A MANCHURIAN DELUGE--A PASSENGER CART--AN ACCIDENT
It surprised me much to find that only one foreign resident had visited
Mukden, which is only 120 miles distant by a road which is traversable
in winter, and is accessible by river during the summer and autumn in
from eight to ten days. I left Newchwang on the 3rd of July, and though
various circumstances were unpropitious, reached Mukden in eight days,
being able to avoid many of the windings of the Liau by sailing over an
inundation.
The kindly foreign community lent me necessaries for the journey, but
even with these the hold of a “pea-boat” was not luxurious. My camp-bed
took up the greater part of it, and the roof was not much above my
head. The descent into the hold and the ascent were difficult, and
when wind and rain obliged me to close the front, it was quite dark,
cockroaches swarmed, and the smell of the bilge water was horrible.
I was very far from well when I started, and in two days was really
ill, yet I would not have missed the special interest of that journey
for anything, or its solitude, for Wong’s limited English counted for
nothing and involved no conversational effort.
For some distance above Newchwang or Ying-tzŭ, as far as the real
Newchwang, there is a complication of muddy rivers hurrying through
vast reed beds, the resort of wild fowl, with here and there a mud bank
with a mud hovel or two upon it. At that time reed beds and partially
inundated swamps stretched away nearly to the horizon, which is limited
in the far distance by the wavy blue outline of some low hills.
We ran up the river till the evening of the second day before a
fair wind, and then were becalmed on a reedy expanse swarming with
mosquitos. The mercury was at 89° in the hold that night. I had
severe fever, with racking pains in my head, back, and limbs, and in
the morning the stamping of the junkmen to and fro, along the narrow
strip of deck outside the roof, was hardly bearable. Wong had used up
the ample supply of water, and there was nothing wherewith to quench
thirst but the brown, thick water of the Liau, the tea made with which
resembled peasoup.
On the morning of the third day it began to rain and blow, and for the
next awful four days the wind and rain never ceased. The oiled paper
which had been tacked over the roof of the boat was torn into strips by
the violence of the winds, which forced the rain through every chink.
I lay down that night with the mercury at 80°, woke feeling very cold,
but, though surprised, fell asleep again. Woke again much colder,
feeling as if my feet were bandaged together, extricated myself with
difficulty, struck a light, and got up into 6 inches of a mixture of
bilge water and rain water, with an overpowering stench, in or on which
all things were sunk or floating. Wondered again at being so very cold,
found the temperature at 84°, and that I had been sleeping under a
wringing sheet in soaked clothing and on soaked sacking, under a soaked
mosquito net, and that there was not a dry article in the hold. For the
next three days and nights things remained in the same condition, and
though I was really ill I had to live in wet clothing and drink the
“liquid cholera” of the flood, all the wells being submerged.
Telegrams later in the English papers announced “Great floods in
Manchuria,” but of the magnitude of the inundation which destroyed for
that season the magnificent crops of the great fertile plain of the
Liau, and swept away many of its countless farming villages, only the
experience of sailing over it could give any idea.
In that miserable night there were barkings of dogs, shouts of men,
mewings of cats, and general noises of unrest, and in the morning, of
the village of Piengdo opposite to which we had moored the evening
before, only one house and a barn remained, which were shortly carried
away. Many of the people had escaped in boats, and the remainder, with
their fowls, dogs, and cats, were in the spreading branches of a large
tree. Although the mast of my boat was considerably in the way, and it
was difficult to make fast, I succeeded in rescuing the whole menagerie
and in transferring it in two trips to a village on the other side,
which was then 5 feet above the water.
We had reached the most prosperous region of Manchuria, a plain 60
miles in length, of deep, rich alluvial soil, bearing splendid crops,
the most lucrative of which are the bean, the oil from which is the
staple export of the country, the opium poppy, and tobacco. The great
and small millet, wheat, barley, melons, and cucumbers cover the
ground, mulberry trees for the silkworm surround the farmhouses, and
the great plain is an idyll of bounteousness and fertility. Of all this
not a trace remained, except in a few instances the tops of the 8-feet
millet, which supplies the people not only with food, but with fuel,
and fodder for their animals.
The river bank burst during the night, and the waters were raging into
the plain, from which I missed many a brown-roofed village, which the
evening before stood among its willow and poplar trees. At 11 a fair
wind sprang up, junks began to move, and my boatmen, who had talked of
returning, untied and moved too. After an exciting scene at a bend,
where the river, leaping like a rapid, thumped the junks against the
opposite shore, we passed one wrecked village after another, bits of
walls of houses alone standing. The people and their fowls were in
the trees. The women clung to their fowls as much as to their babies.
Dugouts, scows, and a few junks, mine among them, were busy saving
life, and we took three families and their fowls to Sho-wa Ku, a
large junk port, where a number of houses were still standing. These
families had lost all their household goods and gods, as well as mules,
pigs, and dogs. On our way we sailed into a farmyard to try to get
some eggs, and the junk not replying to her helm, thumped one of the
undermined walls down. It was a large farmhouse and full of refugees.
The water was 3 feet deep in the rooms, naked children were floating
about in tubs, and the women, looking resigned, sat on the tables. The
men said that it was the last of four houses, and that they might as
well be dead, for they had lost all their crops and their beasts.
