Wednesday, Dec. 23, our last day in China, found us up bright and early, and so impatient that we set out afoot in advance of our carriers. Up and down over the stone-heaped path, passing numerous Chinese forts, and over three ranges of mountains, we walked, climbed and stumbled until we sighted a more civilized land--Burmah. Pausing only to assure our gladdened hearts that our eyes did not deceive us, we plunged down a precipitous path, crossed a swaying suspension bridge of bamboo, and, with a loud hurrah, landed on Burmese soil. Mrs. McIlrath's first action on the new territory was to flop down in the sand and cry; mine to crack the neck from a small bottle, and, with a prayer of thanksgiving, a toast to the United States, Queen Victoria, the Inter Ocean, and the good wheels we rode, we drank the bottle's fizzing contents, and yelled like a pair of cowboys.
At the water's edge were squatted a few of Great Britain's defenders--the black Sepoys of India. We toiled up the hill to the stockade above, and as we approached, an individual, who introduced himself as Gordon, opened the barrier gates and invited us to come inside. Our advent was expected, and other formalities of introduction were unnecessary. We remained the guests of Gordon over night, as our coolies, with the bicycles, did not arrive until after sundown.
As I looked back over the last eleven months, my recollections become almost kaleidoscopic in their variations. For eleven months we were the guests of the Mongolians, having them for companions both day and night; we had adopted their customs, ate, slept and journeyed with them for weeks isolated from a white face, and we felt on our arrival in Nampong that we were competent to judge as very few others the true character of the long-queued Orientals. Our trip from Shanghai had involved 4,200 miles of walking, riding and climbing. We had been pursued by howling mobs; we had slept in swamps and rice fields; we had been fired upon, cut at with knives, lunged at by spears, and stoned innumerable times; often running a gauntlet of maddened natives, with clods and stones falling about us like hail. Coolies of the lowest and officials of the highest type had sheltered and entertained us; pleasures and pain had been our lot; from a palace as honored guests we had been altered in forty-eight hours to besieged beings, expecting to fight for our lives; lost in snowstorms, wading in streams, creeping around landslides, our journey has been fraught with many dangers; death in the garb of pestilent disease had brushed shoulders, feasted at the same table and slept in the same apartment with us; we had been ragged and hungry, yet now, on Burmese soil, not a word of regret could be expressed for all the hardships we had suffered. For myself, there is due little credit. I simply accomplished that which I understood must be done when we entered China, but to the heroic little woman who pleaded to be allowed to share my hardships, is all credit due. Never did she falter when the mobs gathered around us, and when the last possible recourse permitting escape from death and torture seemed exhausted, she was firm and quiet.
