The
interminable wall rises, falls, bends, bends back again, and is lost to
sight on the undulations of the ground.
At six o'clock we halt for half an hour at King-Tcheou, of which I only
saw a few pagodas, and about ten o'clock there is a halt of
three-quarters of an hour at Si-Ngan, of which I did not even see the
outline.
All night was spent in running the three hundred kilometres which
separate this town from Ho Nan, where we had an hour to stop.
I fancy the Londoners might easily imagine that this town of Ho Nan was
London, and perhaps Mrs. Ephrinell did so. Not because there was a
Strand with its extraordinary traffic, nor a Thames with its prodigious
movement of barges and steamboats. No! But because we were in a fog so
thick that it was impossible to see either houses or pagodas.
The fog lasted all day, and this hindered the progress of the train.
These Chinese engine-drivers are really very skilful and attentive and
intelligent.
We were not fortunate in our last day's journey before reaching Tien
Tsin! What a loss of copy! What paragraphs were melted away in these
unfathomable vapors! I saw nothing of the gorges and ravines, through
which runs the Grand Transasiatic; nothing of the valley of Lou-Ngan,
where we stopped at eleven o'clock; nothing of the two hundred and
thirty kilometres which we accomplished amid the wreaths of a sort of
yellow steam, worthy of a yellow country, until we stopped about ten
o'clock at night at Tai-Youan.
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