A solemn old gentleman in a dark-coloured robe with a shaven head received me with that perfect courtesy which it is my experience these monks always show, escorted me into a large room with a k'ang on one side and a figure of a god, large and gorgeous, facing the door. He asked me my age, as apparently the most important question he could ask—it is rather an important factor in one's life—and then when I was seated on the k'ang, with my interpreter, in his very best clothes of silk brocade, on the other, a variety of cakes in little dishes were set on the k'ang table beside me, and a small shavenheaded little boy who I was informed was called “Trees” was set to pour out tea as long as I would drink it. I was so amused at the importance of Tuan. Not for worlds would I have given him away as he sat there sipping tea and nibbling at a piece of cake; and I wonder still what he thought I thought. Did he fear I should call him to account for sitting down as if he were on terms of equality with me? Did he think I was a fool, or was he properly grateful that I allowed him this little latitude? At any rate, except in the matter of squeeze, he always served me very well indeed, and there is no doubt my dignity was enhanced by going about with a real, live interpreter. The priest could not know what a very inadequate one he was.
Presently they came and announced that the chair was ready.
“Put on new ropes,” announced my interpreter pointing out the lashings to me. The chair was fastened to a couple of stout poles and four coolies, they might have been own brothers to the ones I had at the Ming Tombs, lifted it to their shoulders and we were off. All the people who dwelt in the little hamlet that clustered round the temple at the foot of the mountain, hoary-headed old men, little, naked children, small-footed women, peeped out and looked at the foreign woman as she passed on her pilgrimage up the steep and narrow pathway, the first foreigner that had passed up this way for some years, and probably the only one who would pass up this year. It took a good many people to get me up, I noticed, it wouldn't have been Tuan if it hadn't. There was his all-important self of course, there was a man carrying my camera, another one carrying my umbrella and a bundle of incense sticks, there were various minor hangers-on in the shape of small boys, and there were, of course, my four chair coolies.
A Chinese chair is a most uncomfortable thing anyway, and this had exaggerated the faults of its kind. Always it is so built that there is not seat enough, while the back seems specially arranged to pitch the unlucky occupant forward. It is bad enough in the ordinary way—going up a mountain, and a very steep mountain, it is anathema, and coming down it is beyond words. And this mountain was steep, its looks had not belied it; never have I gone up such a steep place before, never, I devoutly hope, shall I go up such a steep place again. The mountain fell away, and I looked out into space on either side. I could see hills, of course, away in the far distance, with a great gulf between me and them, rounded, treeless hills with just a faint touch of green upon them, and the trees on my own mountain, firs and pines with an occasional poplar, green and fresh with the tender green of May time, stood up at an acute angle with the hill-side above, and an obtuse angle below. The air was fresh, and keen, and invigorating, and in the green grass grew bulbs like purple crocuses, wild jessamine sweetly scented, and delicate blue wild hyacinths, that in Staffordshire they call blue bells. I remember once in a delightful wood in the Duke of Sutherland's grounds near Stoke-on-Trent, that most sordid town of the Black Country, seeing the ground there carpeted with just such blossoms as I saw here on the holy mountain in China.