and knelt upon the little goat and slit its weazand.

Southerly Valley was now a floor of golden Globeflowers,
with rare great ragged violet asters here and there, and the
198 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

pink-faced blandness of Primulas beside the beck. We made
(but without a barouche landau) exploring parties up its
various divergencies towards the high tops above. The
lower reaches are all of green soft sward and flowers, blobbed
with occasional bushes of the ivory daphne. And so it very
gradually mounts, so gently that you hardly know it, but
that Wolvesden and the Dene are suddenly seen to have
sunk down out of sight, and the Buttress over them to have
dwindled to a mere detail in the unfolded rampart of Crest
Royal, far overhead. On either side are arid cliffs containing
nothing of merit, that sink starkly out of the cypress coppice,
and then degringolate down towards the valley in long
slides of barren scree, fringed with copse of briar and bar-
berry round the curve of their base, where they die out in a
grassy moundage with the big pale aconite towering among
the tumbles in sumptuous and sickly-coloured evilness.
Then, as the valley climbs and narrows, the beck has to be
crossed and re-crossed: and on its right flank, among the
boscage, which now begins to be of Rhododendron, the Hare-
bell Poppy takes charge, and all the slope flickers with its
lavender butterflies, coyly peering. The lawns in the groove
grow clouded with coppice as one climbs, and backward the
view is now stupefyingly enormous, up to the gigantic heights
of Crest Royal, with the big peaks still only peering over,
and Wolvesden quite lost to view beneath your feet. Copse
and lawn now alternate: there are climbs and dips in the
beck bed. Down from the right a tributary glen converges
through woodland almost at a right angle, round the
flank of the projecting needle from the range behind, so high
that you can no longer see its top. But higher yet is the
wall of slope and scree and cliff that is now revealed above
the tributary valley, bare and open and vast, until it dies
into the fur of the forest beneath. But our own way lies
straight ahead, up into an evident gorge, beyond a wide lawn
and a confusion of coppice. And here, among her green
paddocks, sits Grandmamma Aoo, with her flocks and her
herds and her kindred.
SUMMER WORK 199

So here we paused, to pass the time of day. Forth from
under the low sagging roof of the dark yak-hair tent came
the Matriarch, and beamed upon us, and warned us of super-
natural wonders up above. But we proceeded undeterred,
up into what soon became a narrow steep gorge of shade and
moisture, with limestone clifis on which the pinkness of the
Pretty Primula shone abundant, amid the blue heads of the
Lavandine along the ledges, very lovely, with huge masses
of Isopyrum, promising profusely but not yet out. Above
the shingled damp of the chine the valley becomes a dull and
rather ugly trough of shallowing moorland, humpy with
Potentilla scrub and with ragged cypress coppice still per-
sisting here and there on the little bluffs to the right. At
this point Grandmamma Aoo has a summer steading of two
or three lean-to shacks built of poles plastered over with
yak-dung, and now all grass-grown and green with age, where
she herself or some of her descendants come up in August
to pasture the kine on the upper alps. Now it was all forlorn
and desolate and dank: at this height the moorland was still
dead and pale.

And here there darkened upon us a weight of cloud, which
soon developed into violent thunder and a passion of
whipping sleet that ere long quieted into a soft and passionless
fall of big-flaked snow. Under a bluff we cowered for shelter
(we were high above the last of the Aoo chalets by now) and
the boys characteristically achieved a fire with torn trunks
of the cypress. Up against the face of the rock the smoke
went surging in stormy yellow coils, and down upon it, dark
against the universal pallor overhead, the snowflakes sank in
steady multitudes. The fire kept life and warmth in us amid
the arctic winter in which we were now enshrouded : but the
world was clean blotted out in iron darkness. And then the
storm began to pass. Insensibly the world reappeared : the
foreground, the voor groove of the moor, its succession of
little bluffs, answering each other on either side, and then,
far away below, the sullen green fur of the forests, sinking in
long slides towards its lower reaches, from the long wild
200 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

lines of pinnacle and precipice profiled pale, in the ghost-
liness of mountains seen through storm in a print of
Hiroshige. Down and down they sank, one behind another,
from their taut sweep into the invisibility of cloud on either
hand.

And the deepest depth below, where Wolvesden lay, down
out of sight and thought, was all a blank of black-violet
gloom in a solid wall, like the curtain separating stalls from
stage. But then, as we looked, a ghostly cleavage dawned
about half-way up in a blurred bar of pallor that widened and
lightened, while the darkness in the depths deepened to
midnight by comparison. And up above, so far up above
that one would never have thought of raising one’s eyes so
high, the peaks of the big Alps themselves now gradually
slid into visibility, dim and faint as phantoms, and hardly
more than vapours themselves on the vaporous dark in
which they insensibly dawned behind dense veils of driving
rain. And now, in front of that grim phantasmagoria of
gloom, the sun came suddenly slanting across the foreground,
and the dun moorland flashed into pale fire, and the wet
bluffs shone ruddy and blue, and the gnomish little firs that
crowned them took on a flaring vividness of sun-illumined
wet against the gigantic darkness behind.

But these were the last trees, stunted almost to extinction
by their audacity in venturing so high. As soon as the
clearance was complete we emerged from our shelter and
continued up the long gully of the moorland, bare and open,
shallower and duller all the time towards the shallow col
that we could now see up ahead of us at its end. We con-
tinued very slowly, though the going was gentle and easy :
but the altitude forbids speed. Vegetation was hardly yet
at its birth: the Globeflower was only just appearing, and
otherwise there was only a profusion of the clove-scented
purple Erysimum I had first seen on the Gan-Chang pass :
and, in the dead grassy slopes, the Lampshade Poppy,
luminous in the low scant scrub, prettier than I have ever
seen it elsewhere, from the added refinement it acquires here,
SUMMER WORK 201

by having only one or two flowers, instead of its usual
plethoric profusion and its usual crude gollopshiousness of
stature. Here our way was diversified, too, by what looked
in the distance up ahead of us like a big pale stoat dodging
among the bummocks that densely dot the moorland. And
the scale of the whole scene, the size of the hillocks may
be gauged from the fact that through the glasses we soon
discovered our stoat to be a large silvery fox with a beautiful
bushy brush. He avoided us, however, and faded unob-
trusively away among the hollows. A last pull over the dells
and rises of the moor, and we had attained the slack dip of
the col.

On the far side it falls steep (occasionally in bluffs and
cliffs) and to the very crest it is covered on its further side
with thin low scrub of Potentilla and Caragana, in the top-
most fringes of which the Imperial Primula stolidly loomed.
On the right the moorland slope shoots higher still, in a stark
sweep towards the summit overhead ; and on the left the
line of the col sweeps upward too, more gradually, to lose
itself in an enormous complication of alps and lawns and
plateaux. And in front the view is superb, straight away
out, over a lower world of tumbled valleys and hills and
sharp folds of innumerable ridges and alps, to where, across
the distance, tower the bald and savage corrugations, red
and grey, of the wild chain of peaks along whose slopes we
had climbed, on our way from Gan Chang to Chebson. And
there, indeed, were the level windings of that road clearly
visible, coiling like a Dolomitenstrasse in a thread of white
round the flanks of the range. And it was a day of glory
too, by now, to enhance the day: with the intervening
depths of rich greens and blues and purples, and the far peaks
very cold and clear, and overhead a wild racing sky of clouds
and blue, with rolling cloud-banks about, and pale swirls of
snow drifting from peak to peak in the distance.

So now we addressed ourselves to the slope on the right.
It was a long heavy climb: pull over pull that seemed
endless, before we reached the summit, But it was a delight-
202 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

ful pull, too, up over close moorlznd turf, still dead as Queen
Anne, but comfortable to the climber, with here and there a
fragrant little purple dome of Erysimum squatting tight to
its drabness. And the view widened awfully in all directions ;
straight across, high over the forgotten darkness of the Dene,
rose the wall of Crest Royal, with which now we were on
such equal terms that we could see how it is only the pedestal
or outlying spur of the gigantic Alps up above, from here
expanded in all their overpowering magnificence: while
away to the right we had full command of the huge laps and
dips and shallow lake-like hollows of moorland, with which
the high tops are diversified under the summits—each one
of them looking as if it must inevitably be the home of six
new Primulas at the least.

From the crest you gaze over down into another vale, like
that by which we had come up, except that this one is much
more profound and abrupt, and deeply filled with woodland ;
under a much more wild and gigantic wall of a very much
higher mountain on the other side, tethered, from where we
stood, to the main ridge, by a wall of precipices, falling sheer,
in smooth naked bulges and faces, on either side. We did
not pursue our way forward along these, but kept to the
right now, along the aréte of the spur, skirting its peaks,
and stopping often to rest on the close brown deadness,
springy and dark, and sodden, of the alpine turf, and there
scan out the dips and dishes of the uplands opposite,
mapping out expeditions, and forecasting hopes. As I lay,
my fingers strayed on a pale little thin shoot of green
straggling limp and feeble on the soggy floor of moss, from
which the snow had so lately gone that everything was still
squashed flat: “ Hullo, Bill,” I said, “ here’ll be a gentian
one of these days,” and thought no more. Little did I know
of what it was I spoke so lightly : nor of the ironical contrast
between our high hopes of those dishes, and our levity with
this contemned little bird in the hand.

And now, from among enormous pinnacles and what
looked Dolomite yet was barren, we began descending to the
SUMMER WORK 203

new glen. It was like a trackless descent of Wolvesden
Pass: very far, and very steep: we zigzagged downwards
through cliffs and towers outstanding like teeth from the
grassy wall of the mountain-side. Overhead the sky was
now coming low on us in a baldachin of darkness, heavy
and solid as the murderous bed-canopy in Joseph Conrad’s
tale. Hardly had we reached the narrow groove of the ghyll
below, when a blind white tourmente of snow swept screaming
down into the glen from the ridge above. So that we were
very glad to shelter here, in one of the two shallow lean-to
shacks of dung-plastered poles that we happened upon, one
on either side of the gorge, another alpine steading of the
Aoo’s, evidently. So we lingered, and lit a fire: and the
world went white. Low and empty by now, too, with the
long descent, we ate a snack: both my eardrums were
throbbing in sharp pain, with our deep sudden drop from the
heights overhead. And still the snow continued falling,
steadily, passionately, yet persistently: and dusk was
darkening through the storm.

We decided to run no risk of being penned up by nightfall
in this unknown glen: so adventured forth into a virginal
world of snow beneath the enormous blue brollies brought
with us that day by the boys. These did at least shelter
heads and shoulders: one’s legs, anyhow, bare in their
shorts, must have been whipped in a minute to ice by the
frozen thorny jungles of Caragana and other snow-laden
scrub, through which we now had to battle for a mile or so
down the sinking groove of the valley, laboriously making
steam ahead in that thigh-deep sea of dense ice-bound
shrubbery. It was an unspeakably odious progress : my soul
and my knee-joints wilted within me, and the umbrella grew
heavy as lead. But it would have been far worse had there
been wind, or a cold rain: as it was the white wet world
was calm, and if you whizzed the umbrella from time to time,
when it grew too weighty, its solid roof of snow would fly off
in a Catherine wheel of clots and clods.

And at length, down a series of banks and coppiced drops,
204 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

we came into the main beck ghyll where all the streams of
this valley-head converge, in a precipitous chine, so deep
under an ancient jungle of alder and willow that beneath
their interlacing and almost impenetrable shade huge old
snowpats were still lying, grimy but undefeated. As we
made our difficult way down the cliffs and ledges into that.
lovely over-arched ravine, I just had time to notice that its
walls were hung with what promised to be a quite special
splendour of Isopyrum, just beginning. I could only
frozenly peer up at it, however, as we hurried on downwards,
over a less difficult valley-stretch now, in deeper coppice,
and with traces of a track. The glen was curling round the
base of the high peak which ends the spur we had explored
and crossed : and ere long, beneath a tall jungle, we were
down once more at the top of Southerly Valley where the two
branches of its Y diverge. And now all the ardours and
endurances of the long day were over. There were the
shanties again, and Grandmamma <Aoo yodelling salutations
from her midden : to the left of us, down and down, ran the
delicious smooth descent of Southerly Valley, deep into the
Dene. No more impenetrable scrub or difficult jungle: and
no more whiteness, for the snow left off here, and none was
falling anywhere by this time, and all was pale and clear and
still, with the valley glistering in the wet, and pale new
winter shadowy against the iron sky, on all the huge heights
and masses overhead.

Selection, say the wise, is the secret of art: do not expect
me to lug you out on all the expeditions involved in the
exploration of such a range as the Da-Tung Alps. But, if
I spare your mental legs, on your eyes I will have no mercy :
no flower of any loveliness shall elude you, though the precise ©
steps of their attainment be left a blur, from which only the
more salient ascensions emerge. One of them was an expe-
dition up to the pass, to explore the ridge away up towards
Kerauno. Bill and Ma went away ahead of me, and ere long
I followed with Mafu, in a cross temper that had visibly been
growing upon him these many days past. It is a tremendous
SUMMER WORK 205

long hard stretch up to the base of the pass, certainly, and
then a tremendous long pull up it. Just by the topmost
mule-inn I came upon Bill, engaged in photographing
Isopyrum—or attempting to. But it was no use. All the
blossoms hopped and danced in a saraband to every breath
of air: and when, after an agelong wait, they seemed to
have all subsided, one of them was always certain to start
bowing and fluttering again at the last moment. So we
desisted, and all proceeded onward, and up the pass. As we
roamed round the giant flanks beneath the igneous aréte,
towards the tilted Dolomite towers beyond that make the
‘ramparts of Kerauno, the glorious day began to grey over,
and looking up, I saw a thing unknown to all my previous
experiences. For there, vivid on the sullen lead-coloured
zenith, flamed a perfect solar rainbow, a wide belt of pris-
matic splendours standing away round the sun like Saturn’s
rings, but much further away, with a fainter reverberation
yet further still.

In the thunderous calm it seemed an omen of doom, a
crucial symptom of the Last Day, now brooding down upon
us in breathless livid silence. However, we maintained our
course, easily and level, beneath the aréte and along its
convenient teeth and gendarmes, till we came to the combes
and chines of moisture and cool shades that shoot up into
the blind hearts of the Dolomite towers. At their feet these
sink away in white scree-slopes bedizened with the Welcome
Primula and Celestial Poppies, threaded by the white-starred
promise of a glossy Cerastium, and by the sprawling fluffy
heads of a whitish Lagotis that here replaces the blue fuzz
of L. Ramalana on Thundercrown. But in the jaws of the
chines themselves the shady scree is moist and fine and silty.
And here there is much more wealth of beauty. For here
the Lavandine Primulas’ blue heads are everywhere, and the
Pretty One deserts her accustomed ledges, and comes down
on to the open slope, and twinkles in a tissvie of rose-pink
stars all over the gritty damps: while up above, in the
closest crevices far up in the darkest folds of the precipices,
206 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

My Own Primula flaunts in full splendour of lavender-grey
heads and glistering cabbages of white-powdered emerald
foliage, often seeding down on to the cool silt of the chine-
floors, where the shade is heaviest, and is so always to be
seen, hugging the most umbrageous side of the most umbra
geous gullies and couloirs, down under all the Dolomitic
towers at this high elevation. :

Go-go ran up among the cliffs like a monkey, and from
unseen chinks and rill grooves in the upper precipices cast
down upon me glossy bales and chunks of the stately beauty
to be taken home and matured in the yard garden of Wolves-
den: while I myself adored it in the shade of the ghylls, and
looked reverently up to where I could see it sometimes
peering over from its lodging in the crevices.

Mafu, meanwhile, was gone ahead up higher to scout for
new treasures on the slopes of Kerauno. In course of time
Bill and I foregathered again from our respective precipices,
and began making towards the upper ones, already finding
Androsace mucronifolia in sheets as yet flowerless, over the
finer scree and silt-ripples of the slope, while the Pretty
Primula here ventured out, undaunted and triumphant,
on to the open alp. From this point I went up hand over
hand, in the fold of a cliff, seeing that a rill-gully would give
access to its summit, if I surmounted a lower bulge, and then
traversed above a bold bare bluff. Suddenly there was a
scuffle and a scuttering ; Mrs. Snowhen rose indignant from
her brood, and went shambling away, with such an extra-
ordinarily convincing pretence of being wounded and winged
and helpless, that I stood spellbound to see her running
unbelievably on her big pink feet across the blank frontage
of the precipice: and meanwhile the babies improved the
occasion by squatting so close that not my utmost efforts
could subsequently discover them, scanning that small slope
of bumpy barrenness yard by yard as I did: it was only
afterward from above that Bill was able to discover them
through his glasses, perking and prying for their mother
again, with little cheepings.
SUMMER WORK 207

Not for me the pathway of Mrs. Snowhen along the face of
precipices. By my appointed gully I grappled my way to
the clifi-top, and there found myself in a corrugation of
sere alpine moorlands, reminding me of happy days on
Colbricon, when the spring is barely born, and only Primula
glutinosa flares violet on the pale alpine turf. Here were a
succession of tip-tilted limestone ribs with gullies between,
where late snow still lay : all the alp was still dun-coloured,
and dead, and sodden flat with the recent departure of the
rest. No flowers, therefore, either showing or discernible :
but yellowed masses emerging from the darkness round the
fringe of melting snowdrifts. And, on the open fell, we came
upon a new Erysimum, sweet as the other, but downy, and
of a rosier pinkness, and standing up on sturdy stems of
three or four inches, so that its blushing tight heads were
grievously like those of some new Primula from afar. Ina
bay of the moorland it was prettily peppered : we mounted
steadily and far, over bulges and bluffs and bosses, to where,
high on the flank of the upper slopes, we were heartened to
see Mafu at work. But when we got there, it was only to
find the worthy man gone fast asleep. This was a dereliction
of duty that called for plain speaking : we administered it,
and then, as life was clearly non-existent up here, began all
descending again, by different directions, on our ways back
to the col, and the horses, and lunch. Deep into a gully
beneath a Dolomite cliff I myself diverged, and there found
such beautiful abundance of my Primula as drov> me almost
distracted, like Lydia Bennet. So that the ultimate disaster
befel me unperceived, and when, at last, after very long
weariful toilings round the fell, I came back to the crest of
the pass, it was to discover that my faithful trowel had
somewhere eluded my vigilance, and now lay lost, like a
Slaughtered Saint’s Bones, somewhere on these enormous
Alpine mountains cold.

This was a crushing blow. I havea cult for my collecting
trowels, and set my pride in never losing them. I had
brought four to China; two had been lost, indeed (for
208 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

shame !), in the first week at Siku, but these calamities had
braced me to such a constancy of caution that both the
remaining trowels had hitherto survived all the vicissitudes
of travel. And now it was by my own remissness that the
culminating crime had been committed. In itself this was
a culmination: if treasures ARE to be broken or lost or
spoiled, let this, at all events, happen through some one else,
as then one can at least save something out of the wreckage
by showing oneself magnanimous, and mitigating the
matter: whereas if oneself is alone responsible, the irre-
trievable disaster is complicated by an irretrievable loss of
self-respect. Even damns are too dim to illuminate the
darkness of one’s wrath when oneself is the object. So that
it was in a mood of penitential depression that at length I
found myself nearing the col.

Suddenly there was a crash overhead, a succession of
dull thuds—and a huge square black boulder like a grave-
stone came crashing and bounding down upon me from the
aréte overhead, in a series of widening kangaroo leaps that
gashed and tore the hard flank of the fell as if it had been
cheese. As I stood and pondered the matter, another
followed and another: clearly the promise of that solar
rainbow was being fulfilled, and my last day was upon me,
at the hands of the high angry Gods of these hills. But
really—people who lose trowels, what else can they either
deserve or expect ? In a philosophic pessimism I proceeded
across the danger stretch and the unctuous rich black gashes
in the flesh ofthe fell. No more evil, however, overtook me
till I came to the col. For now I found that Mafu’s jealous
domineeringness had refused to let the Wa-wa put the tea-
ping into my saddle-bag at starting. And so there were I,
and the aréte, and all of us, as irremediably dry as any
epitome of Herbert Spencer. Without my bottle of tea,
how were the crusts and the sausage to go down? Crossly I
chumped and choked: they wouldn’t and didn’t. Even
more than for the trowel I wailed for my tea-ping: while
Bill gave Mafu another rough side of his tongue for such a
SUMMER WORK 209

further instance of neglect, and Mafu went more and more
blank with rage at such a stripping of his “face ” before
Go-go and Ma.

However, this concatenation of calamities inspired me
with such a salutary vigour of rage, that, after assimilating
the unmoistened sausage, I plucked up heart to go back all
along those fells again, on a vague roving quest for the
trowel. It might be lying anywhere indeed on those moun-
tain-sides: but the sausage gradually suffused me with
inspiration as to one particular spot in the last of my Primula
gullies where it might very possibly be. However, when,
at long last, I got there, no sign of it could be seen, though all
around the silt was untidy with the ruddy scatteration it
had made of the rich fat earth. But, though I kicked and
sifted the debris up and down, I could find no trowel, and
was returning disconsolate and downcast, when there, sprawl-
ing loose at my feet upon the open moorland, far from any
plants on which it could have been employed, the steely
gleam of its blade caught my eye. It must have inexplicably
fallen fromt my pocket: which blunted the acutest edge of
my self-reproach. All the same, I beat myself with it
severely, to inculcate caution: and then returned, in a high
radiance of relief, round to the col again, to where Bill was
now photographing a large group of my Primula, looking
very made-up, and bedded-out, and artificial—as, indeed, it
always does, though (thanks to its habit of always growing
in colonies of nicely-disposed single crowns or clumps, instead
of in a confusion of masses and tufts all close together) quite
as much when wild in a stretch of scree, as when carefully
arranged to have its portrait taken.

After which the day’s toils and achievements were over.
We sent the horses down the pass, while Bill and I descended
the sheer steep of the mossy mountain-side, over slopes all
glorious with Globeflower and Imperial Primula, and
promising an equal glory of the Harebell Poppy later on.
It was a far drop to the beck-shingles of the Dolomite Valley :
I was glad to get down on to these, as the lower folds and

P
210 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

slopes of the descent were dense with small scrub of Poten-
tilla and Caragana, that whipped my bare knees unmercifully
till they were red and raw.

At the foot of the pass we rejoined our mounts and
uneventfully proceeded homeward, where Bill, perpending
the day, in connection with other recent happenings, grew
more and more perturbed over the deterioration of Mafu,
who was now sulking impenetrably, dour and hideous as a
bear, and actually refusing, on two occasions, to rise from
his seat on the kang when Bill went into the kitchen. This
was really too much: strong steps were urgently indicated.
I took them, on Bill’s appeal: ‘‘ Robed in the awful splen-
dour of my place, apparelled in. the Godhead that I am,”
the Lord High Keeper <-° the King’s Peace, Law-and-order
incarnate, rose up in person and stalked across the yard into
the smoky dark of the kitchen, where the staff sat accrowpt
in various corners of the kang, and there, in level tones,
standing stiff as a graven image, addressed Mafu in a few
well-chosen sentences, and then avoided, with majestic
rapidity, before any reply was possible. But this august
intervention had all its intended effect: by such a rebuke
from the supreme head, administered coram populo, Mafu’s
face was wholly skinned from him, and he went thence-
forward lowly as a lamb, with no more sulkings or neglects.

Days passed now, in minor expeditions, and achieving of
photographs. The Isopyrum, up in the ghyll of the right-
hand gorge above Casa Aoo, was in beauty almost unbe-
lievable, and after cat-and-mouse waitings through several
hours, at last gave us flashes of quiet for photography, with
all its lovely dodder-headed blossoms unanimously still for
the flicker of an eyelid. And then we judged it time to
adventure up on to the main Alps above, where summer must
surely be ripening, as every day the blobbed whiteness of
the Rhododendron climbed higher on the forest wall over-
head. In much jollity we set forth, very early of a filmy
grey morning, with all the staff in high spirits, recent rows
having quite cleared the air, and Mafu’s repentance being
SUMMER WORK 211

abundantly evident, not in words indeed, but in extra pro-
venances, and general docility.

Him we did not take, however, but our happy band
consisted of the two soldiers, the two Wa-wa’s, Lay-gor,
Go-go and Gomer. Up the long bays of Wolfstone Dene
the procession wound, till it came to the rib that descends
from the Omos massif at the turn of the vale, by the second
inn. Here we dismounted, and home went the horses.
First of all we had a steep high hummock to mount, where
the Butterfly Iris flickered blue in the barer places, but not
in the barest of all, at the top, where the barren climb was
like some steep of the Esterel. But then we struck the
aréte of the spur itself, and after that our toil was only
diversified delight. For this aréte is like a taut cord, strung
between the depths of the Dene and the vast heights above.
At a swinging swoop it mounts, over teeth, and bluffs, and
serrations and gendarmes. Some of them you climb;
others you circumvent, and across the face of others you
boldly clamber: all the way there is a faint hunters’ track
to guide you, and though the climb is unrelenting and
tremendous, yet it is so interesting at every yard, so full of
incident, that the toil of it is unfelt, and the heights you are
so quickly gaining pass unnoticed, unless on some upstanding
bluff you lie down to pant, among the voluminous thorny
branches of the pink Caragana, and see the Dene itself
dwindled to a mere groove beneath the flowing skirts of the
coppice below, and Wolvesden House a mere brown point
in its green lawns. We proceeded easily and delightfully
upward, over the craggy steeps and the easies in between :
till at last, before we dared hope it, we were actually at the
top of the rib, close under the snow-streaked enormous
Buttress that impends so impregnable over Wolvesden, and
on a level with the big snow gully on its right, that can barely
be discerned from below. But this is like a petty glacier,
filling the dip from which a beck descends under clifis out of
a dish of lawn which is the highland Alp. As soon as you
have arduously toiled up, through thin copse of Rhododen-
212 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

dron, along the flank of the Buttress, you find yourself in the
upper level, with the height of Crest Royal now fully revealed
ahead of you, far above the puny brow of the Buttress, out
on the left, with a huge insignificant spur sweeping round
from it to the right, from the yet higher masses that loom
over its beginning, to fold the upland vale deep in its
embrace.

Go-go and Gomer went straight ahead for Crest Royal,
up the cliffs of the Buttress by various directions. The rest
of us having breasted the Rhododendron slope, attained
the highland level and crossed its becks, through marshes
filled with a curious little Allium, with few large flower-bells
of pale yellow. Here we all had to have food, being so faint
with mountain sickness. The dish itself was large and
lovely and lush and greening; abundant with the lovable
pubent pink Erysimum, and with the, Harebell Poppy
already beginning to reveal its inimitable charm. But we
climbed now up to the right, to the ridge of the enclosing
spur; and thence along its grassy aréte, by successive steep
pulls drawing nearer and nearer to the final toil up to the
main massif, still bafflingly far overhead. At last we
attained the foot of the bulk that dominates the vale-head,
and began mounting finally, with many a stress of heart
pang and burdened breathing, and many a consequent
pause to ponder the incalculable huge splendour of the scene.
For now we were so high that the high Alps above Casa Aoo
were sunk to crumpled hills below one’s vision : over which
the eye ranged untrammelled across the world, to the red
violence of the naked peaks above the Gan-Chang pass, and
beyond even these again, to where, in the far North, huge
pyramids of everlasting snow impend over Old Da-Tung.
And in front of us now towered on a level with us, across a
gigantic chine of scree, sinking down through coppice into
the remote darkness of Wolfstone Dene, the whole bulk of
Omos, seen broadside on, cruel and vast (with its dank
Northerly precipices curtained in cushions of green wetness
and big masses that were found through the glasses to be my
 

IN THE DATUNG ALPS.
SUMMER WORK 213

Primula)—standing out tremendous in its unsupported
isolated magnificence above the depths below : and behind,
in the distance, the ridge of the pass, and the gable of
Kerauno away up it to the right.

In the cold intervening gulf snow lay, and snow was still
cold in dying drifts on the open shoulder as we laboured up
its increasing bareness, exploring the dank mossy precipices
on either side as we mounted, but without result. These
diversify the way, though : till the last pull lugs one’s leaden
legs up the nakedness of the open scree towards the bald
summit. It was all I could do to breathe now: the feat
became almost impossible to me, on perceiving at my knee a
new Primula. Alone it gleamed, one solitary spark of rosy
flame, on the dark desolation. No more could anywhere be
found, nor any other sign of life at all. But this apparition
forearmed me against the toils of the remaining fifty feet,
with hope of what we might see on emerging from the cold
sunless Northern fall of the ridge, over on to its warm
Southerly aspect. ‘‘ Despair of nothing that you would
attain, Unwearied diligence your point will gain.” Our
diligence was far, indeed, from being unwearied, but at length
it did attain its point, if such a name can be applied to the
round smooth dome, on the summit of which we ultimately
arrived, with other bare pyramids before us, and Crest Royal
sinking away to the left, emitting the unconsidered Buttress
from its flank: and in front, enfiladed, the line of Achthos
and Axeinos above a vast intervening sweep of Alpine lawn
down beneath our feet. It was a marvellous golden view,
straight into the heart of the Alps, with those dishes of lawn
higher and higher in their recesses, and a little ice-lake at the
top, and the jewel-green Marjelen See of the Clear Lake
refulgent among green embankments on their lower level.

For a while we wandered awe-stricken, up and down the
smooth shaly lifelessness of the summits—the Dome, the
Pyramid, and Pope’s Nose with its stark canine tooth stick-
ing up at the side. We got to the Western fall of the chain
above where the aréte, at the corner, tethers Omos, like a
214 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

young puppy, to the main mass from which we now dominate
him; and looked down and down, over unimaginable
desolatenesses of scree and cliff, to the green fells beneath,
and the greener valley at their feet, gently sinking towards
the Dene ; then returned to the livelier ridge of Crest Royal,
where awakening Alpine turf sinks sharp towards the univer-
sal green of the great basin. And in the topmost ripples,
under the rim of each tussock, the rosy little Primula was
alert and smiling in the sunshine of that favoured Crest, the
first corner of the high Alps to be kissed to life.

It was a most enrapturing sight, so wee, so brilliant, so
endearing ; but I had no hope of it as a new species, though
it made up the last of the five Primulas I knew we had a
right to find in the Da-Tung. P. Farreriana, and P. Wardii
from the Tien Tang rills, were bonuses of the high Gods : we
had already accounted for P. stenocalyx, P. tangutica, P.
gemmifera and P. urticefolia.

About P. gemmifera, indeed, a doubt still hung. All
over the range abounded the lovely pink-faced Welcome
Primula of 1914, to which Edinburgh had given the just
name of P. acclamata; but Pax and Knuth also recorded,
rather aridly, a P. gemmifera from these ranges, as being an
annual, as having large pale purple flowers, and as producing
bulbils. All this sounded very attractive: and might be
held an admirable description of P. gemmifera, except for the
trifling details that that perverse plant is not an annual, does
not have pale purple flowers, and has never emitted a bulbil
in her life. For when, in the course of my homeward jour-
ney, I ransacked the sheets of the Petrograd Herbarium to
corroborate my Primulas, what was my horror on finding that
P. gemmifera was nothing more nor less than my own
beloved acclamata, softly pink, perennial and devoid of
bulbils. But who could have recognized the truth under
such an ill-fitting cloak of erroneous description? And, at
the very same time, Edinburgh was also making the same
discovery: so P. acclamata dies out of the gardener’s
vocabulary for ever, and the Welcome Primula must appear
SUMMER WORK 215

to him henceforth in catalogues as P. gemmifera, though
certainly gemless, and as certainly a gem.

That same visit elucidated also the riddle of the Little
Queen of Crest Royal. For the fifth Primula recorded by
Pax and Knuth, under the very vague locality ‘‘ Kansu,”’ is
P. pumilio—a very small, tufted, weak little fairy of the
highest Alps, forming cushions of tiny flowers in many-
blossomed heads. Now “ Kansu” as a locality for any
Alpine plant does not mean Kansu at all; it means Tibet—
the big mountain chains up the border, which are not really
Chinese at all, often not even by claim. So that it was plain
that P. pumilio must belong (especially as it is a plant of
Przewalsky’s collecting) to the Alps of the Da-Tung. We
had long been anxious for it, long been wondering why we
did not find it, and the Little Queen on Crest Royal at first
satisfied our anxieties, and made us sigh with relief in having
duly worked off all the Przewalsky species, besides adding
two of our own. Until I looked closer. It was very odd:
there was no cushion, there were no heads of blossom, the
blossoms themselves not numerous and wee: on the con-
trary, they were big for the tiny plant, they were carried on
footstalks of an inch or two from a scape so close to the
ground that it looked as if each gay little round-faced gold-
eyed brightness were springing solitary on a thread fine stem
of its own, and, finally, the plant did not grow in cushions,
but in quite small tufts of two or three crowns at the most.
Nor did any other detail square with P. pumilio: on the
contrary, this plant came nearer to P. Wardii, squashed into
minuteness (and still nearer, had I known it, to a minified
P. tibetica). So that my heart soon bounded up again in
the prospect of another novelty. And a novelty it indeed
proved, though one already known in dried specimens from
far and wide up the borders of Tibet, but as yet unnamed.
For when my own specimens arrived at Edinburgh under
the provisional name of P. Reginella (not only in tribute to
its own regal but tiny charm, but also to give an arriére-
pensée of its inventor’s Christian name), they came just in
216 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

time to enable Prof. Balfour to determine the species from
them, and crystallize it accordingly under the name of P.
Reginella.

This was all very fine, though, but where, all this time,
was the redl P. Pumilio? We had got our novelty, but the
last of the Przewalskian species eluded our quest obstinately
and drove me to despair, as high top after high top failed to
reveal it. It was not till I reached the Petrograd Herbarium
that the mystery was solved. Primula Pumilio hails only
from the heights of Djakhar, an eighteen thousand foot
mountain away south of the Da-Tung, down in the Bad
Lands below Kweite, in the heart of the wildest Tibetan
tribes. More than that; another and an older friend is
mixed with it. Przewalsky’s sheets of P. Pumilio consist of
four square patches of the tiny specimens bedded out on the
page. The first is pure P. Pumilio, but the second contains
an admixture of P. Reginella, the third contains more, and
the last is pure P. Reginella, or very nearly. And this shows
what surprises yet remain for workers in Herbaria; where
such a confusion can be made between two species imme-
diately and obviously distinct, that a trained botanist will
diagnose one, and yet entirely ignore the other on the same
sheet.

These dissertations, however, date from ‘‘ the lonesome
latter years.” Come we back now to Crest Royal and its
twinkling Queen. For here, in such a scene, and in such
company, my heart danced as high, I think, as on any day
in all my Chinese travels—though it also danced louder and
more painfully. We sat in an ecstasy to nunch: then
gathered the Little Queen for her photograph, collecting her
in tuffets to be taken down and ripened in the yard. After
which Bill would be off down into the basin, and. across its
successive folds of green to the far-off emerald of the Clear
Lake: and I meanwhile explored the bluffs and slopes and
shingles of Crest Royal up and down, and then lay long and
rested, and grew chilly and crushed and paralysed by the
enormous magnificence of the mountains ahead. Crest
SUMMER WORK 217

Royal runs down, and down, in a long dying spur, banking
up the alpine levels from Wolfstone Dene, far below on the
other side. And the alpine basin itself, having collected all
its becks, fanwise from all its fells, at last centralizes into a
funnel that sinks abruptly and indefinitely beneath the
dying spurs of the ridge, towards the distant dark of a river-
gorge that cuts at right angles into the Dene, round the final
bluff of declining Crest Royal. It is all on a scale of bigness,
though, that words cannot convey : and on the far side of the
vague depths rises a new line of alps, only less high than
these, culminating indeed in the almost equal bulk of
Hypsélos, and then swinging round at the valley head to
connect with the back-quarters of the Thanatos Massif, in a
cirque of gaunt and naked precipices, with a bare wilderness
of uncharted masses behind.

But now, tiny specks on a far horizon, Go-go and Gomer
hove into sight on the profile of the Buttress, and by degrees
drew near, with bales of vegetation in their arms. However,
it all proved to be my Primula, with neither novelty nor
variety. So we played about still, among the pink-headed
Erysimums that densely dotted the slope, and found a white
one. And then Bill was seen returning ; when he reached
us he told a fine tale of how lovely the Clear Lake was, and
what a place for encampment lay hard by it; but he, too,
brought no news of any novelty. And now, instead of
returning over Crest Royal, the way we had come, he decided
to take Go-go and Lay-gor, and go off down the dip of the
alp into the dark of the valley beneath, and so round, and
into the Dene and up to Wolvesden : to spy out tracks and
directions, and judge the possibility of bringing the tents
up to the Clear Lake on mules. The rest of us, therefore,
dropped over the ridge, and sheer down the screes of its
northern face, slithering and skating in slides of shingle and
shale. It was a long way down into the dish of the alp;
and it was not till we were at the snow gully that my heart
began to feel relieved; and we were half-way down into
Wolfstone Dene before it was entirely easy. One of the
218 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

soldiers, indeed, had been completely prostrate with moun-
tain sickness all day, and was a pale, tottering wreck by the
time we got him home.

Long delays, however, and many other explorations inter-
vened before we were able to get up on to that alp. In the
meantime we managed to be rid of our two soldiers on polite
pleas that would not get them into trouble with M4-D4-ren ;
who, of course, would have flatly refused to believe the truth
of the matter, which was that we were unable to feed them.
Then Bill went down to Tien Tang, in search of an extra tent,
while the rest of us achieved various researches in the ranges
round about ; and, though he found that pious establishment
very empty, most of its inhabitants being busy tree-felling
for the Viceroy of Kansu, or gone away to the local Derby
and horse-fair now raging, he was yet quite successful in
his quest. And in others, too, for he brought back an almost
fantastically beautiful Atragenoid Clematis, with double-
looking cruciform flowers of a silky china blue, paling to
waxen whiteness at their heart, which he had found trailing
over little low bushes near the top of the wood in Tien Tang
Ghyll. And there was yet another treasure. On the Cliff
of the Holy Well, beneath the smile of the Buddha, the
influences of holiness had been so strong that the golden
Globe flower had gone, in two specimens, of a perfectly pure
white, rich and solid as cream or fresh ivory. Painted and
photographed and delicately nurtured in the garden, Trollius
pumilus Perfectissimi survived all these ordeals, and survived
its subsequent long journey home to England, and now
diffidently trembles back to life on the same bank of the
rock-garden that enshrines the Albino of the Butterfly Iris.

However, at last our pocket Dartmoor, Murdering
Uncle and Wicked Wa-wa and the rest, including even Dien
Tanguei, went off down the Dene and up the lateral valley,
to accomplish the necessary path-making through the coppice-
jungles below the alp; and on a day, summoned down by
Bill, I embarked for the high adventure. In gay spirits
I was off, though this was to be no permanent encampment
SUMMER WORK 219

but a mere preliminary flight of exploration. Down and
down the Dene we rode, disheartened by the floral emptiness
of the lovely lush-looking coppice-glades through which
we passed (so different now from what they were when
first we saw them): and then to the right, up mile after
mile of the most abominable bouldered river-bed, until
I was heartily sick of its bare stoniness. But at last on
my right hand I saw a little green knoll, with the beginnings
of a path leading up into the green gloom of a narrow
glen down which a grey torrent cameroaring. This was the
way up to the alp, and here Bill awaited me, almost despair-
ing by now of my arrival. So I alighted, and up the steep
gorge we proceeded through the woodland and coppice,
where a very fine raw new path was now making, to where,
in a most arcadian nook of green shade beneath a big rock,
with the beck brawling below, I found the tent established
and the staff encamped. We all rested, and the men
knocked off work and had tea; and this was the purposed
end of our day. But Bill started the notion that it might
be better to push on immediately to the alpine steading
up above, and spend the night there instead of here, so as
to start high next morning. And this so heartily chimed
with all my own wishes, that I pushed the plan forward
enthusiastically, till it was definitely decided. So back
we sent Dien Tanguei, in charge of two of the horses, and
ourselves reloading the other with necessaries for the
night struck camp and began moving upwards, with Go-go,
Wa-wa and Uncle in attendance, and Mafu left behind to
look after the tent.

Soon we arrived at the steep ascent to the upper alp.
I had heard terrifying tales of its length and steepness,
with the result that I took it quite lightly, and found it
not a tithe of the three main stretches up the Tombea.
The boys had made good going, too, with a neat zigzagging
ascent ; so that one stodged and panted unimpeded upwards
through the woodland, rank with Aconite in the open
glades, and its shady places occupied by a frail spidery
220 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

Saxifrage flopping flaccidly about with hairy-edged heart-
shaped foliage like a Parnassia’s. There was nothing else
to notice, though, as the valley sank down behind us.
And so the woodland tailed off, and round a shoulder we
came out on the open vastness of the fell, and saw the path
winding ahead of us in a level leisure round further bays,
belly-deep in a universal surf of Potentilla and sweet Lilac
Honeysuckle, over which, fat and fluffy, stood pompously
up the thick seed-stems of the Lampshade Poppy, and in
and out appeared also the lurid stars of the Tangutic Primula.

In the clear and solemn calm we strolled along, and round
the next shoulder. There, on its brow, was the Ma-Chang
—a deserted horse-steading, of which only the four-square
walls of the shelter still stood. It has never meant, of
course, to be roofed, except by a temporary tenting; now
it was made beautifully cosy for us with the Koko-Nor
Viceroy’s tent unfurled, and inside the forlorn bits of
boarding had been fitted up for beds. The Ma-Chang
is most beautifully situated, on the forehead of the alp,
amid dense scrub of Lonicera Syringantha and Potentilla :
from its open heights it overlooks the far depths at its
feet, and then, above, there are the vast peaks peering,
and wild crags, with dead pines profiled on the sky, impending
immediately over the top of the mountain wall to which
the Ma-Chang clings. On the right the funnel of the glen
dwindles up to where its streams cut down through the
rim of the alp that engirdles it so vastly ; opposite, across
the abysm, a slope of Rhododendron-jungle banks up and
up to where the realm of bare rock begins ; and across the
yet further depth of darkness on the left aspires the naked
hugeness of Hypsélos, and the complicated amphitheatre
of cliffs that closes the valley head.

In the low loose scrub of the white Rhododendron the
wild sheep have their tracks everywhere in the mossy
ripples of the voluminous slopes opposite. But on the side
of the Ma-Chang the fell is open, with patches of dense
lush pasture, thick as hay, and violently green, except
SUMMER WORK 221

for sky-blue drifts of a rather rank Omphalodes. We
descended the yak-dunged richness, to where the beck
furiously roars, but, though the scene was opulent everywhere
with flowers, there were no new ones. So we returned
up to the Ma-Chang, perched above- on its height; and
there lay revelling in the gigantic splendour of the view,
while far up overhead among the skeleton pines the silhou-
etted antlers of an inquisitive elk appeared, far-branched
and wide themselves as the wreck of a dead tree. It was
a real alpine situation, a real alpine view; for the first
time in my Chinese travels a well-known scene, cousin to
any one might see up the Val Savine, or beside the Lac
Clair, but incomparably larger and grander. With a
feeling of being at home once more, I sprawled at ease on
my springy cushions of Potentilla and Honeysuckle, con-
templating the vast loveliness of the world with that curious
proprietary feeling that such loveliness gives—as if one
somehow owned it, or were responsible for it, and had a right
to be proud of it. And yet, I suppose, a glory so great
that it floods and overwhelms one, and absorbs one wholly
into its possession, does also, by that very fact pass into one’s
own possession, too, becomes an inseparable part of one
forevermore. The mere fact of perceiving and assimilating
such things means that one is storing their glory up to render
again for others, even as the giant tree ferns who assimilated
the glow of the Coal Age, now render it out again in flame.
So that I, indeed, become the medium, the middleman,
the mere conduit, to pour forth upon all you who read, a
trickle or so, no matter how diluted and defiled and wasted,
of the torrential beauty that held me breathless and stupid
up on that Tibetan Ma-Chang that you will otherwise never
see.

And so, by degrees, the air darkened solemnly like deep
water, and a deeper stillness than ever seemed to fill the
world. The golden radiance faded upwards, as dusk came
swiftly climbing the opposite slopes; at length the last red
glow died off the crags of Hypsélos, and the Alps all stood
222 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

cold and grey and dead. in the cold dead clearness of the
alpine night. And a roaring fire was built beside the
Ma-Chang, clattering and streaming and swirling up into
the quiet air, to keep off wolves and bears and Powers of
Darkness. On the morrow the high Gods beamed on us
auspiciously in a cloudless dawn, with the Alps: sombre
and lifeless still against the pale sky. We were off about
four, leaving the tent and its plenishings to be disestablished
and carried back to Wolvesden ; up and up, along the right-
hand slope we continued from the Ma-Chang, round the
.countless bays and folds that descend from Crest Royal.
From the Ma-Chang it had looked a mere nothing, a quiet
stroll, just a hop, skip and jump, up to the alpine levels
at the glen head. But it proved a very far cry, and a very
long mighty toil; the vegetation was luxuriant, crowded
with seedspires of the Lampshade Poppy (but always and
only where low scrub filled some dip of the slope) and the
gross spikes of hideous Primula tangutica. And so, in
due course, we did leave below us the sudden downward
sink of the streams from the alp-level, and continued yet
higher, for some distance, before crossing leftwards over a
dip of runnels and marshes, to clamber up on to the alpine
lawns themselves.

