The Racing Foreigner 163 



compact, homogeneous, grey sandstone. Here, on the south- 

 west side of Chung-king, the river-bed widens out, forming 

 a huge sand and boulder bank in the middle, with a wide 

 channel on each side, called the " Shan-hu Pa," or " Coral 

 Strand," the summit of which is cultivated for a space of 

 about one square mile, and sustains several farms and 

 cottages, which have to be removed every year in order to 

 escape the summer floods, when the whole island, now 

 thirty feet out of water, is submerged. The summit of this 

 bank is the only level spot of ground I have yet met with 

 in Eastern Szechuan. I walked for nearly a mile along its 

 edge, until the loose boulders, about the size of cricket-balls, 

 became too much for me. I may mention that I had chosen 

 this uncomfortable path as a means of escape from the large 

 crowd of gamins who had taken to following me. The 

 " Wa-wa'rh," as the children are called in the friendly 

 language of Szechuan, who had collected to the number of 

 some hundreds, were amusing themselves shouting at the 

 top of their voices, " Yang jen p'ao ma'i," i.e. " See the 

 foreigner galloping on his horse 1 " I afterwards found out 

 that this cry (any rallying-cry for a mob) originated in a 

 peep-show of the Shanghai races, which had been recently 

 exhibited by an itinerant showman, and which had excited 

 the sportive minds of the Chung-king youth, to whose bare 

 feet I had hoped the stones would prove a barrier. But it 

 was not so, and I only eluded them by jumping into a 

 sampan, and ordering myself to be set across the river. A 

 tremendous shout arose from the assembled Wa-wa'rh as 

 this feat was happily accomplished. 



In crossing to the -other side, we were carried down nearly 

 a mile by the five-knot current, but almost regained the lost 

 ground by running up in the eddy on the opposite shore, which 

 leads to the small but dangerous rapid formed by a ledge of 



