After crossing the Paik-yang Kang, there 162 yards wide and 16 feet deep, by a ferryboat of remarkably ingenious construction, rendered necessary by the fact that the long bridge over the broad stream was in ruins, and that the appropriation for its reconstruction had been diverted by the local officials to their own enrichment, we entered the spurs or ribs of the great mountain chain which, running north and south, divides Korea into two very unequal longitudinal portions at the village of Tong-ku. The scenery became very varied and pretty. Forests clothed many of the hills with a fair blossoming undergrowth untouched by the fuel gatherers’ remorseless hook; torrents flashed in foam through dark, dense leafage, or bubbled and gurgled out of sight; the little patches of cultivation were boulder-strewn; there were few inhabitants, and the tracks called roads were little better than the stony beds of streams. As they became less and less obvious, and the valleys more solitary, our tergiversations were more frequent and prolonged, the _mapu_ drove the ponies as fast as they could walk, the fords were many and deep, and two of the party were unhorsed in them, still we hurried on faster and faster. Not a word was spoken, but I knew that the men had _tiger on the brain_! Blundering through the twilight, it was dark when we reached the lower village of Ma-ri Kei, where we were to halt for the night, two miles from the Pass of Tan-pa-Ryöng, which was to be crossed the next day. There the villagers could not or would not take us in. They said they had neither rice nor beans, which may have been true so late in the spring. However, it is, or then was, Korean law that if a village could not entertain travellers it must convoy them to the next halting-place. The _mapu_ were frantic. They yelled and stormed and banged at the hovels, and succeeded in turning out four sleepy peasants, who were reinforced by four more a little farther on; but the torches were too short, and after sputtering and flaring, went out one by one, and the fresh ones lighted slowly. The _mapu_ lost their reason. They thrashed the torchbearers with their heavy sticks; I lashed my _mapu_ with my light whip for doing it; they yelled, they danced. Then things improved. Gloriously glared the pine knots on the leaping crystal torrents that we forded, reddening the white clothes of the men and the stony track and the warm-tinted stems of the pines, and so with shouts and yells and waving torches we passed up the wooded glen in the frosty night air, under a firmament of stars, to the mountain hamlet of upper Ma-ri Kei, consisting of five hovels, only three of which were inhabited. It is a very forlorn place and very poor, and it was an hour before my party of eight human beings and four ponies were established in its miserable shelter, though even that was welcome after being eleven hours in the saddle. FOOTNOTES: