Malaria
stalks abroad for her victims, and snatches everyone who dallies in his
journey to the topside mountain village of Feng-shui-ling. The river is
2,000 feet above the sea; Feng-shui-ling is nearly 9,000 feet.
It was ten o'clock as I pulled over my stool and took tea in the crowded
shop at Lu-chiang-pa. I saw Shans here for the first time.
The village now, however, is anything but a Shan village. Of the people
in the immediate vicinity I counted only ten typical Shans, and of the
company around me in this popular tea-house twenty-one out of
twenty-eight were Chinese, including ten Mohammedans. It was, however,
easy to see that several of these were of Shan extraction, who,
although they had features distinctly un-Chinese, had adopted the
Chinese language and custom. A party of Tibetans were here in the charge
of a Lama, in an inner court, and scampered off as I rose to snap their
photographs. This was a very low altitude for Tibetans to reach.
Whilst I sipped my tea the local horse dealer wanted so very much to
sell me a pony cheap. He offered it for forty taels, I offered him five.
It was gone in the back, was blind in the left eye, and was at least
seventeen years old.
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