these poor fellows slips; there is a shriek, his
body is dashed unmercifully against the jagged cliffs in its last
journey to the river, which carries the multilated corpse away. And yet
these men, engaged in this terrific toil, with utmost danger to their
lives, live almost exclusively on boiled rice and dirty cabbage, and
receive the merest pittance in money at the journey's end.

Some idea of the force of this enormous volume of water may be given by
mentioning the exploits of the steamer _Pioneer_, which on three
consecutive occasions attacked the Yeh T'an when at its worst, and,
though steaming a good fourteen knots, failed to ascend. She was obliged
to lay out a long steel-wire hawser, and heave herself over by means of
her windlass, the engines working at full speed at the same time. Hard
and heavy was the heave, gaining foot by foot, with a tension on the
hawser almost to breaking strain in a veritable battle against the
dragon of the river. Yet so complete are the changes which are wrought
by the great variation in the level of the river, that this formidable
mid-level rapid completely disappears at high level.

After we had left this rapid--and right glad were we to get away--we
came, after a couple of hours' run, to the Niu K'eo, or Buffalo Mouth
Reach, quiet enough during the low-water season, but a wild stretch
during high river, where many a junk is caught by the violently gyrating
swirls, rendered unmanageable, and dashed to atoms on some rocky
promontory or boulder pile in as short a space of time as it takes to
write it. It was here that the _Woodlark_, one of the magnificent
gunboats which patrol the river to safeguard the interests of the Union
Jack in this region, came to grief on her maiden trip to Chung-king. One
of these strong swirls caught the ship's stern, rendering her rudders
useless for the moment, and causing her to sheer broadside into the
foaming rapid. The engines were immediately reversed to full speed
astern; but the swift current, combined with the momentum of the ship,
carried her willy-nilly to the rock-bound shore, on which she crumpled
her bows as if they were made of tin. Fortunately she was built in
water-tight sections; her engineers removed the forward section,
straightened out the crumpled plates, riveted them together, and bolted
the section back into its place again so well, that on arrival at
Chung-king not a trace of the accident was visible.

* * *