Often, gazing over the sunlit
landscape, in this land "South of the Clouds," one is held spellbound by
the intense beauty of this little-known province, and one wonders what
all this grand scenery, untouched and unmarred by the hand of man, would
become were it in the center of a continent covered by the ubiquitous
globe-trotter.
No country in the world more than West China possesses mountains of
combined majesty and grace. Rocks, everywhere arranged in masses of a
rude and gigantic character, have a ruggedness tempered by a singular
airiness of form and softness of environment, in a climate favorable in
some parts to the densest vegetation, and in others wild and barren. One
is always in sight of mountains rising to fourteen thousand feet or
more, and constantly scaling difficult pathways seven or eight or nine
thousand feet above the sea. And in the loneliness of a country where
nothing has altered very much the handiwork of God, an awe-inspiring
silence pervades everything. Bold, grey cliffs shoot up here through a
mass of verdure and of foliage, and there white cottages, perched in
seemingly inaccessible positions, glisten in the sun on the colored
mountain-sides. You saunter through stony hollows, along straight
passes, traversed by torrents, overhung by high walls of rocks, now
winding through broken, shaggy chasms and huge, wandering fragments, now
suddenly emerging into some emerald valley, where Peace, long
established, seems to repose sweetly in the bosom of Strength.
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