WESTWARD THROUGH LOESS CAÑONS
We were off at six, with the night still black about us. But that did
not mean that we actually got started so early, for it would be a
strange Chinese journey that began without a hitch. This time it was one
of the mules which we had been unable to examine in the darkness. He
turned out to be small, gaunt, and ratty, and long before we had passed
through straggling Kwanyintang he became so lame and wabbly that there
seemed no possibility of his even lasting out the day. Fortunately we
were in a position to have our desires heeded. By order of his chief,
our aide from Kaifeng had instructed the local commander to furnish us
an escort of ten soldiers. We were quite familiar with the ancient jest
that having a guard of Chinese soldiers is worse than falling into the
hands of bandits; but at least, if they did not succeed in outsprinting
the brigands in case of an attack, they could assure them that we were
not worth the robbing or holding for ransom. Besides, were we not out
mainly if not exclusively for experience? Now the escort proved its
worth at the very outset; for even though it may have little influence
over large bands of outlaws, such a Chinese guard is useful in prodding
simple citizens into prompt action when those they are escorting express
a wish. Ours was barely mentioned to the lieutenant in charge of the
detail when he slipped off into the darkness as if he meant to make it
so “snappy” that even Americans would applaud. That did not prevent the
sun from peering with a red and swollen face up over the uneven pile of
tile roofs to the southeast of us before he gave any sign of continued
existence. But when he did come back there came with him a larger,
sturdier mule than any of those already in our service, with its
old-fashioned owner—who still wore a cue, which was turning
iron-gray—ambling a bit sullenly, we thought, beside him. The transfer
was made, and we were soon off in earnest, in a cavalcade that left the
throngs of passers-by invariably staring after us.
The lieutenant, it gradually transpired, having found the innkeeper who
had contracted to furnish us transportation unable to replace the ailing
animal at once, had calmly commandeered the first likely one he came
upon. This being the chief worldly asset of the helpless owner, he had
been forced to come along, to set off on a week’s journey on extremely
short notice. Being mere Americans, we could not see why one of the
other drivers, of whom there was one to each litter, could not have been
intrusted with this extra mule, particularly as they all lived in the
same town and were under bond, so to speak, through the innkeeper. But
one soon learns that it is far the best plan to let the Chinese get
their results in their own time-honored way, and not to peep too much
behind the scenes, nor conclude that what is absurd, or unjust, or even
cruel to the Western mind is necessarily so to the people of the Middle
Kingdom. Each litter and pair of mules, we found in time, without openly
showing curiosity, belonged to one man, either the driver who plodded
all day long in the dust beside it, constantly quickening the pace of
his two animals with an explosive “Ta! Ta!” and a few choice Chinese
“cuss-words” which there is no call to add to our Western stock, or to a
man who stayed at home and hired some one to muleteer for him. Naturally
our declining the lame mule and the substitution of another divided the
sum that was paid for that litter, and there was bad blood evident
between the two men who trotted beside it as long as the journey lasted.
A summery autumn spread over the land, and the ten soldiers who deployed
on either side of us soon asked permission to toss their cotton-padded
overcoats into the litters. Their low cloth shoes and wrapped
trouser-legs, Chinese fashion, were well suited to tramping, especially
in the flour-like loess. Besides his fairly modern Mauser rifle and at
most a dozen cartridges, each seemed to have a few small personal
possessions tucked away about his person, and one middle-aged fellow
with a face worthy a “hard-boiled” American “top sergeant” of the old
school carried a hooded falcon seated on his crooked arm for the whole
thirty sometimes hot and often laborious miles. Merely another example,
we supposed, of the Chinese fear of trusting one’s belongings out of
sight. Except for one long and somewhat stony ridge, the loess formation
was unbroken, and dust swirled to the ears at every step. Beggars, often
in a horrible state, rolled in it at the roadside, not only in the towns
but at most unlikely spots in the open country. Surely their gleanings
could not have totaled even a modest meal a day, and it was this working
of such unlikely territory which impressed one particularly with the
depths of Chinese poverty.
