HURRYING ON TO THE NORTHERN CAPITAL
I was up at four the morning after the imperial ceremony, in
sufficiently good mood to refrain from kicking the “boy” who had called
me according to orders, and off in a heavy rain by a rickshaw assured
the evening before by a combination of heavy subsidy and threatened
penalty. The train from Hué to Dongha, completing the central stretch of
the railways of Indo-China that begins at Tourane, ran close outside the
moat of Hué citadel, the walled imperial city stretching from river to
river. Beyond, a rich plain was almost completely covered with rice, a
wet green plain backed by the mountain ranges, bulking against the
western sky, that were never far distant on the left. The scantiness of
the country, the paucity of its arable land, seemed to be emphasized
here; for Annam gets very narrow indeed north of Hué, so narrow that it
all but breaks in two. Yet it was surprising how many people were
crowded into this slender strip of earth, how many things of interest to
the hurried traveler too, for that matter.
At length, hardly an hour beyond Hué, we rode out from under the clouds
as from under a roof. For the climate runs in streaks up and down this
narrow country. The weather again became, and, what was more to the
point, remained, splendid, so that almost the only time I did not have
brilliant sunshine during my two months in Indo-China was during that
enforced delay at Hué. Another hour and we ran out of track, and were
set off at 7:30 at a mere station, where I stepped into an autobus in
which I rode until 8:30 that night.
There were plenty of Annamese in the back four fifths of the vehicle,
though it was not packed as the autobuses of Annam often are. For at
this New Year’s season most people were either already at their
ancestral homes or had no intention of coming. Just how the driver and
his unfailing assistant were induced to work at such a time was a
mystery, but that perhaps is one of the advantages of French rule. These
autobuses run as regularly as the trains with which they connect,
whether there are passengers or not, for at least there are the mails.
In fact on the whole they run a little faster than the trains, which is
perhaps one reason their fares are higher. My Scotch blood evidently
having surged to the surface during my delay, I had taken before leaving
Hué a second-class ticket, partly too, I fancy, in order to prove that
the company would have to sell me one, in spite of my complexion. There
had been no argument, though white men cannot ride among the natives in
fourth class on the trains. But the Annamese agent at Dongha, as if he
could not bear to see the race that ruled over his land mingling with
his fellow-countrymen, insisted that I ride first class, that is, in the
front seat, behind the driver this time. Or there may have been another
reason; for when my recovered baggage was placed in the closed box at
the rear of the car—also a first-class privilege, since freight and
express, the parcel-post and the baggage of native passengers, was all
piled up on the railed roof of the vehicle or tied along the
running-boards—he mentioned casually that of course it weighed
considerably more than the fifteen kilograms even a first-class
passenger was allowed as free luggage; and as the rate for anything
above that amount is nearly as high as for human flesh, I felt it only
fair to slip a couple of paper piastres into his limp palm, at which he
not only did not protest but even thanked me in imperfect French.
This time I had a fellow-passenger of my own color. A Frenchman of
sturdy frame and studious face, a khaki patch held in place over one eye
by a cord that had left a thin white line free from sunburn diagonally
across his intelligent features, had also stepped off the train. As the
custom in England and its newer American counterpart of strict
incommunicativeness between strangers unexpectedly meeting on the road
does not apply among the hospitable French colonials of Indo-China, I
soon discovered that my companion, though ostensibly in the customs
service, was a novelist whose latest romance against an Annamese
background I had finished reading the evening before. I might have been
embarrassed at being discovered by so important a personage, an official
to boot, occupying “European accommodations” at the price of a native
ticket, had I not quickly learned that the novelist had not even paid
second-class fare for his first-class seat, but was traveling on a
government _réquisition_, which cost him nothing more than the asking.
