Thus, with a grand impressiveness, this great gully in the mountains
assumed hugely gigantic proportions, stretching interminably from east
to west, up to heaven and down to earth, silhouetted to the north
against a small remaining patch of golden purple, whose weird glamour
seemed awesomely to herald the coming of a new world into being, lasting
but for a moment longer, until again the blue blaze quickly cut up the
sky into a thousand shreds and tiny silver bars. And then, suddenly,
with a vast down swoop, as if some colossal bird were taking the earth
under her far-outstretching wings, dense darkness fell--impenetrable,
sooty darkness, that in a moment shut out all light, all power of sight.
Then from out the sombre heavens deep thunder boomed ominously as the
reverberating roar of a pack of hunger-ridden lions, and the two men,
aliens in an alien land, stood beneath the tattered matting awning with
a peculiar fear and some foreboding. We were tied in fast to the
darkened sides of the great Ichang Gorge--a magnificent sixteen-mile
stretch, opening up the famous gorges on the fourth of the great rivers
of the world, which had cleaved its course through a chain of hills,
whose perpendicular cliffs form wonderful rock-bound banks, dispelling
all thought of the monotony of the Lower Yangtze.

Upstream we had glided merrily upon a fresh breeze, which bore the
warning of a storm. All on board was settling down into Yangtze fashion,
and the barbaric human clamor of our trackers, which now mutteringly
died away, was suddenly taken up, as above recorded, and all
unexpectedly answered by a grander uproar--a deep threatening boom of
far-off thunder. In circling tones and semitones of wrath it volleyed
gradually through the dark ravines, and, startled by the sound, the two
travelers, roused for the first time from their natural engrossment in
the common doings of the _wu-pan_,[C] saw the reflection of the sun on