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30 THE SIEGE OF POET ARTHUR
fire. These dongas have been formed by the
torrential summer rains of centuries, and have
generally perpendicular sides and attain depths
up to sometimes fifty feet. Seen from afar they
look like black snakes wriggling their way uphill.
On the other side of the valley, right in front
of General Nogi’s position, rises a tangled mass
of hills and peaks and crags, intersected by
narrow valleys and gorges and gullies, but with a
general direction from north-west to south-east.
This high land is shaped like a parallelogram,
with its northern side, facing the Shuishi valley,
running nearly due east and west. From the
highest peak there, Wantai Hill, a series of short
spurs spring forth in a northerly direction. Each
of these spurs had been fortified ;
on some of
them permanent forts had been built, others were
only provided with semi-permanent defence-works.
As by far the greater amount of the fighting during
the siege took place about these fortifications, it
will be as well to give at this juncture an enumera-
tion of them, leaving a nearer description until
later, as they, one after the other, were attacked
and captured. I may mention at once that the
Japanese called each of these positions, as they
did with the rearward battery positions, a “ fort,”
and as they probably will appear as such in the
official Japanese reports, I shall adopt this way of
designating them, although it is in reality quite
incorrect. As for their names, I have, as far as
possible, used the old Chinese ;
the Russians
called the different defence-works by numbers or
letters, while the Japanese names, which often
are simply translations of the Chinese, are known
by none but themselves. Beginning from the
west, we have the following fortified spurs and
hills (see Appendix III.) : —
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