It was
entirely unreasonable to expect them to go on to Ch'u-tung, ninety li
away--it was impossible. And I learnt that the reason they would not go
on was that no house this side of that place was good enough to put a
horse into, even a Chinese horse, and they would not dream of taking me
on under those conditions. There was not even a hut available for the
traveler, so they said. I had come over difficult country, plodding
upwards on tiptoe and then downwards with a lazy swing from stone to
stone for miles. Throughout the day we had been going through fine
mountain forest, everywhere peaceful and beautiful, but it had been hard
going. In the morning a heavy frost lay thick and white about us, and by
10:30 a.m. the sun was playing down upon us with a merciless heat as we
tramped over that little red line through the green of the hill-sides.
Often in this march was I tempted to stay and sit down on the sward,
but I had proved this to be fatal to walking. In traveling in Yuen-nan
one's practice should be: start early, have as few stops as possible,
when a stop _is_ made let it be long enough for a real rest. In
Szech'wan, where the tea houses are much more frequent, men will pull up
every ten li, and generally make ten minutes of it.
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