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in other than flood times it occupies, with its swift brown stream, less than half of the bed left for it. A part of the river is dry now, except at flood times, and is crossed by a modern steel bridge, available for motor traffic, other traffic going down into the river bed and over, for half of the bridge lies in a tumbled mass of ruins in the sand. A sort of island divides the live stream from the dry bed, and the good half of the bridge from the half that is no more. How wouldit impress Marco now? He would probably see it as I have seen it many timesin the past, from the windows of the trains that pass on the new bridge a short distance up the stream. To us it was a source of a great thrill, worth the few extra miles involved in going this way.

Across the bridge we struck into the country crossing the plain toward the hills. By dark we were still far from our destination, Chieh T'ai Ssu, or Monastery of the Ordaining Terrace. We went on through the dark, and through little lantern-lighted villages. At length we struck up a broad dry river bed and were soon in the hills. The donkey men had a little too much todrink at one of the villages and they led us astray into the hills, so that we lost nearly an hour of time, Finally we found the right trail and wound up through a narow valley and finally along a paved road up the slope until we came out on a height to the temple. There was some parley about lettingus in, but they finally decided to do it, and in we went. We were given a small subsidiary temple court to ourselves, and there we ate our supper and then made our bed under the stars. It started to rain in thenight, but we pulled the beds up on the porch,and slept on until an old priest came in to put incense before the p'usa in our temple, There had been a service at two which we heard dimly through the rain and in ourdreams.

Sunday, 18 October

The day was dark and chilly, but after breakfast we felt like exploring the temple a little. The temple servant who had taken our coffee and boiled it and fried our eggs in the temple kitchen showed us around some, and we had a good tour. The temple is one of the oldest, largest, and richest