Chapter 24

On leaving Lan-Tcheou, the railway crosses a well-cultivated country,
watered by numerous streams, and hilly enough to necessitate frequent
curves. There is a good deal of engineering work; mostly bridges,
viaducts on wooden trestles of somewhat doubtful solidity, and the
traveler is not particularly comfortable when he finds them bending
under the weight of the train. It is true we are in the Celestial
Empire, and a few thousand victims of a railway accident is hardly
anything among a population of four hundred millions.

"Besides," said Pan-Chao, "the Son of Heaven never travels by railway."

So much the better.

At six o'clock in the evening we are at King-Tcheou, after skirting for
some time the capricious meanderings of the Great Wall. Of this immense
artificial frontier built between Mongolia and China, there remain only
the blocks of granite and red quartzite which served as its base, its
terrace of bricks with the parapets of unequal heights, a few old
cannons eaten into with rust and hidden under a thick veil of lichens,
and then the square towers with their ruined battlements. The
interminable wall rises, falls, bends, bends back again, and is lost to
sight on the undulations of the ground.

At six o'clock we halt for half an hour at King-Tcheou, of which I only
saw a few pagodas, and about ten o'clock there is a halt of
three-quarters of an hour at Si-Ngan, of which I did not even see the
outline.

All night was spent in running the three hundred kilometres which
separate this town from Ho Nan, where we had an hour to stop.

I fancy the Londoners might easily imagine that this town of Ho Nan was
London, and perhaps Mrs. Ephrinell did so. Not because there was a
Strand with its extraordinary traffic, nor a Thames with its prodigious
movement of barges and steamboats. No! But because we were in a fog so
thick that it was impossible to see either houses or pagodas.

The fog lasted all day, and this hindered the progress of the train.
These Chinese engine-drivers are really very skilful and attentive and
intelligent.

We were not fortunate in our last day's journey before reaching Tien
Tsin! What a loss of copy! What paragraphs were melted away in these
unfathomable vapors! I saw nothing of the gorges and ravines, through
which runs the Grand Transasiatic; nothing of the valley of Lou-Ngan,
where we stopped at eleven o'clock; nothing of the two hundred and
thirty kilometres which we accomplished amid the wreaths of a sort of
yellow steam, worthy of a yellow country, until we stopped about ten
o'clock at night at Tai-Youan.

Ah! the disagreeable day.

Luckily the fog rose early in the evening. Now it is night--and a very
dark