He had been in the customs service of Indo-China since early manhood,
but chancing to be on furlough in his native land when the World War
broke out, he had joined his regiment at once, fighting unscathed all
through the war, until, three days before the Armistice, he had lost an
eye. But the government had been kind. It had kept him on the pay-roll
as a customs officer, but let him run about the country at government
expense, to such things as the ceremony we had just seen at the court of
Hué, in order that he might gather material for more writing. For your
Frenchman realizes that even an honest novel, true as to local color, is
useful propaganda; and Indo-China has a longing to be known, in France
as well as in the world at large. Hawthorne and Whitman, I recalled, had
not been paid their government salaries in order that they might go on
producing what was perhaps even better literature than that of my new
traveling companion. Nor could I remember having heard of any of our
crippled war veterans receiving government aid in the production of art
or letters.
We made the constant good speed of a limited express, along a road
raised a foot or two above the rice-fields, here dry but green, still
flooded back toward the foot-hills. I could in fact have ridden a little
less swiftly with more pleasure. For there being rarely any turn in the
road, and no other vehicles, gasoline-driven or otherwise—luckily, since
the roads of Indo-China are for one car at a time—we went over the many
short bridges just wide enough for so ponderous a conveyance as ours
with the roller-coaster feeling of a day at Coney Island. It was a
gravel road in which grew grass that seemed to have sprung up during the
last few days of rain; and there was never a fence or other protection
from it even at the villages through which we roared so madly. Striking
peaks stood out among those rows of ranges perpetually following us on
the west; at the mouths of the several short rivers that looked like
seas in the raging wind we were ferried across in the usual decrepit old
_bacs_.
At Donghoï or Quang-binh we were the first guests in a brand-new hotel,
subsidized by the government in order that the few French travelers who
go up and down the _Route Mandarine_ may have all the advantages of home
during the _déjeuner_ and siesta that break the journey there. During
that Parisian ceremony we picked up a French colonial burned a reddish
bronze by half a lifetime at a country post beneath the equatorial sun.
He went on with us for a few hours to his bungalow at the place where
another _bac_ came across the sea to us at the call of a water-buffalo
horn in the hands of a ferryman. Before it had fought its way to the
southern shore there was ample time to enjoy the coolness of an interior
in marked contrast to the facial and temperamental heat of its chief
occupant, who, apologizing for the absence of his _congaïe_ to do the
honors, had his “boys” serve us drinks cooled with the ice that was
thrown off to him each forenoon from the south-bound bus. Without this
daily necessity he could of course no more have endured life in his
isolated station than without his respectful servants and his female
companion. Most of the conversation ran on the selfishness of a few of
his younger colleagues in expecting their own countrywomen to accompany
them to such posts of “exile in the wilderness.”
Every house or hovel of the natives had standing before it the tufted
bamboo of the New-Year season, that signal to the spirits of the air
that the people who live beneath it are pious and not to be
molested—something akin to the hobo signs of our own land. In many of
the villages the populace was childishly enjoying itself in swings made,
supports and all, not too securely of bamboos crudely lashed together.
Toward the middle of the afternoon we found ourselves making toward a
great wall of mountains at right angles to the main ranges. It looked as
if this ponderous autobus could not possibly pass such a barrier, at
least without the united assistance of the passengers, and I recalled
with some misgiving the ancient story of second-class travelers being
obliged to get off and push, while those in first class had merely to
walk. For the day was still uninviting to physical exertion, and my
special front-seat privileges might not be honored in such an emergency
without the two-piastre agent at Dongha to protect me. But the road
found a way up and around and over the steep spur, twisting itself into
hair-pin curves to climb a slope up which an old-style Chinese road went
straight and unswerving, with the hardiness of the pioneer, to the
remnants of a gate at the lowest point, not far from where our less
virile modern route surmounted it.
To all intents and purposes we had come to the end of Annam. What the
Chinese named the Eminent South Country was usually reckoned as
beginning on the north at the Gate of Annam, as this pass has been
called for centuries. This was the old Annam-Tonkin boundary; there is
still the vestige of an ancient wall built along the summit by the
Annamese to protect themselves from invasion, and many great battles
have been waged there. To-day the official boundary is much farther
north, and does not signify anyway, for there is a fiction that Tonkin,
the northern knob of the Indo-China dumb-bell, is now a part of Annam,
ruled over by Koang-de, the Son of Heaven at Hué.
The climb had opened out a great amphitheater of a valley,
checkerboarded with rice-fields, a stretch of the sea with a curving
beach that flashed in the afternoon sunshine, several other spurs that
almost hindered our progress, and more rows of ranges, with densely
green forests in the hollows high up on some of the ridges. On the
southern side of the Gate there had been no forest, only a light brush;
but it looked as if the northern slopes, blue-black now in the slanting
sunshine, were all thickly wooded. Long pasturelands, rolling and bushy,
dotted with red herds, almost completely crowded out cultivation for
some distance. There were few inhabitants, but many tiger temples, all
set in clusters of bamboos or trees, as if the wilderness that had
driven out the rice-fields brought the dreaded beast that much nearer.
The mountains had pushed us so close to the sea that for some time
beaches and even islands seemed but a stone’s throw away.
A slightly different human type appeared beyond the Gate of Annam,
stockier, the women perhaps a bit better looking, or more nearly good
looking—so long as they kept their repulsive mouths shut. In fact
purists among the French anthropologists of Indo-China insist that the
real Annamese are not in the handle of the dumb-bell at all, but in
Tonkin, because south of the Gate so many tribes have been Annamited, so
to speak, mingled in blood and culture with the conquerors from the
north. Unlike their relatives south of the Gate, the Tonkinese were
dressed in a cinnamon or tobacco-juice color that suddenly became as
universal as black had been farther south, as denim blue is among the
masses of China. The countrywomen, then their men, and finally all the
hand-laboring class, took to wearing long cotton cloaks of this reddish
brown hue. I found later that this is colored with _cunao_, the
vegetable dye in which the masses north of the old boundary dip their
clothing, so that all Tonkin wears the same conspicuous livery. More
exactly it is inconspicuous, in much of Tonkin; one might fancy it had
been adopted as a protective coloring, not only so that betel saliva
would not show on it, but because so much of the soil of the Tonkinese
plains is reddish that everything, earth, water, people, their clothing
and their cattle, anything that comes in contact with the earth, took on
this _cunao_ color. Centuries of toiling in flooded rice-fields
reflecting a tropical sun had indeed given even their faces a similar
tint.
There were fewer male Psyche knots here than farther south, hair-cuts
for men being now popular. The women had suddenly taken to skirts, in
place of the voluminous thin-cotton trousers of Annam proper, and
dressed their hair differently, wrapping the braid once about the head
and letting the rest hang down like the tail of a Hindu turban. But the
most conspicuous change was that the palm-leaf hat of toadstool shape,
which I had grown to associate forever with the country people of Annam,
had given way, among the women only, to a most astonishing head-shade.
Of grindstone shape and size, being easily two and a half if not three
feet in diameter and perfectly flat on top, with a brim six or more
inches wide forming a perpendicular circle about them, these astounding
hats made also of leaves, perhaps of the banana, looked like a tub set
upside down on the head. More exactly they sat on a little round support
tied to the top of the head, and were so unwieldy on this slight fulcrum
that whenever the wind was blowing or the wearer under motion the
struggle to retain her head-gear seemed to be much more difficult than
the carrying of her shoulder-pole burden. The men continued to wear the
smaller cone-shaped mushroom hats that had roofed the rural population
all the way from Cochinchina, as if they realized how foolish they would
have looked in these immense grindstones, or knew the futility of trying
to compete with their women in ornamental matters.
