iany years no. visitor to Peking has failed to pay even a flying visit to the Ming tombs and the great wall near Nankow. And certainly the hurried traveller will. hardly find elsewhere what characterises North China so conveniently together Here: architecture centuries. old, tech-unique thousands of years old, and @esolate mountains staring eternally across the smiling plains. But over the tombs of the present dynasty with the defiant mountains behind, which seem to bend protectingly yet menacingly over them, hangs a mysterious veil which has for two centuries long enwrapped them, and which would have hidden them still longer had not the Boxer outbreak sweeping through the province of Chihli, lifted the veil a little.
Snow Iny on the wide flat fields before Peking as I emerged from the broken-through West wall of the Chinese city in the train on a fine March morning, and rarely' seen snow covered the ragxed peaks of the Eastern Mountains merging into the cloudsyhanging over them. Nearer and nearer tame the dread mountains toward us as farther to the South the slow train bore us, till they seemed as though within reach of the hand at that memorable place where the sparkling Hunho rolls its yellow waves in a course hardly two hundred metres wide, first under the railway bridge over which rattled the screaming locomotive and then under the sacred Marco-Polo bridge between whose countless marble ions an uninterrupted chain of camels was lazily wending its way. Nowhere could the very opposite extremes of two such opposing civilizations more pal bably present themselves to the eye The farther we travel from Peking the-scantier lies the snow, and when we arrive at Tsing-Hsing-Hsien, the last station before Pao-ting-fu, and mount the ponies there, it is dificult to discover any white spots. Then was pass through the narrow streets of the little walled town and on through verdant fields of corn, along deeply furrowed paths and friendly little villages to the old capital of the prefecture, I-chou, where we find oan excellent meal already prepared for us in the large and clean school in the best quarter of the town.
On the following morning we have to rise early in order to have the whole day before us in which to. visit the tombs which can be reached in an hour and a half by means of a comfortable vehicle. At first, flat, neatly kept fields Tie on either side the path. But soon we come nearer to the mountains until we find ourselves almost unexpectedly and sudldenly in the midst of the stony bed of a river, on both sides of which rise bare steep hills which move together ever before us and gradually assume the form of nuked and rigid heaps of stones so characteristic of the Western mountains,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.