During the night the moments throbbed away as I lay on my flea-ridden
couch--moments which seemed long as hours, and no gleaming rift broke
the settled and deepening blackness of my hateful environs. Every thing
and every place was full of the wearisome, depressing, beauty-blasting
commonplace of Interior China. Stenches rose up on the damp, dank air,
and throughout the night, through the opening of a window, I seemed to
gaze out to a disconsolate eternity--gaping, empty, unsightly. Waking
from my dozing at the hour when judgment sits upon the hearts of men, I
sat in ponderous judgment upon all to whom the bungling of the previous
day was due. There were the rats and mice, and cats and owls, and creaks
and cracks--no quiet about the place from night to morning. Then came
the barking of dogs, the noises of the cocks and kine, of horses and
foals, of pigs and geese--the general wail of the zoological
kingdom--cows bellowing, duck diplomacy, and much else. So that it were
not surprising to learn that this distinguished traveler in these
contemptible regions was sitting on a broken-down bridge, looking
wearily on to the broken-down tower on the summit of a pretty little
knoll outside Kungshan, thinking that it were well a score of such were
added did their design embrace a warning to evade the place.
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