174 Over the Riin-tsi-la ; 
to his house. It was delightfully warm now after the fierce 
cold on the passes, and so pure was the air that the Milky 
Way looked like a silver band stretched across the sky. 
Mo-ting, with a population of forty or fifty families and 
a tiny lamasery of no consequence, is built on one of the 
wedge-shaped spurs blocked out by the mountain torrents 
and cut deeply into below, so that it presents a compara- 
tively gentle slope from the mountains to the apex of the 
wedge, and steep precipices on either side. It is a thousand 
feet or more above the Yang-tze which is a mile distant, the 
aneroid reading 21°45 in. at my house and 23°07 in. in the 
river bed, a difference of 1°62 in. 
The river is narrower than at Batang, resembling in 
some respects the Salween or Mekong in the arid regions, 
so that some of the differences pointed out in Chapter X 
do not apply here. It flows between tremendously high 
and steep cliffs which are scarred and torn as though by 
furious rains or sudden torrents, and is quite unnavigable. 
Caravans travelling north-east to Litang or Tatsien-lu no 
doubt cross lower down, but even then probably by ferry, 
as at Pang-tsi-la, and not by a rope bridge. 
The Mo-ting slope is terraced, the terraces being irri- 
gated by means of a mountain torrent diverted into side- 
channels. Quantities of hemp are grown, this plant 
apparently doing very well on the granite, and growing to 
a height of ten feet; there are also crops of millet, wheat, 
barley, and buckwheat, while walnut trees, pomegranates, 
oranges, and a peculiar little persimmon make these villages 
in the arid regions conspicuous from afar. The prickly 
pear was grown in places. 
In the afternoon we started for Yie-rii-gong, a village 
about ten miles up the Yang-tze, by a path which kept 
between one and two thousand feet above the river, but so 
straight-sided was the gorge, that though we could not hear 
we could generally see it. On the other side the villages 
perched far up above the river were occasionally visible, 
but there was no room for any habitation below, and the 
valley is very sparsely populated. 
As darkness came on the road became worse and 
worse; here we ascended by roughly-laid zigzag steps 
beneath the shadow of overhanging cliffs whose summits 
