802 
W© had been warned in Luanfu to be very careful, for 
there was a band of 35 to 40 robbers on the road; well, 
of course, we carried our firearms all of the time, but 
luckily we had no encounter and all we saw was a human head 
hanging in a little wooden cage, hanging in a wild apricot 
tree along the roadside and grinning at us with its white 
teeth, showing partly through the dried-up blackened skin. 
Beneath the cage there dangled a wooden tablet with the 
man' s name on it , as a warning to other evil-minded mortals. 
The whole thing didn't impress us much, for we were 
passing through a wild and lonely landscape; rugged moun- 
tains everywhere and wild apricot trees in full fruit and 
the five soldiers we had with us a convoy over the bad 
place and we ourselves also, we would have liked to see 
some robbers come up and test our strength. As nobody 
came however, we turned to the wild apricots, but they 
were not good enough to satisfy our tastes or quench our 
thirst. 
As you may imagine the stopping places we halted or 
spent the night at were often the "limit". And oh, those 
fleas by night and the flies by day! Really, I cannot 
find any good uses for both these pests in the curriculum 
of our earth. We also had great difficulty in obtaining 
sufficient nourishing food. As you know, in summer the 
Chinese eat exceedingly little meat, and the main food is 
noodles, from wheaten flour and bird's seed; well a white' 
man cannot derive sufficient strength from such a diet and 
one does not wish to deplete one's supply of canned goods 
too rapidly when on such a long trip as this. 
My new interpreter and the new coolie are holding out 
fairly well. The interpreter is by far not as clever as 
the former one. He is more of an office man; with some 
training however, we may be able to transform him a bit. 
Yesterday morning the two were given a beating by some 
villagers some 10 lis from here and now we are negotiat- 
ing with the local magistrate to have this beating busi- 
ness returned to the proper parties. I suppose we will be 
successful at it. So many things here in old China go 
differently from what they do in other lands! 
Now as to my plans. Within a few days I hope to be 
on the road to Wen hsien and Pai hsiang chen to the South 
of here, then back to Chiang chou and along the Pen river 
to the Hoang Ho; by ferry across it and then over Tung 
kwang to Slanfu. From there on S. W. Shensi and to Kansu 
for Potanin's wild peaches. 
I have collected quite a stack already of herbarium 
material and as time goes on this will increase many fold 
these coming months. If it now soon will turn cooler then 
everything will be all right. 
