"Birds that talk--"
"What--parrots?"
"No; criminals' heads."
"Horrible!" said the actress, with a most expressive grimace.
"What would you have, Caroline?" said Caterna. "It is the custom of the
country."
CHAPTER XXIV.
On leaving Lan-Tcheou, the railway crosses a well-cultivated country,
watered by numerous streams, and hilly enough to necessitate frequent
curves. There is a good deal of engineering work; mostly bridges,
viaducts on wooden trestles of somewhat doubtful solidity, and the
traveler is not particularly comfortable when he finds them bending
under the weight of the train. It is true we are in the Celestial
Empire, and a few thousand victims of a railway accident is hardly
anything among a population of four hundred millions.
"Besides," said Pan-Chao, "the Son of Heaven never travels by railway."
So much the better.
At six o'clock in the evening we are at King-Tcheou, after skirting for
some time the capricious meanderings of the Great Wall. Of this immense
artificial frontier built between Mongolia and China, there remain only
the blocks of granite and red quartzite which served as its base, its
terrace of bricks with the parapets of unequal heights, a few old
cannons eaten into with rust and hidden under a thick veil of lichens,
and then the square towers with their ruined battlements.
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