six o'clock
At six o'clock in the evening we are at King-Tcheou , after skirting for some time the capricious meanderings of the Great Wall . Of this immense artificial frontier built between Mongolia and China , there remain only the blocks of granite and red quartzite which served as its base , its terrace of bricks with the parapets of unequal heights , a few old cannons eaten into with rust and hidden under a thick veil of lichens , and then the square towers with their ruined battlements . The interminable wall rises , falls , bends , bends back again , and is lost to sight on the undulations of the ground . At six o'clock we halt for half an hour at King-Tcheou , of which I only saw a few pagodas , and about ten o'clock there is a halt of three-quarters of an hour at Si-Ngan , of which I did not even see the outline . All night was spent in running the three hundred kilometres which separate this town from Ho Nan , where we had an hour to stop . I fancy the Londoners might easily imagine that this town of Ho Nan was London , and perhaps Mrs. Ephrinell did so . Not because there was a Strand with its extraordinary traffic , nor a Thames with its prodigious movement of barges and steamboats .