Of the pitilessness of it we had had an impressive example before
leaving Kwanyintang. In a dust-deep gutter beside its most densely
thronged thoroughfare lay, the afternoon before, a boy of perhaps
sixteen, a single filthy rag covering him merely from shoulders to
navel, several immense surfaces of his exposed body eaten away by some
loathsome disease. Evidently he was writhing in real pain instead of
more or less pretending it for sympathy’s sake, as did so many of his
rivals along the way, for several men had paused to talk with him, and
that is an extraordinary mark of solicitude in China toward roadside
mendicants. But evidently no one did anything else for him; for as we
rode by the spot before daylight next morning, while the night was still
bitter cold, there he still lay in the same all but naked state,
powdered over with dust, and evidently dead—at least we sincerely hoped
so. The poverty of China is so general, and native charity and
compassion so slight—for even the minority who are above suffering
cannot but be more or less constantly obsessed with the dread of
themselves falling into beggary—that even what we would call “very
deserving cases” must put forth great efforts to attract attention to
their needs. Some of these are so ingenious as to be humorous, as well
as pathetic, which may be intentional, for no one on earth enjoys humor
more or responds to it more quickly than a Chinese. In one of the deep
loess cañons through which we passed, a man whose feet seemed to have
rotted away knelt close up against the precipitous earth wall in a spot
which gave him just room enough to keep from under the hoofs of animals
and the feet of pedestrians passing in such constant droves that he
seemed to be bathing in dust. Through this rose his raucous voice in the
monotonous sameness of some phrase of distress, accompanied by the
ringing of a hand-bell. At regular intervals of at most thirty seconds
he ended these sounds by fetching his head down with a terrific wallop
on a big stone that lay in the road before him. Pausing to wonder why he
did not crack his skull, I gradually became aware of the fact that he
always struck the bell in his right hand into the dust in exact
synchronization with the blow of his head, thereby of course cleverly
increasing the apparent thud and at the same time inconspicuously
breaking the blow. But, for all that, his forehead was almost raw with
the constant pounding, and the exercise alone must have proved a real
day’s work before the day was done. Yet the passing throng, being itself
by no means affluent, seldom gave him more than a casual glance. The
wicker farm scoop that lay beside him had barely half a dozen “cash”
scattered about it, and this was typical of all the roadside beggars we
passed for days to come. Whenever one of us tossed a copper into such a
receptacle amazement overcame even the bystanders; for a copper is worth
ten whole “cash,” though it is about the equivalent of one fourth of an
American cent!
For the first few miles there was an endless string of coolies carrying
bags of cement and of flour, and less evident supplies for the railway
construction-camps farther on. A tunnel a mile long was nearing
completion, and grading and cutting continued for some distance. Within
a year, optimistic officials hoped, trains would be running to the
Shensi border, and in two or three would reach at last the famous old
western capital, Sian-fu. Then there were quantities of cotton coming in
from the west, and every other imaginable thing bobbing at the ends of
those springy poles across coolie shoulders which are so often miscalled
bamboos, since they are more nearly hickory, polished and varnished to a
mahogany brown. Itinerant craftsmen of every sort, peddlers of anything
there is a chance of selling, portable restaurants for the feeding of
all this multitude, hundreds of jogging coolies carrying their beds and
their few belongings on their quest for work, all use this pole for
bearing their burdens, so that the vista as far as the eye can reach was
like a river of undulating men and things. Much of the way lay high, and
gave us splendid views off across mountainous country fantastically
broken as only loess can break, terraced on a hundred different levels,
ever falling away at the edges, a world, as it were, that was wearing
out. Or again the road, which never for an instant was worthy of any
such name, would plunge into one of the chasms it had worn for itself
during centuries of plodding through this friable soil, chasms a
hundred, two hundred, in places surely three hundred feet deep, which
might continue for many miles before there came another glimpse of the
surrounding country. To walk in these is like shuffling through a
cement-factory; let the least breath of wind blow, and one heartily
longed again for a gas-mask. The walls being absolutely sheer and the
sunken roads very rarely wider than a single cart, let one of these get
ahead of us and we must inhale and swallow its dust for many weary _li_;
while the tasks of passing those constantly appearing from the opposite
direction required the patience and the profanity of a Chinese muleteer.
Of the joys of fetching up in one of these endless channels at the rear
of a camel caravan, probably at least a hundred strong, and many times
more famous for raising dust than speed, no mention shall be permitted
to sully the pages of what aims to be the veracious story of a perfectly
respectable journey.
