The "Literary Buddha" Temple 43 



objected to my launching their boat upon it, as this is 

 never done but in times of drought, when they go upon 

 the lake to solicit the dragon prince to turn himself round 

 and produce rain. Were the dragon to come out at this 

 opening and escape out of the country, according to Chinese 

 superstition, there would be another Biblical deluge. Hence 

 the three temples to shut him in safely. 



The whole scene was so weirdly romantic that I longed 

 to explore it more thoroughly, and next morning I started 

 early, and walked four or five miles up another ravine, 

 fuller of precipices than anything I had seen yet, with again 

 a dreary dry river-bed, a special feature of the conglomerate 

 country, and a waterfall, now almost dried up, which seemed, 

 as far as I could judge, to make one leap of over 1000 feet. 

 In this region the valleys, bordered by precipices with 

 bulging sides, mostly end not in winding narrowing glens, 

 but in precipices abruptly shutting them in. A steep climb 

 brought me to the top of a ridge, whence the inaccessible- 

 looking " Wen Fo Shan " suddenly burst upon my astonished 

 view like a coup de the&tre. At my feet a yawning gulf 

 separated me from the conical "Wen Fo," or as the few 

 Europeans who have visited it call it, the Dome, which was 

 only connected with the ridge^upon which I was sitting, to 

 prevent being blown off — by a narrow causeway, from four 

 to ten feet wide, and with vertical walls some hundreds of 

 feet deep. Opposite, reaching two-thirds up the Dome, a 

 perpendicular wall of rock stretched for a thousand feet 

 downwards, looking almost as if it had been planed, so 

 smooth was it. And these startling features were framed in 

 what by itself would be a glorious amphitheatrical view of 

 range beyond range of mountains. Crossing the causeway, 

 looking neither to the right hand nor to the left, I was con- 

 fronted by the steep cone, up which a scrambling path leads 



