Much of the indigo disembarked at Chefoo. The ship seemed to have run aground on a brown island of barges. This island was peopled by brown coolies with vacant faces; their heads were half shaven and half covered with hair like cotton waste; sometimes they had bound their hair into chignons. Under their unresting but unhurrying hands, their island of barges became mountainous with sacks of indigo. Many of the sacks burst; indigo oozed down the slopes of the mountains; the coolies became bluer and bluer; there was indigo in their hair and indigo round their shoulders like shawls. Edward and the captain walked austerely and thirstily about Chefoo. The Chinese of Chefoo seemed to be of a rougher race than those of Hongkong. They even grated on the eye, Edward thought. They were taller and hairier; their clothes were neither neat nor complete. Their houses were ragged and indecent. The houses of the missionaries looked to Edward even more impossible than those of the Chinese. Outside one of the mission gates a thin boy, quite naked, tortured a yellow lizard. There were yellow, scarred hills round the harbour. They trailed a silken hem of white sand into the sea and, behind the town, a green scarf of orchard land was thrown upon the shoulder of a low hill. Between golden castled hills the ship left the harbour in the evening. The Yellow Sea was really yellow. It was thickly yellow and reflected no light. It was more like a desert than a sea. The eye would have found a string of camels crossing the sea no anomaly. The Pei-ho River was yellow too. The ship entered the river between low mud forts. Salt was stacked on a broad streaky plain to the north. Primitive windmills, like merry-go-rounds at English fairs, whirled among the stacks of salt. The earth was yellow, the water was yellow, the long slanted wave that ran after the ship was yellow and, breaking over the squeaking yellow babies on the shore, left them a little yellower. The villages were of yellow mud; the blind mud houses had no angles; they were like beehives. There was a ragged yellow camel kneeling self-consciously in a street; he kneeled as though his hind legs were broken. A little girl in dark strawberry red—an exquisite color for a dweller in golden mud—watched the camel from a dark doorway. The boats in the river had nets stretched between bending slim poles hinged to their masts. When, worked by primitive levers, these nets were bowed to the water and rose spangled and silvered, the boats were like dragonflies resting delicately on the water. Tientsin ... a few dusty hours in a train ... Peking. The train seemed to collide with Peking. The high city wall approached the railroad at a steep angle. The train seemed to glance from the wall without impact. Edward found himself outside the Water Gate, at the inner wall of Peking.