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57

Monday, 10 August

Wuhu was really a pitiful sight.  In and around the city were low hills, practically all occupied by missions, and there was no mistaking the ugly domineering buildings erected by the foreigners.  A red brick school house such as used to grace certain towns at home stood on a hill slope. Such buildings in the midst of well-treed yard, in a town of two-storey houses is not so bad. Four-storeys high on a treeless slope above a one-storeyed Chinese town it is pretty bad.  In the evening twilight the town looked discouraged.  The brightest thing on the bund was the custom house, and we have been told that the charges exacted in this very house have sent the farmers to other ports for the shipping of their rice.  A tragic city.

Anking, this noon, was more cheerful.  Here was a high pagoda in excellent repair, and from the city rose the towers of a Christian church.  In Wuhu the Catholic church at once nestled into and rose from the town in the fashion so familiar to one who has traveled in northern France.  We did not even stop in Anking, but slowed up enough for our passengers to disembark into a sampan.

Late in the afternoon we passed more junks and a pagoda or two, and watched for hours the shifting light on blue hills.  Playing clouds made melodies of light upon the mountains; now throwing the foreground into dark shadow so that gleams of distant sunlight made far-away hills look like green lawns in paradise, now lighting the near approach and flinging shadow and mist over the distant ranges.  Evening lights of gray and blue and shite made rare pictures on the cliffs we passed at twilight.

Tuesday, 11 August

The Ningshao we had waited for in Naking passed us on the way and was anchored at our hulk in Kiukiang.  We were up at dawn but the Fu Lung couldnot get in.  We had an early breakfast, then took a sampan from the boat, which lay way down the river off the crippled-walled Chinese town, up along theshore, thorugh the crowds of anchored junks,