time. But, during the weary night
watches, in a bed long since soaked through, and one's safest
nightclothes now the stolid Burberry, with face protected by a
twelve-cent umbrella, even one's curry and rice saturated to sap with
the constant drip, and everything around one rendered cold and
uncomfortable enough through a perforation in its slenderest part of the
worn-out bamboo matting--ah, it was then, _then_ that one would have
foregone with alacrity the dreams of the nomadic life of the _wu-pan_.

Our introduction, therefore, to the great Gorges of the Upper
Yangtze--to China what the Niagara Falls are to America--was not
remarkable for its placidity, albeit taken with as much complacency as
the occasion allowed.

I do not, however, intend to weary or to entertain the reader, as may
be, by a long description of the Yangtze gorges. Time and time again
have they fallen to the imaginative pens of travelers--mostly bad or
indifferent descriptions, few good; none better, perhaps, than Mrs.
Bishop's. But at best they are imaginative--they lack reality. It has
been said that the world of imagination is the world of eternity, and as
of eternity, so of the Gorges--they cannot be adequately described. As I
write now in the Ichang Gorge, I seem veritably to have reached
eternity. I seem to have arrived at the bosom of an after-life, where
one's body has ceased to vegetate, and where, in an infinite and eternal
world of imagination, one's soul expands with fullest freedom. There
seems to exist in this eternal world of unending rock and invulnerable
precipice permanent realities which stand from eternity to eternity. As
the oak dies and leaves its eternal image in the seed which never dies,
so these grand river-forced ravines, abused and disabused as may be, go
on for ever, despite the scribblers, and one finds the best in his
imagination returning by some back-lane to contemplative thought. But as
a casual traveler, may I say that the first experience I had of the
gorges made me modest, patient, single-minded, conscious of man's
significant insignificance, conscious of the unspeakable, wondrous
grandeur of this unvisited corner of the world--a spot in which
blustering, selfish, self-conceited persons will not fare well? Humility
and patience are the first requisites in traveling on the Upper Yangtze.

Reader, for your sake I refrain from a description. But may I, for
perhaps your sake too, if you would wander hither ere the c