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Updated: June 17, 2025
But, just as he had singled out, as his probable captor, one peculiarly unattractive-looking horseman, whose crimson sheepskin coat and long horsetail plume were streaming in the wind, and just as he had braced himself to meet the onset against the great "loess," or dirt-cliff, he felt a twitch at his black upper robe, and a low voice a girl's, he was confident said quickly: "Look not before nor behind thee, good O-lopun, but trust to my word and give a backward leap."
We do not yet know what the men of these communities looked like, because as yet no indisputable human remains have been found. All the stone implements have been found on the surface, where they have been brought to light by the wind as it swept away the loess.
As to the higher and lower level gravels of that valley, which, like that of the Seine, contain no foreign rocks, we have seen that they are each of them covered by deposits of loess or inundation-mud belonging respectively to the periods of the gravels, whereas the upland loam is of much older date, more widely spread, and occupying positions often independent of the present lines of drainage.
Thus a considerable part of western China and much of the United States to the west of the Mississippi is covered by these wind-blown earths. Wherever the rainfall is considerable these loess deposits have proved to have a high agricultural value.
Its texture and lack of stratification give it a vertical cleavage; hence it stands in steep cliffs on the sides of the deep and narrow trenches which have been cut in it by streams. On loess hillsides in China are thousands of villages whose eavelike dwellings have been excavated in this soft, yet firm, dry loam.
They are reared in smoke and physical and moral filth, and become men and women when they should be children: they haggle and envy, and swear and murmur. When in Yün-nan or even in the whole of China will there be the innocence and beauty of childhood as we of the West are blessed with? Roads here were in many cases of a light loess, and some of red limestone rock, with a few li of paved roads.
A few steps farther and we leave this broad alluvial bottom to enter the cañon through which the river, ages ago, began to cut its course. These ridges of limestone, loess and drift rise a hundred feet or more above the level of the plain from which the river suddenly turns aside. They are thickly covered with timber.
The red loess lay over everything, covering the streets and the open spaces of park and plaza, hiding the small houses that had been crushed and pressed flat under it and the rubble that had come down from the tall buildings when roofs had caved in and walls had toppled outward.
Here there is a bluff, the upper 60 feet of which consists of a continuous portion of the same calcareous loam as at Vicksburg, equally resembling the Rhenish loess in mineral character and in being sometimes barren of fossils, sometimes so full of them that bleached land-shells stand out conspicuously in relief in the vertical and weathered face of cliffs which form the banks of streams, everywhere intersecting the loam.
Thus, the loam which fills to a great depth the wide valley of the Saone, which is bounded on the west side by an escarpment of Inferior Oolite, and by the chain of the Jura on the east, is very like the loess found in the continuation of the same great basin after the junction of the Rhone, by which a large supply of Alpine mud has been added and intermixed.
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