316 THE BEGOLITH 



between which gorges and chasms radiate labyrinthieally up- 

 wards into the walls of solid ground around. High upon a 

 rock of earth — steeper than any rock of stone — stands the 

 temple of the village, or a small fortress which affords the 

 villagers a safe retreat in times of danger. The only access 

 to such a place is by a spiral stairway dug out within the mass 

 of the bluff itself. In this yellow defile there are innumerable 

 nooks and recesses, often enlivened by thousands of people, 

 who dwell in caves dug in the loess." ^ 



One of the striking features of the loess, both in China and 

 elsewhere, is the abundance of minute tubes or canals — lined 

 with carbonate of lime — which traverse it from above down- 

 ward, and which are assumed by some to be due to root fibres. 

 It is the presence of these presumably that causes the vertical 

 cleavage, and at the same time the remarkable absorptive quali- 

 ties for which the loess is noted. Such is the material which 

 for more than three thousand years has brought forth crops 

 continuously, and without exhaustion, over many square miles 

 of the Chinese Empire. Its distribution in Europe is given as 

 extending from the French coast at Sangatte, eastward across 

 the north of France and Belgium, filling up the depressions of 

 the Ardennes, passing far up the valleys of the Rhine and its 

 tributaries, the Neekar, Main, and Lahr; likewise those of the 

 Elke above Meissen, the Weser, Mulde, and Saale, the upper 

 Oder and Vistula. Spreading across upper Silesia, it sweeps 

 eastward over the plains of Poland and southern Russia, where 

 it forms the substratum of the tschernosem, or black earth. 

 It extends into Bohemia, Moravia, Hungaria, Galicia, Transyl- 

 vania, and Roumania far up into the Carpathians, where it 

 reaches heights of from 2000 to 5000 feet above sea-level. In 

 northern China it spreads over a large portion of the region 

 drained by the Hwang-Ho. For nearly a thousand miles 

 from the borders of the great alluvial plain of Pechele, through 

 the provinces of Shansi, Sensi, and Kansu, everywhere to the 

 northern base of the range of the Tsing-ling-shan, the loess 

 may be followed to the very divide which separates the basin 

 of the Hwang-Ho from the region destitute of drainage into 

 the sea. Toward the north it reaches almost to the edge of 

 the Mongolian plateau. The entire area covered continuously 



^The Chinese Loess Puzzle, by J. B. Whitney, American Naturalist, 

 December, 1877, 



