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the sky; to the right, hills with the sun full against them were delicately molded, seeming even rounder than they were. Down on the lake we could see a few small junks with high rectangular white sails.

There were a few clouds, but only enough to improve the landscape. Occasionally we could see the plane's shadow on a cloud, and around the shadow a rainbow-like halo caused by refracted and reflected rays. The landscape was falling away in twisting valleys between gorgeous mountains, seemed more spectacular than the area between Mexico City and the sea because more crammed. The hills jostled the lakes, and cliffs almost pushed the tiny railroad line, which we could see twisting and tunneling below us, into the gorges it followed. The atmosphere where we were flying was crystal clear, and because the land tumbled away before us from 6,000 feet to sea level, we could see ahead much farther than usual.

Across from me were two very funny little Chinese men, who were very nervous about going into French territory with no knowledge of the language. They had on a slip of paper, and were busily reciting to each other with incredibly funny accents, four somewhat garbled phrases: "A quelle heure on dejeuner?" "Ou se trouve Air France office?" "Je veux changer mes Chinois dollars en piastres." "Je ne comprends pas." 'How they were going to understand the answers to these questions and statements, they did not say. Every once in a while they asked me about the pronunciation of one of the words.

I had thought the Hongkong-Chungking flight the most beautiful trip I would ever make; and yet this, in its way, was just as wonderful. The imagination of nature makes us seem awful dullards.

For a time the mountains became more and more rough and undisciplined, and then gradually relaxed into something which would have been a roll had there been room. We lost altitude with the tipped landscape, and after three hours were actually flying lower than the ground from which we had taken off. Not only the topography, but also the vegetation, changed below us. We began to see banana trees and cocoanut palms. At last we reached a broad tropical plain, so flat that the wide river which earlier had rushed through those gorges, sometimes divided into ten twisting ribbons and they redivided into other broad streams; all of which, in the end, joined again in time to redivide again. For huge stretches there was almost as much water to be seen as land. Around bends in the river, acres of cultivated land had recently been washed out; the rainy season had begun.

Hanoi lies as flat as the land, so flat that we could not see it until we were almost directly above. A tremendously long bridge runs out of the city across the river. Our landing was on that other side.

The heat when we got out was blistering: 100°. Before long I saw that the nervousness of my two Chinese friends was completely justified. All three of us wanted to take the next plane to Hongkong. There was an Air France representative at the airport, who told us, when we asked him all together, that he didn't know how many seats were free on the plane which was to leave the next day. But a few minutes later he drew me aside and told me that there were just two seats; that I'd better hurry to town to the office and get one of them before the Chinamen got there. I said that we had come from Kunming together, and I could hardly play such a trick on them. He shrugged his shoulders, and reproached me: "Monsieur, zey are Chinee."

On the way into town I rode in a taxi with a young Chinese business man. He told me that he is in the trucking business, transporting gasoline, food, oil, cotton and small piece goods to Chungking from Kunming. Knowing that demand is extremely heavy, that the transportation rate is $1,000 per ton on that run, and that the run is only about 400 miles, I wondered whether profits were very heavy, and after a few leading questions, asked him bluntly: "What margin of profit do you make?" First he looked at me slyly, then he broke into a broad grin, and said: "Business velly good. Velly good." And so while China

Monday, June 12. My interview with the British Ambassador, Sir Archibald
John Kerr Clark-Kerr, was almost worth the whole trip out here. He is a man
of tremendous personal courage, and one of China's very best friends.

The Embassy Offices, which are distinct from the big consulate, are on
the fifth floor of the Jardine Matheson building. As I went in, I noticed
three huge policemen guarding the front entrance, one on each side, one right
in front. There was another guarding the elevator, and three more on the
fifth floor by the office door.

Since I had an appointment, I was shown into the secretary's office. His
private secretary is a young fellow probably only a few years out of the University,
efficient, deep-voiced, but like many British civil servants, sharp and cruel
with Chinese underlings. I was obliged to wait twenty minutes, and when the
Ambassador was finally free, his secretary and assistant both happened to be
out of the room. Another man, in grey slacks and a yellow tennis shirt, came
in and said: "You're waiting for me?" I should never have guessed it was the
Ambassador; it was almost as rude a shock as when I came on Ambassador Johnson
in his underwear! My picture of a British Ambassador, which I suppose I got
from pictures of the European kind, was of a pompous, probably monacled super-
gent in diplomatic uniform. Clark-Kerr couldn't have been farther from that
mark. The first thing he said inside his office, which was an office, not a
lounge, was: "Take off your coat and be comfortable."

He showed me a copy of a letter to his superiors at home, the first he has
had a chance to write, describing in detail the effects of the Chungking bombings
on British official properties. He drew a map something like this:

A is the Embassy; B a tennis court area; C the servants' quarters; and D
the consulate. As the bombing began, or rather just after the warning siren,
the Ambassador was going out by gate II to get up on a high place to get a better
view of the raid. At the gate he found that a big crowd of Chinese were trying
to get in for shelter, and that his sentries were keeping them out. He directed
the sentry to let the poor people in for such shelter as the grounds could give
them. And so about thirty or forty were let in.

The Ambassador went on up the hill (and was not in the Embassy as Edgar
Snow had told us). He was right among anti-aircraft batteries, about twelve of
which he counted nearby; and none of them were silenced, as Japanese reports
said. That particular raid was a double one: the planes turned after one
attack, and flew over again. When the Ambassador's secretaries, who had had
no experience with raids, heard the warning siren for the second attack, they
thought it was the all-clear signal, and they left their "funk-hole" and headed
back up for the Embassy. They were just at gate I when bombs started falling.
Bomb I hit the corner of the Embassy building, bounced off, and exploded in the
ground, doing a small amount of damage. This was the bomb which knocked a brick off
the wall onto the secretary's head. Bomb 2 was an incendiary which landed in some
bushes and burned them. Bomb 3 landed in the tennis court. It must have been
a 500-kilo bomb, for the hole it dug (the Ambassador showed me a picture of it)