The graves were now well weeded knobs on top of large raised circles of
earth; the towns, almost as compact as those of China, were surrounded
by high walls of growing bamboos. The more straggling towns south of the
Gate of Annam had been encircled, if at all, by hedges of cactus or wild
pineapple, concealing nothing; here every village was completely hidden,
with an opening here and there through its bamboo wall like that to the
lair of a jungle beast, so that with Tonkinese villagers going home
consists in crawling away into the jungle like the tiger they so dread
and honor. This lofty bamboo hedge is a vestige of pirate days, and of
battles between towns and clans. Near the coast cocoanut-trees did their
part toward the concealing, and of course the soldierly arec-palm with
its clinging betel-vine was everywhere. Once or twice we passed fields
of mulberry-trees, for Tonkin also produces silk. Women in the
grindstone hat stood on little platforms and screened rice by pouring it
out in the wind, rice to be hulled later by these same women stepping
with their bare feet incessantly on the end of a heavy beam that drops
its hammer-head into a stone or wooden mortar.
It was well after dark when we came to a last _bac_, across an arm of
the sea that seemed in the black night as wide as the British Channel,
and were gradually poled and pulled and sculled by sleepy coolies toward
the lights of Ben-thuy, where the railway picks up again. Another three
years and trains will be running between Dongha and Ben-thuy; we had
seen the half finished embankment now and then along the way. Within
twice that time the traveler should be able to go entirely by rail the
whole length of Indo-China, clear on to the Yang-tze perhaps, possibly
even to Angkor, connecting with the lines of Siam, which already run to
Singapore.
There were no accommodations for foreigners at Ben-thuy, merely the
river-mouth port of the city of Vinh, where we were soon housed in the
almost French hotel of a Spanish—er—lady of fortune. Vinh is a large
town, for Indo-China. Three hundred and ten houses, a whole section not
far from the hotel, had been burned that day as an unintentional
addition to the New Year’s celebration, and the night air was still
strongly scented with the conflagration; but this catastrophe had left
only an unimportant vacancy in the civic area. The French showed little
sign of interest in these popular misfortunes, so long as their own
spacious part of the town, with its uncrowded dwellings on broad half
forested lawns, remained undisturbed. Is it because they no longer hold
in honor their own labyrinthine old cities that the French have given
such an atmosphere of bourgeois order to the towns of their Far-Eastern
empire by making them checker-boards of straight, right-angled streets,
just as the Japanese have done in Formosa and Korea?
Another “boy” risked his life by calling me at four again, though the
train on which I wandered northward all that day long did not leave
until two hours later, from a station a few blocks away. That journey
from Vinh to Hanoï began as rather a stupid ride, but it turned out
better than the morning promised. The little train, with its single
three-class coach at the end of a string of modified cattle-cars for the
populace, sat lower to the ground and was in some ways less comfortable
than the autobus. A stone embankment from two to six feet above the
rice-fields formed the basis for railroad and highway, which flowed
together every little while into the same narrow bridges, with a coolie
at either end to sound a warning. The plain, of more or less width
according to how curious the mountains were to come down and look at the
sea, was one vast paddy-field. Birds were numerous for a tropical land.
Herons lay in wait for careless frogs at the edges of the rice-fields;
the _crabier_, a brown bird showing a patch of white, like a flag of
truce, when flying, plied its customary quest for edible crabs; a little
reddish bird that seemed to have copied the garb of its human neighbors
flitted here and there across the leisurely moving foreground.
Water-buffaloes, almost one in three of them of the albino type, were
plowing belly-deep in the slime of the paddy-fields or loafing along the
dikes; whole Oriental families of them lay immersed in mud-holes,
completely covered except for the ends of their snouts and their
sagacious little eyes, recalling those tales of Annamese pirates hiding
themselves indefinitely under water by breathing through two reeds
thrust in their nostrils. Now and then one of these ponderous pachyderms
presented his massive head threateningly toward our train, as if about
to attack this new type of animal, but always decided at the last moment
not to risk it and loped off into the flooded paddy-field on either side
with a splash of wet mud.
