From that pass the road, if it can be called such, is shut in with the Tai-döng for 30 _li_. In some places there is not room even for the narrowest bridle track, and the ponies scramble as they may over the rough boulders which margin the water, and climb the worn, steep, and rocky steps, often as high as their own knees, by which the break-neck track is taken over the rocky spurs which descend on the river. It is one of the worst pieces of road I ever encountered, and it was not wonderful that we did not meet a single traveller, and that there should be only about nine a year! We made by our utmost efforts only a short mile an hour, and it took us five hours of this severe work to reach the wretched hamlet of Huok Kuri, a few hovels dumped down among heaps of stones and great boulders, some of which served as backs for the huts. Poverty-stricken, filthy, squalid, the few inhabitants subsisted entirely on red millet! Poor Mr. Yi, who had had a wakeful night owing to vermin, said woefully as he dismounted stiffly, “Sleepy, tired, cold, hungry,”--and there was nothing to eat, and little for the ponies either, which may have been the reason that they got up a desperate fight, of which they bore the traces for some days. [Illustration: UPPER TAI-DONG.] The track continued shut in by the high mountains which line the Tai-döng till within a mile of Tok Chhön, forcing the ponies to climb worn rock-ladders, or to pick a perilous way among sharp-pointed rocks. I had not thought that Korea could produce anything so emphatic! As the road occasionally broke up in face of some apparently impassable spur, we occasionally got into impassable places, and lost time so badly that we were benighted when little more than halfway, but as there were no inhabitants we pushed on as a matter of necessity. When we got to better going the _mapu_, inspired by the double terror of robbers and wild animals, hurried on the ponies, yelling as they drove, and by the time we reached the Tok Chhön ferry a young moon had risen, and the mountains in shadow, and the great ferryboat full of horses, men in white, and bulls, in relief against the silvered water, made a beautiful night scene. I sent on the ponies, and Im to prepare my room, fully expecting comfort, as at Phyöng-yang, for though I could never find anybody who had been at Tok Chhön, it was always spoken of as a sort of metropolis.