Across China on Foot | Page 9

wings, dense darkness
fell--impenetrable, sooty darkness, that in a moment shut out all light,
all power of sight. Then from out the sombre heavens deep thunder
boomed ominously as the reverberating roar of a pack of hunger-ridden
lions, and the two men, aliens in an alien land, stood beneath the
tattered matting awning with a peculiar fear and some foreboding. We
were tied in fast to the darkened sides of the great Ichang Gorge--a
magnificent sixteen-mile stretch, opening up the famous gorges on the
fourth of the great rivers of the world, which had cleaved its course
through a chain of hills, whose perpendicular cliffs form wonderful
rock-bound banks, dispelling all thought of the monotony of the Lower
Yangtze.
Upstream we had glided merrily upon a fresh breeze, which bore the
warning of a storm. All on board was settling down into Yangtze

fashion, and the barbaric human clamor of our trackers, which now
mutteringly died away, was suddenly taken up, as above recorded, and
all unexpectedly answered by a grander uproar--a deep threatening
boom of far-off thunder. In circling tones and semitones of wrath it
volleyed gradually through the dark ravines, and, startled by the sound,
the two travelers, roused for the first time from their natural
engrossment in the common doings of the _wu-pan_,[C] saw the
reflection of the sun on the waters, now turned to a livid murkiness,
deepening with a threatening ink-like aspect as the river rushed
voluminously past our tiny floating haven. Strangely silenced were we
by this weird terror, and watched and listened, chained to the deck by a
thousand mingled fears and fascinations, which breathed upon our
nerves like a chill wind. As we became accustomed then to the yellow
darkness, we beheld about the landscape a spectral look, and the
sepulchral sound of the moving thunder seemed the half-muffled clang
of some great iron-tongued funeral bell. Then came the rain, introduced
swiftly by the deafening clatter of another thunder crash that made one
stagger like a ship in a wild sea, and we strained our eyes to gaze into a
visionary chasm cleaved in twain by the furious lightning. Playing
upon the face of the unruffled river, with a brilliancy at once awful and
enchanting, this singular flitting and wavering of the heavenly
electricity, as it flashed haphazardly around all things, threw about one
an illumination quite indescribable.
For hours we sat upon a beam athwart the afterdeck, in silence drinking
in the strange phenomenon. We watched, after a small feed of curry
and rice, long into the dark hours, when the thunder had passed us by,
and in the distant booming one could now imagine the lower notes
streaming forth from some great solemn organ symphony. The fierce
lightning twitched, as it danced in and out the crevices--inwards,
outwards, upwards, then finally lost in one downward swoop towards
the river, tearing open the liquid blackness with its crystal blade of fire.
The rain ceased not. But soon the moon, peeping out from the tops of a
jagged wall above us, looking like a soiled, half-melted snowball,
shone full down the far-stretching gorge, and now its broad lustre shed
itself, like powdered silver, over the whole scene, so that one could
have imagined oneself in the living splendor of some eternal sphere of

ethereal sweetness. And so it might have been had the rain abated--a
curious accompaniment to a moonlight night. Down it came, straight
and determined and businesslike, in the windless silence, dancing like a
shower of diamonds of purest brilliance on the background of the
placid waters.
Very beautiful, reader, for a time. But would that the rain had been all
moonshine!
Glorious was it to revel in for a time. But, during the weary night
watches, in a bed long since soaked through, and one's safest
nightclothes now the stolid Burberry, with face protected by a
twelve-cent umbrella, even one's curry and rice saturated to sap with
the constant drip, and everything around one rendered cold and
uncomfortable enough through a perforation in its slenderest part of the
worn-out bamboo matting--ah, it was then, then that one would have
foregone with alacrity the dreams of the nomadic life of the _wu-pan_.
Our introduction, therefore, to the great Gorges of the Upper
Yangtze--to China what the Niagara Falls are to America--was not
remarkable for its placidity, albeit taken with as much complacency as
the occasion allowed.
I do not, however, intend to weary or to entertain the reader, as may be,
by a long description of the Yangtze gorges. Time and time again have
they fallen to the imaginative pens of travelers--mostly bad or
indifferent descriptions, few good; none better, perhaps, than Mrs.
Bishop's. But at best they are imaginative--they lack reality. It has been
said that the world of imagination is