I ate my food, slept as much as I could in the few hours before the appearing of the earliest dawn on the bench allotted to me, feeling thankful that to me had been allowed even this scanty lodging.  But I could not conscientiously recommend the place to future travelers—­a dirty little village with its dirty people and its dirty atmosphere.  At the top of the pass the wind nearly removed my ears as I took a final glance at the mountain refuge.  Mountains here run south-west and north-east, and are grand to look upon.

The poorest people were lepers, the beggars were all dead long ago.  In Yuen-nan province leprosy afflicts thousands, a disease which the Chinese, not without reason, dread terribly, for no known remedy exists.  Burning the patient alive, which used often to be resorted to, is even now looked upon as the only true remedy.  Cases have been known where the patient, having been stupefied with opium, has been locked in a house, which has then been set on fire, and its inmate cremated on the spot.

Mining used to be carried on here, so they told me; but I was not long in concluding that, whatever was the product, it has not materially affected the world’s output, nor had it greatly enriched the laborers in the field.  When I got into civilization I found that coal of a sulphurous nature was the booty of ancient days.  There may be coal yet, as is most probable, but the natives seemed far too apathetic and weary of life to care whether it is there or not.

Passing Ta-shui-tsing, the descent narrows to a splendid view of dark mountain and green and beautiful valley.  We were now traveling away from several ranges of lofty mountains, whose peaks appeared vividly above the drooping rain-filled clouds, onwards to a range immediately opposite, up whose slopes we toiled all day, passing en route only one uninhabited hamlet, to which the people flee in time of trouble.  After a weary tramp of another twenty-five li—­the Yuen-nan li, mind you, the most unreliable quantity in all matters geographical in the country—­I asked irritatedly, as all travelers must have asked before me, “Then, in the name of Heaven, where is Kiang-ti?"[W] It should come into view behind the terrible steep decline when one is within only about a hundred yards.  It is roughly four thousand feet below Ta-shui-tsing.

Kiang-ti is an important stopping place, with but one forlorn street, with two or three forlorn inns, the best of which has its best room immediately over the filthiest stables, emitting a stench which was almost unbearable, that I have seen in China.  It literally suffocates one as it comes up in wafts through the wide gaps in the wood floor of the room.  There are no mosquitoes here, but of a certain winged insect of various species, whose distinguishing characteristics are that the wings are transparent and have no cases or covers, there was a formidable army.  I refer to the common little fly.  There was the house fly, the horse fly, the dangerous blue-bottle, the impecunious blow fly, the indefatigable buzzer, and others.  One’s delicate skin got beset with flies:  they got in one’s ears, in one’s eyes, up one’s nose, down one’s throat, in one’s coffee, in one’s bed; they bade fair to devour one within an hour or two, and brought forth inward curses and many swishes of the ’kerchief.