or the trip down the river. I might take
passage on the wonderful new steamer plying with some regularity between
the city and Ichang; but that went too fast for my liking, besides
giving me no chance to go ashore. Or I might engage a houseboat; but at
this season of the year the charges were high, as it might be weeks
before the return trip could be made, and one hundred taels was the best
rate offered. So in spite of the fact that "nobody travelled that way,"
or perhaps because of it, I, being a nobody, decided to try the humble
wu-pan again, and through the efforts of one of the Christian helpers in
the Friends' Mission I secured a very comfortable boat to take me and my
reduced following to Ichang for twenty-five dollars Mexican. The boat
was all that could be desired, and the captain, or "lao-pan," proved
skilful and obliging, but unfortunately he was not, as is usually the
case, the owner of the boat, and still more unfortunately, one of the
owners, a rather old man, was serving with the crew. Nothing happened,
but I had at times an uncomfortable feeling that nobody was in authority
over any one.

I started down the river at noon on a fine day at the end of June, and a
little over forty-eight hours brought us to Kwei-fu at the head of the
gorges. For the most part it was a country of soft undulating slopes and
comfortable farmhouses, with here and there a little hamlet or a
bustling town, framed the last part of the way by strange-looking
pyramidal hills. On we went, hurried along by the strong current,
stopping for an hour's marketing at Foo-chou at the mouth of the
Kung-tan Ho, navigable for one hundred and fifty miles by boats of
strange shape known as the "Crooked Sterns," and again at Wan-hsien,
famous for its cypress-wood junks, then on past the City of the Cloudy
Sun, attractive with broad streets and lovely temples, past the Mountain
of the Emperor of Heaven, where for a few cash you may have a pass
direct to Paradise, past Precious Stone Castle, a curious rock three
hundred feet high standing out boldly from the shore and surmounted by a
temple which contains gruesome paintings of the horrors of hell, through
the Goddess of Mercy Rapid and the Glorious Dragon Rapid, and several
smaller ones that I did not even know were rapids, for with the high
water these tend to disappear, while wicked-looking bays of swirling
water showed the peculiar danger of the summer, the great whirlpools.
The nights were very ho