The Daily Dispatch: April 24, 1862., [Electronic resource]

The great wall of China.

I left Tish- on the 18th of March, and after a three days ride through as uninteresting a country as can well be conceived, came in sight of the fine solid wall which encloses the straggling mass of ruin, dirt and decay, called Pekin. At day break on the following morning we climbed the highest peak of the mountain range, and there, standing on the top of the wall, reflected upon the stupendous folly of this wonderful work of human industry, which is said to have cost the country two hundred thousand lives from sheer exhaustion. The wall, which is built of stone and brick, is twenty feet nigh and fifteen feet broad, surmounted by a double parapet, loopholed on the north side. As far as the eye can follow the mountain range it winds over the ridges of the precipitous black rocks like a gigantic serpent crawling along, and with its breath prisoning all around; for, -rn where you will, nothing meets the view but the desolate, dreary tract of rock, unrelieved by a glad, of grass or a turf of moss, and both boulders strewing the base of the mountain sides. It was the whim of a tyrant to build a wall where nature had already built a barrier far more effectual than anything that human art could construct. However, there it remains, after a lapse of nearly two thousand years--a monument of the cruel folly of one man, and the patient industry and sufferings of many thousands.