THROUGH ANNAM TO ITS CAPITAL
We were off again by the same conveyance at four next morning. Long
before daylight the road was alive with files of coolies, two loads
bouncing at the ends of each shoulder-pole, the same familiar lines of
jogging carriers as in China, with the difference that here there were
as many women as men, for the bound foot is one advantage of Chinese
civilization that was never adopted in Annam. All up and down the long
slender kingdom of the Eminent South endless miles of coolies of both
sexes come trotting to market to sell to one another. Always they jog in
Indian files, even on the wide modern roads, unable to cast off
centuries of training along the narrow trails of old Annam. All wore
palm-leaf hats; some carried parasols also, even before daylight,
perhaps as a protection against the setting moon. With the first rays of
sun, flung horizontally across the already tepid world, double lines of
pole-bearers stretched ahead and behind, on both sides of the road, as
far as the eye could see, the women carrying with a floating motion,
many of the men not carrying at all. New lines, cut out in fresco
against the brightening horizon, came jogging in along the dikes of the
paddy-fields. As both sexes dressed and carried alike, and the men wore
their long hair in Psyche knots, it was not easy to distinguish man from
woman until we were close upon them, sometimes not even then. Evidently
the Chinese found this annoying, for when they conquered Annam,
centuries ago, they ordered the women to wear short garments with wide
sleeves. China’s power over the kingdom of the south virtually ended
during the Ming dynasty, however, and the Manchus did not succeed in
introducing the queue.
The country was now perhaps a bit less mountainous than the day before,
the strip of plain wider, certainly more densely populated, and all its
products were bound market-ward. Here and there in the files a mother
carried a child at one end of her pole and a small pig at the other. The
hasty glimpse as we dashed past was not enough to decide whether the
youngster or the pig had been brought along as a counterweight. Like
their near relatives in China, the pigs of Annam refuse to walk to
market. Coolies carry them in baskets—“like foreigners in chairs”—or
merely with a band from their jouncing poles about their bellies, which
would seem to the disinterested observer to be more painful than
walking. Who would be so bold, however, as to claim to grasp the point
of view of a pig?
Often that morning the road ahead looked like a flowing river of
coolies, parasol-hats and jogging poles forming a kind of scum on the
surface. We dashed through this endless stream like a steamer through a
narrow waterway, our incessant horn always clearing a passage just soon
enough to escape doing the ceaseless multitude of dodging pedestrians
bodily injury, the chauffeur’s assistant striking a resounding thwack,
with a whip that he seemed to carry for no other purpose, on every
palm-leaf hat he could by any stretching reach. We dashed as
peremptorily through markets squatting along and, so rare is wheeled
traffic, even in the road at the frequent villages, markets noisy with
bartering, gatherings that recalled Haiti in other ways than the
pell-mell with which they scattered as we rode down upon them without so
much as slackening speed. Annamese markets are always a broad vista of
whitish palm-leaf hats, so that they look like an individually roofed
congregation. There were hat factories beside the road where more of
this ubiquitous head-gear was being fashioned, of other materials as
well as palm-leaves, it seemed, for the brass top of one soldier’s hat
came off in my presence and disclosed the filling to be the
apartments-to-let columns of a New York newspaper, yellow with several
years of tropical service. In certain movements and when the wind is
blowing the Annamese must keep his mouth open to hold his hat on, by
tautening the ribbon under his chin. Wanderlust in Annam takes the form
of going to market, especially among the women and girls. They like the
sense of freedom it gives them, the company, the gossip, above all the
bargaining, at which the women of Annam are past mistresses. In the
afternoon we met these same files of women, or at least their exact
counterparts, jogging homeward as heavily laden as they came, for they
often buy as much as they sell.
