"Above is Heaven's Hall,
Below are the cities of Su and Hang."
During the day they passed Kia-yu and Su-ki-kan, and late in the afternoon swept into sight of Yo-chow. The Shan-si man announced that Tung-ting was not so very far away. He even volunteered that this was the greatest country under "Heaven's Hall" for the exportation of bristles, feathers, fungus, musk, nutgalls, opium, and safflower. The place presented a crowded, if not particularly ambitious, appearance. The shore was jammed, as usual, with thousands of junks, and above the town the muddy banks were lined with Hunan timber and bamboo rafts. From the bridge of the Dirigo the boy caught from time to time swiftly shifting views of vast swampy plains, with a ragged line of scattered distant mountains. Then they passed beyond the bend in the river and suddenly entered what seemed another ocean, a northwest passage to Cathay. As far as the eye could reach stretched an illimitable void of waters, turbid, motionless. A rocky point, some ten feet higher than the surrounding plain, just gave a foothold for a small temple, a two-story Ting-tse or pavilion, and a lighthouse shaped like a square paper lantern. Ten minutes later it was a black spot in their boiling, brown wake. They were in Tung-ting, that desolate waste of mud, water, and sandhill islands, half swamp, half lake that rises into being by virtue of the expanding spring torrents, and sinks into its spongelike alluvial bed as mysteriously as it comes.
"Whew!" whistled the boy, "I only hope 'Dooley' knows where he's at. I wish we'd taken on a lao-ta at Hankow. This hole must be a hundred miles long and it's just about ten feet deep!"
In fact, the quartermaster had already called the boy's attention to the long grasses that swung idly upon the top of the water, and to the fact that here and there patches of bottom could be seen.
"Where is Chang-Yuan in all this mess?" he inquired of 'Dooley' who with Yen occupied a place beside him on the bridge.
The Shan-si pointed to a conical-shaped island several miles distant which raised itself steeply out of the water, on which the boy could see through his glasses clung a Chinese village. Flocks of wild fowl speckled the middle distance with a single lone fisherman on the starboard bow.
"He says," interrupted Yen, "Sim-wu have got on that island. This place belong very good for Chinaman—have got plenty of rice. Plenty water summer time. Winter time water all finish. He says he no think enough water for this boat. Little more far—about thirty li—have got 'nother island—after while catchee Chang-Yuan."
"Ask him how fast his bloomin' lake is drying up," directed the boy.
The Shan-si man shrugged his shoulders.
"He says," announced Yen, "if fish belong thirsty they drink water plenty quick. Fish no thirsty plenty water. Sometime fish drink one foot water in four days."