My wound healed quickly, and on the third day after the fight I was able to move about in fair comfort. We had now come to the stiffest spell of our river journey--the ascent of the beautiful but perilous Yangtze Gorges. These famous localities are too well known from books of travel to need expatiating on here. Suffice it to say that we had passed in a few hours from reedy flats and swamps into a region of tremendous limestone cliffs, sometimes rising naked into the sky like a rock wall built by the Titans, sometimes cleft most picturesquely with gullies of pine and bamboo and orange-trees or bearded with clematis and fern. Not that we had much opportunity to admire the scenery. Our whole attention was usually concentrated upon getting that launch safely past dangerous whirlpools and snag-bottomed shallows into the comparatively peaceful water beyond. Philipson had well chosen his time for the attempt. The annual rise of the river, while it had already deepened the worst shoals, had not yet come to the tremendous pitch it reaches in autumn, when the mere force and volume of the water crushed into these jaws a few hundred yards wide blocks all progress for a span of months. As it was, our ascent was a wild, touch-and-go affair throughout, and I hardly knew whether to marvel more at the capabilities of our boat or the consummate nerve and skill of Saunders Philipson in handling her. There was the usual assembly of junks at the foot of each gorge, waiting their turn to be "tracked"--which is to say, hauled up through the racing water by big gangs of coolies harnessed to bamboo ropes ashore; and as we came along and set about ascending on our own motor power, tremendous yells went up from the trackers and the crews of the waiting junks and the sailors of the red-hulled lifeboats. These outcries may have been a warning to us, but I think rather that to the eyes of these primitive, superstitious folk we appeared a devil-boat, a phantom living through water that would have destroyed any craft of this world. One after another we took the dreaded gullies between the mountains--Niukan, Mitan, Wushan, the Wind-Box Gorge and the "Old Horse"; and when finally we reached Chungking, nine days after leaving the plains, I imagine we had accomplished a feat never before known in the history of Yangtze Kiang. Here Philipson had the launch thoroughly overhauled and put into store. Often during the next few weeks as we crawled up the rapid-fretted Kia Ling River, a tributary of Yangtze, in a native boat, we pined for that queenly little craft we had left behind. It was impracticable to take her farther, however, for here at Chungking, our last halting place with any pretensions to civilisation, we were obliged to lay in most of the stores for our cross-continental march--tents, blankets, water-proofs, cooking gear and what all; and this left precious little room to spare even in the big junk we now chartered.