In this section, all through southern Annam in fact, every one not in
mourning wore black. Compared with those of Cambodia and of some other
parts of Indo-China, the women were almost prudish in their dress. Like
the men they wore thin cotton pantaloons as voluminous as those of the
modern college youth, and a jacket barely disclosing the neck, and more
often than not all this was covered with a flowing cotton coat reaching
almost to the ankles. Rarely was a breast revealed even during the
frequent nursing of children that in many cases should long since have
outgrown that form of nourishment. True, in the hottest hours of the
sea-level day many of the women, especially the older and less
attractive ones, wore in their own villages nothing between hat and
pantaloons except a diamond-shaped breast-protector, tied on with
cross-strings across the back, outdoing from the rear the most extreme
of Western evening-gowns. But on the road and in the market even the
flowing coats seemed almost _de rigueur_.
Among the coolie class these overcoats of both sexes were of thin
cotton. The better-to-do men in the towns and in the autobus wore
jet-black ones, thin as gauze, transparent as mosquito-netting, with
flowered designs of the same hue woven in them, like the pattern in
lace, and fastened together down the side with little gold buttons.
Beneath this the well dressed man wore a white jacket-shirt and very
loose cotton trousers, and thrust bare feet into black slippers or
wooden clogs. A black cloth carelessly wound about the head
distinguished most coolies, but all men above that class wore that most
unique item of the Annamese costume, a black band-turban permanently
arranged in many little folds, rising in stairway fashion up the
forehead and descending in the same manner at the back. This mere
head-band, without top, is worn indoors and out, even, one suspects,
during sleep. In place of the male turban the women wrap black cloth
about the long single thick braid of their generally luxuriant hair, and
wind this about the head. Out in the sun the palm-leaf hat sits on top
of turban or its feminine counterpart. At least along this main route of
French railway and autobus highway both men and women of the well-to-do
class wore gold and other valuable ornaments openly. Long necklaces of
grains of gold of the size of peas are the favorite adornment of the
women who can afford them; there were bracelets, sometimes several on
one arm, earrings usually of gold, and miscellaneous jewelry to suit the
individual taste or purse.
Rice lands stretch for many miles north of Quinhon, some so broad that
they looked like great inundated wheat-fields. In other places the hills
closed in like interested spectators, but still left room for a broad
strip of cultivation. Sunk to the knees in this slime, pantaloons rolled
to the tops of their thighs, men and women clawed about the roots of the
young rice. Here a laborer up to his—or her—middle in mud and water
toiled feverishly to stanch an overflowing pond by slapping hasty
handfuls of oozy black mud on a broken dike. On another such division
between the paddy-fields two Annamese of indeterminate sex were
alternately pulling and letting loose in rhythmic cadence the two ends
of a cord bearing in its middle a pail made of straw, the simplest
Oriental form of lifting water from an overflooded field into a thirsty
one above. Farther on, a coolie condemned to hard labor to earn his
rice, turned with his bare feet a primitive wheel that set in motion an
endless chain of simple buckets. To protect himself from the sun he held
in one hand an open umbrella, and no doubt dreamed himself a mandarin.
Right, left, sometimes everywhere as far as the eye could see, were
rice-fields, mirroring the sun so brightly that the eye quailed before
them. Yet there was little color to make gay this landscape of the
plains; it is green or nothing, except for the bluish tinge of masses of
the Japanese lotus or hyacinth. The Annamese planted this in a few
selected spots to celebrate the victory of the yellow race over the
white at Tsushima; and now, as if to punish them for their seditious
thoughts, it has spread far and wide, invading their ponds and
rice-fields, obstructing their watercourses. To-day the peasants of
Annam spend much of their time laboriously digging out and carrying away
this prolific and troublesome plant, good for nothing, not even as
fertilizer. In so narrow and intensively cultivated a land it is a great
problem even to find space on which to throw the stuff, yet their food
is just so much decreased until they can rid themselves of this
disastrous invasion of flowers.
