2 20 Through the Yang-tse Gorges 



water was set in the middle of the table, from which we 

 could replenish at leisure : all this luxury, including the 

 liberty, of which we freely availed ourselves, of dawdling, 

 Chinese fashion, as many hours as we liked over the repast, 

 for the sum of five copper cash. I am sorry to say, 

 however, that I found the tea, which had a lovely, trans- 

 parent green appearance, so bitter as to be undrinkable, 

 and I had to content myself with hot water, instead of the 

 refreshing cup to which, after our early rise, I had been 

 looking forward with most pleasant anticipation. " Cha " 

 in China denotes any infusion of herbs (we ourselves go so 

 far as to say beef-tea), and was probably used to mean an 

 infusion of any kind, many centuries before tea proper 

 was discovered. Certainly my tea at the Liang-toh did 

 not contain a single leaf of Thea sinensis ; they were 

 apparently all young spring willow leaves dried in the sun. 

 I rambled about for two or three hours, waiting for our 

 dilatory skipper to send for us, and thus had a fine 

 opportunity of examining the rocky islet upon which we 

 were abandoned. Its rugged outlines had been rounded 

 off by the water, although in places the ascents were so 

 steep that short staircases had been neatly cut in the rock. 

 The whole surface was honeycombed with perpendicular 

 cylindrical holes, as though bored out by a mighty auger, 

 from a few inches to several feet in depth, and of equally 

 varied diameters. In truth, a host of mighty augers had 

 been at work, and the tools were still in situ, now lying 

 idle at the bottom of the pits, but only waiting for the 

 untiring hand of nature, in the shape of the now rising 

 flood, to again set them in motion. The tools had been 

 brought from a distance, as though specially appropriated 

 for the work of clearing away these destructive reefs, and 

 consisted of boulders of porphyry and gneiss washed down 



