The infamous path traverses a wild rocky glen with an impetuous torrent at its bottom, and only a few wretched hamlets, in which the hovels are indistinguishable from the millet and brushwood stacks, along its length of several miles. Poverty, limiting the people to the barest necessaries of life, is the lot of the peasant in that region, but I believe that his dirty and squalid habits give an impression of want which does not actually exist. I doubt much whether any Koreans are unable to provide themselves with two daily meals of millet, with clothes sufficient for decency in summer and for warmth in winter, and with fuel (grass, leaves, twigs, and weeds) enough to keep their miserable rooms at a temperature of 70° and more by means of the hot floor. To the west the valley is absolutely closed in by a wall of peaks. The bridle-path, a well-engineered road, when it ascends the very steep ridge of the watershed in many zigzags, rests for 100 feet, and descends the western side by seventy-five turns. Except in Tibet, I never saw so apparently insurmountable an obstacle, but it does not present any real difficulty. The ascent took seventy minutes. Rain fell very heavily, but the superb view to the northeast was scarcely obscured. At the top, which is only 100 feet wide, there is a celebrated shrine to the dæmon of the past. To him all travellers put up petitions for deliverance from the many malignant spirits who are waiting to injure them, and for a safe descent. The shrine contains many strips of paper inscribed with the names of those who have made special payments for special prayers, and a few wreaths and posies of faded paper flowers. The woman who lives in the one hovel on the pass makes a good living by receiving money from travellers, who offer rice cakes and desire prayers. The worship is nearly all done by proxy, and the rice cakes do duty any number of times. Besides the shrine and a one-roomed hovel, there are some open sheds made of millet stalks to give shelter during storms. The An-kil Yung pass is blocked by snow for three months of the year, but at other times is much used in spite of its great height. Excellent potatoes are grown on the mountain slopes at an altitude exceeding 3,000 feet, and round Tok Chhön they are largely cultivated and enter into the diet of the people, never having had the disease.