the last three days.

In an hour they had traversed the hundred and twenty-five miles of
the Korean strait, and while the typhoon was raging on the coast of
China, the "Albatross" was over the Yellow Sea. During the 22nd and
23rd she was over the Gulf of Pechelee, and on the 24th she was
ascending the valley of the Peiho on her way to the capital of the
Celestial Empire.

Leaning over the rail, the two colleagues, as the engineer had told
them, could see distinctly the immense city, the wall which divides
it into two parts--the Manchu town, and the Chinese town--the
twelve suburbs which surround it, the large boulevards which radiate
from its center, the temples with their green and yellow roofs bathed
in the rising sun, the grounds surrounding the houses of the
mandarins; then in the middle of the Manchu town the eighteen hundred
acres of the Yellow town, with its pagodas, its imperial gardens, its
artificial lakes, its mountain of coal which towers above the
capital; and in the center of the Yellow town, like a square of
Chinese puzzle enclosed in another, the Red town, that is the
imperial palace, with all the peaks of its outrageous architecture.

Below the "Albatross" the air was filled with a singular harmony. It
seemed to be a concert of Aeolian harps. In the air were a hundred
kites of different forms, made of sheets of palm-leaf, and having at
their upper end a sort of bow of light wood with a thin slip of
bamboo beneath. In the breath of the wind these slips, with all their
notes varied like those of a harmonicon, gave forth a most melancholy
murmuring. It seemed as though they were breathing musical oxygen.