40 Up the Mekong Valley 
hard that I had great difficulty in cutting through it to 
open up and wash out the wound. After putting on a 
little iodoform, I bandaged it and next morning sent the 
man home, for indeed he could scarcely walk. The sequel 
to this, the first appearance of my medicine chest, was that 
all the muleteers discovered that there was something 
wrong with them—not because they wanted to go back, 
but because they wanted to sample my tabloids. Even 
Ho-shing joined in the popular demonstration, first asking 
me to cure his friend (procured from the village at short 
notice) of asthma, and then informing me dejectedly that he 
himself suffered from running at the nose. This last was 
a disorder that nonplussed me, so to uphold my fledgling 
reputation I laughed it off and told him to go away. 
Passing through several fine gorges lined with tall 
juniper trees we arrived opposite Tsu-kou about five 
o'clock in the evening of the fourth day and continued 
a mile up the river bank to the next rope bridge, just 
below the larger village of Tsu-chung, also across the 
river, and now we had our first experience of the single- 
way rope bridge. 
The rope bridge is not properly a bridge at all, though 
it is a rope, made of twisted bamboo strands, its diameter 
being barely three-quarters of an inch, so that a single 
rope, perhaps fifty yards in length, weighs only about twenty 
pounds. Like many other things which are ingenious, the 
principle of the rope bridge—for such I must continue to 
call it—is delightfully simple. The rope is twisted several 
times round an upright wooden post fixed high up on one 
side of the river bank, a small platform being cut out to 
serve as a landing stage, and stretches across the river to 
another post fixed lower down on the other bank, where 
there is also a landing platform. Thus it slopes steeply 
from one bank to the other, though the slope is as a matter 
of fact nothing like so steep as it appears, the difference 
of level between the two posts probably never exceeding 
twenty feet, while the river may be thirty yards across. 
On the top of the rope runs a slider, which consists of 
rather more than a half-cylinder of tough wood nine inches 
to a foot long, and between one and two inches in diameter, 
polished smooth inside and well greased before use. Slots 
