The canal is falling steadily. No serious damage was done here by the canal being hips. Our trouble was that the land is so flat that the rain did not drain off, and so the country became a sort of pool, but not from the overflow. But if the banks were not high and strong we should have had the story of the Yangtze valley repeated. The city of Kaoyii, to the south of us, was from ten to fifteen feet below the level of the canal water, and if the hanks had failed the city and the surrounding country would have been entirely under water.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.