A few red humped cattle lolled under wayside trees, or grazed on dikes
where they were mirrored in the flooded fields, as were the mountains in
the background and the huts in cocoanut-groves against the more or less
distant foot-hills. Clusters of water-buffaloes on vacation lay immersed
to their nostrils in mud-holes or swung their mammoth horns with an
inhospitable air along the mud ridges between the paddy-fields, or fed
on the edges of the uncultivated hillocks in which the great mountain
range always bulking clearly or hazily to the west gave up its contest
with the sea. A pair of birds stood blithely on the backs of some of the
amphibians; on others a boy, at times even a girl, lay at full length,
head pillowed on rump or withers. Among the trees especially these
ponderous beasts resembled, exactly as to color, that other survivor of
the dinosaurian age, the elephant. Some of them were of that dull creamy
hue of the sacred “white” elephants of Siam and vicinity. For a
semi-albino buffalo is common in Indo-China, its eyes red, a rough red
skin showing through scarce whitish hairs, as if it were half roasted in
the Annamese sun—perhaps it is only because it is not rare enough that
this abnormal beast is not also regarded as sacred.
A whole population was toiling in the rice-fields, or trotting
elastically along the dikes, two pole-balanced loads bouncing from every
shoulder. The rural Annamese are not lazy; on the contrary they are very
hard workers, though they have some of the natural indolence of the
tropics. Agriculture is laborious under the best of conditions, to say
nothing of those of the Orient; with his seldom lacking flock of
voracious children the _nha-qué_, the peasant of Annam, can rarely rest.
Small, but of great endurance, the countrymen of the Eminent South are
forever on the run, like ants in haste to provide themselves against a
drouth or a famine. Both sexes can trot indefinitely under great loads;
even a six-year-old boy can propel a sampan, though he may not yet have
reached the dignity of clothing.
Rice is by far the principal product of Annam, fish or fruit being a
slow second. Thanks to its rice, Annam is rich; all Indo-China is rich,
else why this Western form of “protection”? Low as they seem to us from
the land of exorbitance, prices are high compared to China. There were a
few beggars, now and then one obviously leprous, yet few indeed measured
by the rows of them along any important Chinese route. A visiting French
novelist, angry at the exchange between its real currency and his poor
paper francs, entitled one of his chapters on Annam, “Under the Sign of
the Piastre.” There are so many piastres in Indo-China that the Chinese
and the Chettys, the “usuricultors” who lend to the unforesighted
peasant at highwayman rates of interest, and even French officialdom and
monopolists, cannot take them all; there remain some for the _nha-qué_,
the toiling peasant who earns them all by the sweat of his brown
back—and those of his women-folk.
Since almost all the Annamese are agriculturists, there is no
aristocracy between the emperor and his mandarins and the _nha-qué_,
little exploiting of any other than the agricultural resources of the
country. Whatever wealth it has comes from the soil, almost entirely
from these flooded rice-fields mirroring the ever near-by chain of
mountains that shuts off this laborious people close on the west. For
the real Annam is only this very narrow strip of fertile lowlands on the
eastern slope of the Siamese peninsula. Like the Nile in Egypt, this
main highway, close as it is to the sea, takes in all the narrow
country. The Annamese chain crowds the toiling peasant so close to the
sea in many places that he is often driven into it as a fisherman to
escape starvation. He cultivates only the valleys, both because he knows
little else than rice and because the Moï, the barbarians of various
tribes, make it uncomfortable for him back in the hills. Yet narrow as
their country is, of the eighteen or twenty million people in French
Indo-China two thirds are Annamese. For as if to make up for its
slenderness, that strip of flatland between the mountains and the sea is
incredibly fertile, so fertile that its overcrowded toilers trouble
themselves far less with fertilizing than do the Chinese.
Bamboo of all sizes, palms ranging from mere fans to great masses of
leaves, magnificent trees, some of them bearing the jackfruit on their
trunks, cocoanut-palms hugging the coast-line, banana-plants all but
hiding thatched huts, above all the straight and slender arec-palm up
which climbs the clinging betel-vine, broke the monotony of the
rice-fields. There were miles of hedges gay with what looked like a
small pink rose, and large flowers made up of many tiny ones, care-free,
unconstrained bushes, not the domesticated hedge-rows of England. In
places a shock of colors like an explosion emphasized the landscape.