And now, immediately, the beauty of the Harebell Poppy
began to break upon us. It was everywhere, flickering and
dancing in millions upon millions of pale purple butterflies,
as far as eye could see, over all the enormous slopes and
braes of the grass. The sun was now coming up, and its
earliest rays slanted upon the upland in shafts of gold-dust ;
in the young fresh light the whole alp was a glistering
jewel-work with dew in a powdered haze of diamond, with
the innumerable soft blue laughter of the Poppies rippling
universally above a floor of pale purple Alpine Asters,
interspersed with here and there the complacent pinkness
of the Welcome Primula. In the far-off memory of that
scene I have to rein myself in, for fear a flux of words should
ensue: but do not be embittered, ail you who incline to
SUMMER WORK 223

be jealous, scornful, or incredulous of lovelinesses you
have never shared (and possibly never could) if I tell you
coldly that even I, in those moments, was stricken dumb
and helpless by the sight of a glory surpassing, as I do
truly think, all that I have ever seen elsewhere. Stupid
with a blank delight, I wandered spellbound over those
unharvested lawns, agonizing with the effort to contain
without breaking the infinite flood of glory they were so
mercilessly pouring into so frail and finite a vessel. One
did not dare speak. It was indeed a pain almost like
the water-torture of Madame de Brinvillers. And at my
side walked Bill, silent as I. What was he thinking then ?
How was this sight striking home to him? But who can
ever know what even these dearest and nearest are doing
and enduring in the secret inmost rooms of the soul? We
continued together, voiceless and smitten.

And then at last he turned to me, and in the awe-stricken
whisper of one overwhelmed by a divine presence, he said :
** Doesn’t it make your very soul ache?” It was the right,
the absolute and final word. It did. It twisted one’s very
being, in the agony to absorb that sight wholly, to get
outside it, possess it, delay its passing, tear it away from
its native hills and keep it with one for ever—flesh of one’s
flesh, and brain of one’s brain. But beauty is so big and
enduring, and we so small and evanescent, that for us the
almost physical pain of trying to pack the incommensurable
inside the infinitesimal is, indeed, as if one should try
to decant the Yellow River into a thimble. Let us hope
that even a drop remains inside the poor little vessel round
which so titanic an overflow goes inevitably lost, roaring and
seething in a spate that would baffle any holding capacity.

Meconopsis quintuplinervia! Will anybody wonder that
even I, hating as I do the Wardour Street popular names
with which Ruskin tried to “‘ affubler ” such known beauties
as Saxifrage and Campanula, should now yield to the
same weakness, and try to give my beloved Tibetan Poppy
an English name to which she has no right at all? But I
224 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

hope it is only proleptically that I forge the name of Hare-
bell Poppy. I hope that the plant’s beauty and its charm
and its permanence will so ensure its popularity in gardens
as to make a popular name inevitable. And, that being
so, there will be “ Harebell Poppy” ready made. For
indeed, to cherish or even to purchase, a plant called
Meconopsis quintuplinervia is as impossible as to love a
woman called Georgiana: mitigating substitutes inevitably
have to be invented. So, as the ‘‘ Harebell Poppy,” may
my Tibetan treasure long enrich our gardens, luxuriant and
enduring in rich moist ground, and inimitably lovely in the
well-bred grace of its habit, as well as in the serene and
tranquil loveliness of its lavender bells. Some there are,
indeed, who misprise these, and find them insufficiently
“showy.” Alas, the prevailing fault of Meconopsis is not
modesty ; but it is in modesty that M. quintuplinervia,
alone of her kind, excels. Not for her the blatant crude
enormousness of M. integrifolia, the sinister and snaky
splendour of M. punicea, the hard clear glory of M. simplici-
folia : her fluttering butterflies aim at a more quiet charm,
that only the dull-eyed and deboshed in taste could dream of
calling dull.

So much for the gentle blue-purple of the Harebell as
she normally lives, and so deliriously abounds over that
highland lawn in the high heart of the Alps; but what
of her varieties? M. quintuplinervia, indeed, is a stable
species in her variable race, and not one in a million flowers
shows any difference. But in the very many millions that
possess the upper fells of the Da-Tung, varieties at last do
arise. Further on towards the Clear Lake there is a broad
triangular stretch of the moor, between two becks, on which
the Poppy shifts to rosy and amethystine tones; and,
very rarely, you come on forms in which the delicate loveliness
of the bells is of real azure blue, as it were muted and veiled
with a hinted reminiscence of their normal lavender so as
to have an opalescent effect of shot silk. And then, more
rarely still, there are albinoes and albinoids, almost unimagin-
SUMMER WORK 225

ably beautiful, like living drops of purity or incarnate snow-
flakes—exactly what the Snowdrop ought to be, and isn’t.
These, though, sickened at Siberia, and perished of Petro-
grad: I can only bring myself to tell of their tantalizing
vanished wonders, so that you may all see the point of
raising seed of the Harebell Poppy and going on raising
seed of her (hearty perennial though she be) on chance of
one day blooming a drop of mortal rainbow or a whiteness
pure as milk. And if, amid the cataclysms of anguish that
clamour round us everywhere nowadays,! you declare that
all this babble about beauty and flowers is a vain imper-
tinence, then I must tell you that you err, and that your
perspectives are false. Mortal dooms and dynasties are
brief things, but beauty is indestructible and eternal, if its
tabernacle be only in a petal that is shed to-morrow. Wars
and agonies are shadows only cast across the path of man:
each successive one seems the end of all things, but man
perpetually emerges and goes forward, lured always and
cheered and, inspired by the immortal beauty-thought
that finds form in all the hopes and enjoyments of his life.
Inter arma silent flores is no truth; on the contrary, amid
the crash of doom our sanity and survival more than ever
depend on the strength with which we can listen to the
still small voice that towers above the cannons, and cling
to the little quiet things of life, the things that come and
go yet are always there, the inextinguishable lamps of God
amid the disaster that man has made of his life.

This is no idle fantasy: little happinesses may look
little, and find no place in the plans of diplomats and
prophets; but they outlast the worst catastrophes and
survive the plans and the diplomats and the prophets and
all. Dead bones in their grave lie Mary and Elizabeth,
Queens ; and dead dust of death is all they did; but the
flowers they grew in their gardens still continue giving
comfort and delight perpetually, down through the
continuing generations, to whom the people of the past

1 This was written in June, 1918.
Q
226 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

are mere phantasmal fictions in books, diaphanous, desic-
cated as dried flowers themselves. All the wars of the
world, all the Cesars, have not the staying power of a Lily
in a cottage border: man creates the storms in his teacup,
and dies of them, but there remains a something standing
outside, a something impregnable, as far beyond reach of
man’s destructiveness as is man’s own self. The immor-
tality of marbles and of miseries is a vain, small thing
compared to the immortality of a flower that blooms and
is dead by dusk.

Therefore think no scorn to linger for a little while on
these far fells among the poppies. Slowly we mounted over
down after down, and over the vast dishes of marsh and
lawn into which the uplands drain. From Crest Royal the
basin had looked an undulating expanse: as soon as you
are in it, you find a complication of hills and ranges over-
whelming you on all sides. And everywhere the Poppy
flickered and danced, in multitude and beauty unbelievable,
above galaxies of fat-faced dwarf pale Asters, with Primula
gemmifera sturdy and pink, and Trollius already beginning
to fade rusty and blood-coloured, dark blots in the jewelled
tissue of those incomparable lawns. And in the flatter,
damper stretches the vivid emerald of the finer turf was
sheeted in a uniform flare of sunlight by a yellow Geum or
Sieversia (G. Purdomii), growing densely in drifts of half a
mile across, lovely in its feathered foliage, but concealing
this now from view beneath a profusion of flowers,
rayed out in crowds on weakly declining stems in such
abundance that though not gargantuan individually,
they turned that whole dish to a Field of the Cloth of
Gold.

Gently, dissolved in a constant kaleidoscope of ecstasies,
we sauntered here and there across the firm springy green, and
came at length to the further rise of moorland where the
pale Poppies live. It was still a high far tramp, up rise
after rise, before we came under a big fell-barrier diversified
by the protrusion of a red precipice, as it were a frontal
SUMMER WORK 227

bone that had worn through the epidermis of the alp.
This barrier upholds the Clear Lake; and as soon as we
had climbed to the higher level, by the gully at its top
end down which a beck drains, we found those virgin
waters glittering at our feet like liquid beryl, lapping
against the white gritty marge. The Clear Lake proves
to be a bean-shaped sheet of water, flawless and serene,
about three-quarters of a mile long, set like a jewel in the
brown-green lawns, close beneath streaming red screes of
desolation, that along the far shore descend upon it from
an are of naked pinnacles and precipices, culminating
overhead in a noble pyramid, so gashed with rust-coloured
outcrops from the grey that it could have no other name
than Croda Rossa.

It is curious to see how the Clear Lake is banked up
there, and held, almost artificially, by the long rampart
of moor that it seems to have pushed forward, while at
its top end the steep enormousness of the rise towards the
feet of Axeinos is a wild chaos of black boulders as big as
houses, loosely compiled, that yet, in the unseizable scale
of the scene, seem a mere peppering of pebbles like hundreds
and thousands. Indeed, the valley-head, narrowing upwards
to its dreary source between the lifeless precipices of Thanatos
and the lifeless screes of Axeinos, does suggest glacier-action
in a very remote past, if ever a glacier so small as this can
have been possible. The embankment of the Clear Lake
has all the look of being a terminal moraine thrust out
over the alp as the advance bar of a glacier : higher up there
is a similar but smaller bar, banking up a similar but smaller
water, while higher yet amid the dank desolation of scree
and boulder at the feet of Thanatos, there is a last faint
hollow, and a final puddle, slinking shamefast among the
blocks, and so feeble that it can hardly make up its mind
whether to be slough or marsh or pond.

To the attack of the second upland we now advanced,
across a flat delta of grit and scree that brings down the
streams of the boulder-hill into the top end of the Lake.
228 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

This wonderful bare stretch promised flowers in such variety
and abundance that I thought of it forthwith as the Jardin.
But now we were come to the far side, and were mounting
very slowly in pangs of overburdened respiration up the
steep wall of fell beyond. At the foot of it, in the marshes
that close the Jardin, the Little Queen flamed rosy along
tussocks as yet hardly beginning to awake; but now we
were at such a height, and so immediately in the shadow of
the great peaks, that there was no life yet, and the rippled
side of the fell was alternately pale with drab deadness
or dark with snow-pressed moss. And over the rim we
came upon the Lac Savine, a very shallow, very vivid little
sheet of water, spread-eagled among the moorland dunes
between the tightening grip of the Alps. Here the marshes
were already emerald, but there was no touch of flower-
life yet, except the Little Queen, bejewelling the lines
of cleavage along the boulders across the pool. Round
that side we clambered, and then began mounting again,
up a new high breast to the actual valley-head, which
coils to the right, round the bulk of Axeinos, to the aréte
that links Axeinos to Thanatos.

All this is the very abomination of desolation. From the
Lac Savine upwards, you are in the very jaws of those
terrific dead mountains, biting on you tighter and tighter
like a rat-trap at every step. Below, in the chaos, lies the
Puddle, and after that the upper course of the climb is
nothing but a wild and lifeless wilderness of stone, dominated
awfully by the Northern precipices of Thanatos, more wholly
dead and cold, in a cold dead greyness, than any other
mountain I have ever met. This chill glen, between its
enclosing walls, is a grisly place: its mountains might be
refrigerated skeletons in the moon; they have a lunar
ghastliness of complete extinction, a glaring staring life
lessness that seems to have an almost phosphorescent
pallor. Thanatos was still crusted, indeed, with crests
and ledges and gullies of snow: but not even when sun
and summer sweep these away, can those fearful cold faces,
SUMMER WORK 229

that ugly undignified chaos of crags and cliffs, ever be
warmed and kindled to the faintest cheerfulness.

Barren Axeinos is not quite so irremediably grim, fronting
the sunlight as it does, across the glen-head, opposite
Thanatos. Indeed we were now above the glen, and
mounting, more slowly and agonizedly than ever, the
skirts of Axeinos himself, slanting across them steeply
upwards towards the precipices of the aréte overhead.
Here we were in the sunshine again contemplating the
mortal cold of Thanatos across the depths; and here the
Harebell Poppy, accordingly, was beginning to ring her
chimes. And here, as hand over hand, yard by yard, I
grappled-my way upwards, I came on one as white and
clean and clear as the soul of St. John, a thing so beautiful
as to give yet anew turn to the wheel of the day’s delights.
One tuft of a pure Albino we already had in the garden,
though: so from this one, in reverent appreciation, I
withheld the trowel, and left her swinging out her perfect
snowy bells unperturbed. And there I like to think of her
still thriving through the years, and, still unperturbed,
shaking out her snowy bells across all the din of the world,
in a delicate and remote derision.

High overhead still hung the cliffs and naked earthpans
andscrees of the obvious col connecting Axeinosand Thanatos
by its shallow dip. The way was very long and steep, and
the scale of the scene so huge that one never seemed really
to be any higher, not even after the most heart-breaking
bursts of upward effort. And there were no new flowers ;
all down the slope, even into the mossy turf below, ran
carpets of Androsace mucronifolia, and among the stones
of the bare scree shone the humped white and azure heads
of Corydalis melanochlora, sitting close on the fat sea-blue
ferniness of their foliage. But there was nothing new.
And soon there was nothing more at all in the lifeless crags
and slopes ascending to the neck itself. Up the crags and
along their ledges, and up in the jaws of the narrow gullies
between them, we made our way, beneath bare cliffs
230 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

descending on us from the peak of Axeinos, now immediately
above. And so, at length, attained the despaired-of crest,
and looked over—out above the moorlands tumbling
indistinguishably “like mastiff pups at play” across the
deeps below—to where, along the distance, in a dark
high barrier, towered the wall of Wolvesden Pass, with
Kelaino at its nearer end and Kerauno remote at the
other.

And in the sunlight of the col the Little Queen was
very pink and gay and charming along the mossy cracks ;
but otherwise, after such toils, we were dulled by the
complete (though characteristic) dull lifelessness of these
high primary rocks. However, below at our feet lay the
third of the big highland dishes to which we had so aspired
from afar, on the pass, in sure hope that those three pale
laps that lie between the respective knees of Omos and
Achthos, Achthos and Axeinos, Axeinos and Thanatos,
would certainly yield a sumptuous harvest.

So now we started forth again, questing along the enormous
Western face of Axeinos himself, which is a bewildering world
of steep little slopes of lawn and scree, interspersed among
a grey chaos of crags and spars and boulders, upheld by
successive tiers of naked cliff, away and away downwards
to the alpine lawns below. It was heart-breakingly huge
and dreadful : by degrees we worked downward, scrambling
and dropping in the empty gully of one of the many evan-
escent torrent-falls that have scored this front of Axeinos
all along in a succession of vertical wrinkles. Or so they
look from the pass; but when you are in them, they turn
to wild chines of gloom, lifeless, except for my own brave
Primula, sprouting opulently in the tightest crannies of the
darkest dankest faces of the cliff. Indeed, it is remarkable
with what rigidity the plant selects only such nooks and
niches as are rarely if ever visited by sunlight. And in
that titanic Baalbek of naked ruin, its fat splendour, its
sumptuous lavender-grey bunches, have a more than ever
unbelievable and artificial look, as if somebody had gone by
SUMMER WORK 231

just ahead of one, and poked pale purple Polyanthuses into
all the sunless crevices for a joke.

So gradually we got down beneath the bastion precipices
at the base of the summit mass, and the torrent-course,
now languidly alive with a little water, lodged in pools
and dribbling down the gulches, brought us round at the
foot of a huge cliff, on whose face shone here and there a
spark of purple that for an agonizing instant we thought
might prove a new Poppy. But through the glasses it
turned out to be no more than dull mauve variations of
Meconopsis Prattii. So, disillusioned, we turned away
and descended into the dish of our last hopes. And the
dish held nothing—nothing but a wide shallow wetness of
very coarse tussocks, drab and pale as parchment sitill,
illuminated only at intervals by such re-hashed cabbage
as the Trollius, the Erysimum, and Primula Woodwardii.
And even these were so rare as to leave that disheartening
saucer virtually empty. Stale and leaden we dropped at
last over its lower rim, and began descending the vast
and bulging slopes of the lower fells that descend in merciless
enormousness, towards the depths of the valley, mapped
out clear and green far beneath our feet, with the horses,
like fleas in a fold of baize, awaiting us, much too remote,
away down its course.

Never were there such slopes as these of the Da-Tung
Alps. In our own, the upper fells descend upon lower
ones, and so to the valleys; even in the ranges of Jo-ni
and Satanee, the alps decline by folds and ridges and long
convolutions. But here, from the base of the peaks, they
soar away down in an unbroken sweep to the glens below,
and there is no describing their weariful hugeness except
by saying that they do indeed seem to bulge. From beneath
they swell up over your head, and you cannot see their top :
from the top they swell away below you, and you cannot
see their bottom. Blanked by disappointment as I was,
my knees felt very old and tired, and I could go but slowly
down the stair-steep interminableness of the descent.
232 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

Even the soil here seemed coarse and common, and the
mountain-side had mange. All decent alps—even in the
Da-Tung—are densely clothed in turf, but the Western
slopes under Axeinos and Thanatos have only a scant
scab of grass, through which the crude plebeian soil every-
where appears, nourishing even the Celestial Poppy
grudgingly.

For Meconopsis Prattii alters its habit in the Da-Tung
Alps. In the Min S’an and the Satanee ranges it had
always and only been a plant of the precipices and topmost
shingles—whether you get the short-pedicelled form,
like a stocky mace of azure, or the long-pedicelled one,
strict and élancé, it is always either in the cliff or in the
scree, never out on the open grass of the alps. But in the
Da-Tung the plant strikes a compromise in every way.
It is neither quite a mace, here, nor quite a spire—tending
more to the latter development, perhaps, but laxer in
spike, and looser altogether in habit than any prevalent
form of 1914. And not only does it haunt the cliffs and
high shingles everywhere, but also, in the Da-Tung chain,
it ventures down into the grass of the alps, and wherever
this is not too dense and coarse to be suitable, universally
bejewels the high slopes with its floppy array of blossoms,
rather larger, to my fancy, and of a rather brighter blue,
than most that I remembered in the Min S’an. But still
the same species.

Here skip, Aunt Agnes: I am having an aside with such
experts as are ambitious to perpend upon Poppies. In
particular the Horrid Group of Meconopsis is especially
entangled, confused, and difficult to decipher. All its
members have bristles, all are monocarpous, and all have
flowers in varying tones of blue and azure. The Indian
species may here be left out of account, but the Tibetan
ranges up the Border give us M. Prattii, M. racemosa,
M. rudis, M. horridula—and the disappointing M. eximia
—all differentiable, but not always easy to differentiate.
Yet, after much experience in the field during 1914 and
SUMMER WORK 233

1915, with many hundreds and thousands of specimens, I
remain convinced that the Horridulous Blue Poppy of
the Min S’an and the Da-Tung is always the same species,
M. Prattii, with the unvarying ash-grey anthers.1 But
in almost every other respect—shape of leaf, shape of
pod, length of style, the species appears to me to fluctuate
despairingly, and I grow more and more struck by the
temerity with which Herbarium botanists build up a species
on half a dozen dried specimens on a sheet, whereas in many
a detail the species would give them the lie, if they could
see it by the thousand blossoming on the hill-side. In
point of fact, a specific difference is merely the least common
denominator in a vast generalization of individuals, all of
whom vary this way and that to their own sweet will,
but all of whom possess the one or two quite unvarying
details that by their universality and invariability constitute
a species.

And, to arrive at these bedrock differences, it is really
imperative to see the plant not only living, and wild, but
abundant. It is only on a vast number of living individuals
that you can satisfactorily establish a general formula
for a “species,” since only a vast number can yield you
its one common factor, by giving full perception of the
plant’s range of variation, so that you can arrive at the one
point (or more) in which it never varies at all. Thus,
Meconopsis Prattii (my beloved Celestial Poppy) may,
in my experience of it, have flowers of every shade from
pure white through all tones of azure, mauve and lilac,
to clean pink; it may have quite narrow foliage, or foliage
so broad as to seem, in the second-year seedlings, almost
round; the leaves may be quite entire or faintly waved
at their edge; and the footstalks can be either quite short
or strict and long; it may have the widest diversities in
the shape of its pods and in the length of its styles. But
it never varies in the smallest degree from the ashen-

1I ought to say that Professor Balfour sometimes hovers on
the verge of wanting to separate them.
234 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

cream colour of its anthers. And thus, out of an incal-
culable multitude of diverse individuals on the moun-
tains, I generalize a definite species—Meconopsis Prattii,
with ashen-cream-coloured anthers; and, if I came on a
specimen with golden or orange ones, should attribute it
at once to M. racemosa; or if other indications pointed,
realize a new species.

But I never have, and in M. Prattii I never, assuredly,
shall. At the same time, in gardens I often have to clutch
my faith in those anthers like a sheet-anchor in stormy
seas: when I am shown two or three Horridulous Blue
Poppies, apparently all as diverse as chalk from cheese,
yet all grey-anthered, and all bearing the name. of M.
Prattii, and every one of them children or grandchildren
from my own collected seed. And then I appreciate the
enormous advantage of having known a species in the field,
living, and in bulk, instead of only in a herbarium, dead,
and in a few specimens: for, while my own eyes, and my
host’s tongue, are both loudly saying, ‘‘ Those two poppies
can’t possibly, both of them, be M. Prattii,’’ my brain is
busily remembering the high lawns and shingles of the
Da-Tung, the topmost screes and precipices of the Min
S’an, with their many myriads of Celestial Poppies, indivi-
dually so diverse as to embrace, in their vast definition, not
only both the variations before me (on each of which,
separately, you might base a new species quite plausibly),
but many others yet wider and extremer, connected by a
thousand gradations, yet all gathered into the one fold
by their unvarying monopoly of ashen-cream-coloured
(“ gilvous ”’ is the learned word) anthers. (For when other
poppies have gilvous anthers, they have other definite
specific marks that differentiate them from M. Prattii.)
So variable and yet so constant is the species. Cultivation
may also encourage diversity, as may, too, the difference
between living on the high limestones of the Min S’an,
and on the azoic summits of the Da-Tung. But it is all
M. Prattii—until you come on, or breed, a specimen identical
SUMMER WORK 235

with the rest, except in having differently coloured
anthers.

Cease to skip, Aunt Agnes: I resume my descent of that
endless, endless bank, never seeming to get any nearer to
the microscopic stream-bed beneath. The horses were still
painfully far away, too, infinitesimal down the valley ; Bill
cut across the fell to fetch them, while I continued stolidly
stamping my way down the earthy wall of the mountain,
now dappled and quite gay with the azures of the Poppy,
and the comfortable pink of the Welcome Primula. And
overhead Axeinos and Thanatos had now shot up so sheer
and far and high that it seemed incredible that we could
ever have scaled such altitudes ; and almost equally incredible
that we could have come down from them. No wavings
could attract or awake Dien Tanguei, asleep at his post
by the ponies; Wa-wa and I got down at last into the
valley, and tramped along its trough, traversing two
deserted Ma-Changs with crumbling precincts of stone-
walling and dungy tracts of pasture round them, sodden
and pale, but beginning to spring into rich green. It was
like a suggestion of the Granges Savines in its savage
abandonment, and rich harvest of nettles and cow-pats to
tell of human activities. But lower down, the reaches of
the glen were come to life; and now appeared Tanguei,
galloping up on the brown pony, which I then mounted,
and so jogged on to join the rest. On a grassy lawn I
found Bill pleasantly resting; hopped off, and hoped to
rest there also. But now, for the first and only time of my
experience anywhere in the Tibetan border-alps, we were
so pestered with horse-flies as to be driven headlong forward
in flight like Io. And the poor horses were so tired with
three tremendous stony days that they could hardly put one
foot before the other, and drearily stumbled at the boulders
in their path. By marshy green flats aglow with Primula
Wardii we slowly descended to the junction where this
valley flows into Wolfstone Dene over that wide tract of
shingle about half a mile above the first inn and the beginning
236 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

of the gorges; and thence, more slowly still, down them
and back to Wolvesden, serene in the achievement of so
big an expedition accomplished, and so large a tract of the
Alps explored, but both of us quite flattened out with the
leaden lack of result.

And I hate getting in from the mountains while light still
lingers over the depths of the valley : the rest of the day is
such a lagging bathos, in which one can settle to nothing.
Nor, now that I had got home, did I feel so very tired.
For these huge Tibetan days, in fact, neither in hours nor
in labour, equal those of the Torsoleto and the Tombéa,
for example; and though one climbs at double the height,
and with heart-fettered slowness (I had felt the altitudes
less that day, and worst at the Clear Lake), all this is
compensated by having everything carried for you, as
Chinese etiquette commands. So I pottered emptily
enough over the golden lawns of Globeflower, where Pylzow’s
Geranium was now sprawling through the grass, with its
thread-fine stems and large lovely flowers of clear pink—
the same species, it now proves, from the Petrograd Her-
barium, as the pink Geranium I had got in the Ardjeri
Alps the year before, leaving the high alpine treasure
(Fzoi) to stand, after all, as a separate new species; both
of them, in different ways though, precious adornments
of the garden, the one scrambling and spreading and brilliant,
the other concise, high-alpine, and delicately lovely.

None the less it was sadly that I digested our disappoint-
ment over this granitic range, of which the Russians had
left such misleadingly rosy accounts. A sense of failure
pressed me down like a lid; there was no longer any good
denying it. The summer was fleeting by, and the ranges
had been duly visited, without revealing any novelty or
variety of flora: nothing to rival the rich lovelinesses that
await one at every turn of the track above Li-kiang, or
Sung-pan, or Tali-fu—nothing even to compare with the
high flanks of Thundercrown, and the uncharted alpine
wildernesses of the Stone Mountains. I had always had
SUMMER WORK 237

a fear that we were too far North; and that fear had been
intensified when first I saw the pyramids of the Da-Tung
chain and realized that they were non-calcareous. And by
this time I had to face the facts of the case, and the poor
dull harvest that was all I bade fair to gather for appetent
friends at home. The mischance of the latitude, the
altitude, the geology, all seemed to be my own fault;
and now there only remained the dolomite precipices opposite
Kerauno and the Pass. Limestone alone (as usual) had
yielded us the few chief treasures of the year: its main
outcrop might surely yield us more? So I went in, and
Bill and I spent the evening philosophizing over our failure ;
hoping even yet to retrieve it by wild diversions, we agreed
to recognize that here we had drawn blank. But here,
meanwhile, I was to remain for the seed-harvest, to go round
the district and collect all that was worth having (for
not even in extremity could I bring myself to violate my
own standards and promises by fattening out my seed-list
with worthlessnesses of ugly bramble and briar), while
Bill, with Mafu, sped off to the Koko-nor and the Kweete-
Salar Alps to see if he could not save the situation even
yet, with some new Poppy or Primula. But first we would
explore the Dolomite Valley, go up into camp for a time
beside the Clear Lake, and also do the highest of the high
peaks above Casa Aoo.
CHAPTER XII
THE HASTENED END

When the day came there was packing and preparation
in the lovely morning, and off we all set, up Southerly valley,
and up its right-hand confluent below the Casa. In the
ghyll my Isopyrum hung in waving masses of loveliness,
but:we could not linger in this most perfect of Nature’s rock-
gardens, and pushed on high and higher, till we came to the
upmost steading in the gully. My little green chrysalis of
a tent was then pitched on the brow of the fell, while across
the beck the rest encamped in the yak-dung lean-to’s, sadly
disturbing Mrs. Bird,1 who had hitherto had it all to herself
for her nursery. We then ambrosially lunehed off bread
and milk and apricots, and spent the rest of the day explor-
ing the vast slopes above that look so trifling. But we
found nothing new, except the true Lloydia tibetica (which
is a dull and ugly gawk), and a very pretty little yellow
Cremanthodium like a golden Dahlia, with pendent head on
a four-inch stem, which haunted dank shady ledges of the
wetter cliffs and shingles up above, in the gully of the torrent,
where Isopyrum was also bewilderingly magnificent, and
the Poppies, Harebell and Celestial. So at dusk we came
down again into the dark of the ghyll, filled by now with
blue swirls of smoke from the camp-fire—and in due course,
feeling rather “einsam” and depressed, I retired to my
splendid isolation across the beck.

I woke very early, and felt yet more depressed. No sign
of life appeared in the lean-to down below; I lay empty
and wretched in the cold shadow, awaiting developments.

1 Not Mrs. James Bird, who was née Partridge.
238
‘IMGNAV AY WAYAdOST

 

veep pp kg yg: pO DUO T

 
THE HASTENED END 239

And then, when the sun did come round over the hills, he
came over so very high an edge as made it evident he must
be well up on his journey. Clearly I must call the men, or
they would snore on till Doomsday. And now there was
much bustling for breakfast, and the four little bobtailed
baby birds in their nest woke up and cheeped, while their
mother, on a log outside, reassured me by chirruping cheer-
fully back at them. And the sun, in two minutes, flooded
out the cold blue darkness of the glen with light and warmth.
Off we set, up the alp at the back, so steep as to seem posi-
tively heaving over at us, and as high as Heaven. It was,
however, quite as monotonous: at first of grass, and then
of bare earthpans sliding down in long fat breasts from the
cliffs above ; and all of it occupied with nothing but our
old friends, except for a violet Delphinium still in bud, that
evidently meant to be D. Pylzowi.

Finally, working along upwards to the right, we attained
at last to the col, on which a fresh snow cornice still lay;
the cliffs on its far side were still dark in winter, with
soggy curtains of moss and straggling Rhododendrons. We
lay here awhile, contemplating the vast noble view over the
Gan-Chang pass; then strolled along the moist, fine silt of
the aréte to attack the final climb up slithery shingle-slides
that mounted with fierce steepness up and up, in a desolate
barrenness as naked as truth, towards the culminating mass
overhead, which seemed to wear a ridge or coif of grass, such
as surely, at so great a height, must yield a treasure or two.
Up we moiled, panting ; all I found on the way was a strange
Lousewort among the stones, with dark claret-crimson
flowers, and the whole plant enveloped in a crystalline fluff
of wool that glistered thickly like spun glass. But nothing
else. And when we achieved that high grassy crown there
was nothing else there also; and nothing more on the
highest rocky peak above, in which the mass culminates ;
and nothing more on the secondary peak below that domi-
nates the Dene. Slowly we ascended to it, along that aréte
of coarse turf, and vindinctively named that nasty mountain
240 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

Mother Hubbard. Here we rested: the scene was very
grand and lovely, fronting on to Crest Royal and the Alps;
but I was sick at heart with so many days of failure and so
monotonous a flora, with no distinction between alpine and
high-alpine zones, and the very valleys not low enough for
even their typical treasures. And poor Bill, I could see,
was as sick as I was, if not worse: each of us was “ bright ”
for the other’s benefit, and a more dreadful thing could
hardly be. So, in the end, we dropped down the inter-
minable fall of coarse scree beneath us, until it tailed off
into equally endless slopes of coarse barren grass. And at
length, through a peppering of dead or sickly firs, we reached
the coppice, and came straight upon the Isopyrum gully,
and so home; the staff, meanwhile, collecting the camp,
according to instructions. All that night I lay feverish
and wakeful, haunted by visions of the various lovely new
Primulas that might so easily have been there, upon those
ridges: only that they weren’t!

Weather now imprisoned us, though as yet I saw no signs
of the six weeks’ unceasing rain which had been held out
to me as so charming a feature of the season here. All that
happened was constant broodings and violent storms: the
afternoon would often bring a furious deluge, and end at
dusk in lovely pictures of broken clouds above the sundown,
flooding the valley with brassy light, while all the darkened
hills and their folds were filled with fleecy white rolls of the
unravelled storm. In the twilight the Dene is a mysterious
place, and its darkness seems something private, peculiar to
itself. One evening I strolled down beside the beck, lonely
in the silence. And suddenly I seemed to hear a pistol-shot,
followed by a vast dim chorus of wailing voices that came
flooding up the valley on a cold violent blast. But this
was after the expedition up to Dolomite Valley, by which
time “ fiddle-strings was weakness to expredge my nerves,”
—and I might easily have heard anything, except comfort .
or reason. More especially as Bill had just told me that
Gomer was now to be clawed away from us by his old
THE HASTENED END 241

grannies away in Na-Lang, imperiously summoning him
home to take a wife, so that they might thus have a general
servant to support their declining days.

Altogether, gloom brooded. Indeed, the Rainbow Bridge
has long since reached its bourn; we have long been roaming
at ease on the far golden shore, and found it barren ; now,
upon a bridge of sighs we must embark upon a return
journey across the abysm of tears towards the desolated
shell-holes and slag-heaps of the present days. Yet do not
be misled if I seem to grizzle and peeve as I return. For
there is laughter in every sigh and complaint, and a twinkle
of not unkindly derision that any such should be emitted.
In fact, for the fun of the thing, I exaggerate my attitude,
to make you the better share that fun. My glooms, then,
are all part of it; and, indeed, what perfect fun the whole
adventure is, in retrospect, with even its disappointment,
and flatnesses blended by distance into the rainbow radiance
of the irrecoverably remote. And laughter is the salt of
life, assimilating its bitter savours and its sweet ones alike
into one digestible meal; and the mere exaggeration of a
dark mood provokes its dissipation into a burst of mockery.
But those who stand outside, though sharing the laughter,
are sometimes apt to overlook the exaggeration that bred
it, and to take the grumblings as much more serious and
heartfelt than they are. And therefore I must warn you
that much of what is to follow will be ‘“ only Coleridge’s
fun.”

Meanwhile, a detachment of the boys were gone down the
valley and up towards the Ma-Chang, to prepare for our
expedition to camp beside the Clear Lake ; and we ourselves,
on a fine morning very early, made off up the Dene with
the tents for a sojourn in Dolomite Valley, our last hope,
From the pass, long since, we had marked an abandoned
Ma-Chang lying in one of the gullies that cut down from the
cliffs; and this was our objective. But when we attained
the open alpine bosom of Dolomite Valley, we considerably
overshot our mark. For the walls of precipices tower indeed

R
242 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

enormous in their incredible, untidy crumples ; but enormous
lies in front of them their foothill of fell, through which the
ghylls come cutting a deep and narrow way, giving succes-
sive visions of a widening bay behind, and a big blank front
of precipice. But these V-shaped revelations are like each
other as pea to pea; and it was only after several false tries
that we penetrated up into the right gulch, and there, at
the foot of the rocks, above where two rills converge from
the huge faces overhead, we found the Ma-Chang lurking
among nettles and big white boulders, a ruinous little square
of crumbled walls.

But it was a delectable spot none the less, and, from the
cliffs of the little chine below, my Isopyrum flaunted in
delicate sheaves; while up above the eye soon got lost in
bulge over smooth bulge of topless white precipices, in a
bewildering compilation of cliff and grottoes and grooves,
and narrow gullies down which, occasionally, there came a
dark smear of wetness, or a swaying string of illuminated
diamond sparks from far up above. So here we unfolded ;
and in a little while began exploring the combes and scarps
near by. But their slopes and crannies and overhung caves
produced only our old friends; away and away upwards
over the face of the impending enormousness, so overpower-
ing as hardly to be believable, there flickered occasional
specks of mauve and blue; but even these, through the
glasses, were seen on the lower reaches to be merely the
Celestial Poppy, and so were no doubt still the same on the
higher. Towards the topmost ridges, therefore, we must
now remove our hopes.

In due course we separated, Bill attempting a way straight
up the wall, clambering amid the smooth shelves and
slabs and cafions, in hope that by successive traverses and
scrambles he might at last be led to the top; while I, up
the smooth waterworn little ghyll immediately behind, where
a trickle from the cliff slumbered or gurgled among the
boulders, made upward towards the same goal, over the
opener frontage of enormous earth-pans varied with bluffs
THE HASTENED END 243

of precipice, that faded higher up into scree, and higher yet
into grass. It was a curious scene, like none I have known
elsewhere—completely bald and naked mountain-side of
unctuous ruddy soil, stiff like shaly clay, and on a giant
scale, swelling away below to remote cliffs and depths, and
swelling away above to remote cliffs and heights. And all
quite empty, except for abundance of the welcome Primula,
which particularly loves these bare places. Gradually I
attained the first sprinklings of grass, and then the steep
ripplings of unbroken lawn. But all the way I saw nothing
of interest anywhere, except a big mountain sheep up ahead
of me, seeming darker-bellied and shaggier than those of
Tien-Tang ; and, from the ridge itself, a glorious storm going
down in a dense darkness over Wolvesden, with an almost
continuous drone of thunder hoarsely rattling.

Very cold blew the wind along the topmost, aréte. And
very cold was my mood, as I roamed its sharp dells of turf
and examined its dorsal fins of rock, only to find nothing
new whatever ; far along I roamed, and up and down, and
nowhere came on any better luck, though rocks and turf
alike were all, of course, moderately gay with the usual
flowers. Only a minute high-alpine violet, with a freaked
little peevish face, rewarded my search. And at last it was
evident that there was no more to be hoped for on the lawns
and wild screes that engirdle Dolomite Valley; all I could
now do, as I dispiritedly slithered down the stairways of
the shingle, was to buoy myself up on the notion that Bill
would now be returning from the cliffs with at least four
glorious new Primulas and half as many new Poppies. But
I cannot say the buoy was very solid : I felt rather as if I
were clinging for security in stormy seas to the unsafe
iridescence of a soap-bubble. And when at length I fore-
gathered once more with Bill at the Ma-Chang, it was to
find that he, on his part, had been consoling himself with
similar hopes about me. He, too, had found nothing.

All was over. The visions of romance were as effectively
dispelled as Emma’s. In a frozen gloom we faced failure ;
244 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

in extremity reversed all former schemes, and took Napo-
leonic new decisions. There should be no high-alpine camp-
ing yet, and Bill should go off immediately on his tour to
the Koko-nor, while I collected the harvest of the Da-Tung ;
and then, when he returned, we were to bolt off immedi-
ately, down across the whole depth of China, to where the
Da-Ba-S’an ranges intervene between Kansu, Shensi and
Szechwam. The Da-Ba-S’an ranges, we knew, did not run
very high—only to some 8,000 ft. or so, which is as nothing,
of course, in Northern China; but so far South we hoped
that they might at least yield woods, and the tail-end of
flowering-shrub seed—if only we could finish off here in a
month, and then make a clean run of it Southward, on our
way to the Yang-tze-jang—and so down by water to the
coast. It was a desperate long journey, and on a desperate
hope ; but anything, we felt, would be better than returning,
tamely thin-pocketed and in failure, across that Northern
face of China which we had traversed with such warm hopes
in 1914, But it was altogether a bad business; not even
the Jiu-ping could irradiate the gloom, or discover any real
point of hope in it anywhere. Sunk in lethargy and silence
we sat through the evening, endured the broken feverish
sleeps of nerve-exhaustion, and on the morrow hectically
broke up the camp and hurried home to Wolvesden, too
disgusted to linger, and in a fever to polish off work in these
parts, and shake their barren dust from our feet for ever.
It is an ironical commentary on human joys and miseries,
despairs and complacencies, that (though we did not know
it) perhaps the three most important alpines of my whole
expedition belong to this second season that now seemed so
dull and disastrous—new species all, and new species of a
rank so towering that my Gentian alone, so far as the happi-
ness of future gardens and generations is concerned, would
of itself have been easily worth all the trouble, anxiety and
expense of the entire two years’ tour.

But this still lay hidden in the future; and as yet I had
no presumptuous thought of hoping that the Isopyrum and
THE HASTENED END 245

the big Primula could be mine. In a flopping mood we
returned to Wolvesden, and flung ourselves furiously into
preparations for finishing up with the season. Home, on
our summons, came the staff, in an abrupt break-up of the
camp on the alp, and all our jolly preparations—yet another
sad reminder of the sudden abysm of failure and new
unknown plans into which we had been plunged by the
lamentable omission of these alps to cater properly for
plants. Even the limestones of them lazy and monotonous !
And now my dear Bill whirled away from me across the
pass, carrying with him Mafu and Black Buzzler the Turen,
on his wild flight of exploration to the Koko-nor ; leaving
me with only the Wa-was and the Go-go. Not even this
charge of responsibility could cheer me at the thought of
being alone, and sole manager, for a month or so, mighty
tribute though it was to my increased mastery of Chinese,
humans and language. More especially as he took with
him Gomer also, en route for the grannies at Na-Lang.
“T could have better spared a better man ”’—if I could
have found one, which I greatly doubt. I liked all my
servants—the ridiculous and: wicked Wa-wa, the simian
dourness of Mafu, good simple Go-go; but it gave me a
quite special and personal pang to be parting for ever from
Gomer’s jeunesse-dorée gaiety and enthusiastic interest in
life. I had him into my room before he went, then; and
endeavoured personally to explain what I thought of him,
and how sorry I was to lose him. I think he, too, was sorry
to be going : he did not want either the wife or the grannies,
he wanted to stay with us, and ultimately see Peking. But
those old grannies, all the empire over, are the supreme
power in China, incarnating in themselves in each house-
hold, however humble, the immemorial matriarchy of its
religious system that finds its supreme incarnation in the
figures of the sacrosanct Empresses-Dowager, who dominate
the Chinese Empire all down its history, from behind the
veil of their ‘“ deep seclusion in the palace.”

But no such meditations could distract me from my
246 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

depression in being bereft, at- one blow, of Bill and Gomer.
I attempted minor expeditions to divert me and to fill the
days while the seed continued ripening. In particular I
was determined to conquer Kelaino and Kerauno. My first
assault was baffled by the weather: as I rode up the Dene
such terrifying cauldrons of dense black darkness seethed
round the summits that for once even I, who believe in
bluffing the weather, turned back betimes—though feeling
rather diminished by doing so. I need not have been
anxious about my prescience: the day soon settled to a
soaker that would have sunk the Ark itself.

Ere long a good day came, and Go-go and the Sa-wa
Wa-wa and I set forth. Without event we reached the foot
of the pass, and toiled up it. By this time its shingles were
growing purple with the crowded big butterflies of Del-
phinium Pylzowi, and Corydalis scaberula was very hand-
some in the rubble at the pathside near the top, with luscious
ferny foliage and stalwart spires of claret-crimson helmets
darkening richly to black at their tips. The sky, which
had grown doubtful, cleared ; but still the big blue umbrella
seemed a desirable adjunct. I sent Go-go along the left-
hand ridge to explore Kelaino, while Sawa and the umbrella
and I set out towards Kerauno, looming lonely and pale
and very high to the right. Up the huge fells and folds of
the grassy crest we proceeded, occasionally balked by
scarps and bluffs of dolomite that forced us to cast back
and try elsewhere. The weather now threatened awfully
again: the main massif behind was veiled in a blank of
violet storm, and black dark brooded over the darkness of
Kelaino, and other murky glooms lay out over far Gadjur
and the northerly ranges behind; while ahead of me, up
the giant’s causeway of the grassy aréte, Kerauno soared
into the greying air, pallid as an old rain-sodden bone. I
was prepared for the worst, as ragged rain-clouds seemed
converging on the peak from all round; but all passed off
in a spit, and sun was bright on the turfy knife-edge of the
crest when I attained it. Up, and up, and up, hand over
THE HASTENED END 247

hand, in sharp tussocked steps the crest ascends, narrowing
to the final sword-blade of the actual summit, where the
lawn dies into desolate depths of naked grey shingle on
both sides.

Kerauno stands out, huge and solitary, like a headland
commanding wide lands and seas ; beneath the low canopy
of cloud the westward view was incomparable, far and far,
over all the Sining region, undistinguishable ripplings and
expanses away into the undiscoverable remoteness of the
distance, with here and there the glint of a river like a twist
of silver wire dropped among the flatnesses and faint folds
of some unfolded pall of soft blues and purples and dove-
colour. Otherwise there was nothing more tangibly to
reward me in the way of plants; I find that my diary rather
acidly records, “‘ only the usual Nobbutnowtia invariabilis,
and a poor show even of that.’’ However, the loveliness
of that vast scene was such that I could not but be in good
heart all the same; fie upon the vulgar greed that will not
be content with a high-alpine lawn anyhow; and clamours
for “novelties ” and richer things than the clustered snowy
Lychnis, the orbed butter-coloured fluffs of Garlic, the pink
domes of Erysimum, that here and there diversify the
brown-green moorland along the high-aspiring neck of
Kerauno.

But the peak itself is absolutely and resolutely barren—
a mere wilderness of scree and shingle, squatted over by flat
dull wads of what appeared to be Sibthorbia europea, but
yielding no other life whatever, not even the usual children
of these exalted nudities. Down into Dolomite Valley I
slid and slithered over the scree and slides, taking half the
mountain with me it seemed, as I plunged and skidded and
toboganned, quicker and quicker downwards on my feet,
in a scuttling scattering roar of shale and shingle. Then,
through the Potentilla and Rhododendron scrub of the
lower slopes, and along the valley bottom, more modestly
proceeded along the beck-bed, to where the horses were
coming down the pass to meet me at its foot, and carry us
248 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

home, in a mood of satisfaction at having achieved the two
peaks—though Go-go had discovered nothing more on
Kelaino than I on Kerauno. But my evening meditations
were diversified by the stove. I sat quiet, and felt how
pleasant and warm it was; when lo! sparks fell, and the
thatch round its chimney was seen to be in a red glow.
There ensued violent whizzings-about by all the staff ;
water was applied, and the smoulder got out, and fresh mud
securely plastered round the chimney where it passed up
through the roof. These alarums and excursions in-
spired me with the thought that now the time might be
ripe to go down again to Tien-Tang in search of seeds. I
issued orders accordingly, feeling as amazed as Fanny
Price at Portsmouth, that here should I be, all alone in the
heart of Asia, in sole responsibility for my flock, and issuing
orders to it in a version of the Chinese tongue, which, how-
ever incorrect, was not inadequate.