A fearful sight presented itself at Sho-wa Ku. There the river,
indefinite as it had previously been, disappeared altogether, and the
whole country was a turbulent muddy sea, bounded on the east by a range
of hills, and to the north and south limitless. Under it lay all the
fruits of the tireless industry and garden cultivation of a large and
prosperous population, and the remorseless waters under the influence
of a gale were rolling in muddy surges, “crested with tawny foam,” over
the fast dissolving homes.
On this vast flood we embarked to shorten the distance, and sailed with
three reefs in the sail for 13 miles over it, till we were brought up
by an insurmountable obstacle in the shape of a tremendous rush of
water where a bank had given way. There we were compelled to let go two
anchors in the early afternoon. The wind had become foul, and the rain,
which fell in torrents, was driven almost horizontally. Nothing that
suggested human life was in sight. It might have been “the Deluge,” for
the windows of heaven were opened. There were a muddy, rolling sea, and
a black sky, dark with tremendous rain, and the foliage of trees with
submerged trunks was alone suggestive of even vegetable life and of the
villages which had been destroyed by the devouring waters.
In 13 miles just one habitation remained standing, a large, handsome
brick house with entrance arch, quadrangle, curved roofs, large farm
buildings, and many servants’ houses, some of which were toppling, and
others were submerged up to their roofs. There was a lookout on the
principal roof and he hailed us, but as there were several scows about,
enough to save life, I disregarded him, and we sailed on into the
tempestuous solitude where we anchored.
The day darkened slowly into night, the junk rolled with short plunging
rolls, the rain fell more tremendously than ever, and the strong
wind, sweeping through the rigging with a desolate screech, only just
overpowered the clatter on the roof. I was ill. The seas we shipped
drowned the charcoal, and it was impossible to make tea or arrowroot.
The rain dripped everywhere through the roof. My lamp spluttered and
went out and could not be relighted, bedding and clothing were soaked,
my bed stood in the water, the noise was deafening.
Never in all my journeys have I felt so solitary. I realized that no
other foreigner was travelling in Manchuria, that there was no help
in illness, and that there was nothing to be done but lie there in
saturated clothes till things took a turn for the better.
And so they did. By eight the next morning the scene was changed. The
sky was blue and cloudless, there was a cool north wind, and the waste
of water dimpled and glittered, the broken sparkle of its mimic waves
suggesting the ocean after a destructive storm has become a calm. After
sailing over broad blue water all day, and passing “islands” on which
the luckier villages were still standing, towards evening we sailed
into a village of large farmhouses and made fast to the window-bars of
one of them, which, being of brick, had not suffered greatly. Eleven of
the farms had disappeared, and others were in process of disappearing.
The gardens, farmyards, and open spaces were under 5 feet of water,
the surface of which was covered by a bubbly scum. The horses and
cattle were in the rooms of the brick houses where many human beings
had taken refuge. A raft made of farming implements ferried the people
among the few remaining dwellings.
At that farm the skipper brought a quantity of rice for his family,
and by a lovely moonlight we sailed over the drowned country to his
village. The flood currents were strong, and when we got there we were
driven against two undermined houses and knocked them down, afterwards
drifting into a road with fine trees which entangled the mast and sail,
and our stern bumped down the wall of the road, and the current carried
us into a square of semi-submerged houses, and eventually we got into
the skipper’s garden, and saw his family mounted on tables and chairs
on the top of the _kang_.
Two uneventful days followed. The boatmen were in ceaseless dread of
pirates, and I was so ill that I felt I would rather die than make
another effort.
Arriving within 3 miles of Mukden, Wong engaged a passenger cart,
a conveyance of the roughest description, which is only rendered
tolerable by having its back, sides, and bottom padded with mattresses,
and I was destitute of everything! Nothing can exaggerate the horrors
of an unameliorated Chinese cart on an infamous road. Down into ruts
2 feet deep, out of which three fine mules could scarcely extricate
us, over hillocks and big gnarled roots of trees, through quagmires
and banked ditches, where, in dread of the awful jerk produced by the
mules making a non-simultaneous jump up the farther side, I said to
myself, “This is my last hour,” getting a blow on my head which made
me see a shower of sparks--so I entered the gate of the outer wall of
beaten clay 11¹⁄₂ miles in circuit which surrounds the second city of
the empire. Then, through a quagmire out of which we were dragged by
seven mules, I bruised, breathless, and in great pain, and up a bank
where the cart turned over, pulled the mules over with it, and rolled
down a slight declivity, I found myself in the roof with the cameras
on the top of me and my right arm twisted under me, a Chinese crowd
curious to see the “foreign devil,” a vague impress of disaster in my
somewhat dazed brain, and Wong raging at large! Then followed a shady
compound ablaze with flowers, a hearty welcome at the house of Dr.
Ross, the senior missionary of the Scotch U.P. Church, sweet homelike
rooms in a metamorphosed Chinese house, a large shady bedroom replete
with comforts, the immediate arrival of Dr. Christie, the medical
missionary, who pronounced my arm-bone “splintered” and the tendons
severely torn, and placed the limb in splints, and a time of kind and
skilled nursing by Mrs. Ross, and of dreamy restfulness, in which the
horrors of the hold of the “pea-boat” and of the dark and wind-driven
flood only served to emphasize the comfort and propitiousness of my
surroundings.
[Illustration: PASSENGER CART, MUKDEN.]