Then, after so long a stretch of rice-fields that they grew wearisome,
we went high up over a spur from which spread out another great vista,
more than half of it the dense, very green tops of cocoanut-palms.
Beyond came miles of waste-lands, with sand white as snow piled up over
sterile hillocks.
There were hundreds of graves among these barren sands, strewn as
closely together as are the green unmarked grave-mounds that emerge
everywhere from the rice-fields, where agriculture gnaws at them year
after year, century after century, yet never destroys them. Though
January was not yet done, and the lunar New Year was still a week off,
preparations had almost everywhere been completed for that important
date. Here and there a man was still touching up his family graves,
giving them a new top of sand or earth, weeding and clearing them of all
vegetation, before the Annamese New Year should overtake him and bring
reproach from the spirits of his ancestors. But most of this work had
already been done, so that the rounded knolls, such as stretch in
hundreds of millions from northern Korea to southern Annam, were bare
and smooth now, all showing some sign of recent care. Here in the
waste-lands the graves looked like sand-mounds left by playing children;
farther on came queer coffin-shaped ones of cement or baked mud, just as
if a coffin above the ground had merely been plastered over.
The Annamese live and keep shop on a wooden platform a couple of feet
above the earth floor; and generally mere boards laid on two sawhorses,
covered with a thin reed mat, serve them as beds. Rarely has a native
house more comfort than that. As all houses should be redecorated at New
Year’s, there is a great market then for new reed, grass, or fiber mats,
and whole processions of them were coming in from the country districts
on the shoulder-poles of men and wives. Some were plain, some had simple
designs, some had streaks of color running through them, and I saw many
rich with red and purple and lush-green hues that no doubt would grace
the hard couch of the wealthy. To the Annamese the mat is the symbol of
the bed, of the couple, the household; and believing as firmly as the
French that it is not well for man to sleep alone, they always sell
these mats in pairs. If a family buys only one mat at New Year’s
renewing-time, say the wiseacres, some member of it is sure to die
within the year. From the moment that two persons are gathered together
they should buy two mats, and as there is very little single blessedness
in Annam, merchants do not wish at any price to divide a pair and run
the risk of never selling the odd one. Bachelors and old maids, one
gathers, are as badly off at New Year’s time as a one-legged man in a
shoe-store—and it serves them right, any native of early-marrying Annam
would no doubt answer, were his attention called to one of those rare
and unnatural beings.
Every little while during that all-day journey from Quinhon to Tourane
gusts of rain sprang up, between stretches of blazing sunshine, and then
men, women, and children, every one of the outdoor class, slipped on
palm-leaf rain-coats that were shaped like opera-capes, or like barrels
with one stave removed so that the wearers could get into them, and
which they turned in any direction against the slant of the rain. Scores
of boys in these leaf rain-coats sat their water-buffaloes or their red
humped cattle and let it drizzle. A real shower brought out so many
rain-coats that the whole landscape—people and houses, buffaloes and
hillsides—were covered with palm-leaves.
In the slimy pond at the entrance to every village the inhabitants were
washing their rice, their clothing, their water-buffaloes, their
night-buckets, themselves, everything that is dirty, and dipping from
the same spot water for their kettles. They live with their cattle,
their sway-back pigs, their chickens, ducks, and orphaned curs; at
noon-time everybody in the villages, even the yellow mongrels, the black
pigs, the wilt-tailed fowls, slip into the cai-nha, or thatched hut, for
the siesta; and by night there is a similar congregating. Yet they are
not so filthy as the Chinese; all things are relative. It behooves a
more southern people, eager to live out its allotted span, to show less
innocence of the meaning of cleanliness than do the incredible
Celestials.