The train was dispatched ahead, with many polite
messages to the Gwan-ja: so that when I arrived I might
find my quarters prepared, and my things set out. After
allowing an hour’s start, Go-go and Wa-wa and I set out.
The Dene was dense and umbrageous in summer dullness ;
but the long winding course of it was pleasant, though the
only novelties it yielded were a rather poor Philadelphus
and a rank Hydrangea; and its only event a little aged
woman going by us, with a wee white kitten enfolded in
her grubby bosom. But about two miles above the debou-
chure of the Dene, as I rode through the silvery haze of
willows like a Corot picture, which here fills its shingled
bed, I could not refrain from crossing the torrent to the
opposite bank, where the open steeps of the hill-side were
now luxuriant as a hayfield, with sheaves of pale China-blue
Adenophoras swinging out their branching chimes, amid
the violent sealing-wax scarlet balls of the Slender-leaved
Lily, all tangled up together in a lovely riot, with many
another large lush beauty.

When I got within sight of Bridgehead the sky had
THE HASTENED END 249

darkened, and winds blew furiously and rain splattered.
But duty called me to dismount, and go and seek for seed
of P. Stenocalyx on the banks, wading through the wet sea
of the now knee-high Iris. And the seed was ripe, and'so
was the Stellera’s, which greatly enheartened me. Very far
away ahead, streaking along the high brow of the downs,
I now saw the caravan: so followed slowly on, in what
seemed by this time like a soft and settled soaker, very wet
but by no means odious. Up in the ghyll I could not see
the Blue Clematis in seed and could not be bothered to go
poking for pods of the Violet Iris at its mouth. So we
reached the top, and I walked down, amused by fat big
tailless “‘ mice’’ that scuttled like lightning over the rock-
slabs. Riding into Tien Tang was like coming home again
to old friends: how different from the strangeness and
muffled uncertainties of my first visit! An enthusiastic
welcome awaited me in that happy place, from the Gwan-ja
and the rest: and also my old quarters made ready again
with all my possessions unfolded, and the Wa-wa presiding
over them immediately with his most characteristic air of
serene and stolid patronage. In a warm complacency I
settled down into that warm environment of company and
welcome ; and, after abortive but cordial interchanges with
the Gwan-ja, went early to bed, an enormous moon mean-
while, just past her prime, coming palely up in a milky cloud-
wrack, looking almost painfully like some production at
His Majesty’s.

No words can express the pleasure that I had in this
sojourn at Tien Tang; so exalted as I was by its soft
balmy warmth that I could hardly bear myself for the sheer
delight of it. The very air was like cream to my excoriated
nerves and lungs; and the blue breathless nights incredible
with their blaze of stars, and moonshine that drove one
delirious with its white cold magic. I need not tell of how
the days passed in collecting all the seeds required, and
drying them in trays of cardboard paper on the verandah,
to the admiration of the monks: where the desiccating
250 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

pods of the graceful Caragana would amaze them by explod-
ing in the sunshine with a sharp report, and smartly hitting
one of those holy men in the eye with a pellet of seed, to
the huge hilarity of the rest. There were new beauties
about the place, too. The poplar-park down by the river
was now at its very loveliest, with its stately boles support-
ing a uniform canopy of green shade, beneath which one
roamed the soundless bare sand in a breathless rapture of
calm through the submarine twilight. And all the cloister
yards and gardens were ablaze with Iceland Poppies, in the
richest shades that I have ever seen, and onthe flat mud
roofs fields of young green corn had sprouted thick, illu-
minated by the flaring scarlet blobs of the Slender-leaved
Lily.

Happiness flooded into me again, like wine into a cup;
life went in a sort of leisurely roar of bliss, in work or in
rest, and the only spicules on that perfect rose of delight
were the countless moths that would come to commit suicide
in my candle as I sat out on my loggia in the starlight after
a long day of toil and sweat, and the barking dogs that
used to tatter the moonlit stillness and break my slumbers.
But even these had their compensation, in luring me indig-
nantly out on to the verandah, where the annihilating glory
of the starlight held me immediately spellbound, drowned
in a drunkenness of delight that obliterated thought of dogs
or sleep or me.

Let no one think it frivolous or frigid of me, that even
now, after all this length of intervening days, I thus hotly
speak of Tien Tang, and fly for refuge to its remote radiance.
Nor does a thing like this, once seen and felt, pass out of
one’s grip. It is good for one to have seen the sun: coal
burns in the dark. Not so long since, I stood on the levelled
land out beyond Ypres; all the world was a flat indis-
criminate muddle of raw mud, without a blade of grass or
living green thing anywhere as far as eye could stretch in
every direction, along the livid leaden lines of the distance,
with trees and houses now unguessable, mere blackened
THE HASTENED END 251

splinters and spars of matchwood here and there; and the
waste was pitted universally with shell-holes like bleared
eyes, full of foul water ; and the clammy mud oozed horrible
colours ; and the whole air was sick with a stale vile smell ;
and all the earth with horrors hidden or revealed—aban-
doned wreckage of equipment, and rusted weapons broken
and thrown away; and tattered tanks like stranded dead
whales on a mud-flat, and bloated carcasses of beasts immobile
and mountainous, whitened with lime; and grey broken
trunks and clods like sodden sandbags, that had long lost
the horror of even suggesting humanity, except where the
clogged slime just displayed the spiked bulb of a helmet that
was not empty, or the soles of two boots peered out of a
bank ; their juxtaposition showed you the whole lie of their
owner’s body, slack and at rest inside; or where, down in
the filmy clear depths of a pool, the eye followed the strange
line of a seeming tree-stump, pale and gnarled, until it
startled to discern the tranquillity of an upturned moulder-
ing chin at its end, or discovered a clenched mummified
hand, brown as smoked old ivory.

The pleasant garden of European civilization! And even
this, as nothing to such a garden in the actual making. But
quite enough to bear. And then, when the crushing misery
of it, its immortal smell of despair and defilement, were
growing upon me too heavy for the limits of endurance,
there suddenly rose up clear above all this, obliterating and
triumphant, the reverberating cliffs of Tien Tang, rugged
and high and radiant in the rose and gold, of sunshine, with
the long tranquil lines of white houses at their base, and
their overpowering fragrance of pleasantness and warmth
and peace.

Foreign travel, O reader, has its very real advantages,
and all the pleasant scenes you have collected are so many
medicine-bottles stored on your shelves against the maladies
of life. For ugliness is something local, detachable, evanes-
cent, while beauty is something preponderant, impregnable
and eternal. It is a very smallslice of earth after all that
252 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

man has made into Hell: and only for a very short time.
And the conches are all the while still waiting to worship
in the scented sundown of Tien Tang.

I could have wished they didn’t. How true it is that
the wakeful night only subsides into slumber with the
breakfast bell: hardly had I become able to close my eyes
from the barking dogs as day began to dawn than devotion
on the church-top would begin to penetrate my drowse with
its melancholy note. Church services punctuated the hours
more faithfully than my poor little clock, whom altitudes
and rough treatment and jogglings on mule-back had so
completely perturbed that no wonder if it jumped about,
and marked any hour it chose, except the right one. Nor
were these its only trials. Returning one morning from a
seed-hunt, at what was palpably lunch-time, I was horrified
to see that lying gimcrack say it was half-past four. But
lunch-time it indeed was ; and Lay-gor immediately proved
this by producing dishes. So that I realized it was his
wicked Wa-wa who had been playing with the clock, putting
it through its chimes, so as to amuse the little novices, and
show off his own importance before them. But the jingle
had not worked, and he had gone on turning the hands from
hour to hour, in vain hope of making it do so; and had then
found himself unable to turn them back again; and so had
called in his father to cover his crime. So I sent for him,
and expounded my reading of the case, and how dreadful
it was; and flared my eyes at him for a warning. Little
good I[ got by it. With bun-faced blandness, and a sancti-
monious air of innocence that would have put Job himself
in a fury to take that bad child face down across his knee,
the Wa-wa denied everything, and with such a candid
assurance as left me feeling completely in the wrong by my
unworthy suspicions. However, 1] maintained astern upper-
lip, and continued to hope (without the smallest reason)
that that nefarious infant was properly impressed.

But earthly heavens have two gates: of entrance, and
of exit again. The time grew ripe for me to quit Tien Tang
THE HASTENED END 253

with my harvest, and hie me away across the Alps to Cheb-
son. Sad at heart to be quitting the beloved Capua of Tien
Tang—probably for ever—I nevertheless gave Spartan
orders for departure. And only then discovered that, the
Da-Tung River being now in summer spate, the rope-ferry
was in disuse, and the only remaining means of traversing
it was the bridge. So back we should have to go up to
Wolvesden, and over the pass, and down to Weston—two
nights and three days on the long trail, instead of making
for Gan Chang, and duly arriving on the second afternoon
at Chebson. However, there was no help for it: I gave
my last instructions, and on a day rode out again from Tien
Tang over the downs. In the Da-Tung shingles the little
fragrant rose, so lovely with its fine bluish foliage, and its
pink bloomy shoots, and its profusion of rich red flowers,
consoled me by being now only less lovely with its heavy
burden of scarlet hips, from which the calyx falls away
immediately, so that they look like crowded vermilion fruits
of some magnified Cotoneaster in their thick clusters all
down the bending sprays. Also at the mouth of the ghyll,
Anemone vitifolia was splendid, in one wide colony, waving
now in a boscage of big fat flowers of soft pink—the only
occurrence of this plant that I know, save one, throughout
the length and breadth of the Da-Tung Alps—whereas, in
the regions of Siku and Jo-ni, far to the South of these, in
1914, it had been a commonplace of all the warm open stony
places and field edges, up the whole of the Tibetan border
lowlands.

The next day I spent at Wolvesden, accomplishing minor
jobs ; it was as blazing hot up here as it had been down
at Tien Tang; in nothing but shorts and a pyjama jacket
I roamed up Southerly Valley, and was ecstatically blissful.
A little duil Ephedra that had hitherto only made mats of
dusty grey wire among the shingles had now sheeted itself
solid with bloomy rose-scarlet drupes; and there were
many other seeds near at hand to collect. On the morrow
we removed over the Pass, to the House of Many Babies,
254 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

en route for Chebson. And anything like the Western face
of the Pass I have seldom seen. All the uppermost zigzags
and open scree banks were dense with rounded low clouds
of the Violet Delphinium, among which stalwartly stood up
the azure spires of the Celestial Poppy. It was a stupefying
sight, and one of these combinations that Nature alone can
effect with complete success. But none of the seeds in the
limestone ghyll were ripe, and I could only discover one fat
pod of Iris potaninii, and by the time I emerged towards
the Western foothills the day had grown leadenly grey.
Tired and dehilarated by the lurid dark, I drifted at length
into the yard of Many Babies, and sadly anticipated a soak-
ing day to follow.

But by a miracle the morrow turned out so gorgeous that
I even got another tiny touch of sun. We were off early,
along a new track, indicated to us by a new Do-fu (donkey-
man), who had lately accrued, mysteriously, to the staff. I
raised remarks, but he was so confident and reassuring that
I let the matter slide. Blandly and in acute good humour
at prospect of a short easy stage I drifted over the broad
plains of corn and flax and violent yellow mustard, and
over the ruddy intervening spurs between them. But
gradually the journey, which I had flattered myself would
be so brief, began to be long; and, to my horror, I realized
that the officious Do-fu’s new track that he was so sure of
meant to lead us South of the two big down-masses that rise
in splendid isolation below Chebson. This added many
miles to our journey, and I longed for command of language
adequately to comminate that Do-fu, as the distances trailed
out behind us and lengthened away ahead. With rage I
saw the real downs of our destination away up on the right,
and grew to appreciate the enormousness of having to strike
back at them, all the way up the stream-course that inter-
venes between the two fells. They themselves, too, and
their gorge, were depressing. The gorge, indeed, was really
more of an open vale, extremely long and hot, and entirely
void of interest ; while the fells, though steep and high, were
THE HASTENED END 255

evidently both dry and dull. As the distance increases
behind one, so increases on one the weariness of a prolonged
day’s stage; and I quailed to contemplate the stodge of
toiling all the way up those elephantine bulks, with the
almost certainty of finding nothing there but Nobbutnowtia.
But so I always incline to feel towards the end of the day,
when my climbing ambitions strangely dwindle.

And so, after what seemed almost the period of a patriarch,
we had done with the windings of that uninteresting stream-
bed, and emerged upon a level sea of grassy plain, down
into the head of which ran a cloven green promontory. And
in that fold of the promontory nestled the four white Chor-
tens all of a row, and the crowded low white lines, and the
golden roof of Chebson Abbey. The close of that tedious
journey was by far its brightest part; for not only had I
now our goal in sight, but the plain itself was very lovely,
lush with tall beautiful plants of the damp moorland turf,
among which the most striking was a stately Senecio! with
handsome sea-blue foliage, and very big bright-golden
flowers set rarely and at reasonable intervals near the top
of its three-foot stem. Also, having alighted to examine
this and to walk across the moor and collect its treasures,
I was struck by the likeliness of the place for the little starry
Trollius, of which I had failed to find any seed in the plain
above Weston, where alone I had seen it in flower. And
on prying round, I found the seed-heads abundant here,
and fully ripe, lurking among the elongated sword-tufts of
Iris ensata. And so at last we rode slowly up the final mile
into the downs about dusk, under a sky now dark and
brewing as ever over all the Alps; and found the rest of
the train comfortably settled in, having come the right
way; and the Prior a-beam with smiles, and his own
quarters across the courtyard allotted me this time for
mine.

The lapse of time was evident in Chebson. All along one
side the red outer wall of the church precinct was now

1 In cultivation it has bloomed a dowdy weed, says E. A. Bowles.
256 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

propped up on poles to prevent it falling down altogether.
Other repairs and alterations were proceeding in the other
churches, but a denser calm than ever seemed to brood over
the place. I saw nobody but the Prior all the time I was
there, and the chief signs of religious activity were two small
novices, who sat about and practised on the conch with the
most devastating effect. ven when, by request, they were
induced to remove their pious ardours to a remoter cloister,
the brief and broken monotony of their blasts was madden-
ing. I judged it would be very long before they attained
the sostenuto strength of lung exhibited at Tien Tang;
but anyhow, the patient persistence of their efforts deserved
success.

On another occasion, when the spacious calm of the
cloister had ceased to reverberate with the news of Violet
Asquith’s engagement, I was wandering up and down the
arcades, when my ears were assaulted on all sides with a
droning thundering blare that seemed to come from every-
where at once, like a tiger’s purr, sinking and soaring and
re-echoing hollowly all round the cloister in the most baffling
manner. For a moment or two I stood smitten, casting my
eyes around for some monstrous demon of the air; then
addressed myself to discovering whence these grisly boom-
ings could proceed. For quite a while I vainly peep-bo’ed
with the invisible band, but at last, warned by yells of
especial ferocity, lifted my eyes on high (for I was now in
the deep well of cloister behind the guest-yard) and saw
that the concert was raging overhead, on the roof-loggia of
the church. It was a chaos of queer muffled wailings, as
if on muted violins played high up on the lowest string,
accompanied by duets on two enormous trumpets, at least
fifteen feet long, projecting out over the parapet on which
they were propped. In a vast mimallonean buzz the noise
continued till seven in the evening, assisted below by the
big bell in the cloister: often the trumpets took fresh
breath, and boomed and droned and blared with very splen-
did effect ; but would often collapse and cough and break
 

TROLLIUS PUMILUS (UPPER FLOWERS YELLOW) AND GERANIUM SP. (LOWER
FLOWER ROSE-PINK)

From a sketch by the Author.
THE HASTENED END 257

wind in the most lamentable manner instead, like the sharp
ripping of trousers.

But of other holy activities I saw no sign. Nor went out
to look for them, indeed: nor could expect to see them
otherwise. For here I wish to enter a word of caution.
There is one very silly section of the world, which talks of
all other religions and religious bodies than their own, as
‘ heathenism ”’ and “‘ idolaters”’; but there is also another
section which rushes to the diametrically opposed extreme,
in a silliness which is hardly less extreme than the other
—though very much more respectable, in that it is an
exaggeration of sympathy and interest and curiosity,
developed all together into a gross credulity. For these
good people, who would be cold as pebblestones about any
ordinary European monk, grow moist-eyed immediately
on mention of a Tibetan one, and seem to think the mere
word Lama is not only equivalent to a saint, but pregnant
with all the arts of magic. They look upon me with wonder
when they hear I have frequented Tibetan monasteries,
and seem to think that I must there have been submerged
in a sea of Mahatmas and miracles and all manner of other
such unholinesses as are most strictly forbidden to any
follower of the Buddha, no matter how remote. Even
round my own head I find a reflected aura of mystery ; such
are the sights and secrets I am considered to have absorbed
during my sojournings in the Sacred and Mysterious land,
that on a day, when I tried to play up to this reputation,
and told somebody at a party that I saw in her a mongoose
being evoked, the poor lady immediately turned pale and
faintly shrieked, and sank in a swoon upon the tea-cups,
declaring that she felt herself becoming one indeed; while
all the other feathered hats twittered together, in terror-
stricken envy of her mystic experience.

The plain truth alone shall be my portion. Perhaps I
have not been long enough or deep enough in Tibet to
develop that rank and riotous imagination with which it
sometimes seems to inspire the people who say they have

s
258 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

seen it. But, anyhow, plain truth is always a great deal more
interesting than the most flaring fantasies of fiction. And
the plain truth of the matter here is that a Tibetan monastery
is very much the same as any other monastery all the world
over. The percentage of good and evil in any accumulated
body of religious students and devotees is a very stable
quantity ; and of saints and sinners no doubt Chebson and
Hilmi and Hiei-Zan contain precisely the same proportion as
Monte Cassino, Stonyhurst and the Grande Chartreuse.
And, beyond a doubt also, the main mass of monks, in all
these establishments, are neither the one nor the other, buta
body of men exactly like other men, except for their robes
and restrictions, not very good, not very bad, but rather
bored and obliterated in their profession, and sodden in lust
of body and lethargy of mind, thanks to the unnatural con-
ditions of a life for which not one of them in ten has any
aptitude whatever.

And, in any case, it must be remembered yet again, that
in such a community it is not the real saints and students who
have time to waste on a casual visitor, or who naturally
occur to his casual glance. It is not from loafers in the
church-court that you can gauge the high flights of the
secluded saints you never see. And from the fact that you
never do see them, one section of opinion is much too apt to
jump at the conclusion that they do not exist, as the other
is to exaggerate, credulously, alike their multitude and their
powers. Therefore, of saints abounding I can tell no senti-
mental tale: Buddhas and Bodhisattvas do not grow on
every bush; the men in Tibetan monasteries that I myself
have seen were simply men very like all other average
ecclesiastics in any creed or country, and the others I take
on trust.

As for the powers, who is there that shall prescribe limits
to will-force, and to will-feebleness ? No doubt there are
various people in all countries whose faith is great enough
to move mountains, as no doubt there are very many more
whose folly is great enough to see the mountains move. The
THE HASTENED END 259

Buddha, however, teaches a profound disgust and distrust
for material miracles. No matter how enormous they may
be, they can never be any argument (as an evil and adulterous
generation always takes them) in favour.of a spiritual truth ;
which would be their only raison d’étre; therefore, the
follower of the Buddha, however vivid an academic interest
he may take in marvels and the marvellous powers of man,
will always leave them aside in his course, and refuse to be
preoccupied with them, or to try to prove things by them.
Of what mysterious and supra-normal feats the Living
Buddhas in Tibetan monasteries are capable, I cannot rightly
speak ; everything is possible, but nothing is proven. But
Mahatmas and Maskelyne-Cookeries are mere inventions of a
scheming folly that has nothing whatever in common with
Buddhism but the name ; which it has not the smallest right
to bear. In none of its true branches has Buddhism ever
gone a-whoring after such nonsenses ; whatever powers the
Arahat or the Bodhisat may possess, these are the simple
collateral results of his development, not ends in themselves
to be made a gaping-stock and argument for the silly. There-
fore, once and for all, the general atmosphere of. a big
Buddhist Abbey is neither more impressive and holy,
nor less so, than that of any other religious foundation.
No special awe hangs heavy upon it; miracles do not
occur at every corner of its streets, nor its casual monks
exude conjuring-trick rabbits with each wave of the
hand.

There was much work, meanwhile, proceeding among the
seeds. The two high downs below the Abbey, indeed,
yielded nothing at all, as I had rather dreaded; but the
green folds round about the Abbey itself, beside their harvest
of seeds, were now also at their prettiest with flowers. There
was nothing of special interest, of course, but all the big
grassy downs were thickly enamelled with blossoms, and
Stellera particularly abundant. With penknives we delved
into the hard tussocks of Iris tenuifolia, to pry out its
astonishing fat pear-shaped pods, fleshy and rose-coloured at
260 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

the top, like prickly-pear-fruits embedded in a fossilized clot
of bass-matting. Then we crossed over on to the side where
the folds of coppice are, to quest for the blue Corydal in the
Potentilla tuffets up the slope. But not a trace of seed was
to be seen, nor, indeed, any trace of the plant remaining at
all. So, by degrees we came up on to the crest, where,
among the russet-coloured hollows and rises of the moorland,
my Aster rose glorious here and there, with solitary ragged
flowers of rich violet over the low scrub. And there was
also a big fringy Pink, of ravishing fragrance, that was none
other than our old and valued friend Dianthus squarrosus.
So here, with full packets and pockets, we long lay out upon a
crest, languid in the wide loveliness of the scene, with the
grecn plain at our feet, sweeping round the base of the
promontory like an unrippled sea ; and then those two lonely
and gigantic purple downs beyond, abruptly blocking the
view.

Even the Abbey yielded seed and flowers. For the stone-
walling and the flagstones of the yards and cloisters were
now a-flaunt with Iceland poppies, and in the guest-cloister
itself, at the foot of the stone lions, Trollius Chinensis was
blooming luxuriantly in fine bushes, throwing up far and
wide its gaping patens of rich orange. And there was an
older friend still. For along all the lines of the walls in the
deep quiet of the yards behind my cloister there fluttered
gaily a charming little tri-colour Pansy, of violet and butter-
yellow, with its two upper petals of richest purple-velvet,
but outlined with a thin line of cream all round, that gave
the flowers a most perky and intelligent expression. And
Viola Chebsonensis must have come a very far journey, to be
Viola Chebsonensis at all. For there exists no tri-colour Viola
anywhere in the Eastern borders of Tibet, or the inlands of
China. So that this little pansy must have been of foreign
descent, a cousin, though indefinitely removed, of Mr.
Dobbie’s giants. Some lover of such delights, English
beyond a doubt, assuredly gave pansy-seed to some big
monastery near the coast, such as Wu-Tai-S’an; and in
THE HASTENED END 261

course of time some Abbot or Living Buddha on pilgrimage
must have conveyed a pinch of its descendants’ seed to
Chebson. And here it is, now flourishing and cheery as any
wild plant established on the spot since the beginning of
time. It was with a never-failing thrill of emotion that I
always used to contemplate those multitudinous little old
friendly faces, flickering along the eaves and gutters of the
courtyard walls in Chebson ; trying to figure out the long
romance of their arrival here, and the kindly thought of
the kindly people who passed it on from hand to hand up-
country, in no desire but to give pleasure. How vivid a
contrast, O readers, to the results of that merely utilitarian
and profit-seeking thought which introduced the rabbit to
Australia |!

Now only remained my expedition up into the Alps at
the head of the delta-plain. Untaught by experience, I
had nursed a hope that perhaps, by starting very early, I
might achieve one of the big heights that same day, and so
shorten my visit. However, the pace of the caravan was so
slow, and the length of the moorland level so immense, that
it was at least midday when we got into the throat of the
gorge, and it now took another hour or more to put up the
tent. The first place I picked for it, up under the shelter of a
little cliff, proved too small, and we had to move it down
nearer the floor of the glen, close to the track. It was rather
a public spot, for the delta-plain below was now quite
populous with yurts and camps of cattle, with jolly people
passing down the path all the time, pulling carts of cut
shrubbery for bedding. But peace and security scemed to
rule, and everybody passed us a happy time of day as they
went. Across the flat of the glen where the beck brabbles
greyly through the sombre-coloured waste of hummocks,
two Lamas and their attendant were encamped, each in a
little white tent of his own, like a bathing-box. But they
held austerely aloof, and took no notice of us, except for a
beautiful but wall-eyed peasant lad who was visiting them ;
and presently came splashing through the beck and the
262 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

dotted pools to give us a greeting, and watch our proceedings
with the tent.

But by the time everything was fixed, I looked up and saw
the Alps swelling upon me overhead so dishearteningly
enormous that clearly, in what was now left of the day, there
was no possibility of achieving a serious ascent. So I
distributed the staff, and sent off the officious Do-fu back to
Chebson for Northanger Abbey, which that polypragmatic
person had managed to omit. After which I waded the beck
hard by where the monks were shuttered up in mysterious
seclusion ; and set myself to climbing in the deep ghyll-fold
of the fell that I had already visited, while it was still sere
and bare in early summer. But nothing was yet ripe;
which confirmed my conviction that this place stands even
higher than Weston. After me came Lay-gor and Go-go:
the latter I sent ahead of me, to prospect, while Lay-gor and I
roamed around the bay, above and below. But we saw no
sign of anything new; only a very lovely albinoid of the
Harebell Poppy, with bells of pure white, deepening to a
violet base. The afternoon was grilling and glorious: I
lay on tussocks, and conned the vast green fells opposite,
heaving away up and up and up, to their culminating peaks;
with smallness and cold fear in my heart, to crane up and see
how big they were. So at last I rambled slowly downward
again, still seeing no pod of the Butterfly Iris, whose blossoms
had so beautifully abounded here in June, beside the beck.
It was soon dark down below, and there was yet a long dull
time of waiting before the Do-fu reappeared with the vital
volume. And when he did reappear, it was with Emma in
his hand, not Northanger Abbey! People who will always
do everything do everything invariably wrong. And I had
so longed for that letter of Isabella’s, so ‘faithfully
promised’! However, no alternative in Jane can be
unwelcome : I got into bed and became very happy at the
“ worthy Coles’”; got out of it to dine, and then, getting
back, was happier still.

I rose very early after a poor night to find the day had
THE HASTENED END 263

dawned ominous, filmed over with cloud-threats. But early
as was I, the monks on the scrub-flat opposite were earlier
still.. For now those blank white bathing-tents had come to
life and given up their secret; the pontiffs had emerged in
high yellow mitres, armed with trumpets and green drums.
And now on these they boomed and droned and palely
tooted, perlustrating the place in a solemn measure, this
way and that, forth and back. I wish I could have known
what it was all about, that curious lonely liturgy, up in the
heart of the Alps. But Go-go was ignorant, and the unutter-
able scorn on the face of the Wa-wa was enough, of itself, to
congéal curiosity on my lips.

So now I set forward, and rode about half a mile farther
up, to where, by a gate of cliffs, a left-hand glen converges,
revealing gaunt red. screes and crags and naked peaks away
at its far end. Towards these, then, I sent the Go-go for-
ward, with his collecting-tin, while I myself, and both the
Wa-was, bearing both the big blue umbrellas, set ourselves
to breasting the rib on the left, which is like a steep toe to the
great green fell overhead. The climb was so enormous as
to be quite stupefying: in a mechanical endurance we
mounted and mounted; all I saw of novelty was a queer
Lathraa once or twice. And still we toiled on upwards, ten
yards at a time, while the day grew rapidly more baleful.
It was a long age before we had surmounted even the first
bulge of the fell. Here we came into sight of yet more, and
higher, billowing away overhead in vast swells of lifeless,
browning moorland. But here our way was also unex-
pectedly diversified, and the incalculable loneliness of the
scene unwontedly exhilarated. For, scattered across the
face of the slope, like beaters, came along a carolling gay
crew of Tibetan maids and matrons in blue and scarlet, very
vivid on that dun-coloured scene, with copious chains of
bead and silver and coral swinging from their bosoms or
their many-plaited heads, as they stooped along the moor at
their task of collecting the round yellow garlic heads. We
hailed them and shouted ; but they were coy and startled
264 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

as wild deer, and floundered away over the fell in a flight as
we pursued them, like a flock of Oreads surprised by hunters
on their mountains. But high squeals and laughter floated
back at us through the cold threatening dark of the
air.

So onwards we ascended still, leaving these lesser thoughts
below ; up and up a long series of steep grassy rises, towards
a red and green crest above, and a peak now becoming visible
far overhead ; no new flowers anywhere in the coarse russet-
coloured lawns of the moorland ; the clustered paper-white
Silene was pretty, but, proh pudor, the prettiest, brightest
and most abundant show of all was provided by nothing more
nor less than the common Dandelion! And this is an insult
which has never yet been inflicted on me by any European
height, be it no higher than the mere Moncenisio. But
here, at some 13,000 ft. or 14,000 ft., I felt it the outrage
almost incredible—the night work of some enemy. It takes
a granitic alp of the Da-Tung to achieve so grotesque a
violation of Alpine proprieties.

Jaundiced in my views, and peevish, I accordingly pro-
ceeded up to the stony slides and arétes, close beneath the
black overwhelming darkness of the sky, that now began to
spit. In all the shingles there was rich glory of the Del-
phinium, the Celestial Poppy and Corydalis melanochlora :
but nothing was ripe in seed, and there was nothing new at
all, except for the little dwarf yellow stars of a Creman-
thodium. Sick with so stale a set of beauties, I wandered to
the right, along the rib-saddle which ties this flying buttress
of the mountains to the main mass, where the naked red peak
impends. The saddle would have made a very lovely Alpine
scene, had its views on flower-production been less restricted
—a long rippled series of lawns and dips and shallow blunted
outcrops almost worn down into the turf, which, at this
altitude, was springy and dark and sodden. While, on the
far side, the scree-slopes sank indefinitely downward, jewelled
as they went, with azure maces of poppy, the golden stars
of Cremanthodium, and the excruciating loveliness of the
THE HASTENED END 265

Corydalis, in humped blobs of snow-flecked turquoise, squat-
ting on its sumptuous blue foliage over the raw red face of
the scree. Under a sky so imminent and black the air takes
on a cold ghastly pallor in which flowers seem actually to
flame ; on the charnel-house gloom of that voor alp, the
blues and purples and yellows of the blossoms were like
multitudinous flecks of electric fire, luminous as ghost-lights.
But otherwise neither the view nor its presentment was
rewarding ; the mountains being all dull huge green downs,
or else dead pandemoniums of craggy pyramid and scree :
while the distances of plain out in the West were only a boring
ocean of monotony in the greyness.

And so I came to the foot of the Red Peak overhead, now
beginning to swim in ominous vapour, while behind it, on the
world of black or russet crags that formed its universal back-
ground, the heavy-lidded night of storm was momentarily
sinking lower. Through the glasses I diligently explored the
cliffs and ledges above me. But the peak was a crumbling
pyramid of wholly lifeless ruin, blank and naked. And in
its lower reaches there were only the same things as I had
seen everywhere else. Meanwhile the darkness was settling
down upon me, in a sort of universal droning boom, as if the
consummation of all things was approaching, through a dark
crescendo of silence. So, completely disillusioned, I set off
sliding downwards, in the couloir of fine shale where the ridge
flies out at an angle from the Red Peak. It sinks ere long
into a widening gully of rough coarse chaos, shingle and bald
shale, wreckage of the Red Peak that has now flown up over-
head into the pale Coan swirls of cloud. Among the stones a
small purple Aconite was pretty, and, on the shady side, I
came on one large mass of Androsace mucronifolia ; and the
violet of the Delphinium was everywhere glorious. As the
spitting of the rain ceased, I sat on a boulder to take a midday
snack, and a funny little bush-tailed weaselly creature, as
long and thin as some heraldic beast on a royal shield,
emerged from its lair in the scree, and bounded about on the
stones near by. Both the Wa-was were, of course, imme-
266 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

diately agog to kill it: but I repressed their degrading
ardours.

And now, as I plunged downwards in the corrie again, the
long-delayed rain began descending in force. For a while
we sheltered under a brow of cliff, hoping that the deluge
would lighten; however, it clearly had no such intention,
and grew steadily worse. So desperately we plunged on
downwards, beneath the big blue umbrellas, the Wa-was
bobbing away below me. In time the corrie became a
torrent-ghyll ; far and far we dived towards the depths of
the glen, where gradually scrub and sedge resumed sway ;
we kept as closely as possible to the rill-groove itself, which
offered the one clear channel down the dip, otherwise filled
with sopped Potentilla tangles that birched my bare legs
under my shorts to raspberry ice. And so descended at long
last into the lower valley, whence it was still more than a
mile back to the tent. Here immediately I retired to bed,
blander and in better humour than could have been hoped
after so weariful and disappointing a day—that had. not
even been yery pleasurable as a walk, owing to the general
lack of beauty in weather or air’or scene. But, with each
successive death of hope, the passing pang comes easier.
Even when the Go-go returned from his expedition, he
also brought me, in his crowded tin, nothing newer than
clumped masses of Corydalis melanochlora.

And of all my failures, this lies heaviest on my memory
and my longing, even heavier than Primula hylophila and
Primula Violagrandis. For Corydalis melanochlora is so
specially lovely a plant, and bade so fair to prosper in our
moraines as well as in its own shingles. Its name, indeed,
is very silly (I only discovered it from Przewalsky’s dried
specimens in the Petrograd Herbarium: Professor Balfour
had meanwhile called it C. Purdomii), yet has so liquid a
loveliness of its own that I retain it, though in no way does
“black-pale ” or “ black-green” give any hint of those
amazing snow-white helmets, huddled together on the
glaucous foliage, crested and lipped with a blazing violent
THE HASTENED END 267

light azure, with just a point of black at their vizor. And
so hearty and abundant a plant, too, raging over all the
highest open screes and shingles, from Thundercrown (at
least) equally luxuriant up to the Da-Tung Alps in the far
north—and farther yet, no doubt, whether on lime or shale
or granite. Nevertheless with all my work and waitings
and watching, I was never able anywhere to catch its seed
on the hop. It had always either hopped already when I
came to it, or was too remote from the moment of doing so.
For no plant did I try harder, but in all the thousands of
specimens we attempted, the tale was still the same. So I
then sedulously collected its bunched tubers, and gardened
them up at Wolvesden in boxes, But though they throve
and appeared to ripen their seed, it all turned out no good,
and though I sent home such germs as I was thus able to
achieve, none of them proved fertile, and nothing more has
anybody heard or seen of Corydalis melanochlora in the living
plant. For, unkindest cut of all; though I copiously sent
home those tubers, and though they travelled well, not even
these went any further, but died off after arrival, despite the
plump healthiness in which they appeared to arrive. So that
C. melanochlora still awaits introduction, on her gaunt
screes—and is well worth the pilgrimage, all for herself.
No more expeditions yielded any more results. A chilly
mizzle universally prevailed. In a dull hopeless morning I
caused the camp to be disestablished, and rode away down
to Chebson, so weary and mountain-sick with all this steady
failure that I could have found it in my heart to forswear
alps altogether, and henceforth cultivate no more difficult
eminence than Brighton Esplanade. The monks across the
beck had shifted their tents up the scrub-flat, and then down
the scrub-flat, and now were busy as usual at their mys-
terious pontifications, lugubrious in the drizzling greyness.
And the day darkened to deluges as I rode. But then it
cleared to brightness again, and by the time we had left the
mountains behind, had developed into balmy pleasantness.
Chebson received me with its large august benignity, and I
268 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

sustained various visits through the rest of the day from his
Eminence the Prior, who now developed an alarming assort-
ment of stomachic symptoms, on each of which in turn he
came to me for advice—the reason of this abrupt failure in
health being the arrival of the Post Lao-han, bearing, among
other things, a bottle of Hennessey to replenish my depleted
store.

He also brought a letter from Bill reporting chiefly barren-
ness and monotony from the Koko-Nor and the Kweite-Salar
ranges, except for a pretty form of Iceland Poppy, and a
big white-flowered bush Potentilla, “with the leaves of a
Sorbus,” which abounded in the sterile river shingles. But
in such a state of nerves was I by this time, as to be timorous
over even this lovely acquisition; and then by “one of
those sudden bursts of mind that do sometimes occur” I
flashed into memory of P. Salessowi, of which Bill’s descrip-
tion gave an accurate picture. And P. Salessowi had already
been in the garden at Inglcborough for more than ten years,
and had there once produced one flower, and ugly at that!
“What a life! ’” peevishly exclaims the diary at this point.
The ironies of fate and time! For now, with what a tearing
hunger of heart could I say 7riBatos tro KevOpsior
yevoiunv of Tien Tang or Chebson, never staying at all to
be pernickety about their productions in the plant line. But
Bill’s Potentilla did indeed prove to be none other than P,
Salessowi ; so that all I learned from that soon-extinguished
hope is that if anyone possesses this handsome shrub, and
wants to see it beautiful in blossom, an arid treatment of
gravel and stones is indicated, rather than the soporific
fatness of garden soil.

But now good-bye to Chebson. Long affectionate hand-
holdings with the Prior; many a promise of return—and
forth I rode in the tail of the cavalcade, over the brow of the
down. And the hills closed round on Chebson Abbey, and
hid it from my sight. Sadly I traversed the Deltas, insisting
this time on keeping the proper way; and the day was a
pathetic fallacy to match that of my extinguished hopes—
THE HASTENED END 269

a level day, of ugly arid atmosphere, ha’ary and colourless ;
with much of the sky now overcast with clouds, like me.
The journey, though, was greatly shortened by keeping to
the straight course, and the House of Many Babies received
me warmly. Here I lay a little while collapsed with illness
for hope deferred and defunct maketh more than the heart
sick ; and the Go-go ailed also. The return was yet further
procrastinated by black storms, alike in the staff and on the
Alps. Feebly I tried to comprehend and cope with the
former, and abjectly went to bed from the other, while
appalling thunders raged for hours all around, and the Alps
overhead were lost in bellowing midnight, and the green
world below went white with hail. The temperature, too,
had by this time turned arctically cold through all this high
region; and, even in warm sunny Chebson, lying far out
from the Alps as it does, had been so chilly as to make me
remember, with embittered regret, the gorgeous heat that had
reigned, even on the higher flanks of Thundercrown, a month
later than this.

In intervals of the converging storms I looked up anxiously
to the gleaming combes and chines of smooth precipice over-
head above the green folds of the impending Alps. In flaccid
feebleness I sent off the convalescent Go-go to prospect,
while the rest collected seed of Stellera and Daphne in the
plain. But, as he returned empty-handed without having
attained the highest heights, I was more than ever haunted
by the feeling that we ought to go and camp up there
definitely. But really, in the wintry cold, I could not
manage to lug myself into entertaining the notion of under-
going so much, for the inevitable reward of nothing at all.
Finally the situation was taken out of my hands, and I was
vastly relieved when Lay-gor and Go-go came to ask me if
we might get off early on the morrow, so as to be over the
pass, and home in Wolvesden, before the worst of the weather
had happened. My heart glowed proleptically at this
decision : in Wolvesden, at least, one would be able to have
a fire again, and once more feel that one had feet. So for
270 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

half that idle afternoon I drowsed, and for the rest I slept :
in the evening I got up to dine in the little central room
behind the verandah. But the cold was piercing and blew
in by every crevice ; and the yak-dung cakes on the fire-pan
were powerless to dispel it. I felt strangely empty and
bloodless, and powerless against circumstances: delighted
when dusk at last descended, and the day was done.
Marvellous revival next morning in me as well as the
weather ; for the latter was in a glorious mood, after ‘all,
and so wasI. And there was a nip in the air like iced wine,
and the Alps were grizzled with new sleet. Scruples and
duties faded from my mind like cloud-wracks from a peak
at sunrise. Looking neither to right nor left, I set off with
the caravan, crammed all my pockets with seed of Stellera
in the plain, and then, with various diversions after other
seeds by the way, addressed myself to the Pass. And from
afar, as I rode up towards the glen-head, its upper half
seemed lost in an odd dull cloud, like slate-coloured smoke
lying immovable and solid over the final zigzags. Only
when I got nearer did I realize that this was Delphinium
Pylzowi, now in its fullest zenith of glory, in myriads of tight
domed masses all over the open path-side scree, each of them
perhaps nine inches high and a foot wide; and every one
of them almost hidden from sight by its abundant flights of
big violet butterflies, aggregating into a sheer sheet of
richest purple all up the slope, interspersed with myriads of
bristling azure poppy-spires, as if an army of small pokers
had been dipped in Heaven and then stuck upright into the
fell-side, with Heaven still adhering to their poke in gouts
and clots and splashes. It was a sight to make one shout.
But being alone, I had to do most of my shouting internally,
which always hurts more. If only D. Pylzowi will con-
descend to grow as stout and dense and stocky at home, and
to give that abundance of blossom, and of as rich a size and
brilliancy, as on its own Alps! So far I only know of it as
rather lank and spindly in growth, rather dull and squinny
of flower. But perhaps, when it has settled down to new
THE HASTENED END 271

surroundings, it may revert to its true domestic style—
though I must confess that my Alpine Delphiniums have both
seemed hitherto rather ominously inconstant to their origi-
nal form under the seductive influences of garden culture.
Even D. tanguticum, from its perfectly dwarf and enormous-
flowered form on the scree-tops of Thundercrown and Ardjeri,
too often maintains in the garden a fatal new propensity
to length of weakly shank, and pallid diminished blossom.

Now followed hot and glorious days of seed-collecting, all
about Wolvesden and the neighbouring hills. The grilling
little yard was full of big paper trays with stacks of seed set
out to cook in the sun. These had to be weighted with
stones at their corners against the wind; but even so, or in
the toil of getting them all indoors again at sundown (which
sometimes left a corner of some tray unguarded while its
neighbour was removed), there would come a sudden draught,
and the trays would lift and flap and flounder and threaten
to blow away, until with shrieks I had summoned all the
rest of the staff, who with answering shrieks would come
pelting out of the kitchen to weight them down again, or
carry them in—everybody, meanwhile, vehemently cursing
everybody else for neglect.

No event, and no high adventure, marked these days of
awaiting Bill’s return. They were long. He had written
again, by this time, and was as sickened and disappointed
as I, with unvarying disappointment and sameness in the
Kweite-Salar Alps, and round the Koko-Nor. Evidently he
was as keen as I to finish up quickly with these ranges, and
get away. He sent a hamper of plants ahead of him now,
but they all looked very much the same as those of the
Da-Tung, except for a fat dwarf Gentian, bilious and pallid,
which I soon learned to believe only a variant of blue G.
triflora, universal on the high Alps overhead.1_ For now was

1 Aster F. 75, from the marshes of the Koko-Nor, was also in
this batch, and Mariae, form of Androsace tibetica, thin leaved
and so late in bloom as now to be at its full, whereas the type was
already shedding its seed.
272 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

the hey-day of Gentians, alike on the heights and in the
depths. Only tiny Gentians rule the spring in North China ;
the prime of the big ones begins in August. By now they
shone all about Wolvesden—a big straggling coarse affair
with flopping stems and creamy flowers, which is probably
G. straminea, and a handsome stalwart thing growing into
a dense bush, with such myriads of flowers that though they
never open properly, the rich sapphire blue of their outsides,
and their thick-set multitudes, produce a most sumptuous
effect of colour—which I hope will be no duller or poorer
at home, seeing that this Gentian affects just those common
open sunny places in common ordinary open soil, as are
affected in the Alps by weed-easy G. cruciata. While down
in the hot lands by Tien Tang, the open banks and path-sides
are abundant in yet another floppet, with upstaring violet
flowers along the ground-hugging sprays that radiate from
its crown. And this is the real G. Przewalskyi, leaving the
very much handsomer sapphire velvet beauty of 1914 (F.
303) to take its true rank at last as a new species, under the
name of G. Purdomii, a hardy treasure if ever there was one,
delighting the torrid lowland banks and road-sides round
Jo-ni, as heartily as does G. Przewalskyi those of the more
Northerly regions. But all these, and all their beauties,
are but as an opening chorus of supers for the autumnal
Gentians of the high Alps, from whom is now soon to step
forth and take the stage, the Primadonna assoluta of this
season, if not of both my own seasons, and most of every-
body else’s.

For now, one afternoon, I sat resting, after an expedition
_ for seeds up Southerly Valley, from which I had sent the
Wa-was ahead of me home with the harvest, since their
indefatigable good manners in keeping close on my heels had |
worn even closer on my nerves. And as I sat, there arose
simultaneous rushings in the yard, and cries of “ Por-loy! ”
Out I ran, as eagerly as the rest. And there, indeed, was
my dear Bill, afar off yet, but riding smartly down the last
green bay above the beck, cloaked in a Jaeger blanket, and
THE HASTENED END 273

waving a yak-tail fly-whisk. Ecstasies of reunion followed ;
we sat and prowled and prattled till far into the night, and he
gave me such an account of the sad enormous dull monotony
of the Koko-Nor as quite let me off all wish to sce it. And
we decided to make off immediately up into the Alps,
on a final inspection; and then to pack up and be gone
for the sunny South, and the remote hopes of the Da-Ba
S’an.