[Illustration:
I take my turn at leading our procession of mule litters and let my
companions swallow its dust for a while
]
[Illustration:
The road down into Shensi. Once through the great arch-gate that marks
the provincial boundary, the road sinks down into the loess again,
and beggars line the way into Tungkwan
]
[Illustration:
Hwa-shan, one of the five sacred mountains of China
]
[Illustration:
An example of Chinese military transportation
]
However, we were by no means confined to the bottoms of the cañons. A
mule-litter, we quickly discovered, resembles many another contrivance
in this imperfect world, in that it has both its advantages and its
drawbacks. Shaped like a bath-tub, it might perhaps be quite cozy could
one merely make it up as a bed and crawl into it. But when it is already
half filled with such odds and ends as steamer-trunks and bedding-rolls,
there is only a limited space left for the mere passenger. Moreover, the
straw mattings are neither sun- nor dust-proof, and while one may in
time and with patience learn either to sleep or to read in a litter, in
spite of the camel-like motion varied by a sudden disconcerting lurch
every quarter-hour or so, when the plodding driver outside concludes
that the poles need leveling on one or the other mule, the average
traveler is more apt to pass his time drowsily gazing at the plethora of
red pompons and trappings on his lead-mule and listening to the
monotonous tinkling of his bell. Litter-riding is an art that must be
learned. As the rolling motion is prone quickly to unbalance the
contrivance, proper bestowal of the body is closely akin to tight-rope
walking. If one be of a restless disposition and accustomed to change
the lower leg for the upper at certain intervals, one must not let the
attention grow drowsy; if one persists in the reprehensible habit of
smoking, then in laying down the pipe in the right hand great care must
be exercised that the can of tobacco be at the same instant deposited
with the left, lest the excess of weight prove fatal. In all our journey
my own litter turned over upon me but once, and that was in an inn-yard
where assistance was at hand to drag me out from under the trunks, cots,
suit-cases, and what not under which the mishap buried me; but if there
were ten consecutive minutes when I did not expect it to do so, they
were probably during the many times that I was not inside it. We met in
the west foreigners of long Chinese experience who did all their
traveling in litters, some indeed who lined and carpeted theirs with
felt, put a stove inside, and journeyed for weeks at a time, even in the
depths of winter, reading many volumes during the journey. But while we
are quite ready to admit without controversy the comfort of a
mule-litter as compared with a “Peking cart,” I for one found the finest
thing about it the fact that one could get out and walk.
This we did early and often, and thereby frequently kept out of the
dust-swirling cañons entirely for long stretches. For the constant
procession of coolies plodding up and down this route had worn at least
one, and often as many as half a dozen, hard smooth paths along the
brink of the chasm, paths undulating and meandering just enough to be
delightful. From them we could look far down the sheer cliffs, seldom
fifteen feet apart, upon the endless mule-trains, broken here and there
by cumbersome two-wheeled carts, ox or horse drawn, or by a disdainfully
leisurely string of camels, all so tiny with the depth sometimes that
they seemed a procession of children’s toys. At the same time we enjoyed
a brilliant sunshine—often too brilliant, in fact, though October was
all but gone—now and then a delicious breeze, and views of the life of
the region and landscapes frequently approaching the magnificent, all of
which were unknown to the man who was drowsing or attempting to read in
his litter far below. The average speed of our conveyances, though they
were the swiftest things in the defiles, was scarcely equal to a
reasonable walking pace, so that we could here and there wander a bit
from the straight and narrow paths for a glimpse of something that
seemed worth the deviation.
There were places, for instance, where rows of old earthenware jars were
set up in ridges of earth and filled with water, often carried from long
distances, for the watering of passing animals—trust the people of
cruelly crowded China not to overlook any chance to pick up a few stray
“cash.” The latter, by the way, were now almost the only money seen, and
passing coolies carried a string of them looped over a shoulder or some
other convenient projection. Sometimes a row of enormous bowls formed a
wall, shutting off a compound, instead of the commonplace structure of
yellowish dried mud so generally serving that purpose. Naked children
swarming everywhere and men with bronzed torsos bared to the waist
working in the fields seemed to give the calendar the lie. Blindfolded
animals plodding an endless round, a pair of men, or a man and his
crippled wife, manipulating a big, crude windlass, brought up water from
the field-wells scattered hither and yon, and unsuspected, if the
superstructures were lacking, until one had all but stumbled into them.