Once that day we met an elephant. He was being slowly driven along by a
nonchalant coolie dozing astride his neck, grazing as he went. Somehow
an elephant strolling down a modern highway, marked with kilometer-posts
and traveled by autobuses, daintily picking a bit of weed or a tuft of
grass here and there, and attracting no more attention than a cow or a
water-buffalo, was more impressive than one all dolled up in a
circus-parade.
When it was not clambering over a spur of the ever jostling mountain
chain to the west, this road through Annam was always the same—a dike
between two rice-fields, dusty or muddy in the country, filled with
people, pigs, and dogs in the towns and villages. Then suddenly,
frequently, inevitably, another _bac_, an ancient floating contrivance
that leaks and creaks with age, which Annamese push across some river or
inlet of the sea with poles that seem too heavy for their meager arms.
Sometimes the commander of the _bac_ is a woman, strongest of all the
crew, not only in will-power but in muscle. Once in a while we crossed a
woven-bamboo bridge that gave with a groan under our cruel weight and
regained its shape as an invalid knocked down regains his feet. But the
short rivers of narrow Annam are often so wide and so erratic that they
discourage the building of bridges. For the stream rises or falls,
according to the season, disappears, comes back in a towering rage; and
red with anger some morning it carries away not only bridges, where any
exist, but dikes, roads, villages, the very railways, anything that
dares to loiter in its imperious path. Then, too, Indo-China has
terrific typhoons, which tear down her forests, to say nothing of
destroying roads and bridges and the other puny works of the French
usurpers.
The French do their best to keep the highways of Indo-China up to their
own far-famed standard, especially this ancient route through Annam that
is still sometimes known, in memory of the days when Chinese officials
went over it in chairs, as the Mandarin Road—though now it is Route
Coloniale No. 1. A French _ingénieur de routes_ lives in every stretch
of a hundred kilometers or so; there was much road-mending all along
that two-day autobus journey. An army of _congaïes_, the supple young
women of Annam, trotting like black ants along the dikes, carried
stones, mud, and other materials in little baskets at the ends of their
shoulder-poles; at frequent intervals we dashed past long heaps of
broken stone; men and women, boys and girls, the two sexes working and
looking incredibly alike, and showing no sign that they recognized any
difference in sex, toiled to keep the road passable.
[Illustration: An Annamese girl, chaperoned by her small brother, sells
her wares in the market-place of Hué]
[Illustration: When it rains in Annam, as it does on every provocation,
a simple straw raincoat covers either sex among the masses]
[Illustration: Like the southern Chinese the Annamese are expert boatmen
because they learn their calling long before they reach the dignity of
clothing]
[Illustration: Swinging in the village squares is a favorite diversion
of the Annamese populace during the lunar New Year’s season]
The roads of Indo-China, even this principal highway of Annam, are
constructed for one vehicle at a time, as are the _bacs_ and the narrow
cement bridges across the slighter streams that were constantly breaking
through from the mountains on this journey up the eastern coast of the
China Sea. There was little reason for them to be wider, for few
automobiles take advantage of the Frenchman’s expensive road-building,
though there were then more than four thousand motor-cars in Indo-China,
and any one who has recently traveled in continental eastern Asia knows
that means a great many. We passed a private car or two during the day,
the south-bound autobus of our own line, and the rival mail-carrying
government buses, the one bound in our direction constantly racing past
us or being in turn left to swallow our dust or wallow in our mud. A few
big clumsy carts drawn by water-buffaloes brought rice to market;
further than that there were almost no other vehicles, except rickshaws.
No wonder road-filling markets and startled villagers, to say nothing of
pigs, curs, urchins, and chickens, were not prepared for us when we
roared down upon them out of the south and on like an avalanche into the
north. Nearly all the carts of Indo-China are drawn by man-power; even
massive machinery is hauled by human muscle, though there are a few
stout little horses. A hammock slung on two poles, with a woven-reed or
split-bamboo cover over it, were the only survivals of the sedan-chairs
once so numerous along the Mandarin Road. To-day you can scour all
Indo-China, from Bac-Lieu to Laokay, and never meet, at least on a main
road, a single palanquin, nowhere find a chair porter, once so numerous,
but only a thin line of autobuses and automobiles, and many rickshaws.