But the next few days, after all, were rather niddering.
The staff took ill with a sort of influenza. And then I also
followed suit. And the weather, angry at having given no
smallest sign of that six weeks’ rainy season that had been
held out as my summer prospect, developed sullen rages
that evidently preluded the Alpine winter. Long I lay
abed, low and poorly, listening to the incessant rain: only
quinine could lug me so far out of coma as to be capable of
even Pride and Prejudice—a drug of itself which I had
always hitherto believed could cope with the highest tem-
perature and the deepest lethargy. And when I resumed

‘ consciousness, it was to find a white world, with densely-
falling thawing snow. At thought of what this must portend
up on the Alps above, the energy of desperateness hauled
me into convalescence, and I insisted with myself that I
must be perfectly fit again by the time the staff had prepared
the way up to camp, as they were now forthwith dispatched
to do. Meanwhile the weather obeyed my commands to
clear; and so did I. In glorious days I sat about ecstatic-
ally, though kitten-weak. And in the night, unable to
sleep, I cast all my padded coats about me, and sallied out
into the huge moon-flooded silence of the Dene, where the
beck mysteriously roared and blattered up into the velvety
supernatural calm. It was an intoxicating hour, almost
unbearable in the glare of its black-and-white glory and its
breathless tranquillity. On successive boulders beside the
beck I sat and basked in the ghastly blaze ; it was warm and
still as a night in Kandy.

My own method, when I more severely ail, is to rage

T
274 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

through Burroughs & Wellcome’s black box, and take two
pilules out of every pill-tube ; if one does not cure, the next
may. Anyhow, some effect is bound to be produced, even
if the method be a trifle drastic and empirical. Unfortun-
ately, on this occasion I took too comprehensive a variety
of medicines to combat my ills; though the effect, indeed,
was produced, it was almost excessive ; with the result that
when, on the morrow, we did at last set off for the Alps, in a
fine but filmy morning with a hard cold wind, I suddenly
“came over” abjectly weak and weary, and felt myself a
fool for going. But there is no medicine for megrims half so
good as mountains; I was ere long completely preoccupied.
Down the depths of the Dene we rode, and up the shingled
miles of the confluent river, meeting, in the alder-coppice of
the boulder-bed, with the abandoned antlers of an elk, left
there till its lucky murderer should have time to come and
reclaim them. Then up the mountain-side we still rode, and
up to the Ma-chang, and up and up and up into the Alp, and
over its bays and folds, till we actually attained on horse-
back to the mountain of black blocks above the Clear
Lake. ;

It is a curious place, so loose a compilation of sombre
vast rocks that the turf between is springy with unfilled holes
beneath, and there are deep caverns and hollows everywhere
among the boulders, and water trickling. and lurking, as if
the whole hill were a sponge. As it indeed is, a slack-woven
texture, full of pores and passages, lightly accumulated, and
never settled down into solidity. Here we encamped ;
Bill in one tent, and I in another, and the staff in the
big white one, lent us by the Viceroy of the Koko-
Nor.

Close below lies the Clear Lake, down a steep climb among
the dips and dells of the boulder-mountain. But at its head
there intervenes the Jardin of which I spoke, a smooth delta
of becks and rills converging to the Lake. And, as I now
patrolled it gently, while the tents were being established,
I realized with a certain sardonic amusement that all my
 

PRIMULA FARRERI, SPECIES NOVA.
From a sketch by the Author.
THE HASTENED END 275

other expeditions in the Da-Tung Alps had been wasted.
For here, in this stretch of a quarter of a mile across and a
hundred yards deep, occurred every high Alpine flower that
I had found in the whole course of the season’s arduous and
unrewarding expeditions—with the solitary exception of
Primula urticifolia, immovably calcicole. It was a bewilder-
ingly enrapturing place, with its paradoxical population,
seeded down from the heights or translated by the becks.
All the Poppies were there, all the Primulas, and many
another adminicle of delight. And they all looked like guests
and aliens, gathered together in one space by Nature’s special
invitation. I benignly revelled among the seeds, now ripe
for the gathering, even to the prevalent Alpine Saxifrage of
these ranges—a feathery spire of white stars, rising from a
rosette of very handsome glossy primuloid foliage : and each
star with a pompous fat eye of black-purple, from the con-
spicuous swollen carpels. I suspect this of being S. egregia ;
anyhow it abounds all over the high lawns of the Da-Tung,
and descends to the foot of the Pass. But why pause on one
pleasure, when there were so many more? I was soon as
fat as Humpty Dumpty, with swollen seed-packets bulging
me out in every direction. Indeed, that Jardin at the head
of the Clear Lake is perhaps the most entrancing collecting-
ground I have ever struck ; it was not with the altitude alone
that my heart went boppoty-bop as I perused its gentle
swards and shingle-flats.

That over-tried organ suffered greatly indeed, and did
the oddest things. Wakeful through the nights I lay, with
its rumblings and bumblings and stoppages; it seemed to
me to make such a noise that often I wondered if it was not
avalanches in the silence of the lonely Alpine dark; but
heart-anguishes, hunger and weakness were all obliterated
by the deifying glory of that place. Even in the doorway of
my tent I was so happy that I could hardly breathe. All
around me that tumble of mountainous dark conglomerate
boulders, big as houses, with Isopyrum flopping purple in
their crevices ; and down between them deep mossy caverns,
276 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

or elastic turfy dells beneath which you could hear surrep-
titious waters gurgling ; and the Jardin mapped out below ;
and then the paralysing clean emerald of the Clear Lake, set
in a bevel of sloped green lawns beneath the raw red stone
slopes from Croda Rossa, high overhead on the right. And
all around us nothing but the untarnished empty glory of
the Alpine lawns, incomparably gigantic beneath the naked
piled wilderness of the peaks. Not for the first time did the
exalted loneliness of high places take hold of me, and seize
me out of myself, “ and charm away all wrinkles That cares
and frets and worries of our days Had written in the fore-
head of my soul.” But never, I think, have I known quite
so scarifying a spring-cleaning as I endured at the hands of
that high basin of the Alps, so vast and pure, without touch
or taint of man since the beginning of time, and on to
the unutterable end. No wonder if the Holy Ones
haunt the great heights and draw from them their
holiness.

How powerful are the wings of man’s fancy: how feeble
the efforts of man’s legs. Small marvel the Hebrew Lord
takes no delight in them. Despite the blank white bliss of
my inner mood, it was a toilful puffing person who agonized
up and down the swells of those virgin lawns. They were
now all fired to russet by early frosts: their brief life was
over, and their winter at hand. But meanwhile they had
burst into a final flare of glory with Gentians and Saxifrages.
The Saxifrages were golden creatures of the Hirculus per-
suasion, varying in size, but superb at their best (F. 200)
with blue foliage and big blossoms of gorgeous clear glitter.
The Gentian had not the massed meek loveliness of G.
hexaphylla, but all the same it sheeted the whole moorland
in a film of milky blue ; being G. triflora, bold and upstand-
ing, with three or four fat big trumpets gathered together at
the top of a five-inch stem, rather like a magnified and
glorified G. Pneumonanthe, but of a softer, paler, watery
colour. I even found a pure albino, ugly and disappointing
as albino Gentians almost always are. What ails the mortal
THE HASTENED END 277

mind so to crave for variations that are bound inevitably to
disappoint, in so far as they are, ipso facto, variations from a
beauty such as that of a blue Gentian, on which no improve-
ment is conceivable ?
CHAPTER XIII
FAREWELL TO WOLVESDEN

The rambling days went by in expeditions hither and
thither up among the breasts of Axeinos and Thanatos, and
over the enormous alps, in search of seed: to end always in
an ecstasy of happiness, as we sat at rest in the tent door,
absorbing the panorama of the fells, browning to autumn,
while away over the Clear Lake, beyond its mountain barrier,
the distances opened out infinitely far, over the crumpled
lower ranges away below, in ripple over world-wide ripple
of softest and most entrancing blue, with the gaunt naked-
ness of the Gadjur range for crest of its culminating wave.
Often Gadjur bred level banks of violet darkness in the
afternoons, and Thanatos, not to be outdone, ere long filmed
over the glory of the day in dullness, and out of dullness ere
long brewed dark, which became violent, became a torrent of
rain, became deluges of snow that fell in soft cascades all
night. I would wake from fitful slumbers to what sounded
like alarming stone-falls from Croda Rossa or Axeinos,
possibly threatening the camp; but on looking out it was
only Bill and the servants clearing the solid masses of snow
off the tents. And so would dawn, in time, a new day of
stark diamond-clear radiance, almost unbearably brilliant
on a new world of whiteness, which, however, rapidly began
to resume its normal colours under the hot lances of sun-
light.

Off one would start, this way or that; and on return
would find the camp in a mighty fluster of consternation,
black-and-violet layers of storm having by now accumu-
lated over the whole northerly region, soon to materialize

278
FAREWELL TO WOLVESDEN 279

over us also, in furious squalls, thunder and lashing hail,
together with the penetrating grisly cold that floods all these
high alps the moment that the sun has ceased to smile. But
seed-gathering went very well; in one fold of the Alps a
Celestial Poppy gave us pods of so special a size, shape,
wartiness and thorniness, containing seed so brown and
fat and big and square that I almost dared diagnose a
different species—a wild hope which the whole habit, up to
date, of F. 735 in cultivation goes far to encourage, though
of its flowers not even Bill (who had passed down that dell in
summer) had any clear recollection, to differentiate it from
M. Prattii. The only new treasure of any moment lived in
the very highest scree-slopes of all, where every other form
of life had faded out in the universal deadness and ruin of
Axeinos and Thanatos. This was an Aconite that sat
dumpily in voluminous masses of very handsome foliage
scalloped and glossy, close over which emerged stocky masses
of very large blossoms in a close buzzle of helmets, in texture
like Japanese silk-crépe, and of the oddest, most subtle and
lovely colour, like oyster-coloured chiffon over a blue slip,
so that its effect was that of a delicate French grey or smoke.
This strange and sinister beauty had a tap-root that seemed
anxious to get down again to the bottom of everything ;
however, with much delving, I worried up a few of the smaller
plants, in a faint hope against hope that I might get them
home alive; but Alas! it was not to be.

It is a wonderful walk round the Clear Lake. First of
all down our cataclysm of loose-piled monoliths, porous
with deep mossy chasms, and waters flowing far down
under them; and so across the Jardin to the far shore,
where the red scree shoots straight from the ruinous peak of
Croda Rossa into the green water itself. Here you must
scuttle, for fresh stone-falls come constantly cannonading
down the couloirs and cliffs overhead, like sugar-blocks
clattering down from a scoop. Then comes a curious
rounded swell of boulders, settled and old and moss-grown,
standing out into the lake. Being cool and dank and shady,
280 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

this is matted with large loose masses of rather sad-looking
and flowerless Androsace mucronifolia. And after this you
resume the scree-slope, loose and raw and red, sinking in
steep taut lines to the Lake.

Here, as I went, precautiously, quick and light, I was
gradually engulphed in a great pervading roar that seemed
to come from everywhere, and yet evidently came from
nowhere. I pried about anxiously, but could discern no
visible cause: there was nothing round me at all but the
dry red scree, and down below, the Lake, and up overhead,
the lower cliffs of Croda Rossa. And yet here was this
voluminous muted roaring, like some continuing stone-fall
not so very far away. It took me several minutes to place
its source; this, like Hamlet’s father’s ghost, was in the
cellarage. Down under the scree, in fact, beneath my feet,
a subterranean torrent was making that hoarse uncanny
sound ; and yet, up above, there was no sign of any water
at all on the dead precipices and gullies of Croda Rossa,
while the Lake lay perfectly smooth and tranquil below,
with no trace of receiving any such volume of water, even
beneath its surface. Evidently the torrent is a secret birth
in Croda Rossa, and sinks sheer down towards some tardy
emergence in the valley below the alp.

Round the far bay the circuit of scree grows milder, and
so you come to the end of the Clear Lake, where the real
stream brims over the lip of its moorland barrier in a delicious
stretch of clear bubbling pools and whirls, rippling darkly
round among the dark boulders that lie sunken and becalmed
over the face of the fell and its shallow dip. And the near
marge is green alpine lawn again, all along, velvety and
elastic, with the green water lapping lazily against a hem of
white silt, in which springs a new tall Aconite of no particular
attraction. Ahead of you, over the dwarfed chaos of
boulders from which the indiscernible minuteness of the
camp dominates the flat of the Jardin beneath, now towers
the lumpish massiveness of Axeinos ; while, with any luck,
as you serenely wander close. along the shore you may get
FAREWELL TO WOLVESDEN 281

the entire pyramid of Croda Rossa mirrored in the unflawed
emerald of the lake.

But now the harvest was all gathered, and with our burden
of bulging packets it was time to break up the camp and get
down again to Wolvesden to prepare our final departure.
August 30 dawned in golden brilliancy with a foretang of
winter already crystalline in the air, and in the hollow
blue folds of the alp and over the browned and sparkling
open faces. Beyond the dip, the whole of the distance was
filled with a fleecy milk sea of white cloud, out of which, one
behind the other, in clear soft blue, the remote ranges rose
like islands. With Go-go and wicked Wa-wa I set out
betimes, to return to Wolvesden over Crest Royal after
Primula reginella, while Bill and the rest were to scour the
descending alps and get down by the Ma-Chang, to secure
the pendulous Cherry, and so forth, on their way.

And hardly had I started when, in the fine turf that
crowned the top of a sloping boulder, there stared at me
a new Gentian, a Gentian that instantly obliterates all
others of its race, and sinks even G. Verna and G. Gentianella
into a common depth of dullness. When the first awe was
over, I gave tongue for Bill, and together, in reverend silence,
we contemplated that marvel of luminous loveliness. Not
the faintest hope possessed me that this glaring miracle
could be a new species. Had not Przewalsky crossed this
range ? How then could he possibly have missed a splen-
dour so assaulting as this? I forgot the chances of the season,
and the complete and abject insignificance of Gentiana
Farreri when not in flower. For Gentiana Farreri it
indeed is, first seen as a Gentian-promise on the crown of
Mother Hubbard, and even now, in its overwhelming
beauty, attributed by my pessimistic modesty to G.
Przewalskyi.

The collector’s dream is to have some illustrious plant to
bear his name immortal through the gardens of future
generations, long after he himself shall have become dust of
their paths. Mere beauty will not do it; for the plant may
282 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

fail and fade in cultivation, and his name be no more known,
except to the learned, as attached to a dead dry sliver on
the sheets of a herbarium. To become vividly immortal in
the Valhalla of gardeners, one must own a species as vigorous
as it is glorious, a thing capable of becoming, and remaining,
a household word among English enthusiasts, such a constant
friend, for example, as Gentiana Gentianella or Primula
auricula. And how few of our new Chinese importations
will probably do this! Already Professor Balfour had
refused me several of my Primulas, as being, despite their
loveliness, of a temper so tricky as evidently not to be long
for this world in English gardens, and therefore not fitted
permanently to bear aloft my name in them. Only reluct-
antly, in fact, had he consented to give me P. Farreriana on
my urgent plea that a Primula of my own I must certainly
have, and that a lovelier one there could not be, and that no
more were likely to be got in my season anyhow, so this one
I must certainly have, permanency or no permanency.

But Gentiaua Farreri is of a very different kidney, and
bids fair to be as solid a permanency as G. Gentianella itself.
It is perfectly hardy, and—what is very remarkable in any
Gentian but miraculously so in a Gentian so miraculously
beautiful—it is perfectly vigorous and easy to deal with in
any reasonable conditions of culture in a cool place not
parched or water-logged. Here, indeed, it forms masses
many times the size of any clump you will see on its own
alps; and already special pilgrimages go to Edinburgh in
August and September, to see those jungles of my Gentian,
a yard through, with some three hundred gigantic trumpets
opening at once. Shall I add that, in addition to growing
so freely, and flowering so lavishly in so late and dull a
moment of the year, this preposterously good-tempered
exception to the rule of its race keeps its glory open, rain
or shine, can be struck from cuttings as copiously as a
Viola, and layered along its shoots as complacently as any
carnation.

And its beauty! Nothing could I foretell of its temper
 

GENTIANA FARRERI, SPECIES NOVA.
From a sketch by the Artist of the Botanical Gardens, Edinburgh.
- FAREWELL TO WOLVESDEN 283

and future history that day, as I stood rapt in contemplation
before the actual plant, the last and greatest event of my
second season, and well worth the whole two years’ expedition
anyhow, merely to have seen it. A fine frail tuft like grass
radiating some half a dozen fine flapping stems—that ‘is G.
Farreri, quite inconspicuous and obscure in all the high lawns
of the Da-Tung, even down into the Dene as low as Wolves-
den House. Until it flowers; and every day in early
September brings a fresh crashing explosion of colour in the
fold of the lawns. For each of those weakly stems concludes
in one enormous upturned trumpet, more gorgeous than
anything attained by G. Gentianella, but in the same general
style and form. But the outline is different, with a more
subtle swell to the chalice, and that is freaked outside in
heavy lines of black-purple that divide long vandykes of dim
periwinkle blue with panels of Nankeen buff between ; inside
the tube and throat are white, but the mouth and the wide
bold flanges are of so luminous and intense a light azure
that one blossom of it will blaze out at you among the grass
on the other side of the valley. In no other plant, except
perhaps, Ipomea Learii, or Nemophila, do I know such a
shattering acuteness of colour: it is like a clear sky soon
after sunrise, shrill and translucent, as if it had a light inside.
It literally burns in the alpine turf like an electric jewel, an
incandescent turquoise.

Do you wonder if I stood spell-bound ? Do you wonder if
my heart also sank to my boots in despair? For how was I
to get this glory home? A plant that only blooms in the
beginning of September—when will it seed? The only
possible chance that I could see lay in transporting living
clumps ; for we clearly could not go on waiting in Wolvesden
for the seed to ripen. Nor was there anyone we could trust
to collect it after we had gone. And yet to miss this would be
to miss the apex of my whole expedition, a thing that ranked
already with my Isopyrum—and even above it for the
uniqueness of its colour. So I did transport the living
clumps; with what awe and attendance you may judge.
284 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

And the Trans-Siberian journey killed them all. My dis-
appointment cut so deep that I put it behind me, and
resolutely banished the memory of that Gentian from my
heart. Months passed, and the War submerged me in work,
and London engulphed me, and the garden ceased to exist,
except as a remote memory. But in August of that year
(1916) a little package reached me from the Botanic Garden
at Edinburgh. Would I give the history of the enclosed
Gentian ? I tore open the box, and there, large and lovely
and luminous as ever, was the lost Da-Tung Gentian, which
I had dismissed all hope of ever seeing again.

Do you ask how the miracle was wrought? I hope you
do, for I intend to tell you. Can you remember how in
1914, over the high lawns of Thundercrown and the Ardjeri
Alps, I collected the elusive seed of Gentiana hexaphylla—
on Thundercrown, with my own hands, and vicariously, by
the servants, on the fells of Ardjeri? And do you also
remember that some of the packets brought down by the
servants seemed to show a different form, to be larger and
thicker and darker in the pod than any of G. hexaphylla’s ?
So different, indeed, did they seem to me that I ultimately
sent them, as a precautionary measure, under different
numbers, as #3154, and F473. And these germs it was that
in due course revealed the despaired-of G. Farreri to the
amazed eyes of Edinburgh. On so frail a thread, and across
so complete an intervening gulf of gloom, was accomplished
the introduction to our gardens of so pre-eminent a plant.
In any Comtist calendar, that reckons only the really
important things for human happiness (rather than the mere
deaths of Sovereigns, and passing of Bills that make no
difference, and conclusions of peaces made of pie crust),
large and red will be the letters that mark the August day
which first revealed my Gentiana to cultivation.

After this vision of beauty you will easily figure to yourself
how easily I sailed across the undulations of the Alps, and
towered lightly to the ridge of Crest Royal, illuminated and
drawn on, as I climbed, by occasional flares of the Gentian,
FAREWELL TO WOLVESDEN 285

just beginning in the turf of the hill-side. On Crest Royal
there was the Little Queen to be got,and the sweet pink
Erysimum ; for long I agonized vainly for the latter, and
at last saw the clustered spectacles of its seed heads at my
very feet, and away down the sunny slope. Broken-backed
by the minuteness of my search for the Primula, I straight-
ened out to descend the scree on the other side, in which a
flannel-leaved Saussurea was the only sign of life, with
elongated domes of straw-coloured fluff and wool in a dense
web like crystallized wadding. In the big dish below the
Harebell Poppy was now in the pleasantest state of seed,
all the pods fat and just dehiscent, not yet dried out, nor
dashed by storms. I spent a very happy hour or two snap-
ping off their jolly plumpnesses till I was bulged as a barrel
in all my pockets. And so, over the rim of the dish at last,
and down the enormous descent of the rib-ridge into Wolves-
den again. And at the very bottom, in a lawn of the Dene,
what should once more blaze upon my sight but my own
Gentian ? And so ended the crucial and final expedition of
my second year. Poor Bill was tired and depressed with
the monotony of our matter, but I, who had feared cross-
luck up there, alike with the weather and the seeds, now
concluded the book of Wolvesden in a climax of radiance, so
to have been spared by the former, and so triumphantly to
have conquered the latter.

Bill now went off to Sining again, to fetch back more
mules for our departure. Meanwhile, there were some final
chores of seed-collecting to be done, as well as the boxing up
of the plants we meant to take down country. More tasks
filled the intervening days to Bill’s return; I even crossed
the Pass to try for seed of the lovely Chickweed (Cerastium
melanandrum), which rambles with its dark and glossy shoots
in the earth-slopes of the Western face, and snows them
under with immense flowers of purest white, flushed often to
the softest and loveliest shell-pink. Of this, though, I failed,
and had to take plants; on my heels Lay-gor had better
luck, following with a pillow-case in which to cram pell-mell
286 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

the terrible thorny spires of Meconopsis Prattii. All the
other seeds being also satisfactorily collected, I returned
to camp at the Ma-Chang in Dolomite Valley, in high delight
to find there such abundance of Isopyrum pods, big and
baggy, precisely ripe for the picking, just browning at the
tops of the opening carpels, but without yet having scattered
their precious germs, as it has a maddening habit of doing as
soon as the pods are really mature, each flow of air rattling
them out right and left. On the cliffs, too, there were three
very lovely soft rose-coloured specimens of the Celestial
Poppy; but all of them impregnable.

Not that it would have been any use if they had been
accessible, they were not ripe in seed, and transplanting
would have been useless. On the morrow I set out to return,
all along the frontage of the cliffs and into their ghylls,
prospecting and collecting. At the foot of the last, the pony
was led up to meet me, saddled only with a jadz’, on which
the bedding was strapped. Elegantly I stepped off upon
it, straight from the rock. Whereupon the jadz’ tilted
delicately away on the far side, and in an instant fell off
down the slope with me on top of it, impotent as a sack.
Consternation raged; I felt it a great comfort to have English
to swear in, as nobody understood, and therefore nobody’s
feelings were hurt, while my own were duly relieved. I was
now assiduously picked up and hyked on again, but for a
long time the jadz’ continued very uncertain in its equili-
brium, and I had several more near shaves, as I rode and
dismounted down the Dene, where my Gentian was by now
beginning to reveal the fullness of its inevitable glory in the
lawns of the lower reaches.

In my activities I was not left wholly lonely. Grand-
mamma Aoo called frequently in with milk and butter ;
also her splendid young descendants. And one day two
gorgeous Tibetan ladies in blue and scarlet went flapping
down the boulders of the beck just as I was collecting seed
of Bill’s Dracocephalum from what had once been blue-
sheeted drifts of it in the mud-flats alongside the clear rills
FAREWELL TO WOLVESDEN 287

and pools that lurk in the wide reaches of the alder jungle
across the torrent. Behind them there followed a lone
stray dog, whom in vain they tried to detach from their
tracks by throwing stones at it.

But once a decision has been taken, I am always imme-
diately afire to carry it out forthwith; and now I was
growing desperate to pack up and be done with Wolvesden
for ever, and off on the southward trail. I even wondered
if I could haul up sufficient zeal to accomplish the one
remaining seed-hunt—up Southerly Valley to the col, and
down again by the converging glen. But of courseI did:
incomplete unclean finishes are an abhorrence to me, and I
could not rest till I had got my season thoroughly achieved.
Accompanied by both Wa-wa’s, Go-go, an accidental idiot,
and a new intelligent coolie originally called Wongar (but,
for a certain resemblance, known as “‘ Bongie”’ instead), I
rode up, past the Aoo’s, on the idiot’s bright little red pony.
And very comfortably I rode, on my folded blanket, and
actually continued riding all the way, up the gorge, up the
glen, right away up to the col itself. It was quite fair going
anyhow, and I felt disinclined for gratuitous exertion. As
I intended this to be tiv rwavvatdatny 6dév dmdowy in the
parts, I meant to accomplish as much of it as I could,
é& dxwnrov wodds. On the col I alighted, and the pony
went back to wait at Casa Aoo, while the rest of us dredged
the heights for seeds. All the turf was gay with golden
Saxifrages, and sturdily stood up the milky blue clustered
trumpets of Gentiana triflora; every now and then out
crashed the azure note of G. Farreri from the mild general
beauty of the chorus; and each time made me jump anew
with the rapture of its piercing clearness. Across the ridge
I descended to the steading where we had slept, and there-
abouts made a sumptuous harvest of the Isopyrum. Furies
of rain now supervened, and we sheltered in the opportune
lean-to’s. When we went on downwards the pleasure of
that last pleasant day was done. For now the sky was
black, the wind piercing, and the soaked scrub drenched me
288 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

to the thighs in no time: below, in the Ghyll, this was
succeeded by soaked coppice of just such a nice height as
to flap ice-water in our faces or pour down deluges on our
heads. Altogether it was odious; when I at last reached
the pony I could not think of riding, but raced ahead for
warmth towards the Dene, although the idiot in charge had
had the surprising sense to put a waterproof over the bedding.
With Wa-wa on my heels I tore down to Wolvesden, shifted,
had tea, sorted my harvest, and then folded my hands in
supreme achievement, feeling now so heartily satisfied with
my closing stodge among these Alps, that it was evident the
odiousness of the day’s shower had been merely the final
spite of these grudging old granite mountains at our having
so triumphed over them all along the line. And now arrived
Lady Aoo with a present of clotted cream, and in a little
while more cries were heard, and quite unexpectedly Bill
himself came riding in with news of the required mules
following behind in charge of fat, comfortable Sining Tanguei ;
and laden, too, with a rich cargo of furs, coats and robes of
lynx and sand-fox and squirrel, looted from Peking long
since, and now sold off at a bargain by the robber, established
in security at Sining.

When the caravan at last came jingling up there was
accordingly a great unpacking, and the Dene that night
saw strange pavanes and perambulations, as we strutted
stately in first one sumptuous vestment and then another,
sweeping in the exuvie of squirrels, or opulent in depths of
lynx, or merely picturesque in parquetries of sand-fox. For
the Chinese excel in picture-puzzling with their furs: it is
not enough for them merely to make up a robe of skins, but
they cut and slide and slice them till the reverse of the coat
is like nothing so much as a mad mosaic of stitchery. But
the outer result is often parcelled and panelled fantastically
in contrasting squares, or peacock-eyed with a different fur ;
particularly lovely are the coats all creamy and primrose
with the breasts of Tibetan sand-fox, appliqués with round
dabs of pale blue and soft chestnut from squirrels.
FAREWELL TO WOLVESDEN 289

But now the preparations for departure went furiously
forward, further exasperated by the fact that autumn had
clearly arrived in the Alps, made manifest in universal cloud
and mizzle, and continuing Arctie cold. Gradually everything
was packed, even to the plants in their boxes, and our
happy little house dismantled. It was a miserable delight.
I grudged each wasted minute before we got away, yet
looked comfortably forward to the regret of years. Out
may come the stoves and chimneys, back may go the K’angs
and the black dark of unbroken walls, but Wolvesden House,
I feel, though abandoned again for evermore to mules and
muleteers, remains perpetually my property. Dear little
house, how dull you sometimes were; how desirable you
always are !—sitting up there, far away, lost and lone in your
deep groove of the great Tibetan Alps. Those who may
wish (in days I hope still distant) to commune with my ghost
must take a long journey ; to where it will be found cheeping
and chittering wanly round the mud-plastered walls of
Wolvesden, rather than on the Schneeberg or the Tombia or
even Moncenisio.

And now, in the break-up of the home, came out the full
extent of Grandmamma Aoo’s ambitions. All the summer
through that noble little old lady had so plethorically fed us
on the best of butter and cream and milk that by this time
we bulged. And all the time she had firmly refused to enter-
tain a single penny of payment. But now, at the end, the
inmost desire of her heart was coyly unfolded. Might she,
might she, did we think, be allowed to possess one of our
empty bottles—and, at that, not a dull opaque black bottle,
such as is favoured by whisky, but a crystal bottle, such as
once was the shrine of Chartreuse or Créme-de-Menthe ?
Behold the fatal error of those who travel teetotal in the
Tibetan highlands, where glass in every form is precious and
rare as jewels. And how lucky that we ourselves had been
more provident, and not heretical to the plumpy deity of
pink eyne: for now Grandmamma Aoo could be amply
repaid with about half a dozen specimens of her heart’s

U
290 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

desire. With these, as much too precious to be trusted to
other hands, she went home staggering up the glen herself ;
then returned with all her descendants and collaterals, to
gather up any other flotsam that might be giving away. A
proud lady was she, these days, twinkling delightedly from
amid her elf locks; and a proud lady she undoubtedly
continues, probably the best hated hostess on the Border—
triumphant in a more general jealousy than if she went
pranking it in three tiaras at the Opera. Let no one, I
repeat, who proposes to travel in Tibet, abhor the bottle:
it is a very present help in time of trouble when moderately
full, but especially, when empty, the pilgrim’s most precious
coin of barter.

Cold and clear as a diamond dawned September 13 into
Wolvesden, flooding the deeps of the glen with gold and
striking sparkles from all the frosted lawns. Like Attila
on Cormons watching the burning of Aquilia, I stood on the
breast of lawn behind, to watch the dismantling of the home.
All around me were Aoo’s, bearing burdens, and seeking
more. Every rag and scrap had been torn out of the rooms
and enthusiastically garnered; gone were the stoves, their
chimneys, the windows of plate-glass, and everything down
to the minutest scrap of metal—all compiled on the broad
backs of the gleeful Aoo’s. For why, meanwhile, does little
Tanguei sit sad and sullen on Hill 60, deserted even by his
pig (engaged in a final despairing philander with the brown
pony), and taking no part at all in the packings or apportion-
ings? Bad little Tanguei, a goodly proportion of our relics
had been carefully set aside for his due perquisite indeed ;
but at the last moment it was discovered that he had antici-
pated matters. Concealed among his father’s coffin-boards
were sundry of our possessions brought to light. Justice
accordingly proclaimed. that he had forfeited his share in
our rejecta, and that the entire stock must now be trans-
ferred, instead, to the Aoo’s. These, then, were in the
broadest grins of glee. But Tanguei sat silent and aloof,
in a disconsolate sulk, like the little boy with a smarting tail
FAREWELL TO WOLVESDEN 291

in the Ingoldsby Legends. I am afraid there was bad blood
brewed that day between him and the Aoo’s.
Breakings-up are dreadful; I will not dwell on my fare-
wells to that golden place, where my Gentian was now in the
full of its splendour beside the stone-shoots up the lawns
across the beck, so unsufferably beautiful that even now my
memory staggers in the thought of it, as I saw it that last
morning, and said good-bye to it (as I feared, for ever) in the
nippy sparkle of that virginal air, filled with strange haunting
autumnal fragrances, chill and delicious and sad. But now
all was ready, and Lady Aoo presented us with a poor fluffy
sheep that one of her descendants had been out all the
previous day on the hills procuring. Away rode Bill down
the Dene ahead of us toward Tien Tang: away moved the
caravan. Ina fury of joy to be going, in a fury of regret to
be gone, I hastened to mount the grey pony at last, and for
the last time turned my back hastily on Wolvesden.
Uneventfully, in a stupor of distracted feelings I shep-
herded the caravan down the Dene, and over the hills to Tien
Tang. Seed-gatherings delayed me here and there, so that
when I at length arrived in that delicious bourne, it was to
find the staff already installed. But no longer in our old
quarters : this time we were the guests of the Chancellor, or
Prior, in his own wide-house with L-shaped yard. He
himself was not yet at home; but soon arrived from across
the river by the pulley-haul basket contraption that the
monks had recently rigged up (since a mighty business of
tree-fellng was now going forward in the forest opposite,
on order of the Viceroy) to save the waste of that long trail
down to Chiao-Tor. A kindly and charming host he proved ;
all the civilities passed, and in procession across the yard
we bore him presents of Missionary jam in a tin, Pulu
(Tibetan) serge, cakes, kataghs, and an enamelled wash-basin.
These were accepted with vehement protests and depre-
cations; then, immediately on our return to our own
verandah, requited with butter, sugar, grated cheese, and a
dishful of those little tubers of Potentilla anserina, which
292 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

make such good eating on the Border (they taste nuttily, of
Asparagus and new potatoes) as to make me now feel that
whatever may be the future rigours of rationing in England,
our greed need never suffer, nor its belly be constricted, so
long as Silverweed abounds along every highway-side all
over the country. And after dinner both the Priors came
across to call, and hankered round admiringly among our
possessions.

In chat and pleasantness closed the evening, and on the
morrow, very early, we rode on for the last time out of Tien
Tang. Rode in the wrong direction, up the steep slant of the
track round the big bluff below the Abbey, that impends
upon the Da-Tung-Hor. Fora little while the Sa-wa Wa-wa
trotted alongside, after the farewell good wishes of the monks
had faded,.but soon even he dropped away, and the curve of
the cliff shut out Tien Tang and everything of Wolvesden
was left behind now and safely sealed into the past. My
heart, like Fanny’s (though in no other respect, I hope), can
never resist the sad influences of the word “last”; exactly
three years ago to-day as I write I rode for the last time
out of Tien Tang; and through blurred eyes of memory I
still see each step of the way as blurred as I did then—
looking back and looking back, till that golden bay of sun-
shine was hidden finally from sight.
CHAPTER XIV
BACK TO LANCHOW

Between Tien Tang and Ping-Fan the journey is one of
five days, up and down, over the big ranges of arid open
downs that intervene between the Gadjur range and the
Da-Tung Alps. In due course it crosses the last fading
extension of Gadjur, and then, by long vales, sinks to the
Ping-Fan River and Ping-Fan. Here you have regained
the Great North Road, which carries you thence across
country, from the Ping-Fan River to the Hwang-Hor, and
back to Lanchow.

But I could take little joy in the journey. My face was
set in the reverse direction from. my heart: the Da-Tung
Alps soon died out in the backward distance, and there were
no more anywhere at all, and the soul within me was like
lead. Even when various little passes of 9,000 {t. or 10,000 ft.
might have offered farewell sights of Thanatos and his
colleagues along the skyline, there never was any skyline,
but the remotenesses of Heaven and earth were blended in
one monotony of dun-coloured haze. Occasionally the track
ascends by wooded windings in the fell. These were softly
lovely, and led to lush and pretty upper lawns, filled with all -
manner of autumnating herbage. And there followed happy
windings up a deep forested chine down between the big fell
masses that one sees from the high tops of Tien Tang. At
the top of this was a marshy upland plain where the stream
meandered level with its fount, amid drifts of yellowing Iris,
and tussocks fringed with what looked like a Swertia but
proved to be a pretty little Delphinium of palest water-blue.
In ranges so dull, this was evidently to be my last flower of

293
294 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

the year. But now Bill was lost, and after long waitings we
went on again up over the hills by hidden coilings to a pass
amid hideous knubbly peaks of conglomerate, faced with
here and there a mangy scab of vegetation. On the other
side we descended into a broad river bed, with the ragged
splendour of Gadjur now quite close at hand up at its head
incredibly gaunt and stark and cruel. But away from it,
down the river vale, we had to proceed, still between the
fantastic red Pulhamite freaks of conglomerate that fill all
this intervening region, wherever peaks emerge; and
through a smiling homely scene of fields and harvest, and
golden stretches of stubble, and cornstocks arrayed for
carrying. And finally, in a village of fine houses so square
and solid that I felt they must be Tibetan (though the blue-
clad bending Ruths among the corn were all Chinese, and a
Chinese temple posed alone in the ridge of the hill above), I
found the despaired-of Bill already awaiting us in the wide
yard of an inn.

Tao-erh, despite its solid houses and its abundance of
prayer flags, was a Chinese village after all, of agents and
traders in wool with the Tibetans. Hence its combined
atmosphere. The morrow gave us a very long stage: there
is no recording its windings unless with a special map, and I
am sure my publisher, like him of the Wrong Box, would be
averse to the expense. Miles of serene vales, miles of
downs, phantasmagorias of red pinnacles: the glorious day
was like that of a fine shoot at home, with a colourless ha’ar
over the distance, and an autumnal delicious nip that perhaps
intensified my feeling that the wooded Northerly slopes
and the rosy conglomerate peaks of the valley recalled the
foothills of the Alps. Over a pass commanding a vast fell
panorama, as it might have been Ribblehead on a huge
scale, with Potentilla scrub for heather, we dipped into a
new vale, and up a converging valley, and across it to a ridge
which we mounted in a bold zigzag. All about were big
untouched masses of wood. I might have known their
reason, for, as we mounted the zigzag, what I had fancied
BACK TO LANCHOW 295

was a walled granary fortress ahead of our track in the
valley below, now unfolded beneath us as a very comfortable
large monastery—with two big churches squarely sitting
within its wide half-occupied square. It was a strange
outpost of Tibet in a country now so wholly Chinese
again.

More valleys now, more passes, and then in and out along
the wide open faces of the fells towards a valley-head, and
the highest pass of all, a height of some 10,000 ft. or more.
No flowers of any moment, however, could be expected at so
contemptible an elevation and in aregion so un-Alpine. But
as we mounted towards the actual col, I perceived the moor-
land turf to be veiled in a film of blue. A little nearer and it
was as if the azure zenith itself had descended solid all along
the tops (but no lower), for here, quite suddenly, was my own
Gentian again so vehemently abounding, and in such a
unanimity of glory that hardly could you set your foot down
anywhere on the moor without crushing at least half a dozen
of its imperious trumpets. I raged about, in a stupor of
rapture, searching, of course, for Albinos, but retaining
sense enough to be glad [found none. And the other side of
the pass was a complete bathos—raw plebeian loess and
commonplace Asters, beautiful indeed in their pessimistic
purples, but dull on the retina after the luminous glare of
the Gentian.

And after all this, “‘ such a much.” For the journey tailed
on and on, and each successive hope of our bourne proved
delusive, and on we had to go again. The day began
declining ; the flat wide champaign of golden stubble was
filled in the centre by a long sloping three-sided hill, with a
three-sided little red fortalice on its apex, and all its broad
triangular face a blaze of gold in the slants of sundown.
Away behind it loomed up a huge rounded headland of
precipices, mistily pink on the powder-blue of the darkling
sky. Surely beneath this watch-tower of China and Tibet,
that village crouching at its feet must be the Thirty Bril-
liances, our destination ? No such thing. Another twenty
296 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

li. A climb, a drop, sunset ; another col, and then another
drop towards a village in sight away at the foot of the vale
which this time really could not help being Thirty Brilliances
(or Thirty Names; I do not know the character for Ming
in San-shir-Ming). But still it was no such thing. Away
down the richly cultured valley we had to go on winding, and
all the hills had now died away into low dull ranges of
hummocks that are hardly less tedious and sterile in their
summer life than in their winter death. It was dark, and
everybody tired and heart-sick with hope deferred : a kindly
soul by the wayside cheered us with “ Dao-la” (you've
arrived). But where? It was still long before we wound
again leftward round a buttress of the hills and came at once
into a village which surely, surely must be Thirty Brilliances
—or Thirty Names, and all bad ones. But on and on we
steadily went, right through it: I despaired. Till abruptly
at the very extremity of the place, just as hope had com-
pletely forsaken me, we did actually find ourselves turning
into a vast-yarded inn with two small dungeon-sculleries at
either end of its wings, to serve for Bill and me.

It was not San-shir-Ming at all, but Man-che-Tang. We
rode out of it betimes, in a grilling morning, up through rich
lovely open lands of waving corn, white to the harvest, up
to a small col, and over this still upward, towards a mighty
down-mass running South-East and no doubt the final fading
tail-tip of the Gadjur range. Here it was all open turf with
outcrops of rock : Iris tenuifolia abounded in grassy swathes,
as it does all along these high downs where the soil is not
loess. I was soon exhilarated again to be winding in the
sunshine along the voluminous naked flanks of that green
fell, in that sparkle of the air crisp with the decadent
autumnal deliciousness of dying Artemisias. Down we
descended far into a very deep ghyll, glorious in rich wood-
land on its other side with the mountain ash magnificent in
cascades of blood-drops. And then abruptly up to the left,
up and up, towards a pass so imminent and high that I never
dared hope we should have to cross it. But we did: thus
BACK TO LANCHOW 297

traversing the big down. On the crest, however, though we
were at a greater height than anything we had achieved since
leaving Wolvesden, there was no sign of my Gentian, or of
any other interesting Alpine—either because this crest was
of loess or because the scene was now too far removed from
the Alpine region.

On the far side we descended placidly down long, long
vales of browning moorland, till gradually we came into an
enormously lengthy, dull and hideous shallow valley, with
bursts of red rock, and fantastic toad-stones and boulders
squatting on the right-hand skyline. And ahead at its
remotest leftward coil reappeared at last the crumply and
ochre-coloured downs of all the Lanchow region. Clearly
we were making here our farewells to the fading hills, and
coming back to the river levels of Kansu, with Ping-Fan
and the Great North Road somewhere round the corner at
the end of our stage. It was still a long stretch. By this
time I was completely tired. The weariness and labour of
the trail increase upon one steadily in China, and after nearly
two years of it, on and off, three days of trekking at the end
are more arduous and exhaustive than three weeks at the
start. No doubt it makes a difference, too, that the start is
the start, with all the joys and glories of the journey still
ahead; while the end ¢s the end darkening hourly to the
depths of Finis, with all the joys and glories receding hourly
further into the irrecoverable past. Nor were the prudences
of the cat befriending cook without their influence on my
mood. For, though she had so far modified as to dispatch a
few of the stores on which I had counted to carry us through
the culminating fatigues and exhaustion of the close, yet
these were so very few as merely to make a mock of our
necessities, having to be so agonizingly economized that all
the time one’s rumbling wolf was neither sustained nor
satisfied. But all the same, to show that the heart-loading
length of these stages was not subjective only, but very real,
I need only say that poor fat Sining Tanguei, who had brought
us the new mules to Wolvesden, was now painfully hobbling,

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4
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298 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

with my stick as well as his own to help him forward, while,
actually, the wicked Wa-wa grew so tired that he had to
lag and rest behind, and ultimately had to be sent back for
and fetched. with a mule when we got down to Ping-Fan.
For get down at last we did, out of the hills into the broad
river-flats below; and, turning a corner to the right, now
saw before us, some three miles ahead across the plain, the
noble irregular many-angled walls of Ping-Fan (Easy-Food ?)
picturesquely engulphed in volumes of verdure; while on
the near side of the river, along the downs overhead, the
most fairy-like temples perched along astoundingly fantastic
-pinnacles of loess. On we went, after a vain wait for the
Wa-wa; the Ping-Fan-Hor has a hugely wide shingle flat
for its bed, but now was flowing in only two channels, swift
and dark and vicious. Successfully we made the ford, and
had no difficulty in finding our inn, in the street of inns along
outside the Western wall, facing to the river, and now a
grilling suntrap in the Westering glare. Bill now went back
to guide in Lay-gor and the lagging little tired asses, and
send for the Wa-wa. We decided, seeing how completely
done up was all the staff, thenceforth to take a cart for
ourselves down the remaining stages to Lanchow, thus
freeing the ponies and the bed-bearing mule for the various
servants in turn, while the Wa-wa could come with us.
Easier said than managed ; not a Peking cart, it appeared,
was in the place, important stage on the Great North Road
though it be. Easier managed than said, after all; for,
characteristically, after all the negations and impotencies of
last night, there in the morning a cart duly was. My spirits
cast aside their dolefulness and danced ; the hot soft balmy
air made me feel as if I had just got down to Bozen from the
Stelvio, and even the being in a Chinese town again after
so much mountain solitude set my heart aglow with the
delight of humankind. And now the cart came up—be-
times, too; I bundled in, and set thankfully off, ahead of
the caravan, padded upon my bags and bedding in such an.
ecstasy of comfort as only those who have been on trek for a
BACK TO LANCHOW 299

whole season can understand one’s finding in so ingenious
an engine of torment as a Peking cart on a Chinese Imperial
high-road—which, for surface and quality, is comparable
only to a fading cart-track across a Yorkshire fell. But
the Great North Road is deep and velvety, and soft with
looseness along this stretch ; blissfully I rolled out of Ping-
Fan with the Wa-wa perched in front of me on the cart-sill,
immovably superior, as usual, to all he surveyed, needing
nothing but a livery to turn him into the most typical little
Tiger who ever carried compromising correspondence in a
Victorian comedy. I felt, indeed, that I myself could by
no means live up to the crushing superiority of my little
squire now once more mine only: the monks of Tien Tang
had been so shocked in their sense of dignity to find Bill and
I had but the one between us, that we had felt ourselves
forced to engage the Sa-wa Wa-wa, if only to equalize matters
and save appearances. But now that the need for this was
over, the wicked Wa-wa reverted to his original post, as my
own particular proprietor.

