permitted to cross the northern
frontier. Never was I permitted to put foot to a sampan on the sea. The
Peddlers' Guild carried these commands of Chong Mong-ju to every village
and every soul in all Cho-Sen. I was a marked man.

Lord, Lord, Cho-Sen, I know your every highway and mountain path, all
your walled cities and the least of your villages. For two-score years I
wandered and starved over you, and the Lady Om ever wandered and starved
with me. What we in extremity have eaten!--Leavings of dog's flesh,
putrid and unsaleable, flung to us by the mocking butchers; _minari_, a
water-cress gathered from stagnant pools of slime; spoiled _kimchi_ that
would revolt the stomachs of peasants and that could be smelled a mile.
Ay--I have stolen bones from curs, gleaned the public road for stray
grains of rice, robbed ponies of their steaming bean-soup on frosty
nights.

It is not strange that I did not die. I knew and was upheld by two
things: the first, the Lady Om by my side; the second, the certain faith
that the time would come when my thumbs and fingers would fast-lock in
the gullet of Chong Mong-ju.

Turned always away at the city gates of Keijo, where I sought Chong Mong-
ju, we wandered on, through seasons and decades of seasons, across Cho-
Sen, whose every inch of road was an old story to our sandals. Our
history and identity were wide-scattered as the land was wide. No person
breathed who did not know us and our punishment. There were coolies and
peddlers who shouted insults at the Lady Om and who felt the wrath of my
clutch in their topknots, the wrath of my knuckles in their faces. There
were old women in far mountain villages who looked on the beggar woman by
my side, the lost Lady Om, and sighed and shook their heads while their
eyes dimmed with tears. And there were young women whose faces warmed
with compassion as they gazed on the bulk of my shoulders, the blue of my
eyes, and my long yellow hair--I who had once been a prince of Koryu and
the ruler of provinces. And there were rabbles of children that tagged
at our heels, jeering and screeching, pelting us with filth of speech and
of the common road.

Beyond the Yalu, forty miles wide, was the strip of waste that
constituted the northern frontier and that ran from sea to sea. It was
not really waste land, but land that had been deliberately made waste in
carrying out Cho-Sen's policy of isolation. On this forty-mile strip all
farms, village