By the beginning of August the great heat was due to pass away. There came a mighty thunderstorm, like the bursting of giant shells. Hailstones as big as pigeons’ eggs, made up of a nodule of ice, a layer of snow and then an outer coat of ice, came rattling down in volleys, driving scorpions and centipedes and other horrors to take shelter in our rooms. In three hours the thermometer fell thirty degrees, and would not rise again till the following summer. It was time to fly back citywards. In the two or three days that it took to pack up our various belongings the torrents of rain had wrought a transformation scene. The dry fields and banks were all bright with a young green growth, and in the meantime the giant millet had sprung to a height of some twelve or thirteen feet, so that we rode along the dense paths like Gulliver in the fields of Brobdingnag, guessing at our way. Now came a season during which the weather was such a joy that life was worth the living just for its own sake. Those of us who could claim an immunity from official work for two or three weeks made ready for a trip to Mongolia or some other happy hunting ground. Saurin, after two years, had well earned a holiday, and was bound with another man for an expedition beyond the Great Wall, and I, having a few days at my disposal before the next mail, agreed to go with him as far as Ku Pei K’ou, the great pass between China and Mongolia. Among the great monuments of the world there can be few more striking than those of the North of China. Peking itself, that grim and grey city with all its mysteries and tragic secrets, is difficult to beat. The Great Wall of China at Ku Pei K’ou, a most lovely spot, where it is still in good repair, overtopping the glorious peaks of the mountains, climbing for miles and miles up and down precipices where there would seem to be hardly foothold for a goat, let alone for a bricklayer and his hod, is a marvel. In places which I saw once when I followed its course for some two hundred miles, it has now fallen under stress of weather and neglect into mere heaps of rubble. But at Ku Pei K’ou it is as imposing as it was when the Emperor Shih built it, some two hundred and thirty years B.C., to hold the Mongol hordes at bay. It is perhaps an impertinence to speak of the Tombs of the Ming Emperors in the same breath with the great relics of Egyptian magnificence. Here we can count at most five centuries—there as many millenniums. The great Pyramid of Cheops and the Sphinx are in a category by themselves; and yet in “The Thirteen Tombs” there is something of the same largeness of thought, the same fight for immortality. About five miles away from the little town of Chang Ping Chou—famous, or rather infamous, as the scene of the torture of the British and Sikh prisoners of war in 1860—is a wide plain surrounded by hill scenery of great beauty.