become broken and irregular, the
earth is washed from between them and they are upturned at impossible
angles. The result is a chaotic mass which by no stretch of imagination
can be called a road. Where the stones are still in place they have
been worn to such glasslike smoothness by the thousands of passing
mules that it is well-nigh impossible to walk upon them. As a result a
caravan avoids the paving whenever it can find a path and sometimes
dozens of deeply-cut trails wind over the hills beside the road.

We are seldom on level ground, for ten per cent of the entire province
is mountainous and we soon lost count of the ranges which we crossed.
It is slow, hard work, toiling up the steep mountain-sides, but once on
the ridges where the country is spread out below us like a great, green
relief map, there is a wonderful exhilaration, and we climb higher with
a joyous sense of freedom.

Yuen-nan means "south of the cloud" and every morning the peaks about us
are shrouded in fog. Sometimes the veil-like mists still float about
the mountain tops when we climb into them, and we are suddenly
enveloped in a wet gray blanket which sends us shivering into the coats
tied to our saddles.

For centuries this road has been one of the main trade arteries through the
province, and with the total lack of conservation ideas so characteristic
of the Chinese, every available bit of natural forest has been cut away. As
a result the mountains are desert wastes of sandstone alternating with
grass-covered hills sometimes clothed with groves of pines or spruces.
These trees have all been planted, and ere they have reached a height of
fifteen or twenty feet will yield to the insistent demand for wood which is
ever present with the Chinese.

The ignorance of the need of forest conservation is an illuminating
commentary on Chinese education. Mr. William Hanna, a missionary of Ta-li
Fu, told us that one day he was riding over this same road with a Chinese
gentleman, a deep scholar, who was considered one of the best educated men
of the province. Pointing to the barren hills washed clean of soil and
deeply worn by countless floods, Mr. Hanna remarked that all this could
have been prevented, and that instead of a rocky waste there might have
been a fertile hillside, had the trees been left to grow.

The Chinese scholar listened in amazement to facts which every western
sch