At Lung-tung I noticed a marked difference in the features of the people, especially the women. The faces were sharper and more pointed than the ordinary Chinese type, while the foreheads were exceedingly prominent. There was an undoubted mixture of foreign, probably Sifan, blood. It is a peculiarity of all these non-Chinese races that the women are the last to abandon their national dress, and they cling with tenacity to profuse decoration. The women of Lung-tung backed up their facial distinction with a lavish display of silver ornaments.
For some distance south of the hamlet there was no attempt at cultivation in the stony wilderness; but gradually we found signs of stones having been collected, patches of land dyked, and rivulets diverted for irrigation purposes. Watercress was growing wild in the limpid water. Trees, although not very numerous, were not wanting; the mulberry, orange, red-date, and pear were to be seen. The orange was a tall tree, bearing a small round fruit with a thick wrinkled skin, which reminded me forcibly of a miniature “Buddha’s Hand”--_Citrus sacrodactylus_. Cotton in small quantities was also growing in this valley. Many of the houses were roofed with thin boards weighted with stones, instead of the usual Chinese tiles, and the graves were covered with mounds of rounded stones carefully whitewashed.
The garrison town of Fu-lin, whence a bridle-path leads over the mountains to Ta-chien-lu, lies at no great distance from the left bank of the Ta-tu River, the southern boundary of the valley. In the immediate neighbourhood of the town were a few cultivated patches; but agriculture, to judge from the precautions taken against inundation from the waters of the Liu-sha, which was hurrying down the valley to join the Ta-tu, would appear to be carried on under difficulties. A line of white shingle, running east and west, backed by rising ground, was the only visible indication of the presence of a watercourse, and it was only on reaching the miserable village of Wa-wa, built on a sandbank held together by bushes of luxuriant cactus, that we were able to espy the green waters of the Ta-tu rushing violently eastward in its pebbly bed, to be quickly lost in a gap in the mountains to the south-east. Several forks, into which the river is divided, unite to the west of Wa-wa.