We met rickshaws everywhere, plying even between towns far apart in the
well inhabited sections of this Shoestring Country. Red rickshaws
rattling with the iron-tired wheels of our buggy of a generation ago,
nearly all carried two passengers, and freight or baggage enough to sink
an ox-cart. Yet the little runner, seldom as large as either passenger,
trotted mile after mile across the country, rarely falling into a walk.
Even in hard-working China two adults are hardly ever seen riding in the
same rickshaw, but in Annam it is so common as to be almost the rule. It
is of course nice and cozy, romantic and unoriental, to see a man riding
along with his wife half in his lap—granting that it always is his wife;
certainly it is some one’s wife, for nothing is so rare in Annam as old
maids. Sometimes there is a half-grown child also, for good measure,
giving the skinny puller the task of dragging three persons and all
their movable belongings along mile after mile of highway, until you
wonder whether even the dull-witted human horses themselves do not
realize that it might have been better for them if the French had never
come to build roads capable of two-wheeled vehicles.
Tourane, where the autobus ended its northward task some time before
sunset on the second day out of Nhatrang, is a “foreign concession.” One
suspects that the “protected” emperor of Annam lost little time in
conceding this much to the French when they expressed a desire for a
_pied à terre_ in Annam, with a status similar to those they hold in
Shanghai and Tientsin. As a matter of fact Tourane, the best harbor in
Annam, was given to the French, along with the islands of Poulo Condore
and Touron off the coast of Cochinchina, in return for their help to
Gia-long in consolidating the claims of the present dynasty at the
beginning of the nineteenth century. Tourane bulks larger on the map
than on the spot. It suggests a real-estate boom in some aristocratic
old hamlet that died out long before the “plotting” by its optimistic
sponsors reached its justification. In area it vindicates its
conspicuousness on paper; on the spot it is even more roomy than the
average town of Annam under the French, straining itself to cover as
great a space as possible, like some of our largest American cities,
like a squatter who fears that anything he may not claim will be taken
away from him. Grass-bordered roads rather than streets, broad rural
highways among widely scattered French tropical residences in spacious
yards, each with the atmosphere of a private park, the necessary
official buildings of a French headquarters, shops and market-place
enough to supply the wants of the residents, and the Hôtel Morin, half
grocery and half _pension_, for the accommodation of transient
foreigners, just about complete the inventory. Scattered at the end of a
short wide river where it empties into an excellent blue harbor in which
ocean steamers can anchor close to the town, it is no city at all
compared even with obscure Faifo a few miles south; but as a residence
of foreigners it takes on a false importance.
By the same token it has some of the comforts of home, or at least their
tropical counterparts. The expenditure of two piastres a month brings
daily to those householders capable of appreciating such luxuries two
large bottles of sterilized water from the French government hospital.
Ice, without which the French refuse to live for a day in their
Far-Eastern empire, is brought every morning from Hué, sixty-five miles
away. I was reminded by contrast of the endless individual tasks of
boiling all water that passes the lips of any but the most foolish
foreigners in China, and that four fifths of the foreign residents there
know ice only from homeland memories, while thousands of them never
enjoy the luxury of a really cold drink from the time they leave their
transpacific steamer until they embark for home again. Wherever half a
dozen Frenchmen are gathered together in Indo-China there is an
ice-making machine, or at least some means of getting a daily supply
from some more fortunate group. The most constant cry in any French
hotel dining-room in the colony is “_Nuoc-da!_” Natives who have become
sophisticated in such matters have much sport in startling the Moï and
other wild tribes back of the sea-level strip with the “water-stone”
produced by their French masters. A piece of it passed from palm to palm
until it disappears like a few drops of perspiration produces more
astonishment among the hills than does an automobile or airplane. It is
pure magic to the naïve wearers of the loin-cloth, and by such things
have the people of the West won their prestige among them.
