Their
general acquiescence was astounding, and in the next town,
Lu-chiang-pa, these two men put their theory into practice and almost
caused a riot by offering 250 cash for a fowl for which the vendor
blandly asked 1,000. But they got the chicken--and at their own price,
too.
As I was thus gently in soliloquy, I first heard and then caught sight
of the river below--the unnavigable Salwen, 2,000 feet lower than either
the Mekong or the Shweli (which we were to cross two days later). It is
a pity the Salwen was not preserved as the boundary between Burma and
China.
Gradually, as we approached the steep stone steps leading down thereto,
I saw one of the cleverest pieces of native engineering in Asia--the
double suspension bridge which here spans the Salwen, the only one I had
seen in my trip across the Empire. The first span, some 240 feet by 36
feet, reaches from the natural rock, down which a vertical path zigzags
to the foot, and the second span then runs over to the busy little town
of Lu-chiang-pa.
Here, then, were we in the most dreaded spot in Western China! If you
stay a night in this Valley, rumor says, you go to bed for the last
time; Chinese are afraid of it, Europeans dare not linger in it.
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