The vagaries of the loess soil were often fantastic, sometimes
incredible. Extremely friable, wholly unstratified, yet surprisingly
solid, too, its contrasts were a constant astonishment. There were
villages in which it had split and gashed and fallen away into some
adjoining rivulet cañon to such an extent that the mud houses seemed to
be strewn helter-skelter among a forest of cathedral-spires and Gothic
roofs, perched at every possible height and dozing serenely on
perpendicular chips of earth which it seemed impossible that the first
slight breath of mind should not precipitate in a mere cloud of yellow
dust into the terrifying chasm below. Its persistence in standing long
after it must surely have fallen was one of the wonders of the sunken
roads. Here a great slice of it, split wholly free from the main
precipice and seeming to hang like a curling wave a hundred feet or more
directly above our passing litters, gave every appearance of being on
the very point of breaking and burying a score of travelers beneath it,
yet somehow it never did, at least in our presence. Innumerable such
catastrophes must have come to pass during the long centuries in which
this “national road” had become a cañon; but the Chinese way, no doubt,
had been for the survivors to plod calmly on over the collapsing earth
before the dust had settled, secure in the knowledge that if their own
particular godlets held them in favor they were free from similar
danger, while, if they were not, precautions were mere wasted breath.
Many a time the paths we followed along the crests seemed to have
reached the day when they must spill down the face of the precipice, yet
they always carried us safely past. Of cave-dwellings cut far back into
these cliffs there was no end, by far a majority of the population
having only such homes. But what perhaps was most startling of all the
astounding caprices of this strange soil was to come, in a stroll across
what gave every appearance of being a flat unbroken field, suddenly upon
a great square hole in the ground, fifty or more feet in length and
breadth, and as many deep, which was nothing more nor less than a family
courtyard. Farm-implements and domestic animals littered its floor; into
its side walls, sheer and exact as those of a box, were cut a dozen
caves, high arched but with the usual small doors in each mud-bricked
front—the dwelling-places of the numerous family, probably of three
generations. There was nothing about such a farm-yard different from the
ordinary ones all over China, except that the high mud wall surrounding
it is the solid earth, with an inconspicuous tunnel often of
considerable length connecting it with the outside world. Let this fall
in, and there is not a ladder in rural China long enough to bring the
hole-dwellers to the surface, on which lie their hard earth
threshing-floor and their fields.
The threshing-floors were everywhere busy at this season, beating out
the last of the grain with flails or rolling it out with huge stone
rollers drawn by languidly ambling animals. Whole families took part in
the operation, the more than half-naked children teasing the leisurely
beasts to keep on the move; the women, who generally knelt to spare
their crippled feet, pawing about through the straw and now and then
even helping the men to toss the grain up into the chaff-clearing wind.
About the edges of every floor were stacks of hay and straw, all
plastered over with a kind of clay roof, as seems to be the fashion in
Honan.
But the prize sight of all was the terraced fields. I had seen some in
the Inca lands of South America that seemed remarkable examples of human
persistence, but they are mere children’s pastimes compared with these
of western China. Those in the Andes are faced with stout stone walls
and run only part-way up an occasional hillside, or bring a too steep
valley under cultivation. Here a most remarkable series of terraces, of
thirty, forty, even fifty levels, rose to the very summit of every
mountain we saw not only for days but for weeks, covering it completely
with low steps of endless giant stairways. Yet here stone is unknown;
the facing of each field is merely the loess itself, constantly
crumbling away upon the field next below. Geologists are more or less
agreed, I believe, that the loess regions of North China, covering a
quarter of a million square miles, are due to the destruction of the
forests centuries ago, a destruction so complete that even the roots
were grubbed out for fuel, so that a soil which with its natural share
of rainfall and vegetation was all that man could wish has become a
powder-like earth ready to break down and fly away at the first breath
of wind. If they are right, what a splendid justice it would be to send
those who are doing their best to deforest our own fair land to struggle
for existence with the hordes of China, where the pressure of population
has driven the farmer not only to the very crest of arid mountains but
into every tiniest depression in the soil! Absolutely treeless, with
never a suggestion even of brush or grass, these loess regions were
everywhere for day after day the same bare yellow brown, beautiful
enough in the changing phases from sunrise to sunset, but of a monotony
that wearies the eye for all the extraordinary forms in which the ages
have cast it. In spring and summer perhaps, when the terraces are waving
with crops, there may be green enough. But it was hard to believe it in
this autumn season, when even the rare remnants of a cotton or a corn
field have the same shriveled, moistureless, yellow-brown hue as all the
far-spreading and tumbled landscape.
But walking always became a perspiring form of locomotion long before
noon, and some convenient cañon-mouth or a stretch where the road came
to the surface for a breathing-spell found us climbing into our litters.