[Illustration: With each new year the Annamese clear of vegetation the
graves of their ancestors, back to remote generations]
[Illustration: I asked a living caretaker to fill the place of one of
these of stone which guard the entrance to a royal tomb of Annam]
[Illustration: In the heart of Hanoï, northern capital of French
Indo-China, stands a delightfully picturesque lake of goodly dimensions]
[Illustration: Annamese girls hold Sunday morning flower-market at this
corner of the city-girdled lake of Hanoï]
In places the land was so flooded from the recent rains that only
graves, dikes, and the tops of the half-grown rice appeared above the
broad expanse of water—except of course the villages and temples in
their clusters of trees, standing wherever possible on a knoll too rocky
to be cultivated to advantage. Villages close to the road were frequent,
graves still more so, the dead and the living inhabitants both too
numerous. The plain, flat as a billiard-table, the water and the exact
rows of flooded rice shimmering like silk, was dotted with red cattle,
some also plowing, and with redder people of all ages and both sexes, in
various forms of undress, all toiling for their rice in the inundated
fields. More exactly it was all one vast field, divided into all manner
of queer shapes by narrow green ridges six inches above the general
level. Brown men in faded tobacco-brown clothing—still more often women,
who seem to do most of the work—groped about up to their thighs and
biceps in the slime. Some were immersed to the waist; some paddled about
in sampans; others stood in pairs on the dikes and tossed water from one
field to another in a basket of woven bamboo splints hung in the middle
of a long rope, or toiled alone shoveling water from one level to
another with a huge wooden spoon mounted on a framework.
The reddish-brown garments that had begun at the Gate of Annam were
universal in the rural parts of this region. Some of the men in the
fields were naked except for a shirt tied up about the armpits, but the
women were more or less covered, though they are more careless than
those of China about exposing the person. Trousers for women had for the
time being entirely disappeared, though they were to appear again about
Hanoï; a sign, I suppose, of the fast life of cities. Along the road
close beside us women under shoulder-pole loads of anything, everything,
trotting in constant files, like trains of leaf-bearing ants in the
jungle, often left their long, sun-faded, red-brown cloaks swinging
open, and not concealing all that the once white diamond-shaped
breast-cover beneath leaves visible. Some frankly wore only that and the
knee-high skirt, as if this season of hard labor was no time to be
prudish in small matters. Almost all wore those great basket-like hats,
some faded and frayed, some fresh from the markets to and from which
endless streams of them forever jogged. A picturesque figure is the
Tonkinese woman of the people, with her flat umbrella-hat, her loose,
cinnamon-colored, knee-length jacket, her short skirt or very loose thin
black trousers, her clacking wooden sandals in town or her noiseless
straw ones in the country, her black-lacquered teeth bloody with the
betel-juice driveling from the corners of her hideous mouth. Invariably
she has a well built back, a pretty brown in tint, and suggesting to our
society leaders how they too might have perfect forms—merely by carrying
a hundred pounds or so across their shoulders to market several times a
week.
There were stretches where the land was almost bare, the fields
yellow-green, with brownish graves, the foot-hills terraced, some of
them cut up by bush fences but apparently uncultivated now. The
forerunners of the mountain range were without vegetation, except for
clumps of trees, among which the palm was the most common. In other
places, where the demands of husbandry had not killed them, were whole
forests of trees white with blossoms, bamboos that were like smoke
spirals of blond gold, great kapok-trees, without a leaf on their
whitened branches, but bearing immense bunches of flowers that turned
orange by translucence against the blue of the sky. Finally the
mountains came down so close to the sea that there were heaped-up hills
cultivated in patches, though here, unlike China, the ratio between soil
and inhabitants has never been such that anything more than the level
land must necessarily be cultivated.
Here and there on the muddy mat of the fields stood slender triangular
rafts anchored or mired in the slime, raising in the air, with strange
immobile gestures, disjointed arms, like gigantic field-spiders. Most of
them bore on this base a rudimentary house, a roof of woven palm-leaves
closed at the back with an old paddy-winnowing basket, a bundle of straw
inside taking the place of a sleeping-mat. They were the shelters of the
fishermen who come here whenever there is water enough to make it worth
while to plunge into it the big square dip-net at the end of the
balanced pole suspended at the front of the raft. Some were without the
nets now, the bare bamboos on which these are fastened seeming to claw
the air in their eagerness to be of use again. In places there were
scores of these fishing devices, each with its little hut, its net
balanced with stones and raised and lowered by a rope inside the hut, so
that the fisherman does not need to expose his already bronzed hide to
either rain or shine.
