The salt water estuary of the Han is tempestuous and deep, given over to much shipping and small craft. The river itself does not begin for twenty miles above the tide-water mouth, the intervening stretch of water belonging more correctly to the sea. Above Chemulpo, where the full force of the Han current is hardly felt, the velocity of the stream is quite five knots an hour. Where the breadth of the river narrows the rapidity of the flow increases. At a point, where the river makes a sudden sweep round some overhanging bluffs, which confront each other from opposite banks, the heavy volume of water thus tumbling down becomes a swirling, boisterous mill-race, as it twists and foams through its tortuous channels into another tide-swollen reach. The place of meeting between the sea and the river current shows itself in a line of choppy water, neither rough nor smooth. The water is always bubbling and always breaking at this point, in a manner poetically suggestive of the spirits of the restless deep. The Han river gives access to Seoul. In the days before the railway, the choice of route to the capital lay between spending a night aground upon one of the many shifting sand-banks in the river or the risks of a belated journey overland, with pack ponies and the delights of a sand-bath in the Little Sahara. There were many who found the “all land” way preferable to the “land and water system,” to which many groundings and much wading reduced the experiment of travelling by junk or steam-launch in those days. Now, however, the iron horse rules the road. [Illustration: ON THE HAN RIVER] CHAPTER XXIV Kang-wha, brief history of the island—A monastic retreat, an ideal rest—Nocturnal visitors—Midnight masses—Return to the capital—Preparations for a great journey—Riots and confusion Kang-wha, the island to which I was sailing in these easy stages, lies in the north-east quarter of the gulf, formed by the right angle which the coast makes before taking that northerly sweep which carries it, with a curve, to the mouth of the Yalu River. On the south and south-west, Kang-wha is exposed to the open sea; on the north, the island is separated from the mainland by the Han estuary; and on the east a narrow strait, scarce two hundred yards wide, through which boats, journeying from Chemulpo to Seoul must travel, severs the island from the mainland. [Illustration: WASHING CLOTHES IN A DRAIN]