COUNTRY TRAVERSED 245 



seemed the fitting environment of all the strange 

 brownies and hobgoblins that the distorted fancy 

 of man had ever conjured, became on a sudden 

 the abode of fairies ; beyond their boundaries a 

 man might reach, if ever, that country of which 

 we all dream but which no map defines. A thin 

 streak of river shone argent in the light of the 

 young moon. It endowed the scene with life and 

 made it for the moment beautiful, as the face of 

 a plain woman surprised by some transfiguring 

 emotion. 



Through many mud-walled villages we passed. 

 Nearly all lay in ruins, showing in their now di- 

 lapidated towers and crumbling walls the evidence 

 of a vanished prosperity. Each was indistinguish- 

 able from its neighbour. They rose to meet us 

 out of the dusty plain, sank behind, and rose again a 

 few li ahead with the same walls, the same dogs, 

 the same pigs, the same dirty old men and children 

 collecting fuel in the road, and the same group 

 sitting, sheltered, in the sun busily engaged in 

 removing the superfluous population from its com- 

 ponent parts. Out of the wind and in the sun 

 it w^as possible to sit in comfort, minus even the 

 protection of an overcoat. Once outside in the open, 

 the biting wind chilled to the bone and froze the 

 breatli on one's moustache. 



Now and again we came upon the home of some 

 well-to-do country farmer, double-walled, pictur- 

 esque with its corner towers rising above a belt of 

 trees, and the cosmopolitan and cheery twitter of 

 sparrows beneath the eaves. At times the Great 

 Wall, shrunken to miserable dimensions, mourn- 

 fully meandered alongside the road. A few towers 



