The cotton-fields, by the way, were almost endless, though not much else could be said in their favor. The plants, from six inches to a foot high, were of a dead-dry brown, of the same color as all the landscape to the summit of the terraced mountains, and the miserable little bolls that remained did not seem worth even the trouble of such poverty-stricken pickers as here and there still wandered about in search of them. There had been no rain all summer in this region, they told us, and unless some fell within the next two months and saved the winter wheat, there would be another famine as serious as that of 1920.
Coal is plentiful and cheap in Shensi, and comes to market in Sian-fu in wheelbarrows, there to await purchasers
The holy of holies of the principal Sian-fu mosque has a simplicity in striking contrast to the demon-crowded interiors of purely Chinese temples
Our carts crossing a branch of the Yellow River fifty li west of the Shensi capital
Women and girls do much of the grinding of grain with the familiar stone roller of China, in spite of their bound feet
The first night out of Kwanyintang we slept in the house from which a Greek, and ate in the house from which a Frenchman, both officials of the advancing railway, had been taken by bandits a few weeks before. They were still in captivity among the mountains somewhere to the southwest, the nucleus of the considerable little party of foreigners by whose unwilling assistance the brigands eventually won their way into the national army. In fact we slept on unfurnished beds and were offered unnecessary apologies by our polished French host and Japanese hostess at dinner because of the looting that had taken place at the time his predecessor was carried off. There was still a certain atmosphere of suppressed dread among the few foreign residents, for none of them was sure how soon he might become the next victim; but mankind quickly learns to live without discomfort under many unpleasant circumstances.