. A ring around the cormorants' necks prevents
them swallowing their captives, and previous training teaches them to
balance themselves on the propelling pole that the watchful fisherman
inserts beneath them the moment they rise to the surface with a fish;
captive and captor are then lifted aboard the raft, the cormorant robbed
of his prey and hustled quickly off again to business. The sight of these
nimble craft, skimming along with scarcely an effort, almost fills me
with a resolve to obtain one of them myself and abandon Tung Po and his
dreary lack of speed forever.

The third day of our voyage against the prevailing typhoons and the rapid
current of the Pi-kiang, comes to an end, and finds us again anchored
within the dark shadow of a towering cliff. Anchored alongside us is a
big junk freighted with bags of rice and bales of paper; the hands aboard
this boat indulge in a lively quarrel, during the evening chow-chow, and
bang one another about in the liveliest manner. The peculiar indignation
that finds expression in abusive language no doubt reaches its highest
state of perfection in the Celestial mind. No other human being is
capable of soaring to the height of the Chinaman's falsetto modulations,
as he heaps reproaches and cuss-words on his enemy's queue-adorned head.
A big boat's crew of naked Chinamen cursing and gesticulating excitedly,
advancing and retreating, chasing one another about with billets of wood,
knocking things over, and raising Cain generally, in the ghostly glimmer
of fantastic paper lanterns, is a spectacle both weird and wild.

Another weird, but this time noiseless, affair is a long string of
nocturnal cormorant fishers, each with a big, flaming torch attached to
the prow of his raft, propelling themselves along close under the dark
frowning cliff. The torches light up the black face of the precipice with
a wild glare, and streak the shimmering water with moon-like reflections.

The country through which our watery, serpentine course winds all next
day, is hilly rather than mountainous; grassy hills slope down to the
water's blue ripples at certain places, but the absence of grazing
animals is quite remarkable. Regions, which in other countries would be
covered with flocks of sheep and herds of cows and horses, are without so
much as a sign of herbivorous animals. Pigs are the prevailing
meat-producing animals of Southern China; all the way up country I have
not yet seen a single sheep, and