We made our way to my first monastery, so conspicuous an object to every visitor to these regions, planted on a rocky spur of about fifteen hundred feet high, that not only overhangs precipitously the country beneath, but is separated by a chasm of some one thousand feet from the adjoining hills. Crossing this chasm on a rock bridge about three feet wide, and, as usual in China, railless, required more nerve than one of our party possessed, and the subsequent climb was more trying still up the steps cut out of the steep rock on to the Buddhist temple, that appropriately crowns the whole summit, and which, were it in any more accessible region, would have been "photographed like this and photographed like that," like any professional beauty. As it was, I had never seen a picture of it, and was quite eager to take my camera to photograph the mountain-top, as also the massive wall of conglomerate rock that builds up the _col_ one has to climb in ascending, and from which one obtains one of those extraordinary desolate views characteristic of conglomerate country--a valley ending in an abrupt gully with dry waterbed, and dry waterfalls down precipices marked with pudding-holes, all scoring parallel horizontal lines across their stern surfaces. We came across brecciated conglomerate in which there were some bits of most exquisite glistening marble, and in which we again noticed the peculiarity, that at every fracture it was the marble and stones, of which it was formed, that were cleft through the middle, as evidently more breakable than the apparently soft-looking red cement that bound them together.
The way up was beautiful. We passed by picturesque farmsteads nestling in hollows, elegant shrines, and the grove the Reeves' pheasants particularly love. It is of pendulous cypress, called _funebris_, but suggesting anything but funereal associations by its pleasing grace. Palm-trees grew on the hillside, also bamboo, cunninghamia, ilex, and beautiful soap-trees, with the great long pods from which the soap is made, and tree-like thorns projecting from their stems, such as must effectually baffle any monkey-climbers. In four examples we saw these thorn branches had again other thorns projecting from them. The path is an easy one, carefully laid out by the priests for the convenience of pilgrims; and although there must be over five hundred steps, they do not come all together; so that few climbs of equal height can be so easily managed as that to the monastery of Yuen Ti Kuan, whose site, if paralleled, could hardly be surpassed. It is like that of some wild eyrie on which an eagle might be expected to build its nest, but where we should hardly expect practical, prosaic (so called) Chinamen to build a place of worship, simply to give themselves the further additional trouble of climbing so high. It seems that after all the Chinese have a religion of their own, which they deem holy, though it is often convenient to ignore this. There are many Shansi men in these parts, and one of our fellow-travellers, a man from Shansi, being asked why this was, when his province used formerly to be the granary of the empire, replied at once, "The hearts of the people have become corrupted."
