The valley narrowed at last and pushed us up over another high range, the third stiff climb of the trip, from the top of which labyrinthian views blue with haze but brilliant with sunshine spread to infinity in both directions. But the land had evidently been reclaimed earlier here, so that there were fewer and fewer pioneering conditions, which on the third day died out entirely. A miserable mountain inn offered me its principal room that evening, though it took up more than half the building reserved for travelers, a flock of evicted coolies picking up their soiled packs and crowding together somewhere else without the hint of a protest. I do not know how much they paid for lodging, but it could not have been any fortune, since the landlord was so eager to replace a dozen of them, with prospects of more to come, by a lone foreigner whose bill hardly amounted to twelve American cents. Woven cornstalk fences increased as the smell of newly cleared land diminished. Twenty-four hours of valley brought us to another steep _ling_, from the top of which rows of blue ranges faded away on the distant horizon behind. The population had been longer established here and was made up of born mountaineers, simple yet self-sufficient, like mountaineers the world over. Goiter was almost universal, and nearly every one was deeply pitted with smallpox, so that there was rarely a good-looking face of either sex. Round granaries made of wickerwork, of the height of a tall man, lined with mud plaster and thatched with straw, sat in every yard. All memories of the royal forest had disappeared by the third afternoon, and the familiar old China, stony, bare, blowing with dust or reeking with mud, again surrounded us, though ranges of jagged peaks kept us fairly close company.
Rain began to fall, putting terror into the heart of my “boy,” convinced like most Chinese, at least of the north, that he was merely a pillar of salt—or is it sugar? But the donkey-man was made of sterner stuff. A positive word was always enough to make him push on, and it was quite immaterial whether the “boy” followed or flung himself over a precipice. This time, however, the shower became a deluge that showed no signs of abating. All the region had fled for shelter. One wrinkled coolie had monopolized a little wayside shrine, in which he sat in the cramped posture of the Buddha, literally in the lap of the gods, serenely smoking his pipe until they chose to let him go on again. By the time we were soaked through it was evident that we also must take refuge, and give up the hope of cutting the record from Malanyü to Jehol down to three days.