Near by there are a few pointed-topped hills, queerly shaped, with occasionally an old tower perched on the summit,--the ten or twelve storied kind, which at once give the landscape a Chinese look, with superimposed roofs, curved up like dogs' ears, at the corners, with an Æolian harp at each end. The air is growing purer; the cloud of dust is left behind as we approach the unquestionably privileged region which has been selected for the repose of the celestial emperors and empresses. We stop at a village, after about a dozen kilometres, to take breakfast with a great prince of much higher rank than the one who rides with us. He is a direct uncle of the Emperor, in disgrace with the Empress, whose favorite he has been, and now entrusted with the guardianship of the tombs. As he is in deep mourning, he is dressed in cotton like the poor, and yet does not resemble them. He makes excuses for receiving us in a dilapidated old house, his own Yamen having been burned by the Germans, and offers us a very Chinese breakfast, where reappear the sharks' wings and hinds' nerves. The flat-faced peasants of the neighborhood peer at us in the meantime through the numerous holes in the rice-paper window-panes. We remount at once, after the last cup of tea, to visit the tombs toward which we have been journeying for three days, and which are now very near. My confrère of the Pekin Academy, with his big, round spectacles and his little bird-like body completely lost in his beautiful silken robes, has rejoined us, and slowly follows along upon a mule. A more and more solitary country. No more villages, no more fields! The road winds along among the hills,--which are covered with grass and flowers,--surprising and enchanting our unaccustomed eyes. It seems like a glimpse of Eden after the dusty-gray China we have come through, where the only green thing was the wheat. The perpetual dust of Petchili has been left behind; but on the plain below we still perceive it, like a fog from which we have escaped. We continue to mount, and soon arrive at the first spurs of the Mongolian range. Here behind a wall of earth we find an immense Tartar camp, at least two thousand men, armed with lances, bows, and arrows, guard of honor of the defunct rulers. Once more we see a clear horizon, the very memory of which had faded. It seems as though these Mongolian mountains suddenly huddled together as though they had all pressed forward; very rocky they are, with strange outlines, peaks like turrets or pagoda-towers rising above us,--all of a beautiful purple iris effect. Ahead of us we begin to see on all sides wooded valleys and forests of cedar. True, they are artificial forests, although very old,--planted centuries ago for this funeral park, covering an area twenty miles in circumference, where four Tartar emperors sleep.