200 Through the Land of the Cross-bow 
me in charge of their corporal, an excellent fellow who made 
himself both agreeable and useful ; my yamen-runner too 
did his work satisfactorily, so that the next three days 
passed pleasantly enough. Descending some two thousand 
feet through pine forests, by a path down which not even a 
Yunnan mule could have scrambled, we reached King-chou 
on a small river which here takes its name from this little 
village of ten or twelve Lama families, though no doubt it 
has several other names higher up, for geographical 
nomenclature is notoriously localised in China. The 
cultivable area being confined to narrow strips in the 
valley bottom, the huts, instead of being widely scattered as 
in the mountain settlements, were bunched together above 
the shingle and boulders which marked the high water limits 
of the now shrunken river, so that the village looked even 
smaller than it really was; indeed, it could have been 
comfortably tucked into a moderate-sized English farmyard. 
These people carry on practically no trade and cultivate 
almost everything they require, which is not much, though 
wheat, millet, maize, tobacco, hemp, ‘red pepper,’ beans, and 
turnips are all grown. Still, I do not think the whole area 
of soil cultivated by the twelve families of Ktng-chou, boxed 
up in their narrow wooded valley, exceeded two acres. 
Situated a few miles higher up the Kiang-chou river is 
the much larger village of Kow-shan-ching, where resides 
a petty mandarin with twenty soldiers under his command, 
probably keeping an eye on the salt wells, for on the 
following day we met a small salt caravan going down to 
the Mekong valley under escort. Salt, being a government 
monopoly in China, is jealously guarded, and the most 
elaborate precautions are taken against smuggling. 
On the way down the Kifing-chou river next day I shot 
a cormorant in mistake for a duck, to the intense delight 
of my village escort, who were presented with the spoil ; 
for though they assured me that it was excellent eating, 
I felt that they were more likely to appreciate the flavour 
of the ‘old man of the water,’ as they called it, than I was 
myself. A few miles lower down, where we stopped for 
the night, the narrow valley, hitherto sparsely inhabited, 
widened out, and several large villages dotted the gentler 
slopes of the mountains. The open forest of pine and oak, 
