It was difficult for me to find accommodation, but eventually a very pleasing young priest of high rank gave up his cell to me. Unfortunately, it was next the guests’ kitchen, and the flues from the fires passing under it, I was baked in a temperature of 91°, although, in spite of warnings about tigers, the dangers from which are by no means imaginary, I kept both door and window open all night. The cell had for its furniture a shrine of Gautama and an image of Kwan-yin on a shelf, and a few books, which I learned were Buddhist classics, not volumes, as in a cell which I occupied later, full of pictures by no means inculcating holiness. In the next room, equally hot, and without a chink open for ventilation, thirty guests moaned and tossed all night, a single candle dimly lighting a picture of Buddha and the dusty and hideous ornaments on the altar below. At 9 P.M., midnight, and again at 4 A.M., which is the hour at which the monks rise, bells were rung, cymbals and gongs were beaten, and the praises of Buddha were chanted in an unknown tongue. A feature at once cheerful and cheerless is the presence at Chang-an Sa of a number of bright, active, orphan boys from ten to thirteen years old, who are at present servitors, but who will one day become priests. It is an exercise of forbearance to abstain from writing much about the beauties of Chang-an Sa as seen in two days of perfect heavenliness. It is a calm retreat, that small, green, semicircular plateau which the receding hills have left, walling in the back and sides with rocky precipices half clothed with forest, while the bridgeless torrent in front, raging and thundering among huge boulders of pink granite, secludes it from all but the adventurous. Alike in the rose of sunrise, in the red and gold of sunset, or gleaming steely blue in the prosaic glare of midday, the great rock peak on the left bank, one of the highest in the range, compels ceaseless admiration. The appearance of its huge vertical topmost ribs has been well compared to that of the “pipes of an organ,” this organ-pipe formation being common in the range; seams and ledges halfway down give roothold to a few fantastic conifers and azaleas, and lower still all suggestion of form is lost among dense masses of magnificent forest. As I proposed to take a somewhat different route from Yu-chöm Sa (the first temple on the eastern slope) from that traversed by my predecessors, the Hon. G. W. Curzon and Mr. Campbell, I left the ponies and baggage at Chang-an Sa, the _mapu_, who were bent on _ku-kyöng_, accompanying me for part of the distance, and took a five days’ journey in the glorious Keum-Kang San in unrivalled weather, in air which was elixir, crossing the range to Yu-chöm Sa by the An-mun-chai (Goose-Gate Terrace), 4,215 feet in altitude, and recrossing it by the Ki-cho, 3,570 feet.