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                                                        110.
[[underline]] Chapter VI. [[/underline]]

the magistrate in his mule-cart, we got off to an early start.  Our road traversed some deep loess ravines and crossed the Kan Ho, easily fordable at that season, [[strikethrough]] (pl. LIV) [[/strikethrough]]  It then led us for some miles over a plateau studded with innumerable grave-mounds of all sizes.  These, according to the magistrate, belonged for the most part to the T'ang period; one, the only example of its kind that we saw here, was of three stages (for type see [[strikethrough]] pl. LIII, [[/strikethrough]] fig. 21 no. 4).
     Shortly after midday we encountered rugged hill-country, at a point a little to the east of our goal, the sharp peak that we had seen yesterday and which the magistrate informed us was called the Chiu Tsung Shan 九峻山.  The road now began to wind upward between lofty terraced summits on whose higher slopes grazed flocks of sheep with a few black goats, watched by peasant boys.  On reaching the crest of the watershed a splendid view of the tumbled mountains to the northward met us; separating us from them was a great steep-sided trough through which flowed the Ching Ho in its deeply sunken bed (pl. [[strikethrough]] LV [[/strikethrough]] 20, fig. 2).  Behind us, to the south, lay spread out the tumulus-dotted plain of the Kan Ho across which we had ridden all the morning.
     The trail kept growing narrower, steeper, and more tortuous.  In places it skirted deep cultivated bays bordered by perpendicular cliffs of loess several tens or even hundreds of feet high.  At last it zigzagged over a ridge forming the eastern spur of the Chiu Tsung Shan.  A scramble of a couple of hundred yards farther, on foot---for by now we had been compelled to leave our horses---brought us out on a shelf in the northern face of the peak, with a fine panorama spread out before it and the Ching River in the foreground, flowing through its deep canyon far below.
     Here, on a space still fairly level although partly buried under accumulations of debris---stones and soil---washed down from the heights