The country is changing as the railway runs south of the fortieth degree, so as to skirt the eastern base of the Nan Shan mountains.  The desert gradually disappears, villages are not so few, the density of the population increases.  Instead of sandy flats, we get verdant plains, and even rice fields, for the neighboring mountains spread their abundant streams over these high regions of the Celestial Empire.  We do not complain of this change after the dreariness of the Kara-Koum and the solitude of Gobi.  Since we left the Caspian, deserts have succeeded deserts, except when crossing the Pamir.  From here to Pekin picturesque sites, mountain horizons, and deep valleys will not be wanting along the Grand Transasiatic.

We shall enter China, the real China, that of folding screens and porcelain, in the territory of the vast province of Kin-Sou.  In three days we shall be at the end of our journey, and it is not I, a mere special correspondent, vowed to perpetual movement, who will complain of its length.  Good for Kinko, shut up in his box, and for pretty Zinca Klork, devoured by anxiety in her house in the Avenue Cha-Coua!

We halt two hours at Sou-Tcheou.  The first thing I do is to run to the telegraph office.  The complaisant Pan-Chao offers to be my interpreter.  The clerk tells us that the posts are all up again, and that messages can be sent through to Europe.

At once I favor the Twentieth Century with the following telegram: 

“Sou-Tcheou, 25th May, 2:25 P.M.

“Train attacked between Tchertchen and Tcharkalyk by the gang of the celebrated Ki-Tsang; travelers repulsed the attack and saved the Chinese treasure; dead and wounded on both sides; chief killed by the heroic Mongol grandee Faruskiar, general manager of the company, whose name should be the object of universal admiration.”

If this telegram does not gratify the editor of my newspaper, well—­

Two hours to visit Sou-Tcheou, that is not much.

In Turkestan we have seen two towns side by side, an ancient one and a modern one.  Here, in China, as Pan-Chao points out, we have two and even three or four, as at Pekin, enclosed one within the other.

Here Tai-Tchen is the outer town, and Le-Tchen the inner one.  It strikes us at first glance that both look desolate.  Everywhere are traces of fire, here and there pagodas or houses half destroyed, a mass of ruins, not the work of time, but the work of war.  This shows that Sou-Tcheou, taken by the Mussulmans and retaken by the Chinese, has undergone the horrors of those barbarous contests which end in the destruction of buildings and the massacre of their inhabitants of every age and sex.

It is true that population rapidly increases in the Celestial Empire; more rapidly than monuments are raised from their ruins.  And so Sou-Tcheou has become populous again within its double wall as in the suburbs around.  Trade is flourishing, and as we walked through the principal streets we noticed the well-stocked shops, to say nothing of the perambulating pedlars.