198 Through the Land of the Cross-bow 
loads, smiling and cheerful, with a word for the men and 
bright eyes for me. Charcoal from the little forest settle- 
ments and earthenware pots were the chief commodities. 
Right away up the valley to T‘o-che, the last Moso village, 
where we stopped for lunch, rice-fields terraced the gentle 
slopes, so that here rice is cultivated well above 8000 feet, 
a somewhat unusual altitude. It was good to see the 
unwieldy buffalos floundering through the liquid mud again. 
At T‘o-che we added a Pé-tzu interpreter to our party, 
it being his duty to find us quarters at the next village, 
which was inhabited by Pé-tzu and Lissu families, amongst 
whom he was well-known. Had our official-looking party 
arrived unceremoniously without such a mediator to plead for 
us, the villagers might have received us with mixed feelings. 
As a matter of fact, however, we found that most of these 
people spoke a mangled form of Yunnanese, though even 
my men sometimes found a difficulty in understanding the 
more outrageous localisms. 
After a brief halt at T‘o-che we turned due south, still 
following up the Wei-hsi stream, the valley narrowing 
considerably. Thickly forested sugar-loaf hills rose on 
either hand, but as evening drew in we emerged once more 
into open rolling country and here amongst widely separated 
patches of cultivation were scattered some twenty wooden 
huts. 
The good people of Ching-k‘ou-t‘ou also belonged to 
the Pé-tzu and Lissu tribes, though they had for the most 
part adopted Chinese dress ; their huts, however, in one of 
which I was made welcome for the night, resembled those 
common amongst the tribesmen. Maize was the staple 
crop, and the scattered nature of the village was obviously 
occasioned by the difficulties of cultivation amongst these 
undulating hills, rather than by any system of land tenure. 
Each family establishes its home on the virgin soil where 
there is a reasonable chance of successfully clearing the 
forest and cultivating the hill side. 
After a sharp frost which covered grass and trees with 
glistening rime—for the altitude was over 9000 feet—we 
started off just as the sun appeared over the tops of the hills, 
and crossing the low watershed, descended through wooded 
hills to the little village of Ssii-shi-to, which, though 
