the
drove.

But it would have been well worth while to make the trip if we had
gotten nothing else but the view of and from the Great Wall at the end
of the journey. About two thousand miles of stone and brick,
twenty-seven feet high, and wide enough on top for two carriages to
drive abreast, this great structure, begun two thousand years ago to
keep the wild barbarian Northern tribes out of China, is truly "the
largest building on earth," and one of the world's greatest wonders.
It would be amazing if it wound only over plains and lowlands, but
where we saw it this morning it climbed one mountain height after
another until the topmost point towered far above us, dizzy,
stupendous, magnificent. By what means the thousands and thousands of
tons of rock and brick were ever carried up the sheer steep
mountainsides is a question that must excite every traveller's wonder.
Certainly no one who has walked on top of the great wall, climbing
among the clouds from one {121} misty eminence to another, as we did
to-day, can ever forget the experience.

Perhaps it was well enough, too, that the weather was not clear. The
mists that hung about the mountain-peaks below and around us; the
roaring wind that shepherded the clouds, now driving them swiftly
before it and leaving in clear view for a minute peak after peak and
valley after valley, the next minute brushing great fog-masses over
wall and landscape and concealing all from view--all this lent an
element of mystery and majesty to the experience not out of keeping
with our thought of the long centuries through which this strange
guard has kept watch around earth's oldest empire. Dead, long dead and
crumbled into dust, even when our Christian era began, were the hands
that fashioned these earlier brick and laid them in the mortar, and
for many generations thereafter watchmen armed with bows and arrows
rode along the battlements and towers, straining their eyes for sight
of whatever enemy might be bold enough to try to cross the mighty
barrier.

However unwise the spirit in which the wall was built, we cannot but
admire the almost matchless daring of the conception and the almost
unparalleled industry of the execution. Beside it the digging of our
Panama Canal with modern machinery, engines, steam power and
electricity, considered simply as a feat of Herculean labor, is no
longer a subject for boasting. To my mind, the very fact that the
Chinese people had the courage to conce