It was very pleasant, rolling at ease out of Ping-Fan, past
the many fine walls and towers of the Manchu city, and
through a noble new pagoda’ed gate-house. Down the
empoplared lanes we lumbered in the radiant morning,
Rivieran in the sweet tang of the sweet breeze that came
dancing up to meet us, and was shovelled into the depths of
the cart by the big square awning built right out in front at
an upward slant, over the mule. The country was the same
as that between Lanchow and Sining, but now all heavily
plumed with lovely green in the wide valley of this river,
which is evidently fast shrinking. For its actual bed is
to-day a grass-grown permanent plain, with only room for
runnels here and there; thus showing how all this sad
ancient land is rapidly drying up, and must, ere long, unless
the former forests are gradually renewed, go the same way
as Lob-Nor and Turfan and Khetan the Old. Even the
Koko-Nor is dying from its former rims. But in the midst
of these melancholy musings Bill overtook me at a canter,
300 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

in towering spirits, and packed off the Wa-wa ahead on the
brown pony, while he himself clambered into the cart. We
achieved the rest of the way very happily in chat, refreshing
our throats with gulps from one of the huge but insipid pink-
fleshed melons that are always meeting one in stacked cart-
loads up the North Road, and are so seductively lovely in
their great piled quarters on Chinese fruit stalls, in the
contrast of green rind and rose-pink flesh with bright black
seeds embedded. Our eyes we perpetually refreshed with
the verdure all round us, and with the distant right-hand
view, which down its length was a long fantastic chevaux
de frise of pinnacles and spires and towers, each crowned
with a fairy-like temple as delicate and poised as if it were a
bird alighted from Heaven ; and all softly blue and dove-
colour and far away.

Our stage was the quiet little mouldering town of Red-
borough (Hung Chung). And on the morrow we plunged
into the abomination of death once more, turning away
Eastward from the Ping-Fan-Hor, to cut across the angle
that it makes with the Hwang-Hor. This is all a wholly
desert land; we spent the long day coiling and winding in
and out and up and down among hideous lifeless hummocks
of red and ochre and grey, and then down an endless and
horrible shallow valley of dry bones, between slag-dump hills
of desolation ; and then upwards and Eastwards through
more ranges to match, till our way was temporarily cheered
by a temple lodged on an efflorescence of crag; and by
reviving cultivation in the flats, and by a new appearance
of that solid erosion-resisting red-rock, which had emerged
from the hill-side above Nien-Bi-Hsien in what looked like
pillared frontages of an imperial tomb. Here it stood up
occasionally, stark and lone, in gigantic blocks like Egyptian
temples gone a little blurred, with a crumbling cap of earth
a-top. The road sank soundless in depths of sand: the
going was slow and very bad. It was late when we reached
our stage at Black-Dyke-Water (Hai-dja-Shui).

And here we rummaged out our belongings to try and
BACK TO LANCHOW 301

make some sort of decent reappearance in Lanchow on the
morrow. Off went Bill, very early, and in a kind of flutter
I proceeded after him, tremulously agog, after all these
months, to be re-entering what the accomplished Amanda
McKittrick Ross would call “‘ the heightened haunts of high-
born socialism.” (She means, I think, Society: not its exact
opposite.) The way was very long and dull, but the day so
fine and lovely that I drowsed along through the balmy air
in a soft beatitude, though nothing was to be seen anywhere
but those lifeless hills of red and grey, with one more burst
of the ruddy castellations. Then we entered a narrow gorge,
and wound and wound and wound, till the hills faded at
last, and suddenly we came out upon the vast valley of the
Hwang-Hor again, and then more suddenly still, round a
last Easterly turning, and there was the whole distance
opened out ahead of us, and the wide sinister face of the
river, and miles of green orchard beyond, away and away,
to where, up the enfolding hills, appeared far off and tiny and
pale, the guard towers of the capital.

The last stretch of the stage was much the worst, for the
road now left its deep sandy velvet, and became bone-hard,
and very stony, so that we agonizingly boppled along in the
full anguish of a Peking cart, till my head felt like rolling
from my shoulders. Nor did the distance ever seem to come
nearer. However, the laws of nature prevail even over the
fancies of fatigue. Bill and Bongie had cantered ahead, and
now Bongie came riding back to meet me, and houses
appeared, and increased, and there was the city developing,
and now we were in the suburb, and ahead of me a steep rise
towards a gate house, and on its parapet, bobbing up and
down for welcome, the white parasol of Mrs. Post Office,
with Bill and Mr. Post Office in attendance. I lumbered
out of the cart, to go courteously up to greet them. And
the simultaneous cry that hailed me back into the crowd of
my kind was “Oh, how you have grown stout!”

Dissembling my wrath against Grandmanima Aoo for
leading me to this reproach, I exchanged heartinesses, and
302 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

off we all set into the city. But no large beautiful house for
me this time: the inn was quite good enough for the short
time which was all I intended to spend in Lanchow. The
next morning I woke from a bad night to another glorious
day, and with the sun’s ascent my spirits towered and I had
all the glow of aking to a lovely London day in June—such
was now my eimotion to be in a big city again, and in soft
air, hot and sweet and full of urban scents. And urban
invitations now flowed in: Ma pestered us for the inevitable
banquet ; Mr. Lo and Mr, Li came calling in their smoothest
silks and brightest smiles and bade us to dinner: and the
Viceroy sent asking for an early conference. But these joys
were darkened for us by the sensation ofthe hour. For there
arrived a piteous letter.from the Sining Missionary, asking
us to do all we could for the poor old Chang Gwan of the
Koko-Nor, and relating the tragic tale of his crash. The
superficial story was all we were told, but Chinese official
life has‘so many undercurrents and dark silent pools that the
apparent reasons are rarely the real ones, and never the only
ones; especially in such times as these were, gravid with
change, overshadowed by Yuan Shih Kai’s now evident
and determined ascent towards the Dragon Throne.

So that the true tale of the Chang Gwan’s fall remains
yet, perhaps, to be told. The official tale related how some
wretched young trading agent was up at Sining on a wool-
deal and came to some arrangement with the Chang Gwan,
in contravention of which it was rumoured that a certain
rival wool-office was opened. It was never proved that this
had really been opened at all; certainly never proved that
it had been opened at the order or even with the knowledge
of the Viceroy. The agent, however, young and rash, and
ignorant of all the ropes, leapt at the worst conclusion with-
out further inquiry, and precipitately wired a complaint to
the central Government. All this story, however, if true,
can only have given the Government a handle for a long
pre-determined stroke. For by return of cable, they asked
no explanations, made no preface of remonstrance, did not
BACK TO LANCHOW 303

even in due form accept the resignation of the Viceroy.
They ordered his instant arrest and dispatch to Peking.
The order was carried out with calculated brutality, and as a
crowning insult entrusted to Ma Da-ren the Mahomedan.
Without warning or decency, the Military Governor marched
into the Viceregal Palace, and arrested the Viceroy in full
Yamen. With the shame and the shock the poor old man
went stone-blind. And thus vanishes from history the last
Manchu Viceroy of Koko-Nor Tibet. In a greater actor and
on an imperial stage, the tragedy of Great Lord Fang of
Siku was here re-enacted. But when I remembered the
Chang Gwan, that genial kindly little old gentleman, and
all he had done for us, and the friendliness he had shown, I
confess that I should have liked a few plain words with that
wool agent.

The next day I had my interview with the Viceroy of
Kansu. In three carts went Mr. Li and Bill and I. Bill
mocked at my tardy strivings after tidiness; and difficult
buttonings into a suit that had once been decent. After
libertine months of décolletage, I myself felt strange and
imprisoned in tie and collar. When we reached the upper
courts of the Palace, behold the Viceroy himself, heaving
forth enthusiastically to greet us, more massive and monu-
mental than ever, in a wadded gown of pale blue silk over
many others. He convoyed us directly to an inner room,
and there showed us many pictures and an ebullient
cordiality. This was by far the most interesting interview
I ever had with a Chinese official, For some reason all
guardedness was laid aside, and the Viceroy unfolded openly
in questions and answers and comments. He seemed to
want particularly to discuss the downfall of the Chang Gwan,
and pointedly asked us what we knew, and how we knew it.
In answer, of course, we did what we could to enforce the
Chang Gwan’s case and urge consideration for him. But
for all his smilings and acquiescences told us, the Kansu
Viceroy might have been his enemy, personal or official.
However, everything we said was very well received, before
304 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

we passed at length up characteristic avenues of aimless
amiable talk, towards the real object of the interview.
The Viceroy of Kansu was one of the many cousins whom
Yuan Shih Kai had been diligently planting out in the big
Viceroyalties for some years past, to prepare public opinion
for his own ascent of the Imperial Throne. And now events
were moving rapidly; the President, at the Temple of
Heaven, had recently performed certain pontifications that
appertain only to the Emperors of China, high priests and
mediators between Heaven and Earth. Though the rites
were modified, this was meant as a ballon d’essat, and made
his purpose unmistakably plain; and the calm atmosphere
of China was thrilling throughout with a sense of the
imminent change. And the Viceroy, no doubt on instruc-
tions, was anxious to find out what we thought of this new
move, and how Europe would accept the establishment of a
new Imperial dynasty. Fortunately what was desired on
one side harmonized with what was thought on the other,
smiles broadened and nods became more frequent and
vigorous as we expatiated with courteous enthusiasm on
the prospects of a China once more secure in her im-
memorial system of democratic autocracy. Public opinion,
indeed so far as we could see, (in the North) hailed the
president’s decision with satisfaction usually, with acqui-
escence at the worst, and nowhere with hostility. The
oldest and wisest of the world’s Empires asks only for peace :
that sovereign or that system which brings her peace must
inevitably be the one that will appeal to China ; yet writing
now more than two years since the collapse and death of the
Emperor Yuan, there seems no more reason than before to
hope at last that out of the very extremity of chaos and
misery and aimless antagonistic egoism in which that collapse
plunged her, the unhappy lacerated Empire has effectively
learned the value of solidarity, or is turning in sheer weari-
ness towards harmony and concessions and quiet again.
These, however, are posthumous reflections on what then
appeared like a rosy prospect. No doubt the Viceroy of
BACK TO LANCHOW 305

Kansu looked for his share of profit in being a cousin of the
throne. He had certainly borne the burden and heat of
being a cousin of the President. Yuan Shih Kai had
thorough notions of playing his part, and no one knew better
than he how profoundly Chinese opinion appreciates fine
sentiments, especially when backed by an ostentation of fine
actions. And a would-be Emperor, especially, must go very
cautiously forward on his almost blasphemous climb, pano-
plied in an unvarying nobility of phrase and attitude.
Accordingly he had put forth (after that Imperial tradition
and model so touchingly followed, on occasions, by the
Grand Dowager) the most beautiful and self-denying edicts,
ordering that on his birthday, and other such festal occasions,
no valuable presents were to be sent him by the provincial
Governors, lest their populations be overburdened in their
poverty. This was all very fine and impressive, but the
Kansu Viceroy considered himself, as a cousin, behind the
scenes. Realizing that the heart of man, not excepting
Emperors in posse, is always, whatever his tongue may say,
capacious of presents and so elastic that its capacity even
increases with their number and importance, he filled a
whole train of carts with precious pictures, bronzes, furs,
silks and cash, and dispatched the caravan towards Peking,
heralded by a telegram of cousinly congratulation on the
President’s birthday. He reckoned without the Roman
virtue of his relative. Indeed, what use are relatives to an
aspiring President, unless to be snubbed coram populo for a
good example? Yuan Shih Kai made full use accordingly
of his rights, and all China was edified to learn that the
Viceroy of Kansu had had his procession of presents stopped
on the way by special telegram from Peking, and sent back
in disgrace to Lanchow, under cover of a stately rebuke, for
an action so calculated to corrupt the pure candeur of the
President, and at variance with his express directions.
Results ; a great loss of face for the Viceroy, but an enormous
accretion of credit for the President. Meanwhile we do not
ask what private letters softened the blow, nor what treasures
x
306 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

of particular price were packed off later to Peking, in a less
obtrusive manner.

No wonder the Viceroy now beamed over our gracious
assent to the President’s Imperial programme. The toils
of the business were over, the sweets were now to begin.
And so he took leave, promising us a special garden-party
in afew days’ time. That night we relaxed in a lesser Beano,
at Mr. Li’s, at which the fun waxed fast and furious, there
being no Mrs. Post Office present to supervise the revels. I
think a happy Chinese party would surpass even Mrs. Mus-
grove’s notion of a little quiet cheerfulness; nor could
Cordelia have ever excelled at the morra-game. The two
players simultaneously throw forward their hands, with a
varying number of fingers extended; in the same instant
each yells his estimate of the combined number. If neither
is right neither wins the coup : if one is right, the other takes
a nip from the wine-cup, or a no-heeler if his mood prompts.
The Chinese are agile as a prima donna in altering their guess-
number in the middle of their yell. And when you get four
or five couples at a party, all bellowing like bulls of Bashan,
in a shattering pandemonium of duets, the effect is some-
thing to be remembered ; more especially as the Chinese pad
out the numbers with allusions and associations from the
Classics. Thus, while the uncultured foreigner, hurling forth
his fist towards his opponent, yells “Six” for his guess of
the total fingers extended, his lettered rival, in even more
stentorian tones, is shrieking about the Seven Humours or
the Hight Fairies.

In quieter intervals, too, Mr. Lo and Mr. Li did not forget
the chance of bargaining about their bronzes. Mr. Li, the
more dexterous and practised of the two, had not Mr. Lo’s
warmth of heart and engaging ingenuousness. Mr. Li stuck
sweetly to his price, yielded nothing, and gave no luck-
penny; but there was no resisting Mr. Lo’s incomparable
innocence and round little earnest candid face, as he would
press upon one some acquisition of his, with the endearing
assurance “ Good things I kip, bad things I sell you.” But
BACK TO LANCHOW 307

now, the bargain clinched, Mr. Lo relaxed into generosity,
and pressed upon me as a present a crystal “ dlak’n”
(dragon) which proved to be a little couchant unicorn ; then
becoming a little embroiled in speech, had a long passage
with Mr. Post Office about some “ pixtures ” that he wished
to purchase of him; and so was at last removed, still
clamouring proffers for the “ pixtures.”

Packings, payments and dispatchings were now going on.
It was a question of getting the specimens, the furs, bronzes,
china, scrolls, and all our heavier possessions carted down
country to the railhead. The packing-cases proved dis-
concertingly numerous and vast; it took two large wains
and a Peking cart to hold them. Ma-y, meanwhile, held the
contract—80 taels (£12) for a thousand catties, only to the
railhead. And the weight of our chattels amounted to
two and a half thousand. The price, looking back, seems
little enough. At the time, under the load of big disburse-
ments on every side, I felt this the final straw that crushed
me. The caravan was to break up, too. Ma-y, in charge of
the chattels, and supported by a special escort from the
Viceroy, would see the goods down-country, and up the rail
to Peking, there to await our arrival. And Bill intended
to fly round by Ardjeri and Jo-ni, to gather up a few omitted
or scantily-harvested seeds of the previous season, notably
of the beautiful Drokwa-Land Senecio (F. 400 *) that I have
never seen. Thence he was to fetch a wide bend through
Kiai Chew and down Kansu, and meet me again somewhere
on the Szechuan Border or in Shensi. I, meanwhile, now
travelling almost as light as Bill, discharged of everything
but bed and bedding and comb and cook-pots, and attended
only by Go-go, Bongie, Lay-gor and the wicked Wa-wa,
would forge straight ahead Southward through the Province,
and await Bill for a night or so, in such pleasant places as
should seem probable, until finally we rejoined each other.
The original caravan was quite dissolved, and the ponies (all

1 Abundance was got, but it never seems to have germinated
anywhere,
308 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

except Bill’s vivid little brown one) traded away in Lanchow
for “ pixtures.” Bill was going to ride, and I myself proceed
luxuriously across the face of China in a mule-litter, secure
reliquary for my wearied bones.

Everything went well; and the day of the garden-party
approached. But now, with shattering suddenness, a fatal
blow befell. All these days the Wa-wa had been visibly
swelling at the thought of going down-country with me, and
seeing trains and steamers and Peking, and the world the
flesh and the devil generally. And, under his charge, I did
not quail before the loneliness of my long solitary journey.
But one fine morning Lay-gor returned from some errand
at Wa-gung-Hsien, on the Tao-jo trail, and I was aware of a
commotion in the kitchen. Down I hurried, to find him in
floods of tears, and his Wa-wa alongside, his bun-like face
congested with rage, and his eyes glinting a few painful
squeezed-out diamonds that were meant to express pious
grief, but really expressed only anger in the capital degree.
For down was gone the castle in Spain, and ended, in an
instant, all prospects of Peking ; Lay-gor brought back news
of a Grannie moribund at Na-Lang, and imperiously summon-
ing back all her descendants to her death-bed. There was
nothing for it ; father and son must instantly say good-bye
to us and be off. Never did a face so speak fury as that
Wa-wa’s, as he knelt before me, trying to conjure up an
expression of filial dutifulness, but obviously rent with the
bitterest disappointment. My own was hardly less; such a
bad little boy perhaps, such a good little servant for sure.

And our mutual emotions were further complicated, my
condolences hollowed, and his assumption of dutiful woe made
more difficult, by our common knowledge that Grannie, of
course, was perfectly well all the time, and going about her
business, never better in her life. But she had issued her
fiat : immemorial custom forbade question and commanded
instant obedience even to the empty formality of a pretended
death-bed. It was Gomer’s case over again—the undisputed
autocracy of the Dowager in Chinese life, from Tz’Hsi “ in
BACK TO LANCHOW 309

the deep seclusion of the Palace,” to the publicity of
Appu in the corner of the Kang. And Appu is not going to
have the younglings of her house straying long, or straying
afar, to get corrupted with foreign countries, women, drinks,
diseases. To avert the latter she goes any lengths, and if
her descendant tries to be deaf to her call, Appu takes
officially to her death-bed and summons all the clan to attend
it. Woe betide the truant if he stays away. Truly, despite
the nonsense often talked about the status of women in
China, it is certain that in reality no other country gives
woman anything like such a dominating position as she
holds in Chinese life—if only she can live through the neglect
of her girlhood, the drudgery and subjection of her married
life, and emerge at last into the sacred majesty of Dowager-
hood, with full revenge in her hands to take for all the
previous servitude of her days, and daughters-in-law of her
own to bully in turn, and sons and sons’ sons to dragoon.
No impotent Dower-House, no parish relief or grudged corner
or workhouse for a Chinese Grannie: she succeeds auto-
matically to the mastery of house and hearth and home,
representing, as she now does, the accumulated sacro-sanctity
of the ancestors, the apex of the family, guardian of its
traditions from the past and its continuing branches of the
future.

But all this sociology could not save the situation. We
were to lose our Wa-wa, and at once. Bundles were hastily
made, and the little asses got ready ; almost before I could
realize the blow and all it meant, father and son were on
their knees again before me saying good-bye. And in a few
more minutes Lay-gor and his Wa-wa and the four little
wise donkies were nothing but a memory, specks of blue and
grey vanishing down the Southward road, merged in the
incalculable millions of China. And what has now become
of that precocious infant. I hardly dare to wonder. Dis-
appointed of foreign travel, yet already fleshed with a taste
of it, he must have burst upon Jo-ni as a furious portent,
heady with some knowledge of the world, yet droughty for
310 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

more. A perilous combination. Without doubt he is by
now high in the dissolute entourage of Yang Tu-Ssu ;
unless, indeed, he has ousted his sovereign, and is now himself
the reigning Prince of Jo-ni; or, as is indeed much more
likely, I fear, has long since had his head bashed in by what
Michael Finsbury called an injured husband, or his throat
slit by some rival or stay-at-home, provoked beyond bearing
by his serene and ineffable presumption and monstrous
man-of-the-worldishness. In any case, I tremble for that
Grannie who cut him off from his prospects; though her
first death-bed was merely official, I feel confident she soon
found a genuine one.

At 4 o'clock of a radiant afternoon arrived our summons
to the party. Rather to my disappointment I had learned
that it was to be a big and formal affair, including even the
Missionary element. Well up then, on our hind legs, and in
our tightest clothes, off we duly set in carts, and in a remote
garden-house of the Palace were joined by a knot of fellow-
guests, who had not been admitted till our own arrival.
Then hove in our host, and a long period of courtesies and
chat ensued. Weary’at last of nothing-saying over cups of
tea, I asked if we might not see the garden. The move was
well taken, and forth we all streamed, impeded by a great
deal of ceremonious modesty at each doorway. When we
came to the wil de beuf gateway into the actual garden,
there might have been a longer pause than ever. But Bill
had developed a real friendship of chuckles with the Viceroy,
and now, in particular, wanted to fix arrangements about
the escort of our goods down country. So without delay or
deprecations of any kind, he seized the Potentate’s black
satin arm, linked it close in his, and they wallowed through
the wall together in whispered gurgles and laughter, followed
by an almost audible gasp from the other guests at such an
unbuttoned display of informality.

The viceregal garden is really almost a park in size, and
its then tenant was on the way to making it very delightful.
Its first part, near the building, was a huge extent (canopied
BACK TO LANCHOW 311

by noble old trees) of mounts and monticules and rockworks,
with pools and gazeboes and terraces and towers and
summer-houses, and little Chelsea-Show-ish stretches and
corners of walling and flights of steps, with gay pots of
flowers along the parapets. In the dappled green of the
overshadowing trees it all sparkled with a discreet brilliance.
Here and there, in cages and enclosures, were pheasants
and rabbits and storks. An ape had once illustrated the
collection, but had by now been gathered to his fathers.
And the Ma-ji, shorn of their raison d’étre, drooped sullenly.
Ma-ji (Horse-chickens) are a species of mountain pheasant,
whose plumage, in old Imperial days, was very highly prized
and priced, as a ceremonial adornment of the highest officials.
This plumage, though, is nothing exciting, but nevertheless
Ma-ji always captivate my fancy, for they are exactly—but
exactly—like very stout old ladies from the suburbs, come
up to town by tube to the theatre, tightly bound in grey
alpaca dust-cloaks, with a wisp of white choker just showing
under their chin on either side, and fierce little red eyes
a-sparkle in an expression of restless and vindictive pro-
priety.

The remoter part of the park is flat and more given over to
flowers, planted in by rectangular stretches, with irrigation
runnels between. The gaiety of these was gone: I saw
drifts of what had been a Lily, and alongside a plumy feather-
ing filminess of green, to which the Viceroy delightedly drew
my attention as a particular beauty. Very lovely indeed it
was, but do the Chinese take the wrong end of the stick in
this matter, or do we? For “ Dragon’s whiskers” is an
article of beauty in China, but of diet in Europe. We eat it
in its younger stages with Sauce Mousseline, or melted butter
or vinaigrette. It is, in fact, no more nor less than Asparagus
officinalis. But China does not eat it at all in any stage, any
more than she eats the tomato or the quince. These are all
grown for their beauty or their fragrance, and for nothing
else. At least, up-country, where Lanchow alone rises to
the rare zxsthetic luxury of a few tomatoes, which are piled
312 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

high on a dish to adorn the drawing-room in summer, even
as quinces, big and pale golden, similarly piled in winter, see
the long months out in their beauty, and flood the place with
fragrance to boot.

When we had thoroughly pervaded the Palace grounds
the crowd began moving back towards dinner, but diverged
to a beautiful walled pool, with water-plants abounding, and
a summer pavilion on the far side. And now it appeared
that Mr. Kwai, one of our fellow-guests, had grounds adjoin-
ing, which he wished to show me. So we passed through a
gate into his enclosure, and found a quite charming formal
garden, trim and neat and gay, with parterres and palisades,
and a vine-arbour in the middle, as it might have been in
some Albergo-garden in Verona. But I thought I could
discern that the Viceroy was not wholly pleased at this rival
attraction : the long-delayed dinner was now announced, and
he shovelled us all indoors with firmness and promptitude.

The meal was good and very “foreign”? ; the merriment
went high and disposedly, the Viceroy alleging a sick
stomach. But his real pleasure came later, in having us
apart, to show us his pictures. Now he could really unfold
and expatiate with chuckles over the beauty of each, and
the complimentary scrolls of calligraphy that he was doing
with his own viceregal hand for Bill and me, as a special
sign of friendship. His collection was a big and fine one:
he clearly delighted in it, and delighted in showing. ‘ Hoo-
hoo!” he said with gurgling deep joy, lovingly indicating
some delicate touch of colour or following some suave line
with a downward sweep of his sumptuous long-nailed thumb,
girt with a great napkin-ring of jade. We admired to his
heart’s content, and then were escorted out, down lateral
courtyards, silent and empty, with big earthenware vats
containing little trees in them, formally aligned, or smaller
jars brilliant with annuals—singly planted as specimens—
among which we were shown with pointed pride the Pansies
and Cornflowers and Petunias that we ourselves had procured
him from England.
BACK TO LANCHOW 313

In one of the courtyards, decent and withdrawn, sat
the Vicereine of Kansu, sewing shoes in the quiet sunshine,
while around her the viceregal marmaille tumbled and
played in their brilliant little scarlet breeches and trousers.
The proud father chuckled delightfully, and tweaked the
nearest pigtail with approval. And after a moment’s con-
templation of the scene we moved on. Indeed, these are a
very pleasant kindly people, so paradoxically combining the
extreme of simple homeliness and domestic affection with
the most exacting and elaborate code of ceremonial etiquette
in the world. And this they can do because they are so
completely sure of themselvcs, serene in the unassertive
self-confidence that only the consciousness of four thousand
years of civilization can convey.

Without any serious word said this time, we parted from
His Excellency, and bumped homeinourcarts. But hardly
had we arrived than Mr. Li appeared with a solemn and
secret message. Would we deploy our influence in the
highest quarters at Peking to protect His Excellency against
any scandals or hostile manceuvres that might be engineered
against him by his enemies in that vast and sinister
mechanism. of wheels within wheels? This was a large
contract ; I carry trowels in my pocket, not Viceroyalties.
However, the chance word in season to the powerful is always
among the possibilities of our wonderful mortal kaleido-
scope; I was able conscientiously to assure Mr. Li that
should the President-Emperor insist on coming to tea with
me in Peking, I would not fail to impress him to the best of
my ability with the prowess and loyalty of the Kansu Vice-
roy, all libels to the contrary notwithstanding.

And now, as if to bind me to my promise, the compliment-
ary scrolls arrived from the Palace, with all His Excellency’s
compliments and a large head and shoulders photograph of
him, in military uniform, with the pupils of the eyes pecked
in with a pin to give the required glare of official ferocity. A
brace of scrolls for me, and a brace for Bill, a column of big
black characters on each from the Viceroy’s own hand, with
314 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

the Viceregal signature and seal attached. My legends
announced that I had crossed ten thousand oceans to come
to China and that the tale of my virtues was endless as a
circle—an ambiguous compliment, since a circle has no
beginning either, as doubtless my detractors will discern.
Anyhow, this was glory, and great “face”: the servants
and the fellow-guests of the inn pressed round in awe. Mr.
Lo, however, was illuminatingly candid on the matter. It
appeared that the Great Man’s calligraphy, in the eyes of
those who knew, was, as a matter of fact “ plen’y bad.”
But why tell himso? Accordingly all the Province flattered
his harmless delusion of penmanship, and when in doubt as
to obtaining an office or deprecating displeasure, the surest
method was to beg for a specimen from the Viceregal brush.

But now the time is come. One farewell stroll, out of the
South Gate, and afar round by Wu chuen, over the enormous
waste of dimpling graves with the crumpled Egyptian hills
of the distance very lovely and golden in the late shafts of
the sun, over the illuminated walls and towers of the city,
and the flat green ocean of tree-tops from which they rise.
And then—the Shandz’ is at the door of the inn, a thing like
a big drain-pipe of matting on a frame of laths, with a pole
protruding in front and behind. In its depths my scanty
baggage is packed, a lumpy bed, if it were not for the depth
of quilts and coats and cushions accumulated on top. Good-
bye Mr. and Mrs. Post Office, Good-bye Mafu, Good-bye Mr.
Li and Mr. Lo, Good-bye Lanchow. But just as Iam about
to crawl into the recesses of the Shandz’, arrives a breathless
message from His Excellency. Would we go up and take
his photograph ? Yes, indeed, at whatever cost of trouble
and delay. Had he not crowned all his friendliness by
giving our chattels a flaming passport down-country and two
of his smartest guards for its escort, not only in his own
province, but right through to the railhead? So up we
hurried to the Palace, and there, in the garden, the Keeper
of the King’s Peace and the Keeper of the President’s were
duly immortalized side by side. But I do not reproduce the
BACK TO LANCHOW 315

result ; it is not a portrait on which I dwell with compla-
cency. You may imagine a reformed burglar in black satin,
cheek by jowl with an elderly and dissipated-looking Caruso.
And now, after renewed and tender farewells to Mr. Lo and
Mr. Li, back we returned to the inn. Into the matted ark
of the Shandz, I crawled and there was so securely packed
and wadded up in my bedding as to be like a chrysalis
in its cocoon ;—Houp; it was hoisted up in front and its
frontal pole lodged on the leader mule, and then—Houp—
equalized again by being hoisted up on the mule behind.
Lying out my length, swaying high above the earth, I felt as
tyrannous and splendid as Cleopatra borne aloft in pro-
cession. And now the moment was come; Bill thrust in
his hand for a farewell grip, and off I went swinging out of
Lanchow for the last time, low in my spirits that it was the
last time, low in the prospect of affronting the infinite dis-
tances of China with only Go-go and Bongie for my sole
support, and low beneath all, in thought of such a long
parting from my dear Bill, and our uncertainty as to when
and where we should join forces again.
CHAPTER XV
THE DOWNWARD TRAIL

But the day was very glorious, and I grew serene in spirits
as equably I balleted along through the hours, across the
glaring downs and ravines of bare loess with glimpses of
what may still have been the Hwang-Hor away to my left,
in a cafion of rock with fragments of an apparently ancient
wall alongside. After trudging it and trekking it for months,
there is no restfulness in life like that of a mule-litter.
Relaxed in absolute ease, ensconced in comfort, one lies
wedged into the softness of the bedding, with every muscle
gone loose, every curve and protuberance fitted and moulded
by the bedding. The movement is undulating and bland,
the hours slide by in a stupor of incredible comfort, so acute
as almost to be plausibly mistaken for happiness. It was
out of a roseate havoc of dreams that at last I alighted at Han
Tao, down in a broad river-plain, joyous in greenness and
poplars, and under a sky now gone brazen and sulphurous
and violet with brewing masses of storm. There was a little
delay in finding an inn, and then followed the worst of the
day—the fuss and confusion of the first stage out, with
nothing to be found in its place, and everybody ineffectually
doing everybody else’s work—except the donkeymen, who
did not even do their own. And poor Go-go, of course, had
no more command than a kitten. Sad and cross for my
Wa-wa I coped with the chaos; all the packages had to be
uncorded, and the litter itself completely gutted—as indeed,
it always had to be each night, to get at the bed and the -
wash-pot, and then repacked each morning.

Mid-Kansu is a land of glaring loess, with clean-cut spotless

316
THE DOWNWARD TRAIL 317

loess villages here and there. Always so neat and new,
because when your house begins to show signs of wear, you
do not restore it, but take a pail and a trowel and some
chopped straw, and go out and make a mud-pie wherever
you please to build a new one. As the paste of the walls
rises higher and higher, you corset it flat between braced
boards on either side ; and so it hardens, and you take away
the boards, and there is a faultless square block of yellow
mud walls, with only the roof needing to be added. I spare
you the detail of my uneventful days, broken only by the
noon interval, when they would unyoke the mules to go in
and rest and feed in some village, dumping down the litter
with me inside in the middle of the public street for all the
world to crowd round and gaze at, unless the inn had some
dark little private room where I could go in and sit on the
Kang and take lunch in such comfort as the flies would leave
me in the intervals of whacking at them with my yak-tail
whisk. My last touch of my former world occurred to me
on the second day out. As I neared the midday stage I
looked ahead. And wondered why a khaki-clad gorilla
should be at large on the face of China. Could it be ?
Impossible—but it was—Mafu, in charge of the chattels
and their escort, grinning all over his face as he saw me
approaching. For Mafu, what with the civilizing influ-
ences of Lanchow, and a public beating he had incurred at
Koko-Nor, followed by public kowtows of apology, was now
apparently as good as gold again, and the sight of him, though
our ways were now to diverge finally, was refreshing as a
tonic in that large lone land.

Kan Tsoo Tien is a typical mule-village of this great high-
road, with a long row of clean open shops containing every-
thing a muleman could need, and clean wide inn-yards
running back behind to neat inn-dwellings. Mafu once more
took charge, and I was amazed to find what a pace the
lumbering enormousness of his two wains could make. Now
we were getting Southward: on the morrow, in a lowering
morning, we climbed slowly up a big open loess down, with
318 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

a very wide prospect over the country, now a panorama of
low rolling lines, largely cultivated and largely green in
grass, the crinkled yellow desolations of Lanchow being
here quite left behind. The air was autumnal, the banks
all gay with Asters, amid the gold of Chrysanthemum
indicum. Such a queer little blatant common-looking
weed to be the mother of so vast and august a race of garden
plants, from the Tableaux of Dango Zaka to the mop-heads
dipped in anchovy sauce so dear to the English gardener.
Dark violet storms now pursued us on a violent gale, and
broke in thunder and sharp squalling flaws of cold rain as
we lumbered down the steep far descent on the other side,
and after a tranquil stretch through a new valley, arrived,
under a cleared radiant sky, at Shwa-y-goo, neatest perhaps
and cleanest and newest-looking of all these naked, neat and
new-looking villages of Kansu.

Mafu and his carts and the smartly saluting soldiers of
the Viceroy’s guard here parted company with me, on their
Eastward way. We struck on Southward, through country
still much the same—wide vales of loess, with the crops by
now all carried or stacked, but the gao-liang still beautiful
in heavy tasselled heads of bronze; and on either side
undulating downs of the same, cultivated to the top in long
embanked slopes. One sees the loess country, though, very
differently from the serene ease of a Shandz’ ; it wears no such
pleasant colours from the jogging back of a pony or the
cramped dullness of a sedan. But gradually the downs run
higher, at last we were mounting towards big fells that
recalled Whernside, in the summery day of blue and haze
and soft clouds beginning to grow heavier. And out we
ultimately came on the actual grassy crest of the big down-
system, billowing far and wide on every hand, and crowned
with a chain of low square fortalices away down all the
distances. Steeply we descended to the valley, and came au
length to Ma-Ing, the biggest place on our road yet. A fair
was raging outside, with booths and theatricals. But we
held straight on down a street crowded with mats and bam-
THE DOWNWARD TRAIL 319

boo-besoms (a symptom of the South) till we turned into a
small and ramshackly inn, where I found my quarters in
a tiny warm-kanged room, stacked in one corner with
Spaghetti, piled up in enormous skeins.

And at Ma-Ing, in that dark and squalid little hole, I was
detained by such hopeless floods of rain as made travelling
an impossibility for men or mules. In the afternoon it
dismally cleared for a while, and I went out to the fair, with
Bongie in attendance. The gay street itself was amusing,
but even more so was the actual fair, down below by the
stream, on the sands and shingles of the river-bed, with all
manner of stalls and raree-shows and refreshments and
theatricals. But I myself very soon became the greatest
raree-show of the lot: and was moving along amid a vast
crowd, running before me and behind and on either side,
with their feet making a soft din of many waters on the fine
loose gravel. It was quite embarrassing, not particularly
pleasant, for in China it is generally wisest to avoid such
public festivities, where spirits are on the loose and multiplied
by multitude, so that one might easily by some indiscretion,
either of friendliness or reserve, provoke an outbreak of
anti-foreign feeling. However, as I had chosen to come
down, I must go through with it: one could only proceed
with immovable smile amid the tumultuous laughter all
around, showing no sign of supposing the laughter was so
pointed and personal as it probably was. Gradually I and
my swarms drifted homeward without untoward develop-
ment, and the swarms by degrees diminished. Quite enough
of the cortége, however, accompanied me back to the inn,
and crowded into the yard to go on taking their fill of the
spectacle. On the whole I was glad to be in foreign clothes
that day, and could but hope they were not saying I was as
hideous as I felt sure they must be. They were all quite
cheery and friendly though, and there was huge fun when
the Go-go siphoned them away from time to time. But it
was strange to me to be back among the inquisitive mobs of
central China, after such long experience of better manners
320 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

in the North, where, however much one provokes remark,
it is rarely obtrusive and never a nuisance. Put it to them
reasonably and pleasantly, that the traveller is tired and
not on show, and the population of a Northern village at
once sees the point: the Southerner takes a different view.
He intends to get all the amusement he can out of life, and
considers it would be unfair and churlish of you to deny your
contribution.

The next day was crowded with incident. In the night,
first of all, I had occasion to strike a match. Whereupon the
entire box blew up in a blast of flame, and badly burned my
hand. Then, in the black of the dawn came Go-go, whisper-
ing that it was a very evil day and that the departure must
again be put off. But hardly had I composed myself and
my burned hand to sleep once more, resigned to yet another
day in that mangy hovel, than again came Go-go in grey
cock-crow, saying that after all everybody was anxious to get
away, cotite que cotte. This jumped very much better
with my own mood : I alacritously rose and ate and packed ;
and soon was heaving out of Ma-Ing, in contemplation of
an unrelieved soaker with the little frontal fig-leaf of the
litter let down against the wet, so that I could see no more
than a glimpse of a hill valley, with boulders and cliffs of
immense granite blocks, rounded and glaciated looking.

We toiled over high ground, the rain ceased, the wind
blew cold and gusty. It was a mercy to have the sure-
footedness of mules to rely on in the copious slime of the
track, For, as the day wore down, the rain again descended
in deluges, and the loess lanes became like gruel overlying
ice. And now the track was skirting the rim of a loess
precipice above a river, with deep and very narrow little
gullies in its face, most awkward to circumnavigate with the
unweildy length of a Shandz’, which, by its construction, is
not two mules in free movement fore and aft, but one
unmanageable invertebrate organism, incapable of bending.
These nasty little pitches I bore with philosophic reliance on
the mules and men; till suddenly, at the nastiest of all,
THE DOWNWARD TRAIL 321

where I did not like to look over on the right, straight to the
river far below, there came a frantic plunging, slithering,
scrambling, scuttering, and there in another moment was I,
securely bottled, pensively gazing up at the sky between my
feet. Both the mules had fallen and the jao had come off,
and was just quivering sidelong on the very verge of the
precipice, imperilled every instant by the plunging of the
mules to regain their footing. With such dignity as I could
muster, and with a desperate tranquillity for fear I should
upset the jao into the river, I climbed up like a trap-door
spider emerging from the shaft, and floundered down into the
mud and the rain. The position was very disconsolate in
the pouring wet, with the jao periclitating on the edge, and
no sufficient aid at hand to replace it; pending the arrival
of Go-go and the Pai-ren from the latest Yamen, I waddled
arduously onwards in the perilous “verglas.” Really I
could not blame the mules: I only went a hundred yards
or so, but it took me a very laborious careful and anxious
half-hour.

But now Go-go and the Pai-ren did come along and
rescued the jao and got it onto the mulesagain. I clambered
in once more, but with nerve rather shaken, detesting those
horrid loess cliffs whose rim we went on skirting and the
horrible little ascents and descents in their gullies. Now,
however, one of the Yamen escort went before with a
mattock, and hacked out a footing in the quaggiest pitches ;
with only one more flounder we advanced successfully, and
gradually the dark descended and veiled from me the full
horror of the depths above which we were proceeding. It
was just black night, in a new valley of the hills, when we
lumbered into Whitegate Keep (Bei Mun Gwan 1) and I was
escorted through puddles to a decent little room in an inn-
yard, undecipherable in the dark.

But Whitegate Keep appeared a squalid, derelict place in

1 Or Bei Ma Gwan? (White Horse Gate)—not having Mafu
during this journey, I was unable to collect the characters for the
various place-names, so cannot, as a rule, give them in translation.

Yy
322 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

the morning, and we moved out early, heartened with the
thought of having yesterday achieved the longest stage of
the journey. The weather was all a low cloud, raw and
cold, with the event long in doubt ; but very gradually the
pale sun began to pierce and grew stronger, and, as we soon
set to mounting a big fell, finally prevailed. It was very
beautiful then, on the high hill-top with the last ravellings
of the cloud floating off around us, shot with shafts of sun-
light, and the moisture sweeping up from the slopes in white
smoky vapours. Our whole day of twenty-three miles or so
was spent along the topmost reaches of the down, with
remote undulating views, rich in blue and golden colour, of
soft sunny valleys full of trees and yellow fields at our feet,
and then distance behind distance of expansive high downs
like the one we were traversing. Ahead of us up the track
there wound the procession of some Mandarin changing his
post, with a train of eight mules and a guard of soldiers and
mounted attendants in long crimson cloaks, and My Lord
a-horseback, and an ark like my own for My Lady, and a
very smart pretty little Wa-wa capering about beside his
father beneath a big bowler hat of crumpled black tarpaulin.
I had seen them indeed earlier, just ahead of me as I left the
town, but had been distracted by meeting there a lady of
high quality on a mule, veiled in transparent sapphire silk,
with a huge duck’s-bill coiffure sticking up like a horn at the
back of her head, as is the fashion in these parts seemingly,
together with the veil, when you take the air. At last, up
and down the crests of the fell, we overtook and passed My
Lord, and came to a neat little village on a neck, which was
our Ban Tien (half-way stage).

Here there was yet another fair going forward. I was
glad to alight and withdraw into the inn’s one little dark
side-room to escape the staring crowds. But now came
along the rival train, and its jao disgorged My Lady, a very
comely and capable-looking person, clearly of the most
decided views and temper, resplendent in a short blue coat,
crimson tabard, and tight black trousers. She was accom-
THE DOWNWARD TRAIL 323

panied by a very fat little semi-demi-palace-dog, which she
sedulously hugged out of harm’s way from the mules, holding
it all anyhow as they do, or waving it about by one leg, till
I could not help laughing at its expression of pompous resig-
nation in untoward circumstances. But the poor lady now
stood fixed in indecision with frowns accumulating beneath
the sleek flat bandeaux that framed her brow. I had taken
the only room, and she had nowhere to retire to while her
mules ate lunch. I heard My Lord explaining to her how the
matter stood: there was nothing for it but to emerge from
my seclusion and wave her into it with mutual bows and
smiles and deprecations, while I myself withdrew into my
jao again till it was time to set off once more.

For another two or three hours we crested the down. The
going was good to-day, and I enjoyed it. The distances,
too, now showed real hills away in the South and West,
though very, very dim and remote. Out in the West—real
hills towards the Border! The thought of Siku, only a
few days’ journey now, straight away into the West tugged
my heart constantly like a. magnet and every dim cloud
castle on the horizon I madly moulded into Thundercrown
until it melted away. For the first time, too, I now really
felt as if we were getting to the South, the air was mellower
and the vegetation changed. Stellera still continued on the
downs, but quite gone were the stately straight Lombardian
poplars of the North, and their place in all the valleys was
taken by rounder dimplier sorts: Prinsepia, Alantus and
Sophora reappear, and the vales were still delightful to
contemplate, lush in green and bronze and crimson of buck-
wheat millet and Gao-Liang very sumptuous with its dense
brown thyrses, ranging up the gently-sloping flanks of russet
brown and loess, ravinated and crumpled. And then, far
below, appeared a cosy big village, with dark tiles for the
first time replacing the mud gables and flat tops of the North.
Steeply and abruptly we descended the last pitch : it was so
precipitous as to seem almost sheer. But the sure-footed
mules successfully achieved it, though I had ado, in the
324 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

jao, to keep the guns and sticks from sliding out of it as we
perpendicularly dropped.

Go-ja-Tsui is a staring place like the rest. There was
quite mob enough in the inn, without going forth on the
streets for more. But it is wonderful how completely Euro-
pean one gets in time, to see the Chinese I was perpetually
thinking that there was surely a foreigner coming to meet
me, and then it turned out always to be no such thing. All
my own friends, even, I got to see in what proved on closer
inspection to be a Chinese Avatar. A touch of brown, for
one thing, in the hair is no very rare occurrence hereabouts :
near Go-ja-Tsui I actually saw an adult coolie with a full
chevelure of almost Titian auburn—only just not red. Ina
very lovely morning, fine to brilliant, we sailed forth again
along our road, down and down uneventful valleys, and
through empoplared hamlets murmurous with pigeons amid
the green. It was delicious going, but I felt I could never
quite enjoy coasting the rims of loess precipices over rivers
in the abject helplessness of a jao—more especially as the
jao itself had a tilt to one side. For the adjustment of a
jao is a very nice matter. When properly mounted the
litter should be as exquisitely even in its balance as the art
of Jane Austen: too often it is lopsided as that of Charlotte
Bronté, and one feels all wrong, as if with misyoked buttons
and boots like the luckless young man immortalized by the
ministrations of Betsey and Sairey. At least until a boulder
has been picked up and packed in under the mule’s yoke
on one side or the other.

Now came a narrowing and a gorge, and then a very
picturesque small Hsien, with a beautiful storied tower
perched above on a descending spur of the hill that was its
Acropolis. This was only Ban Tien; gaping mobs drove
me back from the inn-yard into the deep seclusion of my
Shandz’, where I dripped with heat and ate the delicious
little round pears of Kansu, that melt in the mouth like
flowing milk and honey, with the perfect taste of straw-
berries. But at last I and my ark were hoisted up again,
THE DOWNWARD TRAIL 325

off we set, leftward, out of the valley ; and mounted on to
the first high down where I did not see Stellera. Along it
and along we wound, up and down for miles. Ahead, in the
forehead of the fell, there unfolded at last a tiny but most
attractive-looking village, which certainly could not be our
stage, since when was ever a stage not in a valley? But
our stage it actually was, and Geh-Ja-Pu is an entrancing
place indeed, aloft along the high concavity of the fell, with
all the world open before it, and a little fortalice above, and
beneath, a turbulent declension of golden fields over golden
fields in the enormous converging slopes of the down, sinking
away below, with other cosy embowered hamlets nestling in
them here and there at intervals of a mile or so; and for
distance, an infinite overwhelming succession of diaphanous
blue down-crests, level with our own, dotted along their
eminences, as far as eye could see, with forts. It is a gigantic
prospect from that high place, benign and calm and spacious :
wholly dissimilar in many of its details, it yet recalls the
voluminous luxuriance of Sei am Schlern, as you look down
across its undulations from the Salegg.

