HAIRY PIGMIES.

Evening Post, Volume LXXVII, Issue 111, 12 May 1909, Page 10

HAIRY PIGMIES.

EXPLORER'S DISCOVERIES ON THE j GREAT WALL. CHINESE WONDERS! Dr. W. Edgar Geil, the American traveller and writer, has (says the London Daily Chronicle) given to Renter's Agency some particulars of an interesting journey he has made along the whole length of the Great Wall ot China. Dr. Geil lately arrived in England from the Far East. Discussing his expedition, Dr. Geil said : — '' Travelling on mountain mules, we followed the Wall for a distance of approximately 1800 miles, starting at the seashore at Shanhaikwan, and finishing at Kiayukun, on the Nan Shan range, on the northern border of Tibet. We found roughly 200 miles of the Great Wall so far unmapped. This section is a loop wall running from the east and west line of the Great Wall near the city of Liang Chau. On the greater portion of this section no masonry now remains, but there are massive towers of earthen core. I am satisfied that there are at least ten great walls apart from that which is known as the Great Wall of China. x "At one point we heard of a race of Chinese pigmies, and the investigations I was enabled to make tended to confirm the reports we received. It is said that the ancestors of these people, who live in the mountains, were driven there when the Wall was building, having escaped to avoid compulsory work upon it. The descendants have lived in these mountains for twenty centuries, and are to-day wild creatures covered with hair. " I spent some time investigating the. mound of Chin, near Sian Fu — the burial place of the originator of the Great Wall. It is an enormous mound of 918 acres, surrounded by ruined walls. We were told that there was beneath ifc a subterranean palace connected by a long tunnel with the mountains. A NEW SPIRIT. " Some of the changes I found in the remoter parts are almost incredible. Within five days of Tibet I found a modern steel truss bridge being erected over the Yellow River, and in Lanchau, in the province of Kansu, where the Viceroy is making a fine boulevard right through the city, I saw electric light and a tramway. " But perhaps what struck me most was the fact that all over the country, even in the remotest villages, I found small groups of young men drilling. In some cases there were only ten or fifteen men, but it appeared to be part of a concerted plan, of the precise object of which the people themselves, seem ignorant. I believe, however, that it is part of a general plan to prepare secretly an enormous army. One curious thing I noted along the Great Wall was that over a distance of one thousand miles there is one predominating disease — goitre — and one predominating bird — the magpie."-