Viewing page 332 of 469

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

[[underlined]] Chapter XIV. [[/underlined]]   299.

his naǐve discourse and his extremely limited, parochial outlook. He began by asking, doubtfully, whether I was a Chinese. He then admitted, in response to our questioning, that he had never heard of a country called Chung Kuo (China); of its capital city, Peking; or of such a personage as a Chinese emperor or president; and much less, of any foreign lands---of which, indeed, he seemed unable to form any concept. He told us however that he had [[strikethrough]] probably [[/strikethrough]] traveled farther, probably, than most of his fellow-villagers; for he had once gone as far as Ta T'ung---twenty miles away. Yet he was by no means lacking in native intelligence, within the sphere of his own narrow experience.
     We found the summit of the plateau a lofty, treeless, and fairly level expanse, situated between the two confluent streams, the Yü Ho and the Chên-ch'uan Ho (see map, Fig. 53). [[superscript]] (268) [[/superscript]] Roughly it was from 300 to 500 yards
-----------------------
[[superscript]] (268) [[/superscript]] Incidental notices in the old records indicate that anciently all the hill-country of northern China, at least between the great northern bend of the Yellow River and the Gulf of Chihli, was covered with mixed forest---both deciduous trees and conifers---which must have required a considerable depth of soil. Now, of course (as nearly every traveler has remarked), all the heights are rocky and bare, even the very grassroots being grubbed up, for use as fuel during the bitterly cold winters. Most of the soil has in consequence been washed down to lower levels, there (only too often) to be deeply overlaid with scree---a covering of pebbles and boulders---and thus be lost forever.
------------------------
wide, east by west; while from north to south the distance was several times greater. At its northern end it terminated in broken country, of deep gullies and ravines, along whose brink ran the Great Wall of China (pl. 42, fig. 2). This was here nothing more than a much worn rampart of [[underlined]] terre pisée [[/underlined]], on which, at intervals, stood badly eroded watch-towers, likewise of rammed earth; on one of them have been erected, apparently at some fairly recent date, a shrine of gray brick, dedicated, our young informant told us, to the [[underlined]] genius loci [[/underlined]] of the region.
     The level space was much cut up by walls of dry rubble, with here and there semicircular windbreaks of rough stones, piled up by shep-