We gutted our goods, and the litter, in an inn, where I
expanded in a big lean-to room at the back, with clean
kangs so new that fires had to be lit in them to dispel the
damp of their mud, and emitted a stinking smoke from the
stokeholes. After which, as the afternoon was still being
golden and gay and glorious, I strolled in beatitude out from
the village along the track which leads, level and broad and
smooth, hemmed with a tight grey-green velvet of the close
turf that clothes the down, along round the curve of the hill
to a high neck about three-quarters of a mile beyond. Here,
abruptly, a new view breaks upon you. Far down below
lies the broad bed of the Wei-Hor, deep in weeping willows,
and away beyond this a renewed succession of hill-ranges,
but more serrated, and with fewer fortresses, at least on the
nearer chain. In a rapture I roamed and sat and lay: it
was one of those golden scenes and circumstances that live
for ever in one’s memory, as vivid as in their first moment,
326 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

immortally. When at length I rose dazed from my absorp-
tion of its happiness and went home, the flies in-my room
were such a pest, and I so grudged every instant of daylight
in that high divine place, that forth I went yet again. The
sun was now gorgeously setting, in an undistinguishable
tumble of purple cloud-ranges and purple hills. Out into
the sumptuous solemn chaos of the West I strained my eyes,
in anguished longing for some lost glimpse of the sacred and
mysterious Land, still not so very far away out there, but
so soon to be lost for ever. But each possible mountain
mass that I could dimly discern on the uttermost horizon
soon shifted and melted from its first acclaimed solidity, and
proved to be only cloud. In all that ruffle of high ranges
there was nothing solid: the Sacred and Mysterious Land
was finally beyond my sight, and the distances of China all
round me held no suggestion of Tibetan heights. Molten
in the sorrow of exile I watched the sombre splendour of the
sundown, and then, sentimental and low and sad in reaction,
I returned to the inn at last, there still to spend more hours
patrolling the hard-beaten mud threshing floor of the grain-
yard amid stacks of garnered millet, and little cats playing
peep-bo in and out behind them. I was too happy for food,
too completely occupied and haunted.

Down and down, the next day, steep and far, into the
broad plain of the Wei-Hor, full of harvest and tracts of
trees. Then, to my surprise, we turned to the right, and up
over another enormous fell of loess, all gay with the rose-pink
ox-eyes of Chrysanthemum Zawadskyi: only to drop again
on the far side into the same valley of the Wei-Hor. And
immediately at the foot of the descent lay Tsin J6, very
different from when I first saw it in 1914, for now the bare
willows were clothed, and the town was embedded on all
sides in profound weeping cascades of green. And the
evening, as I strolled the streets till dinner, was deliciously
green-aired and hot and balmy. We put up in a less ambi-
tious inn than on our previous visit ; in its narrow stinking
darkness I devoted all the next day to articles and letters ;
THE DOWNWARD TRAIL 327

and on the next morning we resumed the trail, setting our
faces towards the new, unknown and already different-look-
ing country that fills the extreme Southerly toe of Kansu.

In a streaky hot day, turning grey and chilly at its close,
we drifted out of Tsin-J6, among the glorious weeping
willows, and so gradually to the right and across the Wei-Hor,
and then up the flat bed of an affluent. For hours we
proceeded, the country quite dull, but very unlike the North-
ward stretches of the province, being richer, moister, and
clothed in vegetation, with the loess now wholly replaced by
reddish loam in little low hills, with fortalices on their
summits. OurBan Tien was only 30 li out, with fifty more
still to do; always up this valley, which soon became
that of a dead stream continuing without break down-hill.
The luxuriance increased, and the red hills began to remind
me of those about Ga-hoba. Old friends reappeared: the
little Berberis, Loniceras and so forth. There were high
wild hedges, too, with the Barley Bee Rose in clotted cascades
of crimson-fruited clusters. Nor need I have been nervous
about that solitary plant of Cratzgus crenulata on Thunder-
crown, or its occasional appearance at the top end of the
Nan-Ho gorges. For evidently those were its very farthest
adventures Northward ; now we were entering upon its real
territory, and in every hedgerow and coppice it abounded in
almost as fierce and unbroken a blaze of scarlet as C. Angusti-
folia in its solid hedges along the highways of the Venetian
plain about Udine and Gorizia. On and on we luxuriously
wended ; and ultimately mounted to the right, over a little
col. And now the view ahead was indeed a refresher for sore
eyes, weary with the dust-coloured expanses of the North.

Far ahead of us there flowed a sea of hill-ranges, higher,
greener, more peaked, more sumptuous with coppice
than anything I had set eyes on since leaving Wolvesden ;
and all the intervening vales were a surf of verdure. So
we wound along down and came at last into Niang-Niang
Ba, most charming village, most charmingly snuggled among
trees at a convergence of vales. But the only possible room
328 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

for me was so very tiny and dark, and so densely occupied by
the family, and so awfully suggestive of bugs, that I could
not face it till I must, and, while the family moved out,
sauntered along the various slopes of down or coppice,
realizing, as I jumped at the barking of a far-off dog or
recoiled with a gasping squawk before asudden whirr of field-
fares, how thin and worn my nerves were got by now, with
the strain of two seasons’ travel, complicated by the defection
of the cat-befriending cook, whose economies by this time
had landed me in a constant loathing for my food and such a
general condition of urticaria, that for long I thought I must
be harbouring all the fleas of Kansu, till every covert had
been thoroughly beaten in vain.

Despite my fears, no enemy came anigh me in the dark,
neither leaping nor crawling. Nevertheless I had but a
dog-sleep of a night, what with expectation of bugs, barkings
outside, and the family close at hand, moved into the next
room indeed, but separated only by a screen, so that, when-
ever I lay that way, there was its apparently sleepless buzz
of activity or muffled quacks of conversation to contend
with. Rousing in the morning was like coming down in
one’s childhood to do penal sums before breakfast in
December: I ate by candlelight in my black little scullery,
crusted with the ebony of many generations’ smoke: the
day outside was still solid night, and only lightened to a
sky of level dull grey, with clouds on all the hills foreboding
the worst. Off we set, down towards them, through country
more than ever recalling that of the Nan-Hor, till it grew
richer yet in shrub and coppice, and became like the Mo Ping
slopes accordingly ; and then yet more voluminous and
sumptuous still, like the Féng San Ling itself. But it
was even more opulent and moist, with superb autumn
colours billowing everywhere; even in the morning when
powdery drizzles prevailed, I could not refrain from keeping
the curtains open with my feet, to see ahead. Quite
ended now was the reign of loess; this more vital loam
was jocund as a jungle, and the little crouching villages
THE DOWNWARD TRAIL 329

among their trees were no longer mud-boxes, but largely
built with poles and wood, and wooden kangs inside.
Whereas, up in the loess lands of the North, wood is as
precious and rare as pearls. Here it can be had abundant,
for the asking, all about. Soakers kept on threatening ;
nothing happened, and the wet rich green of the hills came
out more and more beautiful and finally the day decided to
cheer up altogether.

On the cooler cliffs along the glen-sides, I saw dark
mats of tangled green that I thought I knew of old. And
Ophiopogon Kansuensis it was indeed, here, like the
Cratzegus and the Rose in the central richness of its distri-
bution.1 But an even more precious “old and valued ”
was now nearing. We wound along indescribably, in and
out amongst the flaming dells and slopes: then, after our
Ban Tien, mounted a little Red Pass. All the gorgeous
shrubbery of the Border now rioted round us, and with a
thrill of joy I saluted the reappearance of Arundinaria
nitida—so far the most lovely, delicate, vigorous and
well-bred of all hardy bamboos, that I can never see it without
feeling an internal thrill of agreement with the old Chinese
poet’s exclamation—‘‘ How could I live without this
gentleman ?’’? Noteven when battling my way up through
its ice-laden jungles on Thundercrown, or being whipped
with its abundant heavy wetness as I try to plant Rhodo-
dendrons in the Ghyll at Ingleborough, can I really mitigate
my enthusiasm for this inimitable loveliness of swaying,
cascading emerald filigree, never more vividly emerald than
in the dead dark of the winter, when all the copse and
woodland is a skeleton, and most of the other bamboos
gone withered and dulled and dingy. So, with a lifted
hat and heart, I hailed its reappearance on the Southern
scene of Kansu.?

Now we went up in the woodland to another Pass. Little

2 It does not seem to thrive or develop very rapidly with us.

2 A. spathiflora and A. anceps are the only other hardy Bamhoos
that even approach A. nitida in plumy elegance.
330 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

wild pears had dropped on the path, and I picked them
up. And among the tangles of the copse above the road
there waved a very beautiful and graceful new Cotoneaster
(Micromeles ?), with handsome foliage of silver-grey, and
big crimson fruits, gracefully borne. From the top of
the pass we had a wilder and finer view than any yet,
out over a whole tumbled ocean of ragged forested ranges,
higher and higher yet, till lost in cloud. And the depths
were all a seething pandemonium of autumn glories, a
witch’s cauldron of gold and scarlet and orange fire, spilled
out in a torrent among the windings of the hills. The
Do-fu now brought me and the litter down a short cut.
It was appalling—wild, precipitous and sheer, with hardly
any track to discern. It seemed a miracle how that cumber-
some burden of the jao could be got down it. Yet, with
various misadventures and stumblings, down it we did
successfully manage to get, lumbering, bumping and crashing
awfully, while I gripped on with all my fingers and toes,
to prevent being slid out precipitately over the back of
the mule, on which I looked perpendicularly down out of
my drain-pipe as it battered its way through the sheer
fall of the bushes unbelievably like some composite elephant
descending a jungle-wall.

A long descent brought us to a pretty village, and yet
another stretch to another no less pretty one, which was our
stage. Gao Chiao, among flaming slopes of coppice. Up
on to the opposite slopes I roamed till dark, sweating mightily
in the stuffy twilight as I wrestled my way along, getting
seeds of a tiny briar rose, and of Ophiopogon from the
ledges of the little broken cliffs that protruded at the top
of the copse. But, whereas I had hoped the bridge of
Gao Bridge would be a noble span of arches over a noble
river, I found it only three stepping-stones over a trickle
like an anemic drain. The next day took us over two
small passes, through rich wild scenes like the last, but now
wilder and less rich, steeper and not so much cultivated.
Finally we got into a long defile, and came to a beautiful
THE DOWNWARD TRAIL 331

little gorge, with a tiny temple perched on a boulder in its
throat, and its cool sides all matted with Iris tectorum.
Other old friends reappeared. Rosa Banksia; and the
copses were full of a Bamboo that looked to be Metake.
And then, passing a water-mill in the glen, we emerged at
last, to find the hill country now left quite behind us, and
in front, a big wide distance of soft and fertile lowlands
of reddish loam. And away beyond this, far away, rose
new ranges of hills, lower perhaps than the last, but evidently
seen even from here, to be much moister, crumpled and
Scotch-looking in browns and greens, with at least two much
bigger masses of cliff and woodland, masked in clouds
from the dense weather raging over there. Those hills
were the ranges of the Da-Ba-S’an beginning, and between
us lay the open lands of Hwei Hsien, the next considerable
town on my route, where I intended to wait, and give Bill
a good chance of overtaking us.

I lunched in a Ban Tien, and saw a pious procession go
by, with drums and gongs ; then was sleepily borne down the
uneventful valley, and round a corner, and immediately
into the mouldering little walled city of Hwei Hsien. Go-go
had gone ahead and got us a.good inn, with a good room
at the side (the appropriate and honorific end one being
occupied by sempsters). But there was no sign or news of
Bill; in spite of having told myself that I expected none,
I felt flat and depressed in consequence almost to the point
of anxiety. Finally, I strolled out in the stifling still heat,
and down the long grey dullness of the insignificant streets,
to the East Gate: there mounted on to the wall, to the
salute of a pleasant little uniformed sentry, and strolled
leisurely round by myself to the South Gate, conning the
landscape. Vainly will you con it, though, for the environing
forests which Bretschneider leads one to expect here—as
also at-Chebson. For all the lands about Hwei Hsien, up
and down, as far as you can see, are plain and open and
cultivated. The farther hills are remote, and even on them
there is no wood, till your eye reaches their highest inmost
332 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

recesses. But the Da-Ba-S’an, though really a low little
ruffle of ranges, yet has this much of Alpine interest, that
it connects, however feebly, the great range of the Tsin
Ling running bravely out into the East, across Shensi
(the one big Alpine chain that is genuinely in China), with
the much greater ranges away in the West, descending from
the Tibetan highland. Only quite a few days’ journey
Eastwards from Hwei Hsien, and those alluring-looking,
developing heights would have led us to the Tsin Ling and
the foot of Tai Bei S’an, on which we might have snatched
a fresh harvest of seeds, known indeed, but precious,
Primula Knuthiana, Androsace spinulifera.

Had Bill been to hand, I do not know but that the hope
might have galvanized our tired nerves, and strung up our
food-sick stomachs to this heroic diversion. But Bill
was not there; and though I continued to give him the
chance, by waiting on for two more solid days of dullness
and hope deferred, still Bill persisted in not being there.
And the Loo-yeh crowned my disabilities by sending a
message asking me not to go out too much in the streets
without an escort as the populace was apparently ill-
disposed. Also the Do-fu came fussing and pleading for
more cash than had been covenanted, their reasonable
plea being that at Hwei Hsien they could buy things and
replenish supplies in a way that would be impossible at
Eaux Blanches, our next important point.

Abandoning hope of being overtaken at Hwei Hsien, I
at last gave orders for starting again. And on the morrow
was borne away Southwards, sad in my spirits, feeling like
Mrs. Gummidge, lorn and lone, and widowed of my William.
We traversed the red undulations of the vale and made
straight for the crumpled ranges on the far side. Their
moist scotchness proved only the accident of autumnal
colouring. In reality they are actually drier than the
last, more rocky, more cultivated and less coppiced. Loess
had long ceased : here it was all ruddy loam, with outcrops
of conglomerate and primary rock, and finally of limestone.
THE DOWNWARD TRAIL 333

Up and down and in and out of steep complicated pitches
we came and went, steadying ourselves at last down a very
long continuous defile or wide gorges that in a way, though
so different, recalled those of Thundercrown. Vitex
reappeared, Cesalpinia, Trachycarpus and a Buddleia.
We dropped at length, down and down and down, much
farther than we had mounted, upon our Ban Tien round a
corner, snug and picturesque, deeply folded in the seclusion
of the hills. Here began for me, a herbaceous pretty
Gentian of amethystine pink, suggesting an Incarvillea,
which seems abundant all over central-Southern China.
And now the way became much wilder; often we were
able to follow the actual bed of the now-dwindled beck—
though here, if there is less river, there is also more water
about, in a wider and not so towering gorge. It reminded
me a little of the Bei Shui Jang Gorges below Kiai Jo, and
indeed was so Mediterranean as to suggest the lower reaches
of the Reja. Inured by now to vertiginous edges, I kept
my place and lay placid, feeling now in happier heart,
bucked up with the boldness of having. started on again,
on a new section of the journey.

To our left the broadening patches of light and sunshine
on the slopes indicated that the overshadowing hills were
diminishing, and that the range was nearly penetrated.
Nevertheless it was sooner than I expected that we emerged
wholly from the shadow of the gorges, dropped round a
corner, and came into a mule village that I made sure was
our stage—until, a little farther on down, across a much
bigger stream that received ours at a right angle, and then
swept away to the right in a mighty bend, deep among
the hills, I saw the most charming townlet that ever met
my eyes in China emerging on the toe of a wooded hill
behind, with curly-roofed grey temple dominating its
amassment of dark gables, and a many-storied magnifi-
cent Gate-tower rising conspicuous. It was Eaux Blanches
—which I so call, not to vaunt a familiarity with French,
but to distinguish this Bei Shui Jang from the entirely
334 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

distinct Bei Shui Jang River away in Kansu, at the foot
of the Fény S’an Ling, which, in the Haves of the World,
I immortalized as Whitewaters. And the river was the
Ja-Ling-Jang, flowing deep from here among wild dark
gorges in the bowels of the main Da-Ba-S’an, away down
out of the last of its hill-ventures towards the leisurely
opulence of North Szechuan, of which, indeed, it is one of
the Four Rivers that give the Four Rivers Province its
name.

And not so very different from the Whitewater River,
after all: if you struggled far away Northward up its
deviosities, you would come to a bifurcation at Biku.
And if you followed one of these, it would be the Whitewater
itself, you would come in yet more time to Wen-Hsien,
snuggled at the foot of the Fing S’an Ling, while, if you
followed the other, it would be the Blackwater, you would
come at last to Siku, tucked into the toes of Thundercrown.
In other words, the Blackwater and the Whitewater coalesce
at Biku, and there become the Min-Hor, which in time
becomes the Ja-Ling-Jang, which in time becomes the
Yang-die-Jang at Chungking, away down in Szechuan,
merging into the Da-Hor, which only foreigners call the
Yang-dze-Jang (and, even so, spell the poor thing Yang-
tze-Kiang, and so pronounce it). And on this old friend
it was our intention, at a favourable point, to take boat and
proceed, to save the labour and strain of further journeyings
down Szechuan to the Da-Hor. I scanned it accordingly
with eagerness at Eaux Blanches. But not yet, evidently,
would it serve our turn, though matted great arks lay
moored at its margin, and my eye longingly followed it to
its disappearance round the corner from Eaux Blanches,
immediately into the clean-cut darkness of the deep Da-
Ba-S’an gorges. But even more longingly, with the ache
of an exile, did my heart’s desire track its winding upwards,
till my longings came to Siku again, and Thundercrown
above it, unvisited for evermore, lonely in rain and
shine.
 

Boats aT Ber Suur Jase.
THE DOWNWARD TRAIL 335

My inn adjoined the tower at Eaux Blanches. It was
small and dark and so awfully malodorous that I climbed
up out of its stinks into the loft at the end for refuge, fearing
the worst. For you never meet the much-talked-of stenches
of China in the North, that huge open clean country, roomily
populated, with clean bare mud-houses and all the wide
earth for humanity’s wash-pot, and the sane austere air
of the North keeping the world swept and sweet. You
only realize the truth of travellers’ tales when you have
come down South and are merging on Szechuan, coming
into a moist, steamy warm climate, bland and clogging,
with a very dense population accumulated in wooden
houses. Eaux Blanches was my first stink-pot in China.
But Eaux Blanches was also very beautiful, and a fanaticism
for beauty has always been the real key of my life, and all
its happinesses and hindrances. So acute is it that one seems
at last to merge into something older still and more universal,
standing behind beauty; it could not be mere bien étre
or adequate secretions that gave me such almost unbearably
stimulating delight in a group of silly little trees, on the
top of a silly little hill across the river, against an azure
sky in the sunlight. In an ecstacy I sat in my loft, and
settled down to give Bill ample chance of catching me up
in Eaux Blanches.

And then I set out to explore it. Duly escorted by
Bongie and a soldier (for the place was reputed of doubtful
temper), I went out beyond the town, up the long climb
of stone steps that continue the trail. Then with the
snug place lying below, I came back along the hill-ridge
above to a curly temple half-hidden in green: and down
into Eaux Blanches again, by steep stone stairways, visiting
en route the twin-towered main temple, whose dim arcades
of darkness and dust proved to be stacked with coffins.
It was a lodging-house of the dead, a guildhall where they
lay secure, awaiting the time when their friends should
be able or see fit to remove them to a permanent home
elsewhere, perhaps far away in their own province. For a
336 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

while I sat in the grateful cool of its galleries, musty and
sombre and obscure, with glints of colour and old gilding
on its heavy carvings. And then returned home to the
inn down through the fair that was raging in the vast
shingle-flat of the river. Goitre had been very evident
ever since I left Tsin J6, and here especially prevailed.
Also in an inner yard, I here saw my first Musa (I do not
mean any deity addicted to song, I mean a Banana
plant).

But Bill did not come, and the stinks plugged up my
passages more and more. Also, fusses arose about the
jao. It appeared that the farther stages, on to Loyang,
were over hills so high and wild that the mule-litter could
not hope to accomplish them. Accordingly ,the litter
must be dismantled, and its poles and skeleton packed on
one of its mules, while I myself went in a sedan instead.
This also meant that I must shell out more money. I felt
choused, considering that surely the matter ought to have
been declared and settled for in Lanchow, instead of being
thus sprung upon me at the eleventh hour. To cool my
frets, and in constant hope of seeing Bill approaching at
any moment, down the shingles, I went out again at dusk
with my Chaperons. A crowd as usual attended, but watched
me quite benevolently. However, under a thousand eyes
there is no rest. I was driven in at last by a grey dust
squall, and on my way my discontents were crowned by an
old lady in a shop, who exclaimed as I went by: “‘ Oh, how
fat the Lord is!” So now, in feebleness of mood, I allowed
myself the luxury of vacillating over whether we should
not after all wait yet another day for Bill, seeing that the
place was so pleasant, and so ravishingly picturesque.
But the problem was settled by the head Do-fu’s urging
that we should move on at once, to the better quarters
and ampler supplies of Loyang, and there definitely wait till
Bill arrived.

Thus it was done. My chair proved very comfortable,
and serenely I was borne up along the steep high climb
THE DOWNWARD TRAIL 337

above the river. Then we made away across the top of the
fell and down into a back glen where Zinnias had gone
wild in the shingle, and were looking very much prettier,
in graceful branching stems, and diminished flowers of
blood-coloured velvet, than the dreadful painted-looking
pompoms that, you get in gardens. But now all the world
was far-gone in autumn,and even the Zinnias were at their
last flower. At a little eating-shanty under the steep of
the fell we called a halt ; and then, immediately and abruptly,
set to work ascending the brant hill-side, in a succession of
hair-pin coils so short and sharp that assuredly no mule-
litter could ever have got up, or managed their bends. It
was tough work for the sedan; there were two more halts
for refreshment before the tremendous mass of the hill
was conquered, and the hours of unbroken climbing landed
us on the top. The scene was now very like that of the
Mo Ping Pass, though about 2,000 ft. lower: the same
shrubs reappeared—Cotoneaster and Dipelta—but in much
poorer form and very sparse. Xanthoxylum also resumed,
Ivy occurred and Saxifraga Sarmentosa, and my Grey
Flannel Buddleia was very occasional and sad and sickly
in the rock crevices.

On the crest I alighted to peruse the unfolded world
before me under a forbidding sky of cold grey. And my
perusal plunged me in greyness to match. It was a very
fine view, with tumbled ridges away and away on every
side. But the biggest and peakiest and most promising
now all lay behind me; and their promise had borne me
such very scanty fruit that what could I expect of the
lower, duller chains ahead? With sudden dismay I realized
that here I was already more than half-way through the
ranges of the Da-Ba-S’an, without having seen one plant
of any note or newness, or any mountain at all capable of
producing such. Was the Da-Ba-8’an, then, going to play
me the same trick as the Da-Tung Alps, but for the opposite
reason—the one range because it ran too high, but this one
because it ran too low? Had I come all this way, at such

Zz
338 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

a cost of weariness, for nothing better than these uninter-
esting fluffy hillocks of 8,000 ft., wadded up in a woodland
of coppice, with nowhere any suggestion of Alpine heights,
or Alpine austerity. I had staked my last throw on some
fertility in the Da-Ba-S’an to counterbalance the disappoint-
ments of the Da-Tung and make them good to my friends
at home, hungry for seeds and more seeds of new species
and genera in an imposing list of names and numbers. But
little should I evidently get in the Da-Ba-S’an to swell that
list. My last throw had failed. My last long adventure
had been undertaken fruitlessly.

Wasted labour, time and weariness are poor condiments
to a grey cold view, under a cold grey sky, under the lash
of a cold grey wind. With a jaundiced eye I contemplated
that world which I could but consider as entirely wasted
as my own efforts in getting there. Why could not
those nasty little cosy mountains have grown only just a
little bit taller—another 2,000 ft. would have done it
—and so developed a flora? But to expect Alpines at
8,000 ft. in China is like going out to look for Eritri-
chium in Epping Forest. Drearily I followed the track,
silty and black, along the ins and outs of the down-top,
with hard glaciated-looking rocks emerging through the
scalp of dull grass in rounded muffled contours. At the
end a spur jutted out from the ridge, and on it a pretty
little temple perched, embowered in forest. This we did
not enter, but passed straight on beneath the dark of a gate,
and under a hanging wall of woodland beyond, sumptuous
and solemn with autumn. And then down, very steep and
very far by a bad track treacherous with loose shaly stones.
But though this stage is reckoned as 70 li, these can only
be 70 li of difficulty, not 70 li of actual distance. For now
quite soon and only about half a day’s journey from Eaux
Blanches and only some 6 miles away, we turned a corner
at the bottom of the drop and there, in a dull defile, were
some derelict-looking buildings. And this was indeed our
stage, though at first I could not believe it, until I saw the
THE DOWNWARD TRAIL 339

skeleton of the disestablished jao lying unloaded outside
the main house. This proved a vast barn-like building, with
no accommodation at all except for mules, whose mangers
filled the dusty dark of the interior. But a k’ang was
curtained off for me in a corner with waterproofing, and
in that uneventful place of stoppage we passed the night
not unsuccessfully, though my own was broken and haunted
by perpetual cock-crowings, and the movements of the
mule-men, and the soft monotonous champing of the
mules.

The morrow was a miserable day of leaden greyness,
with a cold shrilling head-wind. Down the winding way we
went on, with walls of Silurian on either hand, yet never
attaining to the dignity of a gorge. I saw two stems of
what once had been a Brownii-lily, and the first masses of
a new Bamboo, tall and lovely and plumy, with stems
of bloomy grey when young, and the general Anemone
vitifolia was here so vividly red that once I got out of my
chair to go and see what it could be. In time we debouched
into a wider valley, with a tranquil stream, and turned down
it to the right through a little glen. Now came a long
vacant stretch, and then ahead of us I saw a tiny perched
pagoda, barely distinguishable in the pale grey tones that
universally prevailed, against the huge high mass of hill
that rose behind. And underneath it gradually unfolded
the mouldered little sad Hsien of Loyang. We got into it
so early that I was confirmed in my yesterday’s conviction
that the 70 li of these last two stages was merely a figure of
rhetoric. But when I entered the Inn outside the wall,
I found all my anticipations falsified, and the Do-fu hand-
somely justified of their desire to move on here from Eaux
Blanches. It was a fine, neat, pleasant place, and my own
quarters upstairs quite palatial, after two years of Kansu-
Tibet, with everything clean and new as a fresh-minted
coin. It was a real human room in fact, up in a loft, with
a k’ang built of black brick, and big glass panes in the
window, and even tables with drawers in them, surmounted
340 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

by a little contrivance like a dresser or a bookshelf. Never
had I seen the like in all my Chinese travel.

In high contentment we unfolded and luxuriated. Apart
from the comparative luxury, I had a quite definite feeling
of relief and achievement in having reached Loyang, and
so successfully, with all my flock. For this was the end of
my solitary journey. Here, definitely, I would wait for
Bill to arrive, no matter how many days it might be before
he did so. It was a tedious time, though—nothing to see,
and nowhere to go, and only greyness and failure to con-
template. I roamed and meditated and mourned and lay
a-bed; a dense dusty ha’ar like a London fog perpetually
pervaded all the air, and the whole world was filled with
sickly sullen grey. The place itself was cheery and populous,
though the Hsien in the midst and its walls were very
forlorn: the pageant of life included a funeral procession,
and an amazing stout woman in the house opposite with the
most ill-tempered face and voice I have ever met who
stood on the doorstep all day long, scolding and vociferating
incessantly. Then there was the farm-yard below my loft
to watch, with a queer-shaped duck, and cocks and hens,
and two geese whiter than any white thing in the world, and
a sick mule who kept on passing spouts of bright blood.

All the same, the days lagged ; I could hardly believe my
ears at last, when time had ceased for me, and I lay comatose
in a sluggish contentment, when Go-go and the Do-fu
came running about 4 in the afternoon of a dead dark day,
with joyous cries of “Por Loy lai, Por Loy lai!” I leapt
to my feet and forth into the lane with such speed that
I forgot my stockings. But up the grey flat wastes of the
landscape I could see nothing new, so returned to my room
to assume those forgotten attributes of dignity, before
sallying out again with more discretion. And there indeed
I did see Bill, minute in the distance, making swiftly towards
me. And here in a few more moments he actually was
beside me, radiant in health and spirits, and heavy-laden
with precious seeds from the Ardjeri Alps. But he had not
 

THE DOWNWARD TRAIL 341

been able to lure either Gomer or the Wa-wa away again
from their homes ; and the vivid little brown pony, beloved
of the piglet in Wolvesden, had foundered far away in a
marsh of Drokwa-land.

We allowed ourselves another day of relaxation after the
joy of this reunion, to recuperate and exchange the tales of
our respective travels; and on the morrow resumed our
journey, both of us on ponies, the chair having gone home.
We traversed gorges and a pass and gorges again; each day
on this track takes you through and across a chain of
hills, and brings you out to rest in the intervening valley,
before the next. The only incident of this stage was a
low-growing rose, conspicuous with very large thick-rounded
fruits, like young pomegranates, of flushed golden amber,
beset with rare dark bristles. Otherwise the scene and its
actors were the same as heretofore. Mah-liu Pa is not a
place of note: at grey dawn, and in floods of rain, we quitted
it on the morrow. The valley grew wilder and wilder, with
big copse-clothed hills, and gorges and ravines of dark
rock, that seemed to promise well, but yielded nothing.
Boea reappeared, and Trachycarpus was now native and
abundant in the rocks: it looked so odd and inappropriate
and attractive, this stately fan-palm playing at being an
Alpine of those untropical cliffs. I also saw a Mahonia ;
the rosy-headed Clerodendron was expensive-looking as an
Ixora along the track; and by this time Iris tectorum had
ceased to occur. And so we emerged from the mountain
mass, and saw the next ahead of us, across a wide fertile
vale with Tai-an-i sitting on its far verge, at the foot of
the hills.

A huge fair was here a-foot; but I was borne swiftly
and sternly indoers, up into a clean wide Inn of quite a new
and Southern type, without k’angs. The cold North was
evidently left behind and its winters here unknown. We
had a happy evening together, toying with the wild and
glorious notion of giving up the Yang-dze and striking
straight away East to Tai Bei S’an, for a desperate grab
342 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

at the back-end seeds of the Tein-ling. Had we come
together again at Hwei Hsien, in fact, or Eaux Blanches, this
audacious volte-face would probably have taken place ;
as it was, we were too far South by now, and the proposed
diversion therefore so much more of a strain on our tautened
endurance and our slackened digestion. The idea was only
good to be played with : in sober fact we had both had our
fill of travel and toil by this time, and longed for the moment
when we could board a boat on Ja-Ling-Jang, and let
ourselves blandly cease.

In thunderous glooms and a stifling Turkish-bath
atmosphere, we moved out of Tai-an-i, and up towards our
entrance into the hills. The valleys, ever since we left
Loyang, had been rich with tillage, and the heights are
pricked out with maize to their very tops, on the merest
scratches and ledges of the red loam that now universally
replaces the loess. It was all very picturesque, with a
new characteristic Chinese picture at every turn: not for
the first time did I now realize that Chinese paintings,
which seem so fantastic in their landscapes, do actually
convey a quite accurate generalization of Chinese scenery,
though without ever copying any one particular view.
Oriental art aims straight at the inner spirit of what it is
trying to represent, and now, in the wildest phantasmagoria
of peaks and depths, I can see the essential generalization
of dozens of pictures that I myself have traversed. In the
open lands, meanwhile, there occurred a very lovely tree
of heart-shaped foliage drawn out into points, and then the
most graceful foot-long bunches, borne in profusion, of
bloomy coral-scarlet berries. And it seemed to be capable
of bearing fruit even in its tender years: younglings of
eight feet or so were weeping their rose-red rain as copiously
as their elders. I leapt off my pony to gather it, though
in despair of its hardiness. But these Szechuan plants
are very surprising: their general level of hardiness is far
higher than I could have hoped. Many things in England,
from away up in the North, are much more tender than these
THE DOWNWARD TRAIL 343

children of the equable South: the flora of the hot dry
river—valleys of Kansu—my Buddleia, Convolvulus
tragacanthoides, Oreocharis, the Leptoderms, Androsace
longifolia, all seem hopeless for cultivation in the open
over here, and even Androsace tibetica sulks through our
winter damps. Whereas the Szechuan flora has a more even
temper and a kindlier average of resistance: the red-
fruited tree (F. 753) has so far proved quite equanimous in
our Northern winters.

But the noble races of the rock-garden were long since
extinguished. No more Primulas were possible in these
low-running regions of soft lush vegetation and steamy
warmth. We wound up now into a gorge of rose-grey
limestone, hung with creepers, wild and splendid as a
“ schlucht ” in the Dolomites. What a wasted life, thought
I, to have such possibilities of Primulas, yet to possess
none. These hard stark walls exactly repeated the stark
hard walls of rosy rock above San Dalmazzo di Tenda, in
which Primula Allionii so closely clings: but where was
there here a repetition of Primula Allionii to round off the
resemblance? Acidly, in these musings, I scanned the
cliffs, as my pony stumbled along between them, and
disdained the weeds on which they exclusively wasted their
fissures. And then a withered yellowing tag caught my
eye, up on a particularly hot hard face. It was worthy of
closer inquiry ; I got off and climbed up. It was a Primula
indeed and, to my eye, nothing else than Primula sinensis
—a discovery that set my tired heart palpitating with all
the old emotions of the hunter, not only in that it was a
Primula, but that it should be P. sinensis, such hundreds
of hard and weary miles away from the Yang-dze Gorges,
hitherto its only recorded habitat. Of course, there was no
trace of flower remaining, and even of seed there was
barely a vestige; but it crowned my year with a Primula.

Very preciously did Go-go and I explore the cliffs, and
examine each one of the soft baggy capsules, now almost
withered to crisp chaff on their withered brown stems:
344 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

the plant abounded in the tightest closest cracks of the
hottest, hardest, sheerest cliffs, but the seed was by now so
completely shed that only after long agonies of anxious
search were we able to glean here and there a stray germ,
still clinging round its column. But the small pinch that
at length we accumulated was sufficient to introduce the
plant. And now it proves to be a quite new species, though
close to P. sinensis in a group in which hitherto P. sinensis
had been believed to stand alone. Primula rupestris
turns out as pretty as the wild forms of P. sinensis, and of
a pleasant shade of pink, with variations in depth of tone
and amplitude of flower. And it is perceptibly more hardy
than P. sinensis, though also a soft thing, and never likely
to be trustworthy in the open through the winter, except
in very special conditions. These it has, in one dry little
overhung niche on the cliff at Ingleborough; and has
there accordingly lived happily now through two summers
anda winter. P.sinensis would never have been capable of
such audacity and endurance; but even so, P. rupestris
must be chiefly counted on for the cold greenhouse. These
slack-textured fluffy flimsy things will never resist the
darkness and raw damp of our winters in the open ground.

Emerging from the gorges, the cobbled track now climbed,
very high, to a pass, but though water abounded in these
ranges, there is no trace of any moisture-zone vegetation,
no big woodland; and culture stretches right up to the
crests. Through a stone arch on the top we passed, and
then down, endlessly, past a small grave-coppice near the
summit, where Aconitum Hemsleyanum towered in solemn
sapphire obelisks, very vivid against the dead autumnal
brown of decay that now monotonously clothed the whole
world. Atintervals the descent was so steep that I preferred
to light down and walk. The Go-li stage is Go-li indeed,
well measured and by distance, and a handsome 30 miles
at that. It was quite dusk when we emerged from the
mountains and slowly wound across a plain of rice-fields
towards what proved to be the big and busy city of Ming
THE DOWNWARD TRAIL 345

Chiang J6 (where all the old women make match-boxes)
lying just like Tai-an-i across the plain, at the foot of the
next hill-barrier we had to cross, parallel with our last,
and very like them, but that these were rockier, and all
tilted up in an odd violent slant of their dark strata, barring
their slopes in streaks. A fine and stately Inn received us
at Ming Chiang J6: woodwork, by now, is much more
copiously evident in the buildings, and I was further cheered
with prospects of getting a chair again.

The chair was got, and in it I was borne away on the
morrow up the valley, along beneath the hills. Everything
was softly grey. I do not feel to have seen the sun since
I left Eaux Blanches: far up in the North were now quite
left behind the diamond clearness of Kansu, its blaze of
light and heat and cold ; by this time we were well embogged
in the gentle muggy gloom of Szechuan, where the sun
proverbially shines so rarely that the dogs bark at it in
Chung King when it does. Up and down among innumerable
foothills we diverged in time from the valley, till, at a dull
low point among reddish expansive hills, we crossed the
range by a steep ascent, up the steady sharp tilt of the
stratum ; and then far down again, with masses of moun-
tains to right and left, very sombre and gorgeous in dark
blue violet under the gathering storm clouds that now capped
them. They were coppiced and rocky, wilder looking than
the last, in the livid savage light. Much traffic was on the
road, enormous stacks of matchwood went by in long
processions, en route for the old ladies of Ming Chiang J6.
Finally we got down into a ghyll that opened out on a soapy
blue-green beck, with yet another big dark range across the
valley, barring our next day’s journey. And then up to
the right, by a very long and violent ascent of stone steps
in a heaven-high stairway, like that ascent to Saint Some-
body’s convent, high, high up above Santa Margherita.
Through various temple gate-houses we passed, attained the
crest, and dropped far down on the other side, in and out,
among fields where the population was out a-sowing. They
346 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

do not plough or scatter. Across the prepared face of the
field little holes are scratched in the red loam in orderly
succession two feet or a yard apart. Along the rows a
woman passes, and drops a pinch of seed into each cavity
as she goes; and then some one else comes after, with a
handful of dark and friable-looking manury silt, to pepper in
on top.

Seventy long li of travel brought us to our stage at Chiao
jang Ba, a very tiny simple village, where the Inn was very
small to match, but with enormous accommodation for the
mules in barn-like yards, and a walled garden embowered
in densely-fruiting trees of a small clustered Tangerine
orange—a significant evidence of the climate into which we
were now come. Also, being a country place, tiny and
clean, it had no such stench as that of the daily-emptied
latrine-tanks of the towns and cities of Szechuan,
perpetually pestiferous with strings of coolies carrying
unsavoury slop-pails slung from each shoulder.

The brooding skies had broken in a sheet of tears when we
rose next day to move on. The way was dull at first, up
and down among foothills till we reached the beck. But
then its course grew wilder, in ascents and descents with a
chaos of tumbled boulders all about. We came in face of
a huge rosy cliff, with the huge high arch of a dark grotto
at its foot, into which the stream disappeared. This,
from our high point of vantage across the valley, we duly
contemplated ; then wound up the flagged ascent to a wooded
neck where a temple nestled. Through arches we went
down on the other side ; and there below us was our stream,
reappearing from a gorge. But now the track took us away,
round and about, mounting high upon the vast flanks of an
open down. It was dreary in the streaming wet, a wide-
bosomed highland of brown and russet, orcharded here and
there with a queer little tree that bore fantastic fruits
(Aleurites cordata), Shivering with lowness in my Sedan,
I ached yet more for Bill and the servants, splashing unpro-
tected through the deluge, in a sad procession, swelled by
THE DOWNWARD TRAIL 347

two escort-soldiers from the Yamen at Ming Chiang Jé6, a
brace of unbelievable degraded atoms, like the fading ghosts
of two malignant yet imbecile Elementals, chinless and
spidery.

But the enormous circuit of that high bay was at last
accomplished. We curved round to its farther rim, and
there, very deep down below, immediately at our feet,
came into sight again the Ja-Ling-Jang that had lost
itself to our view in the deep labyrinths of the Da-
Ba-S’an ravines, ever since it parted company from us at
Eaux Blanches. And there, too, in a huddle of dark roofs,
lay Bridge-hall, beyond its eponymous Bridge, magnificent
and stately and of many arches, which carries the highway
over the hill-stream there flowing down, tired of gorges and
subterranean adventures, into the candid sweep of the Ja-
Ling-Jang.

It was a tremendous drop to Chao-Tien, down long pre-
cipitous flights of stone stairs, like those that descend from
Esino upon Varenna. But the Inn, though narrow, was
good, and any lodging would have rejoiced us after such a
day-long battering of deluges as might have gratified Regan
and Goneril. Fortunately, the next morning, despite the
usual over-night denials, a second chair had been achieved
for Bill. Therefore, in better heart, I was carried out
through the grey drizzle. Almost immediately we mounted
up, and over a big rise and down again to the river on its
other side, where, across an affluent rill, there was a little
limestone bluff, on which, through my blinds, I caught a last
glimpse of Primula rupestris. I had dreaded a long day,
dull and drenching. But gradually the sky lightened and
the rain left off, and the journey turned out beautiful,
following the course of the Ja-Ling-Jang, in and out of
wooded bays, and over ribs of rises, each making a picture,
but one more attractive than all, culminating in a thickly
crowded gate-house, with soldiers and guns, and a dear little
temple beyond, alighted on a pinnacle aloft, with trees
aligned up the stairway that climbed to it. And the way
348 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

was wild, too, with stones—although now we were finally
emerging from the hill-country, leaving all our hopes irre-
trievably buried behind us in the Da-Ba-S’an, and drawing
out into the many-breasted opulence of the Red Basin of
Szechuan. As I undulated along in my chair I scanned the
rocks assiduously for the fossils that Richthofen found such
a feature of these parts. Not one did I discern, but Bill
reported them multitudinous: I only saw a bewildering
abundance and diversity of rocks—reddish-dark shales,
vast boulders of limestone amazingly moutonné, and black
enormous blocks parqueted in slopes or tumbled into
pandemonium.

Finally we came down out of the hills for good, and away
into the open country, with the coal-measures evident, and
big arks over-arched in tunnels of matting, plying freely
on the swift smooth peasoup-coloured tide of the Ja-Ling-
Jang, and often being towed upstream by harnessed leashes
of fine jolly fellows, in the well-made, well-featured hand-
some type that now prevailed (and we said good-bye to
goitre at Lo-Yang), Away ahead of us now for a long time
lingered Kwang Yuen, out in the flat, embowered in trees.
But a sandstone bluff impended over the river, and in its
face was a carven gallery of innumerable grottoes and
cavities and niches and caves and alcoves, all occupied by
scriptured sacred scenes and groups of Buddhas, bodhi-
sattvas, saints, angels, abbots and holy persons. Among
several other such rock-carvings in China, the Thousand
Buddhas of Kwang Yuen stand high ; and not unreasonably
did they delay us. But at length we tore ourselves onward,
andin due course arrived down in Kwang Yuen as night was
falling. Round the projection of the Northern gate we had
to pass, and right away round along the river-front of the wall,
above the crowded ranks of barges, till by the West Gate
we entered the city, and drew up in a smart Inn, embedded
in the usual paralysing stenches from the latrines (so to
flatter an unalluring lake) immediately behind our state-
apartments. But all the same, it was a huge relief to be
 

S
-

 

FF OF A THOUSAND BUDDHAS.

THE CLI
THE DOWNWARD TRAIL 349

here, for this was the end of our trek, the supreme
objective towards which we had looked from far-off Lan-
chow. Horses, mules and chairs were now done with:
nothing remained but to fold our hands in peace, and in
the relaxation of complete and well-deserved exhaustion
go glassily gliding down the Ja-Ling-Jang through hills
of palm and orange to Chung King.
CHAPTER XVI
THE WATERWAYS

It was about 11 before I decided to wake up on the
morrow, and found outside my dark room darkness and
drizzling damp, corroding as ever. Now it was a case of
going out to see our prospective boat. Down a side-alley
we went, and descended by a steep and sloppy stone stair-
way on to the sad mud-flat of the river-shore. And
there was the huge matted ark, lying becalmed out on the
broad bosom of the Ja-Ling-Jang. A punt was waiting to
take us to it, but in between the punt and us intervened a
wide stretch of shallow which it was proposed that we should
traverse pick-a-back. This was a most perilous and infelici-
tous proceeding ; I cannot feel that I looked my best, with
my bulk obliterating the small frail veteran, who yet con-
tinued intrepidly staggering on, with slow sure movements
and vibrations of his tautened muscles, through the ripples,
gripping the mud with his toes at each step. It must have
looked like some large blowzy blossom hovering heavily
above the water on a quite inadequate stem. My only
consolation in this unbecoming conjuncture and Bill’s loud
laughter at it was the sight of Bill himself horsed likewise
in the same undignified position, and similarly periclitating
across the straits with the same pinched and haggard
expression as I felt sure I was wearing myself. However,
we did at last attain the punt without ill-adventure, and so
arrived at the barge. This proved full of merchandise and
babies. Our landlord was our escort, and now we set to
bargaining with the ship-master. But Bill and I, inured
to Kansu, proved quite at sea in the dialect of Szechuan :

350
THE WATERWAYS 351

and the Go-go turned out even more helpless than our-
selves, being determined, like all Chinese, not even to make
any attempt at adapting himself to the barbarism of a
different province. He, a Shansi lad, had framed himself
by practice to the tongue of Kansu; but now, neither
could he nor would he condescend to the new little clickings
and neighings and slurred enclitics that alone might have
made his talk pass current in Szechuan. So we giggled and
shouted and squawked at each other with perfect good-
humour but no approach to mutual understanding. Finally
it was decided, in our complete darkness as to stages and fares,
that we should return to the town and there try to find some-
body capable of shedding light upon the situation.

