96 TOWARDS THE BORDER 



cultivated from top to bottom are a commoner 

 sight. Humanity swarms omnipresent, paying but 

 little heed to its inevitable end. To really enjoy 

 China one must possess "a suffocating passion of 

 philanthropy," and although the proper study of 

 mankind is man, the philanthropist there gets 

 such a surfeit of his passion that he has to travel 

 far to study anything else. 



For the whole distance between Feng-siang and 

 Choni, a small town on the Thibetan border from 

 which we intended to make our next hunting trip, 

 is densely populated, though nothing compared to 

 some of the Southern provinces. 



At first the country was not very interesting. 

 We passed for hours through the same monotonous 

 fields of maize and millet, the latter here used 

 almost entirely to make wine. Up the valley of 

 the Wei River, shut in on each side by ridged and 

 terraced hills, the natives chattered like daws from 

 their hollowed cave dwellings above the road. 

 Later, fields of buckwheat, splashes of rose du 

 barri, relieved the monotony of their drab sur- 

 roundings. 



The Wei River is the greatest affluent of the 

 Hwang-ho, and the Wei basin the greatest agri- 

 cultural country of the west. "Northern Shensi 

 comprised in former time all the territory situated 

 between the north and south reach of the Hwang- 

 ho to the east, the Great Wall to the north, and a 

 line of high mountain ranges to the south-west." 

 When the province of Kansu was created, Shensi 

 was considerably diminished in size, though the 

 two provinces are under one viceroy, who resides 

 at Lanchow-fu. " All historical, political, strate- 