Some time in mid-morning, masses of jagged rock, similar to the “Marble
Mountains” of Tourane, began to rise from the plain, growing ever more
numerous. They were identical, I was to find later, with those fantastic
rock isles that dot by thousands the northwestern corner of the Gulf of
Tonkin. This region has indeed been called the terrestrial Bay of Along,
which is no misnomer, for these rocks also once stood out of the sea,
before the earth came to fill in between them the flat plain that flows
as level as the ocean all about them. Some of these gigantic formations,
which were to follow me far down the West River into the Chinese
province of Kwangsi, had patches of hardy vegetation on them; some were
as bare as the forbidding mounds of stacked bayonets they suggested.
They were of most curious shapes, forms as tormented as if the mountains
had been tortured in their youth, some like rocks torn jagged by
uncounted centuries of dashing waves. Now they grew up among the
rice-fields, and continued for hours, fantastic, of every possible
formation, attitude, posture, striking peaks and ridges with
perpendicular, horizontal, diagonal strata, covered with thorny scrub
vegetation wherever it could get a foothold. Some of those queer rock
hills, half covered with plant life, looked like velour fedora hats
carelessly tossed out on the plain; others resembled the slack heaps of
a region of pulsating industry.
All the rest of the day we rode among those mountainous heaps of rock,
those phantoms of stone. Sometimes that afternoon the whole western
horizon was cut off by a capriciously peaked range so hazy as to seem a
gauze curtain, at other times so close that it appeared to hang
threateningly over us. But always there was this vanguard of isolated
rock heaps standing sentinel along the plain. I made the journey between
Vinh and Hanoï three times before I finally left Indo-China, and I never
tired of those eccentric nonchalant piles of stone, on land and sea, of
which the “Marble Mountains” of Tourane are the southernmost
outcroppings and the bandit-riddled cliffs along the Si-kiang near
Nanning the most northern.
The arable land was still more intensively cultivated and inhabited
north of Thanh-hoa, a hot “citadel” of well built structures along
orderly streets, which there is time to go and see if you will miss the
midday meal at the station presided over by an Annamese woman with
unlacquered teeth whose French is suspiciously fluent. Thanh-hoa station
well outside the town is the luncheon-place of all foreign travelers
between Vinh and Hanoï, whether by train or by automobile, and track and
road run so close together much of the distance that acquaintances made
there can be renewed from time to time during the journey. Those in the
motor-cars now and then sped past us within handshaking reach, tossing
over their shoulders gibes at our slowness, though we were not so slow
at that. The towns grew larger, with some more or less European houses,
an old church sometimes bulking above the trees. The mountains gradually
retired to infinity; French appeared in the platform crowds, the Chinese
merchants in our car increased as Jews do in trains nearing our own
metropolis. Crowds were returning from holiday jaunts on this last day
of the official _Têt_ season. French boys, and girls too for that
matter, with nascent mustaches and bare knees, who had never been in
France, were on their way back to school; French and half-caste hunters
filled our car with dogs and guns, with dead rabbits, wild chickens and
ducks, bagfuls and bunches of still less commonplace game. Though we
took on more cars as they were needed, our coach was so overrun with
standees that the mind was unwillingly carried back to the subways of
another continent, while the fourth-class cars were almost as packed and
jammed and chaotic as the soldier-abused trains of China.
Passengers were piled three deep from engine to back platform by the
time we reached Hanoï at six, and I found the city so busy that I had my
first and only ride in a _pousse-choléra_, as the French quite fittingly
call the iron-tired buggy-wheeled rickshaws usually patronized only by
the natives. Certainly I should have had something akin to cholera if
the journey to the post-office for my first mail in a long time and back
to the Hôtel de la Gare had lasted much longer.