So home we went and I wrote letters, while Bill set forth
on his quest. And it so happened that he forgathered with
an elderly lady, whom he ungratefully and ungallantly
described as “a dreadful old doxy in whiskers.” But this
forbidding female showed more sense than all her kind.
She advised us to go on again by road, unless we wanted
to run the risk of passing our New Year on the boat, becalmed
and stranded on a mud-flat in the middle of the Ja-Ling-
Jang. The river, in fact, was low, and she did not recom-
mend us to trust to it. This was rather a blow. We did
so want to be at rest. We were so heartily tired out with
the road. And here we had felt so sure of being finally
done with it, and allowed to flop into the lethargy of com-
plete fatigue. But there was no help for it: with mingled
thankfulness and disappointment we acclaimed the old
doxy’s counsel, and the rest of the day went by in rapid
readjustments. The mules were chartered on, Bill’s shag-
haired little pony sold, and a second chair at last obtained.

It was a notable relief to awake on the morrow to a fine
and eventually a beautiful day. Our first stretch led across
an affluent of the Ja-Ling-J ang, over which we were conveyed
bodily, mules and chairs and all, ina ferry. Now we turned
away from the Ja-Ling-Jang and mounted steeply, up and
up, very high on a big mountain mass that commanded all
352 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

the country, and all the silver winding of the Ja-Ling-Jang.
Down into a mere nothing sank the fine pagoda which had
been so conspicuous above the ferry; and Kwang Yuen
was left behind. Now we were on the highland: at one turn
(only) of the ascent Bill happened on a very attractive
little glossy-leaved evergreen flopping Lonicera, with ter-
minal bunches of bloomy blue-black fruit, well worth col-
lecting for its own sake. The scenery gave our first sample
of the Red Basin. It was very lovely, and quite unlike
anything I had ever seen in China, though reminiscent of
much that I knew in Europe. The Szechuan roads run
over large irregular highlands, with the deep valleys of the
big rivers rarely intersecting them. So now we continued
up and down, among the windings of glens and dips in hills
of tilted reddish sandstone, wonderfully new and picturesque
in effect, suggesting the low vineland hills of the Rhine about
Cologne, with innumerable little red terraces running up
them, dappled with small trees: then, as one descended
into a glen, it was just like passing through some scant
woodland of the Provengal coast, with Pinus maritima here
replaced, over light scrub, by a fine, lovely Cypressus in
the same rich emerald green and fluffiness of effect. The
country, too, flows with abundant water, and the dells and
dips each nurse a beck, with many collateral mossy wood-
rills that mockingly suggested Primulas. Our stage was
short, and ended—for this is only a by-track—in a quite
small village, where I spent the sundown patrolling the
stone-paved threshing-floor below, on the brink of a ghyll,
with a wide vista over low hills of tilted russet strata,
crowded with small cypresses and recalling the foot-hills
approaching Marathon.

The next day still took us on over the highland, but the
scenery steadily grew tamer and duller, with shallower
slants to the strata, and stupid uninteresting profiles to th~
distances. As I came down through a slight coppice
towards a village, I saw a spray of silver stars aspiring over
a bush. And it has proved a Clematis of variegated milk-
THE WATERWAYS 353

veined foliage, suggesting Armandi, yet not, I think,
identical. Whatever its flower may prove, its branching
flight of seed-heads will always have their value, not being
fluff-whirls, as usual, but, rather, flattened stars, with
rayed achenes glistening. The village was crowded and
clamorous with a fair: it lurked in a fold of the fells, and
afterwards we had a steep far climb to the very top of the
highland, along the crest of which the track then continued
up and down for the rest of the 80-li stage. The views were
far, the fell-tops wild and brambled like a British common,
with a new ramping rose, whose leaves were velvet on their
reverse, and a new Viburnum, like a stiff little privet, with
black fruit and foliage suggesting an olive’s. But the air
was now gone all grey and cold, under a cold grey sky, with
the distances uglier than ever in a dusty grey ha’ar of dull
monotony. It was a relief to arrive at New Hall (Hsin
Tang, or Gin-u-Chang), tucked into the bosom of the down,
and there to find beautiful quarters up at the end of the
inn, very high-pitched in the gable, with pin-new roofing-
poles and wainscotting, and beams outlining the white
plaster panels of the walls, in the finest simple-life or Garden
City style. And here a wet day held us captive throughout
the morrow, lying luxuriously abed, though the lofty
studio-like room was so a-bluster with draughts from the
almost latticed tiling of the roof, that the luxury was strictly
tempered to the unshorn lambs.

But a glorious day succeeded, and off we set once more,
with a short but lovely stage. First of all we dropped at
last off the conclusion of our highland upon a very pretty
little towered hamlet standing out on a spur. And then
down and down again, and over one of the splendid stone-
arched bridges that abound in these parts, and seem so
grotesque for the piddling little rills across which they
pompously convey such a tuppenny-halfpenny side-road as
this is, unusable by anything but foot-traffic and sedans
and mules. Then on tothe next hill-mass we mounted out
of the valley as high as we were on the last. Travellers
354 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

met us in strings, advancing single file over the down—
pedlars and shopmen going North to try their fortunes :
each had in one hand a bundle; and in the other every man
of them swung his bird-cage—swaddled in a bandanna to
keep its inmate from being frightened. Not that this
beautiful and idyllic picture is so purely idyllic as it sounds.
The birds are not only objects of sentiment to their owners,
they are also important from the point of view of profit.
For they are champions of song, and singing matches are
arranged, and heavy stakes are won and lost, so that nobody,
on however far a journey bound, will willingly abandon
his bird ; everywhere in China, the pedestrian on progress
is armed with his bird-cage. But, quite apart from profit,
the Chinese does also love his bird for itself: of cats he takes
no account, and dogs are despised outcasts of the streets,
and the universal pig is profit incarnate and more; but on
his bird he lavishes real affection, and all the resources
of his love and art are deployed on keeping it well-housed
and tended, with the utmost extravagance of exquisite
decoration for its perches, and its seed-pot, and its water-
pan.

On the very crest of the down, by a steep rise of stone
steps, there was an eating-house. We stopped to rest and
feed. Papa and mamma were away, and the shop was being
run by two minute little pig-tailed maidens of four and five
years old, barely as tall as the two gigantic vats on the
cooking-range, out of which, straining a-tiptoe, they ladled
rice for their customers with complete command of the
situation, in a weighty seriousness accepting payment
and giving change, and gravely demurring to a halfpenny
tip as something excessive and unheard of. Hard by, in
an outhouse, was their baby brother’s go-cart, a home-
made contrivance of wood, which ingeniously combined the
functions of a chair, a table, and a tricycle, with a handy
little hole in the seat. Having satisfactorily wooed these
complete shopkeepers into accepting a few cash for a present,
we pursued our way along the down, the air still lovely, but
THE WATERWAYS 355

the distances duller and duller, with the innumerable and
very shallow strata-lines of the hills now so quieted down as
to be almost horizontal. Quite early in the afternoon we
drew into Yu-ning-pu, a cosy, fine place along the.frontage
of the hill, with a noble temple Guild-house in the midst,
and a fine raised side-walk of flag-stones heavily arcaded
with thatching. Our inn was fine and stately, as last night’s,
and full of dear old kindly grannies who made much of us.
But it was also peopled by a batch of soldiers, returning
from very well-known territory up in the far North, having
been to Tao-Jo to buy four hundred horses for the troops,
and being now on their way South with them to Cheng-tu.
And they were a rough, offensive crew, as soldiers prover-
bially are in China, with no respect for dignities. They soon
provoked a row with our own people and, secure that good
gentle Go-go could have given them no just cause of offence,
we took his side, and ere long had coped successfully with
their impudence.

Next day gave us a long 90-li stage. The morning was not
so cloudless, but very lovely and pearly and golden, with all
the valleys beneath us filled with milky cloud-rolls as we
continued: along the high-land. And above the milk sea
rose the farther hills, away and away, misted and veiled into:
a perfect Chinese painting. We passed a little village in
full fair, and then a charming building tucked into a wooded
hill-top. A pine appeared more maritime than even the
Cypress; the springy-turfy ‘“‘landes”’ over which we now
undulated were more than ever Mediterranean, with their
red soil, and their scant herbage, and the tall pines over-
shadowing them in sparse multitudes, inclining this way and
that on naked, spindly shanks. In early afternoon, thanks
to our early start, we were borne up a steep slant of stone
stairs to the topmost stratum of the fell-neck, beyond which,
along the last conclusion of the down, lay out our stage, the
comfortable, prosperous village of Hwa-y Su-y.

Here we looked for an inn apart from the soldiers,
and at last found one at the far extremity of the village,
356 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

presided over by a charming deaf old Manchu, who
yelled at us most affably. Out along the street-way I
then strolled to the neck, to enjoy the sundown. And
there away below in its valley reappeared at last, between
the folds of the fell, a silver glimpse of the Ja-Ling-Jang,
just a curved streak of light far down in the grey
depths, in the flat of its vale, striped dimly with emerald
strips of culture, and beyond it, one behind another,
up and up in a disorderly sea of crests like grey waves,
the monotonous hills of Szechuan surged higher and higher
across the whole distance in a monochrome of grey, till they
merged at last into the grey monochrome of the sky, riven
at one point only by a broad flaring rent of clear yellow.
And in the foreground dimly-terraced promontories from
the down loomed out above the depths of the vale, and
immediately before me the converging slopes sank gently
away, ample and voluminous, in broad sweeps of flooded
rice-fields terraced with red-raw ramparts of earth, blinking
up in pale metallic sheen at the sundown like broken cres-
cents of mirror set flat into the fall of the hill, and diversified
by myriads of little cypresses dotted all up the slopes, now
black and attentive-looking, like crowds of hooded gnomes,
in the blurred, dying softness of the twilight. And in the
shallows the buffaloes were wallowing.

Along and along we went next day, and down a dip,
through a pretty village containing a big tree all hung with
huge citrons like pale-green balloons: and up again, and
still along high ground, with the river only fitfully appearing
below on the right ; till at last we came to a battlemented
piece of wall and a gatehouse, in the beautiful russet free-
stone of which these hills consist (and which therefore is
so handy for the fine building that is so general hereabouts).
And so to an eating-house on a neck, beyond which the down
did definitely diminish and die finally away. And there,
barring our Southward way, the river came fully into view,
flowing wide in many channels over vast flat beds. So
now we continued to a crest, crossed over on the right, and
THE WATERWAYS 357

went down and down and down by endless winding flights
of stairs into a gorge, only to mount up out of it again
quite as high up stairways quite as steep and stiff, to con-
tinue along the down frontage yet another while before
descending at last once and for all into the valley of the
Ja-Ling-Jang. It was a rippled ocean of grave-hummocks
in enormous expanses. We continued steadily up to the
right, till at length, on afar hill dim and ghostly and grey,
the dim grey shape of a noble tower dawned out of the grey
universal monochrome of the day and the distance; and
then on a higher mass behind a yet nobler pagoda emerged,
and various stately temples tucked into high folds, above
a now-perceptible level of green tree-tops, which was clearly
to be Bao-ning-fu, though at present undiscoverable. The
lone trail was over. Half an hour more, and we were
traversing the whole breadth of the town, very bustling
and big and busy, with silk greatly in evidence in most of
its shops ; and came at length at its far edge by a little lane,
to a narrow little dark stinking inn, selected because it was
handy to the landing-stage, the conclusion of our labours.
The next day, though gorgeously hot and balmy, and
replete with an almost overpowering sensation of relief and
relaxation, was also one of storm and stress. In the first
place there arrived no passport from the Yamen to protect
our Do-fu on their return journey against the malignity of
the soldiers, from whom the worst was to be expected in the
way of vengeance, now that the protecting sacrosanctity
of foreigners was no longer at hand. In the second there
now appeared a very jumped-up little Jack from the
Governor, with nose and teeth running out ahead of him,
who told us that-even our own passport, made out originally
for Honan, Shansi, Shensi and Kansu, had ceased to be
valid on our entering Szechuan, and no longer entitled us
to official recognition and protection. This was a point of
which we had not thought, in starting the new hare of this
Southward journey; we dealt straitly with the impudent
minion, and yearned for our dear Kansu Viceroy. Then to
358 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

get me out of the stenches, Bill manceuvred me away for
a stroll in the streets, until it was time to go down to. the
river and engage our boat. But there was nothing of new
interest, and I was delighted at last to go with him to the
landing-stage, down flights of stone stairs lined with booths
and perpetually sloppy with bucket bearers ascending and
descending, to where the fleet lay moored in the river, with
perched temple buildings conspicuous on the far side, and
crowds incessant, crossing by the ferry, which only plies
on certain days. This was a stately and formal descent
to the water very different from the sidelong alleys that had
sneaked us down to the river at Kwang Yiien: on the
“plage” itself it was delicious to stroll down the long
stretches of damp sunlit mud, with hulls of big arks lying
hawled up here and there for repairs, and ahead, down over
the bend of, the broad quiet river, the town-pagoda pre-
siding from on high over the scene, upon a hill-top; emerging
from a wood of scraggy pines (all town-pagodas, it appears,
sit on hill-tops across the river from the town they protect).
In the warm sunshine it quite felt like being at the seaside ;
and the delight of having finally finished with the road was
something inexpressible and now irrecoverable. The first
boat we examined was too heavy-laden with stinking pelts
to please us. So we adjourned to the next, which proved
big and bare and empty, containing nothing except a very
brisk and decisive little tidy lady, and a brace of flufiy
puppies like baby bears in a basket. This looked likely :
we made an appointment with Madam’s Mister, and in due
course there turned up at the inn a tarred and gaunt old
leathern-faced salt in a long blue gown. The rest of the day
passed passionately in bargainings. As so often happens,
he refused absolutely to capitulate to our proposed (and
proper) price, thereby compelling us to appeal to the Yamen,
which, as jobbing contractors ought to know by experience,
invariably insists on their accepting something even less
than the market-price, on pain of breeches down and a good
spanking. So it proved, despite the inadequacy of our
THE WATERWAYS 359

passport, the Yamen intervened with prompt civility, and
secured us the Ark for 80 taels (half of Mr. Noah’s demand)
all the way down-river to Chung King, for us and all our
belongings. The Lao-yeh also sent his belated card, and
even promised a passport for the muleteers. But these
were now so little concerned for themselves (in contrast
to our dutiful and diligent agitations on their behalf), and
so keen on achieving fresh trade to take back with them,
that I felt discharged of my previous anxieties.

Bargains having been clinched all round, the evening
passed in successive interruptions from would-be buyers
or would-be payees. On the morrow we were both anxious
to get out betimes from the arid, noisome gloom of the inn,
with its room floors of mud, trampled and congealed in
dank darkness with the unfiltered urine of ages. The
promised carriers, however, were as usual non-existent when
it came to the point; till suddenly, at the last minute,
they all came trooping into the yard in a string, like waiters
in a big hotel. with a new course at table d’héte. They
were duly saddled with the luggage, and in charge of them
I proceeded down to the landing-stage, with two cheery
little attentive soldiers from the Yamen so close upon my
heels that I felt like a prisoner. Here I found that where
the ferry had been plying yesterday there was now a solid
bridge of boats, across to the farther shore: and learned
that the fashion of Bao-ning is to have ten days of ferry,
and then ten days of the boat bridge. Along this, then, we
commodiously streamed, until we came to our boat, now
lying handy.

The Ark was by this time manned and ready for her
journey. Her complement was our two selves, two servants,
two attendant soldiers, nine oarsmen, their cook-caterer,
the ship-master, his nephew (who was an idiot), his neat
little comely lady, his eight-year-old pert small minx of a
daughter, and his boat-guard bitch with her brace of black-
and-white babies. At one end was the boat’s shrine, and
the central portion was permanently roofed over with arches
360 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

of matting, while the oarsmen had an open deck behind to
work on, which at night was to be rigged up with its frame,
and more arches of matting telescoped out on it above from
the central tunnel, till the whole boat was roofed in like the
central part. In this I now arranged our quarters and
where Go-go was to cook, and where our beds were to
be unfolded each night along the central gangway, and how
they were to be screened, and- how our various arrange-
ments were to be discreetly contrived, with due respect to the
square enclosure of mosquito-netting farther down, where
Mr. and Mrs. Noah and little Miss Wei-Shang took their rest.

The goods were got aboard, and disposed as best might
be, the accommodation being but crowded and scanty
for a cruise of fourteen days. All, however, went well,
and everybody was in a good temper. Sooner than I had
hoped, Bill also rejoined us, having had a very satisfactory
wind-up at the inn, with even the mulemen’s passport
come safe to hand. And sooner than either of us had
hoped after this, there was a lighting of candles in the
shrine, and to a blare and rattle of crackers flaking away up
the water behind us, the good ship Ark drew slowly. and
solemnly out into mid-channel, and slowly and solemnly
set to gliding down the smooth broad face of the Ja-Ling-
Jang, to the solemn chanting of its nine oarsmen blithely
rowing in the stern, standing each man to his long spliced
paddle, corded to its tall rowlock-post.

No words can paint the final languid ecstacy of lying out
on our boat, with nothing more to do, and nowhere more to
make for, but only to be quiet and be borne onward through
the grey day, under the restful grey monotony of the scene
with the pagoda gliding by above us on its hill; and then
the gradual sliding panorama effortlessly slipping along,
with ducks and herons flighting in the wide river shingles
as we moved. At dusk we moored to the shore, the prow
was rigged up with its temporary arcade of matting, the
oarsmen took their last bowlful of rice, and then tumbled
immediately to sleep, each in his roll of bedding on the deck
THE WATERWAYS 361

aft. Night and rest came down on the Ark; we prowled
the dank mud of the shore awhile, in glory of release, and
so came aboard again to bed, unbuttoned and all to pieces
with our delight in being at ease at last. There was nothing
more to eat; but there was also nothing more to endure.
Our hearts and our stomachs and everything now went
flop in the enjoyment of complete exhaustion; only our
tempers, in the reaction, tightened to a quite new but equally
delicious complacence. In plain words, we were utterly
tired out, nervously, mentally and intestinally ; and now,
for the first time, could safely and even pleasurably allow
ourselves to acknowledge the fact to ourselves. So kindly
night put us to bed.

In black dark of dawn, clamouring, stamping, bumping,
shouting roused us to the news that we were casting loose
again. Through our broken slumbers I heard the night’s
arches of matting being pushed back, and the frame being
dislocated, and then the slow soft chanting of the oarsmen
to their rhythmic stroke lulled me to sleep again in the
knowledge that we were once more off, on the face of the
river. A lovely monotony filled the next day and all that
ensued: I only keep the chronicle to mark the beat of our
luxurious lethargy. We woke to a merciless mizzle darkening
to deluges. I sat out, under improvised arches of matting,
in the bows. Down the successive rapids we adventured, for
the Ja-Ling-J ang is full of shoals and rapids; all the while
the oarsmen sweep and bend to their chant of ‘“‘ Ai-oh-ee-oh,
ai, ai’’ as they waft you down the broad face of the river;
but when this became broken and dangerous, the beam,
propped up on stools, at back of the arcade, from which
the idiot nephew, in placider reaches, used to supervise the
rowers in front, over the tunnelled arch of the central mat-
ting, was now occupied by the skipper in person, awakened
from his opium dream under the mosquito net inside, now
to preside, tall and gaunt in his blue robe, and impressive
in his bad language, over the perils of the passage, and
guide in his practised hands, sensitive to each eddy, the vast
362 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

rudder pole that governed the course of the ship from behind.
As the danger-reach grew nearer, turbed and foaming, the
song of the oarsmen would accelerate and intensify to the
intensified accelerated beat of their oars—Ai-oh, e-oh, az,
ai, aioh—Eiho, at, AI—mounting to a passionate passage
of Ai-ai-ai-ai, staccatissimo fortissimo, prestissimo, till the
actual rapid had been passed ; and then expanded, in renewed
leisure and relaxation, into ‘“‘ Ai-oh-ee-oh, ai, ai’’ again.

After which the skipper would come indoors again, and
lie down under the mosquito net with his pipe again, while
the crew as often as not knocked off for a service of bowls-
ful of rice out of the barrel from which their stout cook-
shop-looking caterer was always ready to serve them at
intervals of two hours or so (five or six times through the
working day). I gathered, in fact, a good notion here, of
how and why it is that the Chinese is so famous and willing
and indefatigable a workman. His secret lies in many, but
very short and complete, intervals of rest. With these, he
will work longer and harder, and better than any other race
on earth: but these intervals must be frequent, and thor-
ough, and filled with food and fun and complete change ;
let him have only ten minutes in every three hours, to lie
about. Crack a joke, smoke a pipe and empty a bowl of
rice, and he will then buckle to again with redoubled zeal
and complete refreshment. What kills him as a labourer
is long dull hours and long dull rests. I often wondered,
watching our boatmen, whether or no the same results could
be got out of European artisans by the same system. To me
the Chinese system seems the sane, simple and psychological
one ; but in our own scheme of stereotyped hours and meal-
times it is possible that the men could not so safely
be trusted to knock off and turn to again. The strength
of the Chinese system lies in its lightness and elasticity,
and creed of mutually advantageous give and take;
our own cruder theory builds an adamantine unyielding
programme of hours and intervals, trusting to nobody’s
honour and implicating nobody’s interest,
THE WATERWAYS 363

Southwick (Nan-Pu) was our midday stage of the mor-
row, all along a curved bay of stone-built esplanade, where
Louisa could easily have broken her head off the steep,
perilous landing-stairs. It lay in a hollow curve of the hills,
with a pagoda perking behind into the dim soft weeping
greyness of the day. The heavily thatched houses along
the sea-front were pure Cheshire, panelled in broad patches
of whitewashed walls, intersected by lines of black-dark
woodwork. Trees embowered it, and a big palatial tower
rose in the middle like a glorified bandstand, and the road-
stead was dense with maltinged arks in rows: Along
beneath an undercliff of the prevailing rounded sand-
stone ranged Nan-Pu, below a peculiarly dangerous swirl
of the river: huge blocks of the sandstone have fallen in a
chaos to the waterway.

All this course of the river, indeed, grows more and more
definitely hedged with clean-cut straight lines of little cliff,
in which there are tall black rectangular doors of darkness,
squared and stark as anything in Egypt, indicating artificial
caves and galleries inside, excavated so long since that
nobody now knows who by, nor for what. And all the
marge, naked rock and all, is thick set with what look like
amateurish Wireless stations, with wheels and poles and
pulleys. But these are the brine-pits, for which all this
country is famous: from deep in the living stone itself they
haul up their buckets of brine, and the salt-gabelle is one
of the largest items in the incalculable wealth of China.
And in all the stretches of shingle that occurred, the hope-
ful, amid heaps and trenches, were washing for the gold that
the Ja-Ling-Jang brings down from Tibet, like all the other
rivers that have their birth on the golden Roof of the World.

A more delectable method of travelling was certainly never
invented. Balmily we were swept along, through landscape
steadily growing tamer and more silken. The air was like
sweet fragrant oil, and the low sandstone cliffs alongside
universally dripped moisture in dark smears down their bold
bald faces. The river wildly wound and bent, indulging in
364 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

many rapids and races and rushes and smooth swelling
expanses. And there was nothing more to do, nothing more
to say, nothing more to think about. And the pageant of
China went smoothly by on either hand, uncannily unfolded
like something on a film. Never before had I had leisure or
opportunity or detachment to perceive it, but now it came
plainly out to view—the blue-clad figures at their work,
their rest, their meals, the whole gigantic kindly panorama
of this people, so frugal, simple, affectionate and honest, so
quietly august in the civilization that they have evolved and
maintained through half a dozen thousand years. Through
all her troubles and changes China has continued firm in her
grasp of essential wisdom: and as you see her unaltering
history reeled out before your eyes, it is as if you were getting
a glimpse through the veils of European blindness into the
elemental simplicity of wisdom, impregnable and immutable,
that seeks its happiness in realms beyond the reach of com-
peting telephones or trams.

The heat grew softer and steamier, day by day; the
country slow and flat, and fat and low; no more cliffs, but
terraced little red bare hills. And the river also ran fat and
flat and slow, with few rapids for a while. But these were
bad ones, and in the night, Mr. Noah being at his pipe under
the mosquito netting, the idiot-nephew ran us on a rock, with
a shattering concussion. All day we rowed, knocking off at
some half a dozen intervals for a quarter of an hour’s meal
of rice : and at dusk would draw into some village-shore, and
there tie up for the night among the other hooded barges in
dense rows, with the whitewashed, dark-beamed thatched
cottages looming beyond in their ranks, and a curly-roofed
temple standing up in the middle and perhaps a pagoda,
paternally presiding from a hill across the water. Never
before had I so poignantly realized this dear kind land, so
colossal in its calm and strength ; and the direct wise people
who have made it. Never before had I had time. Glorious
bamboos now filled the walled temple-enclosures along the
hills with their sumptuous plumage: we passed a particu-
THE WATERWAYS 365

larly famous Temple of Boatmen’s Luck, in a fold of the
hills; and then the river abruptly swung in a great bend
round shingled miles of “ landes ” feathery with a big grass-
like Pampas, in clumps. And so came to the charming
walled town of Peng, lying on a flat behind the shore,
embowered deeply in trees, and with a goodly tower. Here
we moored to change soldiers. The Laoyeh asked to see our
passports ; these we statelily refused him, fearing more fuss,
but got our new escort none the less. For we were moving
towards trouble: coming events were so near, and their
shadow so dark, that already Szechuan was seething with
revolt against the President’s obvious ambitions, and brigan-
dage, masquerading as civil war, was already agog down the
lower reaches of the Ja-Ling-Jang.

I felt calm and comfort spreading like ointment over the
raw surface of our nerves. No high events troubled our
days; Bill concocted scones, and the caterer-cook had his
tubful of rice perpetually preparing for the rowers, and Mrs.
Noah with little Wei-Shang assiduously kept house. It was
my first insight into Chinese domestic life, and never in all
my experience have I come across a more rigid and unresting
housewife than Mrs. Noah. She was for ever at it, scrubbing,
scouring, brushing, till the beards of the boat fairly shone
with cleanness, and not a grain of dust or dirt was allowed
to linger anywhere. She ruled the roost with a rod of iron,
and if even I myself cracked a nut, and dropped the shells on
deck, down would be brought a little wooden box, with a
message, would his Lordship kindly put his nutshells into
that. Little Wei-Shang also helped, with a little besom and
brush of her own, and frantic squeaks and rushings about
whenever the puppies misbehaved. And when the scouring
was done, mother and daughter would sit insatiably sewing
shoes, and darning and mending. Mrs. Noah was small and
neat and trim and comely, with the typical alert build of the
born housewife all the world over, and the housewife’s tight
little hard face and pinched, superficial smile. She never
relaxed or became human : her detachment was as inviolable
366 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

as her courtesy, and we seemed to make no impression on her
notice whatever. Little Wei-Shang was of quite a different
kidney, a vivid small butterfly of a child, full of fun and
pranks and pusseries, and little quirks of laughter. She was
evidently the darling of her parents, unabashed and candid
as a happy kitten. She played with us, and she played with
the puppies ; and what fun it was when the day’s work was
done, and Little Wei-Shang’s best shoes and frock and scarlet
ankle-bands were put on and her two pigtails done up with
scarlet bows. Then came bowls of dinner, which she and
Mrs. Noah discreetly ate, sitting each on her stool ; and after-
wards they crept under the mosquito-netting for the night,
where Mr. Noah was already prone with his opium pipe, till
the time came for him to resume his place on the bridge.
And every evening when we had moored, the tapers would
be lit before the shrine, in gratitude for the past day and
propitiation for the next.

Quieter grew the country, and broader the river, and
blander the warmth. We had a crate of hens aboard, and
one afternoon Bill and I discussed whether hens could swim.
I put out a stick to touch one of them, who was sitting on
the gunwale. Whereupon, to my amazement and horror,
that misguided fowl rose into the air with loud squawks and
flapped heavily away and came down flop in the middle of
the Ja-Ling-Jang behind us. A hubbub arose: the oars-
men easied, contradictory clamours raged: and I then
realized that gallant bird was swimming bravely as any duck,
chest up and head high, paddling passionately, and evidently
meditating abandoning pursuit of the perfidious boat, and
making instead for the shore. But my heart was wrung to
see its efforts failing, and its brave head gradually declining,
and its hull sinking lower and lower in the water. But
meanwhile the skipper was not idle: to let us lose a hen
worth perhaps a full threepence, was not to be thought of:
amid shouts the Ark swung back, and put about, and bore
down to the rescue of the now sinking hen. It was almost
at its last gasp when the boat-hook caught it, and its head
THE WATERWAYS 367

drooped to the water. To general acclamation it was drawn
aboard, and hung up to dry and recuperate before the fire.
Which it very soon did, and was put back among the other
hens, no doubt to tell them the wonderful story. And we
issued orders in respect of its courage and skill, that though
the other “Ji’s”’ might ultimately all go the destined road
of “Ji’s,” this particular Ji should never be sacrificed to the
table, but fill out its full tale of days in laud and honour, as a
living legend.

Despite the perpetual expectation of brigands, the scene
continued wholly peaceful, and the country continued each
day in a diminuendo,. wider and flatter, with flatter, wider
water, and wider plains of ‘‘ pampas.’”’ We came to a very
picturesque place at last, called Nung Mun Chiang, which I
regret to have to present to you in so unmanageable a jingle
of jargon. There is no help for it though: Mafu was no
longer with us to write down, however ill, the characters
for the successive place-names, and Go-Go could no more
write than fly, so that except for such simple words as were
within hold of my own very limited vocabulary, I have been
quite at sea for the meanings of names ever since we quitted
Lanchow. Nung Mun Chiang had a cheap pagoda on the
hill above, and a long bayed frontage of white Kentish-
looking houses under the cliff below: a huge fair was being
held ; and the blue-clad crowds were dense, with rows behind
rows of arks drawn up in the waterway, and quantities of
people being borne to and fro on ferries.

We changed escort here, and to my relief had no difficulty
in getting four smart soldiers for the next stage, in view of
the skipper’s increasing anxiety about the brigands. We
were now busily on guard ; when we reached Li-Du-J6 (which
has a very noble temple, and a low foreshore stacked with
reeds, and little screens of reed-matting rigged up all over
the place as if it were a camp) we were boarded by big soldiers
and a neat polite little man in black satin, who might so
easily have been a brigand, except that he wasn’t. But the
alarm was serious: in terrorem we rigged up acamouflage in
368 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

the prow, with camera-tripod, the rifle, and a cloth thrown
over them all—to look like a hooded machine-gun with the
barrel protruding. And at Ting Yuen, further down, the
Laoyeh sent out, with a new escort, two very elegant and
courtly minions, who came, not once, but twice, on purpose
to beg us not to go any further yet awhile, since trouble
had already broken out down the river the day before.

We held firm, however, in our purpose, and ultimately got
our passport to proceed. But then Mr. Noah himself weak-
ened, alarmed by stories of the battle; and at Ting Yuen
we stayed moored all night after all. And really, considering
all the perils we had successfully lived through or escaped, it
did seem as if it would be a waste to die by some strange
bullet in Szechuan, within actual sight of our journey’s end.
The air was thick, in fact, with drama, as we sat out on deck
in the gloaming; plunk, there came a great stone crashing
down between us in the soft fragrant stillness. I quite
thought it was the opening shot of an engagement, and
instinctively assumed my tumbrel-face immediately: but
nothing more ensued. It was as well, for none of our staff
any longer had any help in them at all; the strange country
and people having deprived them of any small wits they
might ever have had and reduced them to a pack of blank
baboons.

Meanwhile the country grew richer: rounded bluffs of
sandstone reappeared, and the profiles of the hills were
castellated in outline with one big phallic cone of rock aspir-
ing, and many a walled temple park of woodland along their
tops, and groves of bamboos more and more dense and
sumptuous each day, and orchards of tangerine oranges
huddled under the cliffs glimmering redly golden in the thick
black blocks of their dark foliage. As day dawned we moved
out in a milk-white universal fog, that soon cleared to a
blinding radiance of light and heat. Various temples, agog
with fairs and beanoes, we passed by : Nien Ming is a pecu-
liarly lovely little place, of whitewashed houses piled up
among heavy verdure of trees, along the top of cliffs about a
THE WATERWAYS 369

creek : a man was pulling up a fishin-gline that seemed to
have no end, and the broad face of the river was not more
than wide enough for the broad V-shaped rafts of timber
that were being floated down, in a plain of spillikins, with a
hutch at one end for the raftsmen. Finally the day died
down in a consuming glory of orange glow, with the embank-
ing hills and their profiled clumps of bamboo cut out solid in
sombre violet, and the swale of the river unctuous in long
streaks of alternating black and gold.

Soon after dark we drew into a little cove, and again found
soldiers on the watch, to prove to us once more how pressing
and general was the apprehension of trouble hereabouts.
We had a mischance, too, of our own: for as we edged into
our Ark’s space in the row of others, the next one bumped
us, and a tumbler of the Lord High Keeper of the King’s
Peace’s fell off the table and broke. Pandemonium was
loosed : even Mrs. Noah was moved to emotion : everybody
talked at once in screams. All, however, got amicably
settled, and there came aboard a very comely, pleasant-
smiling woman, a gossip of Mrs. Noah’s, to sit with her and
chat: apparently she habitually ailed, for pussy little Wei-
Shang came across to us and prettily asked for medicine for
her. And the party was also enriched by two perfectly
hideous old Appu’s, aunts of the idiot-nephew.

* Ai-oh, EE-oh, Ai-ai—Ai-oh, Ee-oh, ai, ai,” calmly, in the
calm white misted dawn we were out in mid-river again,
long before I had properly woken, so that the rhythmic
chanting and soft rhythmic splash of the oars only flickered
into my dreams dimly, like a far away half-heard accompani-
ment. Lower country now, and lower still: a perched
village ; narrows; vast flights of duck, in myriads along all
the shingles ; orange groves packed along the under cliffs :
and a voluminous glory of bamboos on the slopes ; and now
wide-stretching flats of moulded rock, flowing away into
backwaters that formed lagoons over the plain. At Ho-J6
a new river, clean and clear as an emerald, flows down into
the dun-coloured dirt of the Ja-Ling-Jang, and is imme-

BB
370 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

diately obliterated in its filth. Ho-Jé is a very big place,
with long and densely crowded quays, and handsome build-
ings, and a fine pagoda opposite, and an incessant turmoil
of ferries and ship-faring in all directions.

It was twelve before our new escort came aboard. Isat
on deck to watch the traffic, rejoicing in the strong sharp
wind that tempered the blaze of the day. Swirling round
the race of the point, the square patch-sailed ships came
bravely sailing on its impulse, and the scene was all glad
bustle with news of four brigands condignly shot the night
before. And as I sat the Queen of Shamakhan went by
me, surely shrined in a gauze-curtained sedan, green as
grass, with two ancient and dreadful duennas attendant in
the prow of the ferry-boat that was conveying her across.
Through the green slats she glimmered, in a loveliness almost
elfin and unearthly, a lady of very high quality, calm as
an image, with face of delicate oval, perfect alike in
feature and colour, and high-flung moth-eyebrows that
emphasized the immemorial innocence of her mysterious
close smile. And so she passed: when a Chinese lady is
beautiful, not Cavalieri herself could eclipse her; she has a
finish, a poise, an exquisiteness unsurpassable, of looks, of
manner, of movement. But beauty is rare; and not easy
to catch sight of among these barbarous old races who do
not care to level the lady with the harlot in a rivalry of half-
clad display and advertisement.

The next day hills reappeared, and we entered upon a long
passage down between them, in what might almost be called
a gorge. High on either side rose wooded, rocky ranges,
nursing little whitewashed cottages amid the verdure in
their folds. And every one of them had its coal-shoot
streaming down to the river in a long smear of darkness.
The villages were extraordinarily English in effect, and their
scene would have been rurally English too, but that it was
bigger and bolder, with much denuded limestone strata
uptilted almost perpendicularly to the summit, that made
it rather a Provengal picture, taking me back yet again to
THE WATERWAYS 371

the mouth of the Roja; especially as all the long bare hills
have every possible inch of their ground, no matter how tiny
a strip it be, or how un-get-at-able, terraced up for culture
by a bank of rough-walling. And one of the bigger, rounder
hogs’-backs of scar limestone was densely peppered with the
wild Palm.

Stations of the river-police were by this time frequent, and
the face of the river was dense with traffic. Big hulks were
being towed up by teams of thirty or forty towers, almost on
all fours with the strain, bare-legged and bare-bottomed,
glowing rosy on the grey ground of rock and shingle, with
that odd uncanny radiance which the human body possesses
at large in a landscape. Delays by the police-boats brought
us to again and again. Till at a bend of the river, with fine
wooded pinnacles ranging away ahead, we were pulled up
more seriously than before. Bill went ashore to cope with
the authorities, while I filled up.the time by exploring the
foreshore, which, from a bluff overhead, descended gradually
in a chaos of enormous tumbled boulders, plumy here and
there with tuffets of grass. I sauntered on: the calm
warmth of the evening was delicious, and conduced to com-
placent meditation. But then, afar off, I saw Bill hastily
returning from the village: when he noticed where I had
got to he shouted to me to get aboard again as quickly as I
could, feigning debility. Evidently my stroll had been ill-
timed. Languidly I drooped and flopped and stumbled
broken-wingedly down the rocks for the benefit of possible
observers ; and when I came aboard sank swooning into my
deck-chair, there to be histrionically tended by Bill, with
lifting of the arms to Heaven, and convulsive gestures of
anxiety.

It appeared that the police had threatened to keep us
moored here till midday of the morrow, and that Bill had
only dissuaded them by representing me as prostrate in
mortal sickness to be got down into Chung King as soon as
possible. And then, lo and behold, there was I, for all to see,
strolling among the boulders as gay as any grig. However,
372 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

the authorities showed no suspicion about my symptoms,
and placidly our oarsmen chaunted us out into midstream,
and once more downward. But about dusk-we were stopped
finally and made to moor for the night in a gorge, at what
the morning showed me to be a very pretty little coal-wharf,
with steep stone stairways down to the water and a cascade
above. Then, having loaded up with coke, we made off
again, emerging at last into tame country, leaving the beauti-
ful narrows and pinnacled range behind us. Two new-
looking great slim pagodas dominated the next town we
came to, a buzzing place, where our final police-station
worried us. The river now gushed over many wide perilous
strata of half-emerged rock, and in the afternoon we came to
a much larger town than any yet, with a big foreign factory
and chimney-stack and steam-whistle. The journey was
almost in sight of its end : in luxuriance, such as the lethargy
of fatigue would allow us, we sat on deck to watch the popu-
lous scene, and a faceless syphilitic peddling cakes alongside
on the shore. I had a moment’s unpopularity with Mrs.
Noah, too, for after I had been sitting for some time on a
bale in the prow there was extracted from beneath it the
smaller of the mangy little fluffy black puppies, in so limp a
condition that it was long before he showed signs of coming
back to life. And then we were off again, and the chaunting
of the haulers that we now kept meeting on their way up-
stream was a pure joy, no longer a series of high-pitched
nasal cat-calls, but deep and solemn and dark as a litany in
some old cathedral. So night came down, and in the grey
morning of November 16, two months and two days
since I rode out of Tien Tang, I woke uneasily, amid rivering
clamours, to find ourselves anchored in what seemed the
same river, but wider than before, though no less turbid,
But we had rounded our last corner, and this was the Great
River itself, the Da-Hor, the Yang-dz’-Jang ; and above us
hung a steep wharf of houses built of matting, up and up ina
wall—the Yang-dz’ frontage of Chung King.
COLOPHON:

Chung King lies high and up and down above the curve
of the river. In due course a brace of chairs came down for
us, and we were conveyed dizzily up flights of stairs into the
town itself; and thence along its very narrow streets, very
crowded, dark and dank and paved, to the narrow dark yard
of what proved, however, an inn so foreign as to rightly justify
its claim to be an hotel. For here, after two years of exile,
I felt myself quite like a child come back to its doll’s-house,
revelling in the folly of white sheets and spring-mattresses,
and tables and chairs and tablecloths and cutlery and glasses.

Out in front was a big wooden loggia looking over the
river far below to a range of peaked wooden hills, with
temples and pagodas on them, and immediately in front of
us, across the river, the name of that great nobleman, Sir
Alfred Mond, emblazoned across the frontal of a factory, to
bring us once more in touch with the beloved benefits of
British enterprise. Not even this happy home-touch, how-
ever, not even the spectacle, one night, of raging fire, devour-
ing house after house in its maw, but not Sir Alfred Mond,
could cheer the dark of our declining days, in this dark place
where the air is almost always suggestive of a London fog.
Final disbandings proceeded, and the Ark went back up-river
again after farewell visits to the inn from Tanguei, and Little
Wei-Shang in her silken bests. We ourselves hesitated long
about our next move. My theory had been to take another
ark down the river, and alight at South Wu S’an on the
chance of getting seed, up in the ranges behind it, of Primula
Fargesii and Rhododendron auriculatum. But now the
information about the region seemed so vague, and we our-
‘selves were so much the worse for wear, and this fiddling little

373
374 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

odd-and-end of a post-final trapese seemed such a bathos,
such a contemptible excrescence on the full and perfect
round of our travels, that we inclined more and more to
abandon the notion of going after a goose so wild with hearts
so weary.

And so at last we did, and booked our places on the steamer
that now lay moored under the farther bank getting ready for
her last downward journey, before the locking up of the
Tibetan snows made the river no longer navigable for her.
Mr. Chun, our genial landlord, escorted us over to her by
ferry, and there we found quarters that seemed palatial, on a
vessel of the oddest shape, like two vast trams tied together,
side by side. One more night in the inn: we were poled
back, quite tremulous, through the awful swirls and whirl-
pools of the Yang-dz’ heaving all round us in a pale waste
of waters, unctuous, vehement and baleful: but the high
river-wall and tower of the city in front of us and its piled-up
houses of matting, plastered up its sandstone cliff like swal-
lows’ nests, were all of a lovely picturesqueness in the golden
afternoon. And now Mr. Chun would stand us a farewell
dinner, and after it, amid general salutations, he and we
came away in chairs, and borne down the long stone flights
to the river again, the waning moon now glorious in ghastly
reflections on its oily expanses. And so we reached the
s.s. Shu-Hun, and at last our kind landlord had done the
last he could to make us comfortable. So it was farewell to
him, farewell to Chung King, farewell to the toils and tediums
of the track. It was quite with sorrow that I took leave of
Mr. Chun, so ingeniously helpful and friendly and full of
indefatigable services that never appeared on his modest bill,
nor indeed could have been reckoned for in coin. Good luck
to the Chung King Hotel!

At daybreak we loosed, so softly that I never knew we had
done so till we were already far from Chung King. After a
poor night I rose to another brumous day of raw and gusty
darkness, whose pearly tones of blue pallor well harmonized
with the rapidly-shifting scene. This was precisely that of
COLOPHON 375

our last uneventful stages down the Ja-Ling-Jang, but the
swiftness of the Yang-dz’ is such that even junks going down
it make at least double their pace on the Ja-Ling-Jang. As
for the steamer, it fairly tore along: the Yang-dz’ runs in
vast oleaginous swirls and hills and valleys of hideously force-
ful silent water, with long successions of flats over concealed
levels of rock-strata, most perilous and appalling, and least
80 whenemerging. We surged along, however, magnificently
tossing the junks along our wake unmercifully, on white-
horse waves against the rocky shores. Then we passed a
big mountain of rock, like Sigiri, with temples on it, then
came into sight of red ranges, on either hand, very dim and
ghostly in cloud.

The next day’s journey started out from Nan Hsien in a
dense, drizzling brume. We descended in and out amid
steepening hills, in a channel dull as the Rhine’s but far
deeper and finer, the significant note of the Yang-dz’ being
the appalling depth and volume of it, often confined for
miles together to a straight canal-like channel vo wider than
the Thames at Marlow, down which the incalculable weight
of one of the greatest rivers of Asia seethes with a silent
intensity of smooth fury that makes you curdle as you
watch its bland slow-seeming eddies. At one point the
strata on the North bank are quite horizontal, those on the
South almost perpendicular: you can see down what a
narrow line of cleavage this terrific river has cloven a channel.
We anchored placidly at Gui J6, where wooden combs in
bundles (a speciality of the place) were brought on board for
sale. After dark there came little dancing-girls (another
speciality) and were rowed round the ship in sampans shrill-
ing thinly in the black starless night. And then down came
the Lao-yeh of the place, and the dark was shattered with a
fury of light and mortars and bombards exploding ; and the
shore grew gay with a concourse of torches. And all night
long the din continued, with barking of dogs and howling of
coolies, and military bands braying and salutes being fired.

Very shortly after leaving Gui J6, we very abruptly passed
376 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

through a Strait Gate of cliffs round a bend, and found our-
selves at last in the famous Gorges of the Yang-dz’ Jang—
the objectives of all this gigantic journey, because so widely
proclaimed one of the world’s marvels. And this indeed
they are; do not let me discourage those who contemplate
visiting them in ease and comfort and a three days’ steam-
trip up from Hangkow. Of this, indeed, they will most
handsomely “‘ repay the trouble and expense.”” Allowance,
too, must be made for the tired eyes and lowered mood which
was all I had left to apprehend them with by now. Never-
theless, I will boldly premise that to us, who had known the
ravines of Thundercrown and the Gorges of the Nan-Ho,
those of the Yang-dz’ proved comparatively tame, and by
no means adequate reward or climax for the length of toil
which we had undertaken to reach them.

