end Nathaniel Morse, who had
joined the train at Kachgar.

"It is never comfortable to be dragging a powder magazine after one!"

Nothing could be truer, and this van with its imperial treasure was a
powder magazine that might blow up our train.

The first railway was opened in China about 1877 and ran from Shanghai
to Fou-Tcheou. The Grand Transasiatic followed very closely the Russian
road proposed in 1874 by Tachkend, Kouldja, Kami, Lan Tcheou, Singan
and Shanghai. This railway did not run through the populous central
provinces which can be compared to vast and humming hives of bees--and
extaordinarily prolific bees. As before curving off to Lan Tcheou; it
reaches the great cities by the branches it gives out to the south and
southeast. Among others, one of these branches, that from Tai Youan to
Nanking, should have put these two towns of the Chan-Si and Chen-Toong
provinces into communication. But at present the branch is not ready
for opening, owing to an important viaduct not having finished building.

The completed portion gives me direct communication across Central
Asia. That is the main line of the Transasiatic. The engineers did not
find it so difficult of construction as General Annenkof did the
Transcaspian. The deserts of Kara Koum and Gobi are very much alike;
the same dead level, the same absence of elevations and depressions,
the same suitability for the iron road. If the engineers had had to
attack the enormous chain of the Kuen Lun, Nan Chan, Amie, Gangar Oola,
which forms the frontier of Tibet, the obstacles would have been such
that it would have taken a century to surmount them. But on a flat,
sandy plain the railway could be rapidly pushed on up to Lan Tcheou,
like a long Decauville of three thousand kilometres.

It is only in the vicinity of this city that the art of the engineer
has had a serious struggle with nature in the costly and troublesome
road through the provinces of Kan-Sou, Chan-Si and Petchili.

As we go along I must mention a few of the principal stations at which
the train stops to take in coal and water. On the right-hand side the
eye never tires of the distant horizon of mountains which bounds the
tableland of Tibet to the north. On the left the view is over the
interminable steppes of the Gobi. The combination of these territories
constitutes the Chinese Empire if not China proper, and we shall only
reach that when we are in the neighborhood of Lan Tcheou.

It would seem,