A descent from a second pass leads to the Keum-San Kang, a largish river in a rich agricultural region, and to the village of Pan-pyöng, where they were making in the rudest fashion the great cast-iron pots used for boiling horse food, from iron obtained and smelted 33 li farther north.
On two successive days there were tremendous thunderstorms, the second succeeded, just as we were at the head of a wild glen, by a brief tornado, which nearly blew over the ponies, and snapped trees of some size as though they had been matchwood. Then came a profound calm. The clouds lay banked in pink illuminated masses on a sky of tender green, cleft by gray mountain peaks. Mountain torrents boomed, crashed, sparkled, and foamed, the silent woods rejoiced the eye by the vividness of their greenery and their masses of white and yellow blossom, and sweet heavy odors enriched the evening air. On that and several other occasions, I recognized that Korea has its own special beauties, which fix themselves in the memory; but they must be sought for in spring and autumn, and off the beaten track. Dirty and squalid as the villages are, at a little distance their deep-eaved brown roofs, massed among orchards, on gentle slopes, or on the banks of sparkling streams, add color and life to the scenery, and men in their queer white clothes and dress hats, with their firm tread, and bundled-up women, with a shoggling walk and long staffs, brought round with a semicircular swing at every step, are adjuncts which one would not willingly dispense with.
Before reaching the Paik-yang Kang, a broad, full river, an affluent of the northern Han, with singularly abrupt turns and perpendicular cliffs of a formation resembling that of the Palisades on the Hudson River, we crossed one of the great lava fields described by Consul Carles.[19]
This, which we crossed in a northeasterly direction, is a rough oval about 40 miles by 30, a tableland, in fact, surrounded by a deep chasm where the torrents which encircle it meet the mountains. Its plateaux are from 60 to 100 feet above these streams, which are all affluents of the Han, and are supported on palisades of basalt, exhibiting the prismatic columnar formation in a very striking manner. In some places the lava, which is often covered either with conglomerate or a stiffish clay, is very near the surface, and large blocks of it lie along the streams. It is a most fertile tract, and could support a large population, but not being suited for rice, is very little cultivated, and grows chiefly oats, millet, and beans, which are not affected by the strong winds.
There are two Dolmens, not far from the Paik-yang Kang. In one the upper stone is from 7 to 10 feet long, by 7 feet wide, and 17 inches deep, resting on three stones 4 feet 2 inches high. The other is somewhat smaller. The openings of both face due north.
After crossing the Paik-yang Kang, there 162 yards wide and 16 feet deep, by a ferryboat of remarkably ingenious construction, rendered necessary by the fact that the long bridge over the broad stream was in ruins, and that the appropriation for its reconstruction had been diverted by the local officials to their own enrichment, we entered the spurs or ribs of the great mountain chain which, running north and south, divides Korea into two very unequal longitudinal portions at the village of Tong-ku.
The scenery became very varied and pretty. Forests clothed many of the hills with a fair blossoming undergrowth untouched by the fuel gatherers’ remorseless hook; torrents flashed in foam through dark, dense leafage, or bubbled and gurgled out of sight; the little patches of cultivation were boulder-strewn; there were few inhabitants, and the tracks called roads were little better than the stony beds of streams. As they became less and less obvious, and the valleys more solitary, our tergiversations were more frequent and prolonged, the mapu drove the ponies as fast as they could walk, the fords were many and deep, and two of the party were unhorsed in them, still we hurried on faster and faster. Not a word was spoken, but I knew that the men had tiger on the brain!
Blundering through the twilight, it was dark when we reached the lower village of Ma-ri Kei, where we were to halt for the night, two miles from the Pass of Tan-pa-Ryöng, which was to be crossed the next day. There the villagers could not or would not take us in. They said they had neither rice nor beans, which may have been true so late in the spring. However, it is, or then was, Korean law that if a village could not entertain travellers it must convoy them to the next halting-place.
The mapu were frantic. They yelled and stormed and banged at the hovels, and succeeded in turning out four sleepy peasants, who were reinforced by four more a little farther on; but the torches were too short, and after sputtering and flaring, went out one by one, and the fresh ones lighted slowly. The mapu lost their reason. They thrashed the torchbearers with their heavy sticks; I lashed my mapu with my light whip for doing it; they yelled, they danced. Then things improved. Gloriously glared the pine knots on the leaping crystal torrents that we forded, reddening the white clothes of the men and the stony track and the warm-tinted stems of the pines, and so with shouts and yells and waving torches we passed up the wooded glen in the frosty night air, under a firmament of stars, to the mountain hamlet of upper Ma-ri Kei, consisting of five hovels, only three of which were inhabited.
It is a very forlorn place and very poor, and it was an hour before my party of eight human beings and four ponies were established in its miserable shelter, though even that was welcome after being eleven hours in the saddle.