The face of China, travels in East, North, Central and Western China; with some account of the new schools, universities, missions, and the old religious sacred places of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism . they are obliged to let go, and then thejunk slips back in the swirl of water, to the greatdanger of any others that may be in the rear. The fourth day after leaving Ichang we had a verynarrow escape of this sort. I had been admonishingthe captain about his stupidity in following closebehind a heavy large junk, and told him we oughtto have been in front of it, by starting a lit
The face of China, travels in East, North, Central and Western China; with some account of the new schools, universities, missions, and the old religious sacred places of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism . they are obliged to let go, and then thejunk slips back in the swirl of water, to the greatdanger of any others that may be in the rear. The fourth day after leaving Ichang we had a verynarrow escape of this sort. I had been admonishingthe captain about his stupidity in following closebehind a heavy large junk, and told him we oughtto have been in front of it, by starting a little earlierin the morning. He was surly, and complained thatit would have been necessary to get up so very, veryearly; but he was soon brought to repentance bysomething much more unpleasant than my were waiting our turn to get round a sharpcorner, and were moored to the bank, so we had nomeans of escape when the big junk suddenly swoopeddown upon us. A horrible grinding, tearing, crashingsound ensued, accompanied by violent yells from themen; but we gasped with relief to see our walls stillintact, though our windows were shivered and theshutters torn off. The damage done was quite small, 124. ch. xiii On the Yangt%e but it delayed us several hours that day, and causedus to be at the end of a long string of boats for gettingup the big rapid next day. The Yeh Tan rapid (nicknamed Mutton Point bythe prosaic foreigner) is one of the most dangerous,and we made great preparations in case of accident,packing up our things carefully in oiled paper—amost useful Chinese article, as it is a very cheap kindof waterproof. Our men made quite other prepara-tions, which they firmly believed in. A quantity ofspecial sacred paper was waved—burning—over thefront of the boat; incense sticks were fixed up andlighted ; finally a cock was killed, and its blood andfeathers plentifully bespattered around. This wasextremely distracting to me, as I was well embarkedon a sketch when it took
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