rved line shows itself,
growing ever greater, opening like the arch of a gigantic bridge, and
binding this first group to a second, more complicated, each peak of
which has a form of its own, and does in some sort as it pleases without
troubling itself about its neighbor. The most remarkable point about
these mountains is the life they seem to possess. It is an incredible
confusion. Angles are thrown fantastically by some mad geometer, it
would seem. Splendid banyan trees shelter one after toiling up the
unending steps, and dotted over the landscape, indiscriminately in
magnificent picturesqueness, are pretty farmhouses nestling almost out
of sight in groves of sacred trees. Oftentimes perpendicular mountains
stand sheer up for three thousand feet or more, their sides to the very
summits ablaze with color coming from the smiling face of sunny Nature,
in spots at times where only a twelve-inch cultivation is possible.

A dome raises its head curiously over the leaning shoulder of a round
hill, and a pyramid reverses itself, as if to the music of some wild
orchestra, whose symphonies are heard in the mountain winds. Seen nearer
and in detail, these mountains are all in delicious keeping with all of
what the imagination in love with the fantastic, attracted by their more
distant forms, could dream. Valleys, gorges, somber gaps, walls cut
perpendicularly, rough or polished by water, cavities festooned with
hanging stalactites and notched like Gothic sculptures--all make up a
strange sight which cannot but excite admiration.

Every mile or so there are tea-houses, and for a couple of cash a coolie
can get a cup of tea, with leaves sufficient to make a dozen cups, and
as much boiling water as he wants. Szech'wan, the country, its people,
their ways and methods, and much information thereto appertaining, is
already in print. It were useless to give more of it here--and, reader,
you will thank me! But the thirst of Szech'wan--that thirst which is
unique in the whole of the Empire, and eclipsed nowhere on the face of
the earth, except perhaps on the Sahara--one does not hear about.

Many an Englishman would give much for the Chinese coolie's thirst--so
very, very much.

I wonder whether you, reader, were ever thirsty? Probably not. You get a
thirst which is not insatiable. Yours is born of nothing extraordinary;
yours can be satisfied by a gulp or two of water, or perhaps by a
drink--or perhaps two, or perhaps three--of somet