The _Whang Ho_ sheered to one side and shouldered past the outermost shoals. O’Shea took the wheel, and Charley Tong Sin, cool and quick-witted, told him how to follow the turbid, twisting channel that wound its course between the sea and the wide mouth of the estuary. More than once the steamer scraped the oozy bottom, hung and shivered while the breakers pounded her, and then stubbornly forged ahead, timbers groaning, boilers hissing, propeller kicking up clouds of mud astern. It was evident that the channel had shoaled in places since any other steamer had made the passage, and it was not at all certain that the _Whang Ho_ could stand the strain of forcing her way to sea again. “I have not been here since two years ago,” said the comprador. “It is worse than I expected, you bet! Ai oh, a man that sails with you dies a dozen deaths, Captain O’Shea.” “I find it more comfortable than living in the best hotel in Shanghai,” very pointedly returned the shipmaster as he climbed the spokes of the big wooden wheel with hands and feet and wrenched the _Whang Ho_ clear of a hungry sand-spit. By now she was fairly in the midst of the marshy islands that extended from the watery main-land. The violence of the surf was broken and the tide moved in broad, sluggish currents. Mr. Parkinson, who was swinging the sounding lead, shouted that the channel had deepened to five fathoms. The steamer had survived the passage. Two miles farther inland she let go anchor in a wide lagoon. The afternoon had waned. A cloudy twilight was closing down. On every hand stretched a flat, unbroken region of swamp and creeks and rivers. No villages were visible nor groves of trees against the sky-line to mark the situation of a temple. A few small fishing-boats with ragged sails fled at sight of the foreign steamer. The comprador waved his hand to starboard and exclaimed: “Yonder it is, the River of Ten Thousand Evil Smells, as you call it in English. Wait till the tide goes down, and you will find out pretty quick why the Chinese give it that funny name.” “’Tis a filthy-looking country,” quoth Captain O’Shea. “It looks like one great big sewer, with the yellow water and the sludge and the slime on the banks.” “It was all very well drained one time, long ago,” explained Charley Tong Sin. “Then there were many people and towns. The Tai Pings destroyed the canals and played the dickens with everything. And nothing has been repaired, so the people don’t live here any more.” “And where is this place called Wang-Li-Fu?” demanded O’Shea. “Six miles up that stinking river. You think you will see the Painted Joss to-morrow, Captain?” “The Stinking River and the Painted Joss! You are loosening up, Charley. I am near the end of me journey when you say things like that. I have heard of them before.”