At the same time, I must admit that I had luck as regards the weather. For on the Szechuen portion of the road, all the bridges are down; not only the long stone bridges over rivers, which would not matter so much, as there would probably be some kind of ferry, but every single bridge over the smaller gullies. This made driving very trying. as one had to pull up dead every mile or less and then crawl slowly and painfully down into the gully and up out of again. That was a riner evil, but if there had been any rain, the road, 1 imagine, would have been quite impassable, At the time I passed, they were repairing all these bridges, so that in a few months the will pened to my car, the top-heavy bus with its load of passengers would quite certainly have toppled over the precipice) it swerved inwards and ran into a shallow ditch at the side. I stopped for a minute, but seeing that it was not serious: it only meant that the passengers would have to augh: and help to push the bus out, I proceeded on my way without any feeling of remorse. It was their own fault, and anyhow I remembered an incident quite early on in my trip, when I had tried to pass a bus on a wide road and had been purposely forced into the bank. We were now all square.
About six in the evening we arrived at the small walled town of Chienkou. It lies immediately on the motor-road, but steps led up to its gates, so that there was no question of taking the car inside. There was still another hour and a half of daylight, but I was very uncertain about the road ahead and, on the principle of a "bird in the hand," decided to make the best of the open platform in front of the bus-station which the bus people very kindly placed at my disposal. Chienkou, about 180 miles from Chengtu and eight stages by chair, must have been a very remote and inaccessible place in the old days, completely cut off from the outside world. That no longer holds good to-day.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.