From then on until toward evening our view of the world about us was
likely to be confined to the triangular bit of it visible between the
red pompons on the lead-mule’s back and the straw roof of the litter,
often still further reduced by the walls of the narrow ditch which so
frequently was the road nearly all day long. Through this we saw more,
however, than might be expected. A camel-train, or one of many
mule-drawn soldiers’ wagons, loomed up out of a dust-fog so thick that
collisions were narrowly averted in spite of our slow speed. Loess soil
would not be so bad, at least so far as the traveler is concerned, if
only it would lie still, instead of insisting on exploring the innermost
recesses of any one or anything with which it comes in contact. Let a
breath of air sweep down the road—which was certainly no unusual
experience—and we could barely see the next litter before us. Then there
was nothing to do but cover the face with a handkerchief and lie
listening to the endless _dingle-dingle_ of the little mule-bells and
the slight creak of the swaying litter, broken frequently by the
“mule-train coughing in the dust”—cough the weary animals did,
indeed—and now and again by the vociferous “Ta! Ta!” of the drivers
whose footsteps made no sound in the powdered earth, or a long-drawn
“Trrrrrrrrrrr!” when they wished to bring the animals to a halt. An old
and very experienced traveler is authority for the assertion that the
road from Honan to Sian-fu is perhaps the most trying bit of cart-road
in China, and, strong as such language is, we were inclined to agree
with him. Yet it is a journey I would not have missed for several times
its many minor discomforts.
Sometimes the road escaped from the cañon for several miles, and then
there was sure to be plenty to catch the eye. Perhaps it was a little
house, temple, or dove-cote at the top of a high slender pillar of
earth, for rain and wind may have washed the world away from about it
and left an unbelievably frail support. Soldiers we were constantly
meeting in great numbers; occasionally we passed large groups of
recruits not yet furnished with weapons, simple-faced boys who might
much better have been left in their native cave-villages to till the
terraced mountains than to add still more to China’s most serious
problem. But this draining of the country districts of able-bodied young
men goes merrily on all over the republic—and the training of eventual
bandits seems to have no end. Our own escort and long files of their
armed fellows bound in the opposite direction now and then showed
themselves on the sheer edge of the cliffs high above us, they and their
guns silhouetted against the cloudless sky. We constantly met veritable
crowds of travelers, mainly pedestrians. Endless strings of coolies came
and went, their beds and tools and all their earthly belongings in blue
denim rolls on their backs, or balancing from the swaying pole over
their shoulders. I often caught myself wondering why they could not all
stay where they were and save themselves all this laborious shuttling
back and forth, so exactly alike were the long files of them plodding
eastward and going west. There were very few women travelers; compared
with the great throngs of men there were almost none, and they were
always riding, naturally, since the most they could do otherwise would
be to hobble a few hundred yards an hour on their dwarfed feet.
Sometimes one of them loomed up out of the dust astride a donkey, always
with a man prodding the animal on from behind, his easy stride seeming
to emphasize the helplessness of the crippled legs tapering down to all
but useless little feet on either side of the biblical animal. Children,
swarming everywhere, were rarely on the move along the road, though
occasionally we passed the cart or litter of a better-to-do Chinese
carrying his family with him. But even if the heavy cloth front door of
his conveyance was not closed, we rarely caught more than a glimpse of
the peering faces of women and children tucked away behind the man and
the driver in what must have been extremely tight quarters.
Several times widows in white or sackcloth passed, usually seated alone
Turkish fashion on an uncovered cart, as if to make their grief as
conspicuous as possible. Some of them were surprisingly young; generally
their faces were completely covered; and invariably they rocked back and
forth on their haunches and wailed at the tops of their voices, whether
in passing through a town or out in the open country, at least whenever
there was any one except their plodding driver to hear them. This public
display of grief seemed to be a custom of Honan; at least, we seldom if
ever saw it farther west. One morning while we were still walking we
heard a choral wailing from afar off, and at length came upon the
mother, wife, son of six, and baby of a man who had just died, all
squatting together on the outdoor threshing-floor at the edge of their
village, and all of them, including even the infant, pouring forth their
sorrow to the four winds. A pathetic, almost touching scene it was to
me—until I chanced to glance back just in time to see the old woman
pinch the boy in a very sensitive spot, and thereby redouble the wailing
which the sight of a passing foreigner had almost silenced.
Once in a while a bride passed, conspicuous in all her finery, and
looking as if she, too, could easily weep the length of her tedious
journey, did custom permit it. Then there was the wheelbarrow-brigade,
in some ways the most interesting part of all the endless procession.
