camels, for every step was upon sharp, rugged rock; and their feet,
accordingly, were very speedily bleeding. We ourselves, however, were
too absorbed with the strange, fantastic aspect of the mountains we were
traversing to think of the toil they occasioned us.

In the hollows and chasms of the precipices formed by these lofty
mountains, you see nothing but great heaps of mica and laminated stones,
broken, bruised, and in some cases absolutely pulverised. This wreck of
slate and schist must have been brought into these abysses by some
deluge, for it in no way belongs to the mountains themselves, which are
of granite. As you approach the summits, the mountains assume forms more
and more fantastic. You see great heaps of rock piled one upon the
other, and apparently cemented together. These rocks are almost entirely
encrusted with shells and the remains of a plant resembling sea weed; but
that which is most remarkable is that these granitic masses are cut and
torn and worn in every direction, presenting a ramification of holes and
cavities, meandering in a thousand complicated turns and twists, so that
you might imagine all the upper portion of each mountain to have been
subjected to the slow and destructive action of immense worms. Sometimes
in the granite you find deep impressions, that seem the moulds of
monsters, whose forms they still closely retain.

As we gazed upon all these phenomena, it seemed to us that we were
travelling in the bed of some exhausted ocean. Everything tended to the
belief that these mountains had undergone the gradual action of the sea.
It is impossible to attribute all you see there to the influence of mere
rain, or still less to the inundations of the Yellow River, which,
however prodigious they may be, can never have attained so great an
elevation. The geologists who affirm that the deluge took place by
sinking, and not by a depolarization of the earth, might probably find in
these mountains good arguments in favour of their system.

On reaching the crest of these mountains we saw beneath us the Yellow
River, rolling its waves majestically from south to north. It was now
near noon, and we hoped that same evening to pass the river, and sleep in
one of the inns of the little town of Che-Tsui-Dze, which we perceived on
the slope of a hill beyond the river.

We occupied the whole afternoon in descending the rugged mountain,
selecting as we went, the places right and left that seeme