the Mississippi-Missouri, four thousand miles from its mouth, and on
March 1st were in the mouth of the Yangtse river whose waters are
gathered from a basin in which dwell two hundred millions of people.

The Yamaguchi reached Woosung in the night and anchored to await
morning and tide before ascending the Hwangpoo, believed by some
geographers to be the middle of three earlier delta arms of the
Yangtse kiang, the southern entering the sea at Hangchow 120 miles
further south, the third being the present stream. As we wound
through this great delta plain toward Shanghai, the city of foreign
concessions to all nationalities, the first striking feature was the
"graves of the fathers", of "the ancestors". At first the numerous
grass-covered hillocks dotting the plain seemed to be stacks of
grain or straw; then came the query whether they might not be huge
compost heaps awaiting distribution in the fields, but as the river
brought us nearer to them we seemed to be moving through a land of
ancient mound builders and Fig. 24 shows, in its upper section,
their appearance as seen in the distance.

As the journey led on among the fields, so large were the mounds,
often ten to twelve feet high and twenty or more feet at the base;
so grass-covered and apparently neglected; so numerous and so
irregularly scattered, without apparent regard for fields, that when
we were told these were graves we could not give credence to the
statement, but before the city was reached we saw places where, by
the shifting of the channel, the river had cut into some of these
mounds, exposing brick vaults, some so low as to be under water part
of the time, and we wonder if the fact does not also record a slow
subsidence of the delta plain under the ever increasing load of
river silt.