Explore "China" by Harry Alverson Franck on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It was hot in Suifu at the end of July when Yang Chi-ting and I, with our horses and our baggage, reached there on a very shaky native boat. The water in the branch which we had been following for a week was so high that it snatched us in about four hours over a distance that usually takes two hard days by land. It gave us a queer feeling not to hear a sound from the river while we were traveling on it, though it had roared in our ears day and night when we were clambering along its stony shores. Two hours after we took the boat the branch joined the Yang-tze, 1700 miles above where it reaches the ocean near Shanghai. Up there the Yang-tze rushes on as if it were still dizzy from its fall down out of the mountains of Tibet-a very different stream from the broad placid river below Hankow.
We were still more than two hundred miles from the capital of the great province of Szechuan, which means "Four Rivers. " We might have taken a small steamer up another branch of the Yang-tze and perhaps have found water enough in a small branch of this big tributary to have gone on to Chengtu by another native boat. But only those with plenty of time and no end of patience should travel up small rivers in China. So we hired two new coolies for what was left of our baggage, and started off still farther to the north.