write now in the Ichang Gorge, I seem veritably to have reached
eternity. I seem to have arrived at the bosom of an after-life, where
one's body has ceased to vegetate, and where, in an infinite and eternal
world of imagination, one's soul expands with fullest freedom. There
seems to exist in this eternal world of unending rock and invulnerable
precipice permanent realities which stand from eternity to eternity. As
the oak dies and leaves its eternal image in the seed which never dies,
so these grand river-forced ravines, abused and disabused as may be, go
on for ever, despite the scribblers, and one finds the best in his
imagination returning by some back-lane to contemplative thought. But as
a casual traveler, may I say that the first experience I had of the
gorges made me modest, patient, single-minded, conscious of man's
significant insignificance, conscious of the unspeakable, wondrous
grandeur of this unvisited corner of the world--a spot in which
blustering, selfish, self-conceited persons will not fare well? Humility
and patience are the first requisites in traveling on the Upper Yangtze.

Reader, for your sake I refrain from a description. But may I, for
perhaps your sake too, if you would wander hither ere the charm of
things as they were in the beginning is still unrobbed and unmolested,
give you some few impressions of a little of the life--grave, gay, but
never unhappy--which I spent with my excellent co-voyager, The Other
Man.

It is a part of wisdom, when starting any journey, not to look forward
to the end with too much eagerness: hear my gentle whisper that you may
never get there, and if you do, congratulate yourself; interest yourself
in the progress of the journey, for the present only is yours. Each day
has its tasks, its rapids, its perils, its glories, its fascinations,
its surprises, and--if you will live as we did, its _curry and rice_.