Until I reached Tourane I had not seen a Christian missionary in
Indo-China—that is, not a Protestant missionary; the French do not
admit that their own priests are missionaries in a land over which
their own flag waves. Glad as the traveler always is to meet his own
people in very foreign parts, I had been half conscious of a feeling
of relief at the scarcity of avowed soul-savers, compared to the
swarms of them in China itself. This paucity of workers in the
spiritual vineyard of a race in some ways more Christ-like than we is
not an indication that Protestant missions have wilfully overlooked
Indo-China but that the French do not fervently welcome them there. In
all the colony-protectorate there are only a few proselyters from the
English-speaking world, and they are confined to three or four
stations. In activity as well as in territory they are forced to be
very circumspect, and thereby hangs the sad tale they have to tell the
traveler who will listen.
They came first in 1911, a bit of pollen wafted southward from the great
mission-field of China. At first they were allowed comparative freedom,
or at least were graciously ignored. Then came the World War, and in due
time the discovery that the United States might not after all join the
Allies. Neutrals were rated little better than enemies in this far-flung
slice of the French empire. All American missionaries in the possession
were ordered to leave. The Canadians might remain, since they were
allies; but as they were merely individual workers in what was virtually
an American mission-field, they had little choice but to leave also.
When the war was long enough over for its bitternesses to have become
somewhat diluted, the missionaries were allowed to return, but only to
find their goings and doings more hampered than ever. They were almost
freely admitted to Cochinchina, because it is rated a colony, in which
the laws and customs of France apply in most matters. They were allowed
in Tourane, because it is a “foreign concession.” But the rest of
Indo-China being merely under the “protection” of France, missionary
work there is a different matter. The authorities had discovered that
the treaty of 1877 between the emperor of Annam and the Western world,
by which Christian missionaries were granted the right freely to
propagate their doctrines in the emperor’s realm, applied only to the
Catholics, “because they are the only Christians within the meaning of
the text.” Moreover the startling fact was unearthed that “the emperor
and his ministers are against the teaching of the Protestant doctrines
to their people”—as if the poor little puppet on the throne of Annam
would dare to be against anything unless his French guardians suggested
it. Similar difficulties developed against admitting missionaries to
Tonkin, Cambodia, and Laos, and to-day the saving of souls in the
Protestant fashion is not a flourishing enterprise in that part of the
peninsula east of Siam.
On the other hand the Annamese are converted to Catholicism by whole
villages, particularly after some priestly assistance in the courts, a
communal loan, or some other legitimate Catholic form of propaganda. One
great inducement is that the converts are allowed to retain their
ancestor worship, under a slightly different guise. But then, the
Protestant missionaries permit their rare converts to keep all the wives
of whom they are possessed at conversion, so long as they do not add to
them afterward. “What,” the missionaries quite properly ask, “could be
done with cast-off wives if their converted husbands found Christianity
a means of getting rid of their support?”
In Tourane there was a Protestant church—though the French deny such
false places of worship any other name than _temple_—and a school. But
those great educational and medical institutions so common in China with
its thousands of missionaries of who knows how many sects are not a
feature of the Indo-China landscape. The French have many hospitals, but
they are government- rather than priest-operated. They have found it
uphill work to encourage the Annamese to go to them, and only of very
late years have they attracted any great percentage of the population,
though clinical service is free and even in-patients pay very
little—lying-in cases, for instance, are charged about a piastre a
fortnight, just enough to pay for native food. But when the French
doctors go to call on patients outside the hospitals they ask fees of
five piastres a visit of French and Annamese alike. Naturally an
Annamese earning ten piastres a month cannot call in the doctor often,
so they fall back upon their own medicine-men. “_Mais quoi donc!_” cry
the French; “A doctor must have his pay like any one else, _n’est-ce
pas?_” True enough no doubt, though after two years of associating with
the foreign missionary doctors of China, whose fees amount almost to
nothing—unless the patients are non-missionary foreign residents—one
begins to dream of some more ideal method in matters of health than the
competition of the market-place.
