For days there had been unwonted activity in the enemy’s camp West of the Pass. Reinforcements arrived and preparations were made to renew, on a grand scale, the attack of the 4th of July. Meanwhile, the Japanese had strengthened their advance post and awaited the assault. A strict vigil was kept, and for two nights men slept fully armed. Shortly after midnight on the 16th the officer commanding the brigade on the North of the Pass was informed that a body of the enemy was moving on his front. The attack was about to be delivered. He sent warning to the head quarters of the brigade West of Mou-tien-ling, and measures were taken to repel the enemy. At half-past two o’clock on the morning of the 17th a squadron of cavalry and a large force of infantry appeared in the valley that debouches on the road to Liao-yang, and reaches by a gradual ascent the road over the Pass. Three thousand five hundred yards from Mou-tien-ling--on the road to Liao-yang--stands a white tower, conspicuous on the lower spur of a hill. West of the To-wan--the name given to this locality--the road approaches the Pass between hills, and enters a narrow valley in which are two tiny hamlets--Kinki-hotsu at the Western end, and Lika-hotsu in the middle. The sides of the valley run North and South and are steep. Leaving the valley the road ascends past an isolated conical hill to a sharp low ridge, which closes the Eastern end of the defile. Upon this road, commanding the valley and its approach from the West is a trench--the farthest point reached by the Russians on the 4th of July. At the back of the trench is some scrub, and to the left of it, facing West, is a small plantation, and behind that again a shrine, from which the road dips into a gorge, and then ascends to a broad ridge. From the centre of this ridge, which is like a bow bent between broad backed hills, rises a temple, large and solidly built--the head quarters of the post. East of the temple the ridge tumbles into a V-shaped valley, the Western slope of which rises abruptly to the summit of Mou-tien-ling--the Japanese line of defence.