Here is another excerpt from the journal my father kept on his 1934 expedition into the interior of Western China to collect specimens for the Museum of Natural History in NY. Would anybody read this if we published it? Monday, Oct. 22nd (1934) Our third day of penetrating into this magnificent wilderness. We travelled up the Changou Valley almost due West. On either side of the stream the mountains rose up abruptly a thousand to fifteen hundred feet forming deep, picturesque gorges. The trail led for the most part along the stream itself. Often we passed through tunnels of interwoven bamboo, where daylight scarcely penetrated, and we could catch but occasional white flashes of water from the rushing creek only a few yards away. More commonly we were walking through deep, semi-jungle; bamboos, rhododendrons, and bushes and vines of all sorts pressed close on either side of the trail. There were huge, moss-covered boulders and shallow caves running back under the ledges. Ancient willows leaned out from the bank over the water, their branches covered with soft, green moss, from which grew delicate ferns. A hundred small waterways trickled across our path, and underfoot the ground was soft with grass and dead leaves. It was really an enchanted valley. Once, rounding a sudden bend, a waterfall flashed into view through the trees. Spurting in crystal jets from a ledge two hundred feet above us, it seemed to drift down gossamer-like to loose itself in the shadows below, a dream without an ending. At eleven o’clock we came to a fork where our stream split. Ascending the left hand branch a short ways, we climbed a few hundred yards a steep hillside and came to Chung Wei, a place apparently consisting of three farmhouses, spread about an eighth of a mile apart in an open slope of farmland. At the first of these we stopped. It is the same place at which Dolan and Schaffer stayed three years ago, so history is repeating itself. I wonder what these native people think at the spectacle of strange foreigners with a large retinue invading their domains. I suppose we are but the second white men they have ever seen, for they are so local in their habits that I doubt they leave this immediate region.
Posted on: Sat, 30 Aug 2014 16:22:54 +0000
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