I coaxed one of the few Americans engaged in saving souls in Tourane to
take a needed holiday and visit the “Marble Mountains” with me. These
farthest-south outrunners of the great rock hills that become so
numerous and so fantastically individual in form farther north, dotting
by thousands the Bay of Along and stretching far on down the West River
in the Chinese province of Kwangsi, seem wholly out of place here
protruding from the flat sandy coast-land. It is as if the gods,
carrying these absurd heaps of molten rock from their equatorial
melting-place to their allotted destination, had dropped a few of them
unnoticed on the way. Across the river, by native boat, we walked for
hours along the beach toward them, close as they look to the town. The
sea, stretching away to the eastward like a sheet of molten steel,
rolled great breakers in at our feet. Had they swept over us we should
probably have been less drenched than we were with perspiration from
that endless plodding through the sand.
The incandescent sun stood sheer overhead by the time we reached that
misplaced cluster of savage heaps of rock. Jagged mountain peaks jutting
out of the sand like islands from the sea, the “Marble Mountains” of
Tourane, taking their name from the marble-like rock of which they are
formed, rise in thousands of pinnacles, nearly all of them sharp as
needles, the peaks themselves pointed as the head of a Roman spear.
Nature evidently did not intend man to explore these isolated crags
standing out so sharply against the white sand all about them. For not
only are the myriad rocks themselves needle-pointed, but all the
vegetation that steals its scanty nourishment among them bristles with
thorns. No four-footed animal has ever been known to venture up them;
and only hardy climbers of the two-legged species, with the price of a
new pair of shoes available, are wise to attempt the ascent, slight as
is the elevation. From the summit of the highest, once the climber can
find standing-space for both feet, spreads a brilliant scene of beach
and sea, of rice-green plain backed by the endless Annamese range not
far inland, and, dim in the offing, the hogback island which the
government rents to a syndicate of Cantonese who gather there the
ingredients of bird’s-nest soup.
We fell upon our wilted lunch at a temple cut into the lower slope of
one of the “mountains,” a temple quite like those of China, even to the
languid attitude of the priests. Then we explored grotto after grotto,
deliciously cool after our infernal climb. In the largest of them the
Annamese have set up other Chinese-style temples, for the attracting of
pilgrims. Half-naked families peered forth from little huts nearly
buried in the sand as we skirted the bristling waterless heaps on our
way to the river, down which native boatmen sculled us back to the town.
The mission stands so convenient to the railway station in the outskirts
of the widely scattered concession as to suggest that the workers in
this difficult bit of the Lord’s vineyard wish to be prepared at any
moment to abandon their task at the behest of their powerful rivals. The
train that picks up there the broken end of what in a few years will be
a continuous railroad the whole length of Indo-China strains its way for
more than two hours toward Hué, the Annamese capital. First there is a
desert of brush and sand from mountains to the sea, its blue bays dotted
by so many sails that one’s sympathy is rather with the hunted fish than
with the crowded people who must have them or starve. Huge fish-nets on
poles, pulled from the shore, leave the denizens of the deep little
chance for safety except by taking to the far high seas. Then for twenty
miles the railway crawls along the face of a cliff, not a hundred feet
above chaotic heaps of rocks boiling in the surf of a vast stretch of
blue ocean, burrowing its way through many tunnels. At length both rocks
and sea disappear, some densely jungled hillsides succumb in time to a
plain, now planted with rice, now covered with low brush, single
weather-faded thatched huts or clusters of them scattered across it, and
with the sudden tropical twilight passengers blend into the chaos of
rickshaw-men of the capital of Annam.