For three thousand miles the Great Wall clambers over the mountains between China and Mongolia
One of the mammoth stone figures flanking the road to the Ming Tombs of North China, each of a single piece of granite
Another glimpse of the Great Wall
The twin pagodas of Taiyüan, capital of Shansi Province
Toward the end of the afternoon a kind of cart-road grew up underfoot and carried us over the steepest and last ridge of the day to Hsin Lung Shan. “New Dragon Mountain” is a brand-new pioneer city in the heart of the former reserve, Chinese in its main features, but so fresh and even clean that one might easily have doubted its nationality. The inn itself had not found time to convert its yard into a slough or a dust-bin or its rooms into crumbling, musty mud dens. Imposing shops lined the principal streets; the chief official, with whom I exchanged calls of respect, was a man of culture as well as authority—and he seemed to have had no special orders concerning foreigners.
Great masses of white clouds drifted through the streets when we set out next morning along the stony river that gives Hsin Lung Shan its setting, and were responsible for a curious illusion. The sun had evidently just topped the mountain ridge close above the town, and the single irregular row of trees that had survived at the crest showed one after the other through a little rift in the moving fog that covered everything else, so that it looked exactly as if the sun itself were having a procession of trees across its surface. A fairly broad valley of palpably fertile virgin soil lasted all the morning and somewhat reconciled one to the destruction of the forests. Here it was less stony, or better picked up, and supported rather a numerous population in reasonable style. The mist continued to play queer pranks until it had been burned away by what remained a blazing, despotic sun. Field boundaries of stone, also of single logs laid end to end, warned the road against trespassing. There were stone-heaps in great number, but no graves to interfere with the husbandman. Four prisoners tied together with ropes and flanked by two policemen in the usual black uniform plodded past toward the new city, implying that this virgin region is after all no sinless Eden. Twice that morning we met strings of camels stepping softly westward, though how they crossed the ranges that shut in the valley on all sides was a mystery which their surly drivers, so unlike the simple, almost obsequious settlers, except in their avoidance of soap and water, would not pause to answer. Many a camel-train stalking with supercilious mien past our Peking home goes on to Jehol, but they take the direct route worn deep with centuries of traffic. In this May-time the beasts were ugly with the loss of great wads of hair which made them much worse than moth-eaten, and the drivers had tied networks of string about their necks to keep them from dropping, or being pilfered of, this most valuable of their fur.
The valley narrowed at last and pushed us up over another high range, the third stiff climb of the trip, from the top of which labyrinthian views blue with haze but brilliant with sunshine spread to infinity in both directions. But the land had evidently been reclaimed earlier here, so that there were fewer and fewer pioneering conditions, which on the third day died out entirely. A miserable mountain inn offered me its principal room that evening, though it took up more than half the building reserved for travelers, a flock of evicted coolies picking up their soiled packs and crowding together somewhere else without the hint of a protest. I do not know how much they paid for lodging, but it could not have been any fortune, since the landlord was so eager to replace a dozen of them, with prospects of more to come, by a lone foreigner whose bill hardly amounted to twelve American cents. Woven cornstalk fences increased as the smell of newly cleared land diminished. Twenty-four hours of valley brought us to another steep ling, from the top of which rows of blue ranges faded away on the distant horizon behind. The population had been longer established here and was made up of born mountaineers, simple yet self-sufficient, like mountaineers the world over. Goiter was almost universal, and nearly every one was deeply pitted with smallpox, so that there was rarely a good-looking face of either sex. Round granaries made of wickerwork, of the height of a tall man, lined with mud plaster and thatched with straw, sat in every yard. All memories of the royal forest had disappeared by the third afternoon, and the familiar old China, stony, bare, blowing with dust or reeking with mud, again surrounded us, though ranges of jagged peaks kept us fairly close company.