Nor need those ambitious of visiting the Yang-dz’ gorges
go even so faras Hangkow. You may traverse the Yang-dz’
gorges any day you please (when peace permits) on the
stretch of line between Culoz and Aix-les-Bains, along which
indeed whole scenes of cliffs and narrows and impending
complications of wooded mountains. will give you the perfect
picture of every aspect of the Yang-dz’s break through its
mountain barrier, substituting, for the line and the stream,
the one monotonous, boiling, mud-coloured Horror of the
Great River, completely filling the valley bottom. In fact,
the most impressive thing in the Yang-dz’ gorges is the Yang-
dz’ itself, surging along at the rate of an express, in a terrify-
ing concentrated fury of heaves and strivings, so narrow
between the walls as to be an apparent nothing across which
an urchin could chuck a pebble, yet compressed by the
channel into such unplumbed depths that the largest steam-
ship can nose-dive to the bottom and not only utterly dis-
appear and be no more heard of, but even be beyond reach
of plummet. The Da-Hor is no river to jest with, and its
dark bowels digest many a big ship, undiscoverable for ever-
more.

A flotilla of junks approached to meet us, ahead of the
COLOPHON 377

Great Gate, phantasmal as a floating flight of moths in the
grey of dawn against the towering grey of the cliffs behind.
‘But, as day lightened, the Great Gate opened on into a
scene of comparative tameness. About seven we passed Wu
S’an, and then came into a gorge of twenty-eight miles,
astoundingly narrow for so vast a river. You do not need
to be told tales of disappearances, to appreciate the rightful
profundity of this preposterous channel, that has to be the
main drain for all the waters of Eastern Tibet and Western
China. For the Hwang-Hor swings up into the far North,
while the Mekong and the Salween sweep straight South.
In a deep and sombre cutting the gorge winds on, tightly
bound by walls of rock, in huge undulating strata of rock,
aspiring here and there to peaks. Late as it now was in the
season (Nov. 29), hardly a leaf seemed shed, and the rocky
limestone hills looked singularly dry for so presumably
damp a range. The river receives no tributary: only the
merest and rarest rill-runs join it, down lateral chines, above
and beyond which there sometimes shows a higher and more
rich region. But, noble and splendid as was all the scene,
it was on a very small gentle scale to us, after the immeasur-
ably huge austerities of the Tibetan Border: I could not
help envying early collectors the fame they acquired so
comfortably and easily, boating up the Yang-dz’ and mooring
here and there, and exploring (often vicariously) these
pleasant ravines and chines. And in those far-off golden
days too, when everything that every coolie brought home
to you, basking over a book in your boat, was either a new
species or a new genus ; till you could not step ashore into a
back-yard without the merest hideous little weed there being
a novelty. Gone, gone are those days for ever, though, and
farther and farther away live the Farreris and Purdomiis
and Forrestiis of the future, increasingly remote year by
year on mountains less and less get-at-able.

At Gui J6 the river widens and passes out of Szechuan into
Hupeh. And now comes the finest stretch of the journey.
For soon you enter a new set of gorges, far wilder and more
378 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

glorious than the last—not a titanic railway-cutting but a
splendid compilation of cliffs and fantastic peaks and woods,
with big high downs and. more fantastic peaks tumbling up
into the distances on either hand. Then ensues a very
dangerous stretch of loose rocks, with one of the river’s most
fatal and famous rapids, a definite drop already growing
visible in the diminution of the water which, ahead of you,
is seen in two planes like the double-lake trick at Friar Park.
One saw clearly why it is that steamers daren’t ply when
the river runslow. And now at length we entered into a new
and isolated mountain range, and were actually in the
I-chang Gorge itself, the last and most famous of all. But
the I-chang Gorge is very mild and tame by comparison with
its predecessors. It runs meekly between pinnacled tidily-
clothed clifflets on either side, neatly arranged all along in
horizontal white strata, so regular and obvious that they
look as if they were built of white Doulton-ware, a little the
worse for use. However, as I say, perhaps my standard was
spoiled by greater things seen earlier : and other visitors to
the I-chang Gorge will not by any means agree with me, that
it makes one feel as if one were passing by waterway down
through the ruins of Leicester Railway Station, enormously
lengthened and magnified, and so long ago abandoned as now
to be stratified in the grass and overgrowth of ages. And the
I-changs will certainly arise and slay me, and the dragon
issue from his cave to eat me.

For, along these limestone gorges are caverns lurking ;
and in them legendary dragons lie sleeping till the moment
of their emergence. When we came out from the Gorges,
and down a last flat stretch of river, open and dull, to where,
in unrelievable monotony I-chang lies flatly sprawling, we
found the town agog over the recent discovery of a fossil-
dragon in one of the caves. In times so critical this event
loomed large for the President-Emperor’s future, and an
official inquiry was already afoot, and official bulletins were
being issued. The Imperialist party argued that the timely
revelation of a dragon clearly favoured Imperial claims : the
COLOPHON 379

Republicans with equal plausibility maintained that it
mnilitated as clearly against them. Yet a third party existed,
which realized that the ‘‘ dragon ” was of course only a fine
large sample of those corrugated scaled-looking barriers of
stalagmite that often get built up in caverns across the lower
rim of their pools, looking, according to their size, like petri-
fied ropes or tree-trunks, or, as in this case, dragons. But
not even the European population of I-chang was wholly
friendly to this rationalistic interpretation. They would not
willingly be weaned from belief in their dragon, and only the
crashing political movements of the time, and the eventual
downfall of the Emperor Yuan, at last silenced popular
speculation on the point, by depriving it of popular interest.
The roadstead at I-chang will always be to me the saddest
place on earth. Round a vast bend of the Yang-dz’ it lies,
sad and flat and forbidding-looking, grey under a grey sky,
with nothing but grey flatness filling all the world around,
and the mountains left behind for ever, and even the meek
hills of the gorges now only a dim grey ruffle up the Western
distance. It may, indeed, be a delightful place to those who
live there, but to me it spells the close of everything. The
Rainbow Bridge here sinks to its end, and comes back to
earth, fading into the shadows of the nearer shore. After
I-chang everything grows faint and dim: the past veiled by
apprehensions of the new future, and the future darkened
by sunset flushes from the past behind us. To my fancy,
the expedition now literally dissolves into cloud. Out in
the new circumstances ahead the old close-knit realities
fall away like ghosts. The old bonds were done with and
dissolved: I felt Bill drawing gradually away, and I also,
out of a fairyland, where we both had once belonged, but.
from which we were now severally emerging on to different
roads of greyness. And Bongie and good Go-go were quite
gone. See how they have faded out of these pages as I
re-lived the past. They began to vanish when we reached
the Ark, and their essential functions ceased and, as the
journey South continued into increasing civilization, they
380 THE RAINBOW BRIDGE

grew more and more dithered and dotty every day, more and
more unreal ; till now, though both were still with us, they
had wholly ceased to be, had become anachronisms first,
then lingering evocations out of the past, phantoms as filmy
as Faustus’ Helen, though in no other point recalling the
beauty of the evening air. They had passed, forgotten, in
fact, as a dream dies in the opening day. But, better to
parallel my own point of view, say, ‘‘as a joy dies in the
close of dark.” Anyhow, they were gone; though often
again in Peking I saw Go-go, and saw Mafu, I never could
feel them real or solid. They had passed away; they
belonged elsewhere. I was glad when I no longer saw them.
They were less real to me in Peking than the Prior of Cheb-
son, and the Gwan-ja of Tien Tang, and Grandmamma Aoo :
it is always a jar when things that only belong to the mind’s
eye persist in obtruding themselves on the body’s.

So I bring you no farther. To the rest of my tale belongs
only decent uneventful dullness—golden long dull days in a
new steamer down the vast dull flats of the river, through
country so flat as almost to seem all river; a pause in
Hangkow, to learn again, for the first time since leaving
London, whata real bath was like, and then the long train-
journey up to Peking again, and a dull drab arrival, on
December 6, to face the dreadfulness of three months’
accumulated correspondence. And here I leave you, reader ;
here I no longer know you, nor you me—here for a long
time I could not know myself. For we have known each
other and belonged to each other away from all this, out
in the Radiant Places. And if ever I can return to them,
reader, perhaps you will come too 2?
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

oF CHINA

Showing the route followed by

REGINALO FARRER
in1914 and 1915

Scale of Miles
oo me HO Oo Sw

Route -+-----

\

 

Ching-ning J6

 

 

 

 

 

London, Edward Arnold & Co. 1921
BOTANICAL INDEX

Aconitum, 219, 265
French grey, 279
Hemsleyanum, 344
new, 344
Adenophora, china-blue, 248
Adonis, coerulea, 109, 113, 147
yellow, 73
Alder, 190, 204
Aleurites cordata, 346
Allium, yellow, 212
Androsace longifolia, 343
mucronifolia, 146, 188, 206
spinulifera, 332
tibetica, 50, 78, 111, 114, 115,
125, 127, 135, 144, 169,
183, 193
late form, 271
Anemone obtusiloba, 142
vitifolia, 253, 339
Aquilegia viridiflora, 50, 127, 136
Artemisia, 296
Arundinaria anceps, 329
Metake, 331
nitida, 329
spathiflora, 329
new, 320
Aster, Alpine, 222
China, 177
dwarf, pale, 226
large violet, 197
new, 148

Berberis, 109
Boea, 341
Buddleia, 333, 337, 343

Cesalpinia, 333
Caragana, golden, 73, 110, 113,
131, 250
pink, 194, 210, 211
‘Cerastium melandrinum (Chick-
weed), 285
white-starred, 205

Cherry, 113, 281
Chrysanthemum Zawadskyi, 326
Clematis, atragonoid, blue, 218
similar to C. Armandi, 352
Clerodendron, 341
Convolvulus tragacanthoides, 343
Corydalis curviflora, azure, 165,
260
melanochlora, 165, 229, 264,
266
Purdomii, 266
scaberula, 246
Cotoneaster Micromeles (7), 330,
337
Crategus crenulata, 327
Cremanthodium, 238, 264
Crocus speciosus, purple, 77
Cypress, small aromatic, 83
copses of, 108, 156, 199
Cypressus, 352

Daphne, 80, 151, 152, 180, 193
Ivory, 181, 198
Delphinium, pale blue, 293
purple, 190
Pylzowi, violet, 239, 246, 254,
264, 270
tanguticum, 271
Dianthus squarrosus, 260
Dipelta, 337
Draba, golden, 94, 152, 181

Ephedra, deep rose, 253
Erysimum, purple, 152, 200, 202
rosy, 207, 212, 285
white, 217

Fabaria, golden, 109, 127
Fairy Bell, 191, 192
Flora at 10,000 ft., 133

Gagea, 127
Garlic, yellow, 247

381
382

Gentiana, 88, 118
cruciata, 272
Farreri, 281, 295
Purdomii (F. 303), 272,
purple-pink, 333
skim-milk, 175
straminea, 272
tri-flora, 276, 287; variant,
: 271
Geranium Pylzowianum, 88, 236
Géum Purdomii, 226
Globeflower, 148, 180, 185, 186,
197, 200, 209, 236
white, 218
Gooseberry undergrowth, 165

Hedysarum multijugum, 110
Honeysuckle, lilac, 220

Incarvillea grandiflora, 99, 182
Iris Bungei, purple, 113, 136
Butterfly (feline & pardaline),
134, 211
albino, 218
ensata, 50, 73, 109, 115, 255
goniocarpa, 134, 146
albino, 146
potaninii, 182, 254
tectorum, 331, 341
tenuifolia, 154, 164, 259, 296
tigridia, purple, 73, 127
Isopyrum Farreri, 172, 184, 191,
199, 204, 210, 238, 275,
286
Ivy, 337

Jasmine, 64

Lagotis ramalana, 205
whitish, 205
Lathrea, 263'
Leontopodium* (F. 740) (Edel-
weiss), 77
Leptoderm, 343
Ligustrina amurensis, holy tree,
63, 64, 121
Lilac tree, blue, 121
Lily, slender-leaved, scarlet, 248
Brownii, 339
Lloydia alpina (Fairy Bell), 110,
114, 118, 126, 144, 169
tibetica, 238
Lonicera syringantha, 220
new, 352

BOTANICAL INDEX

Lousewort, 109
dark crimson, 239
Lychnis, white, 247

Mahonia, 341
Maianthemum bifolium, 109
Meconopsis eximia, 232
horrida, 232
horridula, 168, 232
integrifolia, 147
Prattii (Celestial Poppy), 167,
168, 205, 231, 232 et seq.,
243, 254, 264, 279, 286
quintuplinervia (Harebell
Poppy), 83, 100, 167,
169, 188, 192, 198, 209,
212, 223, 224, 285
albino, 229, 262
racemosa (Sapphire Poppy),
168, 232, 234
rudis, 232
(F. 735), 279
Musa (Banana), 336
Mustard, 254

Nig-munk, Tibetan name for P. .
stenocalyx and Andr.
tibetica, 125

Northern Flora, limit of, 72

Omphalodes, 221

Ophiopogon Kansuensis, 329, 330
Orchids, 192

Oreocharis, 343

Oxygraphis, yellow, 187
Oxytropids, violet, 59, 118, 182

“Pampas,” 365, 367

Peach, double, 71

Peony, tree, 69, 121
magenta, 142

Pines, 355

Polypody, emerald, 131

‘Poplars, 114, 176, 323

Poppy, Iceland, 177, 250, 268
Lampshade, 147, 167, 200,
220, 222
Potentilla, 64, 88, 181
anserina, 126, 291
davurica, 134
Salessowi, white bush, 268
in serub, 147, 152, 156, 165,
199, 210, 220, 247
BOTANICAL INDEX

Primula bella, 183
Biondiana, 98
cognata, 98
farinosa, 97
Farreriana, 185-6, 206, 209,
214, 230
gemmifera (Welcome), 205,
214, 235
Imperial, 185, 188, 201, 209
Knuthiana, 332
Lavender, 169
leptopoda, 98, 151
nivalis (see Farreriana), 185
pumiilio, 215
Reginella (Little Queen), 215,
228, 230
rupestris, 343-4"
sinensis, 343
stenocalyx (Clusterbeauty),
96 et seqg., 109, 111, 113,
125, 136, 146, 214, 249
st. dealbata (Lavandine), 98,
185, 187, 199, 205
tangutica, 147, 166, 214, 220
urticifolia (Pretty Primula),
' similar to P. minima,
183, 186, 192, 199, 205,
214, 275
Wardii, 127, 214, 235
Woodwardii, 83, 185, 187, 231
Prunus, tree, 109

Raisins, 176
Red Birch, 108
Rhododendron, 83, 87, 145, 148,
188, 192, 210, 212, 225,
239 :
azalea amoenum, 150, 152
fastigiatum, 145
imbricatum, 145
Little, 169, 195
(F. 119), 145
Ribes, 109, 191
Rosa Banksia, 331
golden-amber, 341
new, 353

383

Saussurea, 285
Saxifraga oppositifolia, 115
egregia, 275
Hirculus (F. 200), 276
Kabschia, 188
sarmentosa, 337
Scopolia tangutica, 175
Senecio, golden, 255
Sibthorpia europea, 247
Sieversia (see Geum), 226
Silver-grey scented bush, 181
Silverweed tubers, 126
Star of Bethlehem, golden, 112
Stellera, 112, 127, 164, 181, 249,
323
Summer flowers and foliage, 181
Szechuan red-fruited tree (F.
753), 343

Tamarisk, 45
Tangerine Orange, 346, 368
Trachycarpus, 333, 341
Trollius chinensis, 260
pumilus, 148, 180, 226
pumilus Perfectissimi (white
Globeflower), 218, 255

Viburnum, 58, 60, 61
whité, 64
fragrans, 69
new, 353

Viola Chebsonensis,

260
Patrinii, 66
pinnata, 112
Violets, golden, 191
Vitex, 333

tri-colour,

Willow, 190, 204, 248
Xanthoxylum, 337

Zao’erh, thorny (jujube tree), 44,
Zinnia, 337
Messrs. Edward Arnold & Co.'s
AUTUMN

ANNOUNCEMENTS, 1926

 

IN BLACK AND WHITE.
By SYDNEY HOLLAND, VISCOUNT KNUTSFORD.

One Volume. Demy 8vo. With Portrait. 21s. net.

Lord Knutsford has written an entrancing Autobiography. He
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independent critic: and he writes in a lively, breezy style that
never wearies the reader.

Although the Author has not been a maker of history in the wider
sense, one feels after finishing his book that one could not have
skipped a single chapter without losing something that was worth
recording. Itis the life of a fine English gentleman that is put before
the reader, a good example of the type to which the country owes
much. Quick and prompt in decision, adapting himself readily to
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End slum, tolerant of the weaknesses of humanity though not
deceived by them, equally capable of handling “‘ big business ”’
or grasping the smallest detail,—such is the man whose vigorous,
sterling character scintillates through these delightful pages.

Besides his well-known work at the London Hospital, Lord
Knutsford’s avocations have been many and varied; and
whether the book is opened here and there at haphazard or read
from start to finish, the reader will find his attention arrested at
once and his unflagging interest secured.

 

Lonpon : Epwarp ARNOLD & Co., 41 & 43 Mappox Street, W.1.
2 Edward Arnold & Co.’s Autumn Announcements.

FIFTY-TWO YEARS A POLICEMAN.
By Sr WILLIAM NOTT-BOWER, K.C.V.O.
One Volume. Demy 8vo. Illustrated. 18s. net.

Sir William Nott-Bower’s name has long been familiar to Lon-
doners, as he filled the office of Commissioner of Police of the City
of London from 1902 to 1925. But that important post was only
the crown of a career of over half a century in the public service.
Starting as an officer in the Army, at a time when active service
was rare and promotion slow, he decided that a Police career
offered better prospects and obtained a Cadetship in the Royal
Trish Constabulary in 1872. Six years later he was appointed Chief
Constable of Leeds, and after two or three years there he was elected,
at the early age of thirty-two, Head Constable of Liverpool, the
greatest police command in England outside the Metropolis. There
he remained twenty-one years, when he succeeded Sir Henry Smith
as Commissioner of Police of the City of London.

In each post he filled, Nott-Bower’s experiences were varied and
exciting : in Ireland, riots and murder trials contrasted sadly with
the lavish hospitality and careless gaiety of Society. In Leeds the
trial of Charles Peace, ‘‘ life-long burglar, multiple murderer and
arch-hypocrite,”’ took place, and Nott-Bower’s account of the crimi-
nal is extraordinarily interesting. In Liverpool we see how wide
and far-reaching are the duties of the head of a great Police force.
We are shown the enormous vigilance and careful organization
demanded by great public functions, such as visits of Royalty or
great race meetings. We are introduced to the terrible series of
Trish Dynamite Outrages in Liverpool in 1882, to several famous
criminal cases such as that of Mrs. Maybrick, to the “‘ High Rip
Gang ”’ scare of 1886, and to the Great Dock Strike of 1890.

The chapters on the author’s experiences in London deal with
the culminating years of his career. He describes fully the
‘‘ romance of crime ”’ of Von Veltheim, the “ battle of Sidney Street ”’
and various remarkable trials for great business frauds. The
War years 1914-1918 and the Air Raids on the City were an ordeal
splendidly faced by the Police, to be followed unfortunately by the
Police Strikes of 1918 and 1919.

From this brief summary has been omitted the constantly present
work of social reform and Police organization which was always
pressed by Nott-Bower, whose advice, born of great experience and
goodwill, produced many a fruitful measure.
Edward Arnold & Co.’s Autumn Announcements. 3

MY ARMY LIFE.
By Lisvt.-Gen. The EARL OF DUNDONALD, K.C.B.
One Volume. Demy 8vo. With Illustrations. 21s. net.

Lord Dundonald will always be remembered in English history
as the officer who led the final advance into Ladysmith, when Sir
George White’s garrison was relieved by General Buller’s troops in
1900. He served with distinction all through the Boer War, and
his first-hand accounts of the famous battles of Colenso, Spion Kop,
etc., are of great interest. A few years earlier he took part in the
Nile expedition for the relief of General Gordon, was present at the
battle of Abu Klea during the famous desert march, and was in
command of the transport during the night march to Metemmeh, a
march that was disastrously protracted by the treacherous conduct
of an Arab guide, and occupied eighteen hours. After the news of
Gordon’s death arrived, Lord Dundonald was himself selected to
guide troops back for provisions and accomplished the same distance
at night in ten hours. The difference between ten and eighteen
hours on the night of January 18 might have saved Khartoum
and Gordon !

In 1902 Lord Dundonald was placed in command of the Canadian
Militia. Mr. Chamberlain warned him that the post was a difficult
one, and that previous occupants of it had almost invariably come
into conflict with the local authorities. How true this warning
proved will be seen in the chapters devoted by the Author to his
experiences in the Dominion.

Although the book naturally contains a good deal that lies
outside his professional career, Lord Dundonald has in the main
kept closely to the title of his work, and the reflections of so dis-
tinguished an officer on all matters connected with Army work
and efficiency cannot fail to be of great interest both to professional
and to non-service readers.

THE EPIC OF MOUNT EVEREST.
By Sm FRANCIS YOUNGHUSBAND, K.C.S.1., K.C.LE.

Frest CHArRMAN oF THE Mount EvEREST COMMITTEE.
8vo. Illustrated. 7s. 6d. net.

Separate records of the three Mount Everest Expeditions of 1921,
1922 and 1924 have already been published, but it was felt that
a condensed description of them in one volume would bring the
4 Edward Arnold & Co.’s Autumn Announcements.

heroic story within the range of a much larger class of readers
than the limited number to which the more expensive and elaborate
works were accessible. Sir Francis Younghusband has written the
present volume on behalf of the Mount Everest Committee, basing
it on the previous records, but for the sake of connectedness and
brevity of narrative, not always using the exact words of other
writers.

A difficult task has been approached with enthusiasm and carried
out with entire success. The trilogy of the Reconnaissance, the
Assault and the last Fight for Everest has been reduced to unity,
without losing any of its picturesqueness, its true epic character.
Intimately associated with the personnel of each expedition and
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advantage of viewing the whole sequence of events in its true
perspective, and is able to do full justice to the wonderful feats
performed, which the modesty of the climbers forbade in their
own recorded narratives. The story culminates in the tragic dis-
appearance of Mallory and Irvine when the goal was apparently
within reach, but Sir Francis looks forward confidently to the time
when the magnificent work already done shall be crowned by the
complete conquest of the highest mountain in the world.

AMONG THE KARA-KORUM GLACIERS.

By JENNY VISSER-HOOFT. With contributions
by PH. C. VISSER.

Demy 8vo. With Illustrations and Map. About 21s, net.

In the heart of Asia between the two great ranges of the Kara-
korum and the Hindu-Kush lies a high mountain region which
presents one of the most difficult fields of exploration in the
world. Although a caravan route exists through the dark Hunza
gorge from India to Chinese Turkestan, there are large stretches of
unknown country on either side, which it was the aim of the Visser
expedition in 1925 to investigate. The main objectives were the
exploration of the great Batura and Malangutti glaciers, and the
Khunjirab and Gujirab gorges and side-valleys. The story of the
expedition is admirably told by Mrs. Visser, aided by her husband,
who contributes several special chapters dealing with the occasions
when he was exploring unaccompanied. The party was excellently
equipped and had two Swiss guides whose services were invaluable.
Great heights were reached and some very perilous and difficult
situations were successfully overcome. Rarely if ever have such
beautiful photographs of high mountain scenery been obtained, a
large selection of which is reproduced in this handsome volume.
Edward Arnold & Co.’s Autumn Announcemenis. 5

THE RIDDLE OF THE TSANGPO
GORGES.
By Carr. F. KINGDON WARD.

AurHor or “THe Romance or Piant-Huntinea,” “ From CHINA TO
Hxamit Lona,” ETO.

With contributions by the Earl Cawdor, and an Introduction
by Sir Francis Younghusband.

Demy 8vo. With Illustrations and Map. 21s. net.

This is probably the most important journey undertaken by that
intrepid explorer and naturalist Capt. Kingdon Ward, who was
accompanied by Lord Cawdor. He had a great and puzzling
problem to solve, namely to complete the exploration of the course
of the famous Tsangpo, or Brahmaputra, where it plunges down
from the Tibetan plateau to the Assam lowlands, a fall of about
11,000 feet, boring its way through the mightiest mountain range
in the world. Tradition asserted that in the depths of those
unknown gorges was hidden a great waterfall, and although previous
explorers had penetrated far down the river from the north and
far up it from the south without discovering the mysterious Falls,
the impenetrable nature of the country had still left a gap of about
fifty miles unexplored, which it was the aim of Capt. Kingdon Ward
and Lord Cawdor to make good. How they succeeded and what
they discovered will be found in the pages of this fascinating volume.

Capt. Kingdon Ward always travels with two strings to his bow,
and it is hard to say whether exploration or botanizing has the
first claim upon him. The flora of the region is of marvellous
beauty and variety, and nothing escaped the practised eye of this
famous plant-hunter. The native tribes encountered presented
many peculiarities, and Lord Cawdor contributes two very inter-
esting chapters upon their habits and manner of life.

The photographs of the great Gorge are unique, and after seeing
them one begins to understand why it has remained so long un-
explored. A valuable map, prepared by the Royal Geographical
Society from Capt. Ward’s survey, adds greatly to the work.
6 Edward Arnold & Co.’s Autumn Announcements.

ACROSS THREE OCEANS.
A COLONIAL VOYAGE IN THE YACHT “SAOIRSE.”
By CONOR O BRIEN.
Demy 8vo. With Illustrations and Maps. 16s. net.

The 20-ton yacht “‘ Saoirse ”’ left Dublin for her cruise round the
world on June 20, 1923, and anchored there again two years later
to the day. For the three stages of this voyage, the first to Cape
Town, the second via Melbourne to Auckland, and the third round
Cape Horn home, Mr. O Brien was awarded the Challenge Cup of
the Royal Cruising Club three times in succession, and his book is
honoured by an Introduction from Mr. Claud Worth, Vice-Commo-
dore of the Club. However common long ocean voyages in small
yachts may become in future, the Author will always be remem-
bered as the man who brought a 20-tonner round the Horn. His
plain, seamanlike account is so modestly written that a casual
reader might miss its full significance. But anyone who knows
anything of the sea will realize the good seamanship, vigilance and
endurance required to drive this little bluff-bowed vessel at speeds
of from 150 to 170 miles a day, as well as the weight of wind and
sea which must sometimes have been encountered.

NEW IMPRESSION.

THE RAINBOW BRIDGE.
By REGINALD FARRER.

With Illustrations and a Map. One Volume. Demy 8vo.
21s. net.

In this volume the late Mr. Farrer completed the account of his
adventurous journeys in the mountainous region of Western China,
of which the first portion is described in “‘ On the Eaves of the World.”
The latter volumes have recently been reprinted, so that both
works are now obtainable in the original format.

“There can be no denying that Mr. Farrer was one of the great masters
of English prose. His last book is bright with sidelights on the wie intime
of the essential China.”—Morning Post.
Edward Arnold & Co.’s Autumn Announcements. 7

ON THE EAVES OF THE WORLD.
By REGINALD FARRER.

With Iilustrationsand Map. NewImpression. Two Volumes.
Demy 8vo. 30s. net.

“ This book will be the envy of travellers—of those who have seen wonders
they long to describe, but whose pens lie ineffectual in their hands when they
return to their own country.’’—Sir Francis Younghusband in The Observer.

“A travel book of a most agreeable character. If only for its perfect
pictures of Chinese life we should welcome this work, but it is excellent in
all its aspects, and should find a place upon the shelves of every well-equipped
library.”—Pall Mall Gazette.

THE MAIN CHANCE.

By RONALD SYMOND.
Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.

‘“No proverb,”’ writes the Author, “‘ is more widely honoured than
that which says: ‘ Always have an eye to the main chance.’ ”’
But what is this main chance, this source of complete satisfaction,
after which human nature is ceaselessly striving ? Men look for it
in power, wealth, fame, comfort, love, the hope of Paradise, in a
hundred other things. Yet few can deny that the permanent life-
giving satisfaction eludes them, though most of us feel that there
is hidden in the mystery of life some other main chance of a more
constant nature, upon which we sometimes stumble as if by accident,
but find it difficult to keep our eyes fixed.

To track this down is the Author’s object, and his argument may
be roughly summarized as follows: Love as the motive power of
all successful action, individual and collective, is in essence self-
interested ; there is nothing immoral in thinking of love as selfish.
The key to durable satisfaction is to be found in the translation of
this personal selfish love to a universal plane, in what might be
called “‘the higher selfishness.”” This development the Author
traces carefully and convincingly. It can be seen in the tragedies
of Shakespeare (this chapter is a masterly essay in literary criticism)
and—its ultimate manifestation—in the life of Christ. He con-
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the brink of which he thinks we are now standing ; and he analyses
the forces on either side, an examination which produces a good
deal of sane and valuable criticism of the ethical, religious and
economic position of the world to-day. In short, it is a book of
well-marshalled argument, of apt quotation, easy to read and full
of food for thought.
8 Edward Arnold & Co.’s Autumn Announcements.

ANCIENT EGYPTIAN MATERIALS.
By A. LUCAS, F.LC.

CHEMIST IN THE DEPARTMENT OF ANTIQUITIES, CAIRO.
AUTHOR OF “ ANTIQUES,’’ ETC.

Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.

The origin and composition of the materials used by the Ancient
Egyptians for buildings, mummification, and for making jewellery,
weapons, tools, papyrus and other objects, are subjects which have
a fascination for all those who find pleasure in contemplating the
activities of ancient races and particularly of races such as the
Egyptians, who have left so many wonderful works for posterity
to admire. Who has not heard of the Great Pyramids and won-
dered whence came the stone of which they are built ? Many state-
ments have been made that the stone was transported across the
Nile from localities far distant from the Pyramids, but Mr. Lucas
shows that most of the stone was quarried on the site, the actual
quarries being at present almost hidden by the sand which has
covered them. Only comparatively few stones which were used
for lining the chambers and passages inside the Pyramids consist
of rock which was transported from a distance. Again, “‘ old
amber ’’ beads and necklaces are sold to tourists in all parts of
Egypt, but Mr. Lucas, as the result of many investigations on
ancient jewellery in the Cairo Museum and in other collections,
has been unable to identify amber in any instance.

The author with his wide knowledge of Egypt has in this book
considered the various ancient materials and with keen scientific
penetration indicated their probable origin, and in most cases,
even the method the craftsman employed to fashion his ware.
Those who have either seen or heard of the wonderful objects from
the tomb of Tut-ankh-Amen and wish to know more about the
materials of such objects and the manner in which they were made,
will find full information in the book, which is written throughout
in non-technical language. The clear style and lucid treatment
cannot fail to make the reader long to visit the ancient land of
which the author has so fascinating a tale to tell.

For those who require further information as to the source and
composition of the materials described, numerous references to
other books and original papers are given, while chemical analyses
have been collected together in an Appendix.
Edward Arnold & Co.’s Autumn Announcements. 9

ON WRITING AND WRITERS.
By the late Sir WALTER RALEIGH.

AuTHoR oF “ Sryzz,’”’ ‘ Mitron,’’ “ WorDSWwoRTH,”’ ETC.
One Volume. Crown 8vo. 6s. net.

This little volume has been constructed from notes prepared by
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while Professor of English Literature at Oxford. It was his habit
to write out in full the most important passages in his lectures
and to rely on extempore diction for the connecting links. Fortu-
nately the note-books Sir Walter made use of have been preserved
and Professor George Gordon, his successor in the University Chair,
has been able to extract from them the interesting and valuable
materials which are now presented to the public. Professor Gordon
has edited the book with great skill, piecing the fragments together
into a harmonious whole, so that the pages can be read with plea-
sure and profit as a consecutive guide to certain branches of literary
study. The first section contains notes on Writing and Composi-
tion, the second is on Letters and Letter Writers, and the last on
Criticism. Through every page breathe Sir Walter’s inimitable
style and his striking independence of judgment and critical acumen.

LEAVES OF HELLAS.
ESSAYS ON SOME ASPECTS OF GREEK LITERATURE.
By J. MARSHALL MACGREGOR.

READER IN GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON.
One Volume. Demy 8vo. 12s. 6d. net.

Mr. MacGregor is already well known for his scholarly editions
of Classical Authors, and in this volume he makes excellent use of
his wide reading and eminent scholarship in presenting students
and the general public with some of the fruits of his knowledge.
The volume contains a series of critical studies, some dealing with
definite classical masterpieces, and some of more general application,
as will be seen from their titles.

Contents :—I. Labor Improbus. II. Drama and Deity. TI. A
10 Edward Arnold & Co.’s Autumn Announcemenis.

Professional Poet. IV. A Military Man. V. A Greek Crusoe.
VI. Plot and Character. VII. Plato and his Time. VIII. The
Humanity of Aristotle. IX. An Heir of Hellas. X. In Memoriam.

At the end of the volume the author gives some charming examples
of translation into English verse from the Olympian and Pythian
Odes of Pindar.

A NEW IMPRESSION.

THE LIFE OF A FOX: WRITTEN BY
HIMSELF.
By THOMAS SMITH, Esq.

Sometime MasTEeR oF THE CRAVEN AND OF THE PytTcHLEY Hovunps.

With an Introduction by LORD WILLOUGHBY DE BROKE, and
Coloured Plates from rare old coloured prints and paintings by Alken, Howett
and other contemporary artists. t

One Volume. Crown 4to. 21s. net.

The present edition of this classic of fox hunting has been out
of print for two years, but owing to the constant demand for it a
new impression has been printed. Other reprints of rare old sport-
ing books, issued in similar style to ‘‘ The Life of a Fox,” include
the following :—

THE DIARY OF A HUNTSMAN.

By THOMAS SMITH, sometime Master of the Craven and of the
. Pytchley Hounds. 21s. net.

OBSERVATIONS ON FOX HUNTING.
By COLONEL COOK. 2ls. net.

THE ANALYSIS OF THE HUNTING FIELD.
By R. 8. SURTEES. 21s. net.

Ae OF JOHN MYTTON, ESQ., OF HALSTON, SHROP-

By NIMROD. 21s. net.

JORROCKS'S JAUNTS AND JOLLITIES.
By R. 8. SURTEES. 21s. net.
Edward Arnold & Co.’s Autumn Announcements. ll

NEW FICTION.

THE MELLBRIDGE MYSTERY.
By ARTHUR O. COOKE.
Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.

This is a detective novel containing the traditional ingredients of
all good detective stories, but told with more regard for both literary
and common sense than are most of its class.

A journalist of the best quality, living alone in charming rooms
in the county town of Mellbridge, is found strangled in bed one
Sunday morning. The only obvious clues are that the front door
is not bolted and that a latchkey, a scarf, and £250 are missing.
It sounds like a straightforward burglary with violence, but in the
absence of a suitable burglar, it develops into a first-class newspaper
mystery. The solution falls to an amateur with an interest in
obscure crime, but it is only fair to Scotland Yard and the police
to say this is due more to luck than the amateur’s good management.

Mr. Cooke’s cleverness lies in giving his story the ingenuity of a
crossword puzzle combined with the excitement of criminal-hunting,
and yet keeping hold of that useful quality known as verisimilitude.
This is a murder which might have happened to any one of us.

A SEA-CHANGE.
By Lieut. MARK BENNETT, R.N.R.

AvutTHor oF “ Tack SuHrP,”’ ETC.
Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.

A rattling story of the sea, with exciting happenings. In ‘‘ Tack
Ship’ Lieut. Bennett proved himself a skilful weaver of short
yarns, and he now shows that he is equally at home in constructing
anovel. George Merriman is a bank clerk in a quiet seaport town
on the south coast, who without knowing it has been left a fortune
to which the condition is attached that it must be claimed within
ninety days. To prevent his doing so, the next heir arranges a
plot whereby George is lured on board a sailing vessel bound for
12 Edward Arnold & Co.’s Autumn Announcements.

New Zealand—a ninety days’ passage out. The captain is a ruffian
and George’s fate is cruel. Mutiny and bloodshed ensue, the
captain is killed, the crew quarrel among themselves, regard George
as a ‘‘ Jonah,” and dismiss him and the captain’s wife to a passing
homeward-bound steamer. Thus he gets back on the eighty-ninth
day, goes at once to see his lawyer, learns about the fortune and
claims it in the nick of time, with ten minutes to spare. He marries
the captain’s widow and all ends happily.

THE UNINVITED.
By DOROTHEA FAIRBRIDGE.
Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.

“The Uninvited’ is Paula, a young South African artist, who
palms herself off on an English country rector and his sister as
their cousin. Her story passes muster, for the dreamy clergyman
had long lost touch with the real cousin who had settled in South
Africa. Lord Comers, another of the Rectory cousins, falls in love
with beautiful Paula. Paula one day, visiting his home, recognizes
his crest as that on a ring belonging to a half-caste boy she knew
in Africa. Investigation leads to the horrid discovery that this half-
caste is really the legitimate son of Lord Comers’ disreputable uncle
and predecessor, and therefore the true heir to the title and estate.
Lord Comers, wretched but honest, sets off to discover and establish
his supplanter. Paula, wretched at her own dishonesty in deceiving
these nice people, disappears. The nice people, who have learnt to
love her, are unhappy. In Cairo all is smoothed out again. The
half-caste boy is found, but found dying, so Lord Comers is still
Lord Comers. Paula too is found, and found in love with Lord
Comers.

This is a novel which combines an exciting story with a charming
study of English life. Miss Fairbridge is already well known to
the reading public for her delightful books on Lady Anne Barnard,
and on South African gardens.
Edward Arnold & Co.’s Autumn Announcements. 13

RECENT NOVELS.
PREM.
A TALE OF MODERN INDIA.
By H. K. GORDON.

Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.

In a foreword to this remarkable book, Sir Michael O’Dwyer writes: ‘‘ Of
the many novels—some of them excellent—dealing with Indian life which
I have read in recent years, I regard ‘ Prem’ as holding the first place. The
book will give every one who reads it a true and vivid impression of the India
of to-day.”

“This masterly novel of Indian rural life teems with interest. Among
novels on Indian life, and we have read many, it stands by itself in excellence.”
—Country Life.

“This engrossing narrative carries absolute conviction on every page.”
—Truth.

‘“Not only an interesting but also an extremely able piece of work, which
will rank high in the literature dealing with our Indian Empire.’’—Morning

Post.
THE BLUE POPPY.
By C. E. BAINES.

AvutTHor or “THE Down Tray,” ETC.
Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.

“As a full-blooded ‘shocker,’ the novel, besides being very well written,
is thrilling and cleverly done.”—The Times Literary Supplement.

“ Not for the first time, Mr. Baines has found a quite new idea for a sensa-
tional novel and has worked it out with the touch of an artist.”—Daily
Telegraph.

“** The Blue Poppy ’ can be safely plucked from the library list.”,— Punch.

**In common with its predecessors, this book has u pleasant richness of
personality which makes reading rather the mental equivalent of eating a
fine mince pie well stuffed with plums. And it seems to be the mixture of
a fantastically credible plot with a number of very entertaining characters
that results in this richness.’”,—G. K.’s Weekly.

THE UNCHARTED SEA.
By STEPHEN KING-HALL (Etienne).

Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.

‘The story is well told. But still more attractive is the vivid picture of
the official and underworlds of Hong Kong; the author knows what he is
writing about, and he has a mordant humour that is enlightening.” —John o’
London’s Weekly.

“¢* The Uncharted Sea ’ is that upon which Lou embarks with her machine-
like husband in the background, and the naval officers stationed in Repulse
Bay in the foreground. Vividly and with a fine sympathy this atmosphere
is created, with its storms and calms.’’—Bookman.
14 Edward Arnold & Co.’s Autumn Announcements.
ELEVENTH LARGE IMPRESSION.
SHEPHERD EASTON’S DAUGHTER.

By MARY J. H. SKRINE.

AvrHor or “Tse Brack Cow,” “A RomMANcE or THE SIMPLE,” ETO.
Popular Edition. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.

“A very beautiful book—one which it is a great privilege to read. We
hope that all who can will read ‘ Shepherd Easton’s Daughter,’ not only for
its beauty of style and character drawing, and interest, and influence, but
because all these powers of workmanship are covered and controlled by its
overmastering purpose—the very rare one in. modern novels—of revealing
the irresistible attractiveness of the spiritual side of life.”—-Church Times.

“In this ‘ beautiful story,’ as Miss Evelyn Underhill calls it, Mrs. Skrine
translates a medixval saint in terms of the modern word, and the measure of
her success is the ease with which she captures our judgment and holds it
to the end.”—New Statesman.

‘We enter into the atmosphere of ‘‘Shepherd Easton’s Daughter ’ as into a
country where innocence and beauty still remain and the very air is comfort
and grace. What a relief we feel, how tranquil we become, how refreshed ! ””
—Spectator.

MR. E. M. FORSTER’S FAMOUS NOVEL
A PASSAGE TO INDIA

has now been added to the
UnrirormM Epition oF Mr. Forstrer’s NoveEts.

Crown 8vo. Cloth. 5s. net each volume.

The Uniform Edition includes also :-—
THE LONGEST JOURNEY.
WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD.
HOWARDS END.
A ROOM WITH A VIEW.

*,* A very few copies of the Large Paper Edition of A Passage to India
are still obtainable, price £2 2s. net.
Edward Arnold & ‘Co.’s Autumn Announcements. 15

DR. JAMES’ BOOKS OF GHOST
STORIES.

A WARNING TO THE CURIOUS,

AND OTHER GHOST STORIES.
By Dr. M. R. JAMES.

Provost or Eton CoLLEece.
Fifth Impression. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.

‘“Not since Lytton wrote ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’ have we had
such a feast of delightful horrors.”—Morning Post.

“One of the most refreshing fireside books a jaded reader can wish for.”
—Spectator.

‘“The brand is happily the same as of yore—a blend of authentic scholarly
lore with the presentation of bizarre, supernatural events happening to
ordinary people amid the ordinary pursuits of life.” —Bookman.

GHOST STORIES OF AN ANTIQUARY. 5s. net.
MORE GHOST STORIES. 5s. net.
A THIN GHOST AND OTHERS. 4s. 6d. net.
THE FIVE JARS. With Illustrations. 6s. net.

TELL ME ANOTHER.

By the Most Hon. THE MARQUESS OF ABERDEEN
AND TEMAIR, K.T.

Third Impression. 7s. 6d. net.

“* It would seem that all the best Scots stories come from Aberdeen, judg-
ing from the number and quality of them in ‘ Tell Me Another.’ ’’—Daily
News.

“Scotland has no more entertaining raconteur than Lord Aberdeen. His
book is a choice mixture of good yarns.’’—John o’London’s Weekly.

‘Lord Aberdeen knows many good stories and is an excellent raconteur.
The stories are so arranged as to be useful for speakers seeking apt illustra-
tions to argument or cheerful sallies to brighten their after-dinner oratory.”
—New Statesman.

“It is a great book . . . I confidently challenge the revilers of Scottish
humour to show me two masterpieces in the works of any humorist to cap
the two gems I have quoted. ... I therefore bid all Scots who cherish
the real old original ‘ wut ’ of their forefathers, as they lived and joked before
they were corrupted by English beef and bawbees, to borrow or steal Lord
Aberdeen’s book.”’—Sunday Chronicle.
16 Edward Arnold & Co.’s Autumn Announcements.

RECENTLY PUBLISHED.

THE ROMANTIC THEORY OF POETRY.

AN EXAMINATION IN THE LIGHT OF CROCE’S
FESTHETIC.

By A. E. POWELL (Mrs. Dodds).
Sometime WitLt1am NoBLE FELLow oF LivERPooL UNIVERSITY.
One Volume. Demy 8vo. 12s. 6d. net.

“We know of no better, no more careful or illuminating exposition of the
conception of poetry held by the English romantics than this of Mrs.
Dodds. By her remarkable book she has done a great service to literary
criticism. She has made it plain that the English romantic poets, whatever
their momentary vagaries, thought more and knew more concerning the
nature of poetry than the whole century of critics and zestheticians which
has followed them.”—The Times Literary Supplement.

“A fascinating and stimulating volume.’’—Obdserver.

A STUDY OF THE OCEANS.
By JAMES JOHNSTONE, D.Sc.

PROFESSOR OF OCEANOGRAPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL.
AvutTHoR oF “THe MeEcuHanism oF LiF.”

One Volume. Demy 8vo. Illustrated. 10s. 6d. net.

“This is an admirable book, and of its various qualities it is hard to say
which one admires the most. While it contains a vast amount of information
in small compass, all is so clearly and easily stated that no reader need find
it difficult of digestion.”—The Times Literary Supplement.

‘*A book which will kindle the student’s enthusiasm as well as supply him
with the broad outlines of his subject.”—Morning Post.

““The book is bright and clear, full of thought and an interesting introduc-
tion to a study of the greater classics.” —Geographical Teacher.

HERTHA AYRTON, 1854-1923.
A MEMOIR.
By EVELYN SHARP.

With Illustrations. One Volume. Demy 8vo. 15s. net.

“A delightfully written memoir.”—Queen.

“The great merit of Miss Sharp’s biography is that it presents the picture
of a singularly interesting type without letting us lose interest in the
individual.”’—Nation.

“Hertha Ayrton was one of the great women of the world.”—Daily News.

‘An admirable record of the life and work of a woman distinguished alike
as scientist, suffragist, and humanitarian.”—Nature.

 

Lonpon: Epwarp Arnotp & Co., 41 & 43 Mappox Srrezer, W.1.
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