st visit. The ostensible object is to provide
amusement for our Russian companions, but as a matter of fact everyone
finds them interesting.

_Tuesday, August_ 29.--I find that the card of the sunshine recorder
showed an hour and a half's burn yesterday and was very faintly
marked on Saturday; already, therefore, the sun has given us warmth,
even if it can only be measured instrumentally.

Last night Meares told us of his adventures in and about Lolo land,
a wild Central Asian country nominally tributary to Lhassa. He had no
pictures and very makeshift maps, yet he held us really entranced for
nearly two hours by the sheer interest of his adventures. The spirit
of the wanderer is in Meares' blood: he has no happiness but in the
wild places of the earth. I have never met so extreme a type. Even
now he is looking forward to getting away by himself to Hut Point,
tired already of our scant measure of civilisation.

He has keen natural powers of observation for all practical facts and
a quite prodigious memory for such things, but a lack of scientific
training causes the acceptance of exaggerated appearances, which
so often present themselves to travellers when unfamiliar objects
are first seen. For instance, when the spoor of some unknown beast
is described as 6 inches across, one shrewdly guesses that a cold
scientific measurement would have reduced this figure by nearly a half;
so it is with mountains, cliffs, waterfalls, &c. With all deduction
on this account the lecture was extraordinarily interesting. Meares
lost his companion and leader, poor Brook, on the expedition which
he described to us. The party started up the Yangtse, travelling from
Shanghai to Hankow and thence to Ichang by steamer--then by house-boat
towed by coolies through wonderful gorges and one dangerous rapid to
Chunking and Chengtu. In those parts the travellers always took the
three principal rooms of the inn they patronised, the cost 150 cash,
something less than fourpence--oranges 20 a penny--the coolies with
100 lb. loads would cover 30 to 40 miles a day--salt is got in bores
sunk with bamboos to nearly a mile in depth; it takes two or three
generations to sink a bore. The lecturer described the Chinese frontier
town Quanchin, its people, its products, chiefly medicinal musk pods
from musk deer. Here also the wonderful ancient damming of the river,
and a temple to the constructor, who wrote, twenty centuries ago,
'dig out your ditches, but kee