The thought of a man wheelbarrowing a heavy load clear across a province
or even farther had a mixture of the pitiable and the ludicrous about
it—something reminiscent of a nonsensical election-bet. Yet it is
doubtful whether any man in all our broad land, with the possible
exception of champion athletes at the climax of their exertions, perform
such grueling labors as do these Chinese wheelbarrow-men, who passed us
in veritable regiments, sometimes in close unbroken file for a mile at a
time. Given the weight of the big clumsy, creaking contrivances
themselves, an incredibly heavy and often awkward load, a “road” which
no untraveled Westerner would recognize as such, with steep hills,
cañons ankle-deep in dust, and the constant struggle for right of way on
the crowded caricature of a thoroughfare, and it was no wonder that the
man straining at the handles, with the stout strap from them passing
over his shoulders, all but invariably resembled a marathon runner at
the end of his greatest contest. In northwest China the _tui-chu_ is not
a passenger vehicle, as in some parts of the country; but this ceaseless
one-wheeled cavalcade carried almost everything except human beings. The
luckiest seemed to be those whose bulky load was merely cotton; the
heaviest burdens, with rare exceptions, were evidently the two to four
black-brown bags of wheat, a bit smaller in circumference than our
two-bushel sack, but nearly twice as long.
All possible manner of aids had been enlisted by the sweating men at the
handles, though the great majority toiled onward without assistance.
Sometimes another man, perhaps a donkey, once in a while a mule, an aged
horse, a small ox, pulled in front of the wheelbarrow. More than one man
had pressed his son and heir into service, and boys of all ages added
their by no means insignificant bit to the drudgery. The detailed
picture still stays with me of one child who could not have been more
than six, his little bronzed body completely naked except for the red or
blue diamond-shaped stomacher which most Chinese consider indispensable
to health, steadily tugging away for all he was worth at the rope over
his bare shoulder. He and his brawny father behind were plainly many
toilsome days away both from home and their destination, yet on the
child’s face there was not a suggestion of protest, but more than a hint
of joy at this splendid opportunity to see the world. Indeed, the
generally contented, not to say joyful, attitude toward their arduous
fragment of life of these slaves of the wheelbarrow, of the coolies, of
the toiling masses of China in general, is one of the astonishments, and
delights, of Chinese travel. Possibly these men were paid the equivalent
of fifteen American cents a day for their cart-horse exertions,
furnishing their own food and lodging on the way; yet a surly face was
as rare as a lazy body, and laughter always burst forth upon the
slightest provocation. Those who pulled in front, I noticed, no matter
how young or how weak, were never reproved or admonished to greater
exertions from behind; it seemed to be as natural for them to do their
unflagging best as for water to run downhill, and the thought of their
slacking or of being capable of more never appeared even to suggest
itself to the man at the handles.
Twice, possibly three times, I saw a woman tugging at a wheelbarrow
rope, but in each case the load was light and the distance evidently
short; it must have been, in fact, for she could not have struggled far
on the little goat-like feet and muscleless legs which time-honored
custom had left her. I suppose the several brilliant Western
“authorities” that are at the moment engaged in “interpreting” China to
us would cite as another proof of the ascendancy of esthetic over
material things in the Chinese mind the fact that, though her unhampered
labor is very necessary to him, the Chinese peasant and coolie still
insists on having his wife beautified at the sacrifice of her physical
usefulness. On the threshing-floor or in the cotton-fields the women
could be worked to somewhat better advantage than on the road, and there
one saw more of them. For they could do most of this work kneeling, and
nearly all of them, even girls of eleven or twelve, wore thick
knee-pads, not unlike the shin-guards of a football-player, to soften a
bit the hard lot that had befallen them. In the towns one often saw
wives or servants crawling about the dirty earth floors on their knees
in the performance of their household duties.
The cotton-fields, by the way, were almost endless, though not much else
could be said in their favor. The plants, from six inches to a foot
high, were of a dead-dry brown, of the same color as all the landscape
to the summit of the terraced mountains, and the miserable little bolls
that remained did not seem worth even the trouble of such
poverty-stricken pickers as here and there still wandered about in
search of them. There had been no rain all summer in this region, they
told us, and unless some fell within the next two months and saved the
winter wheat, there would be another famine as serious as that of 1920.
[Illustration:
Coal is plentiful and cheap in Shensi, and comes to market in Sian-fu
in wheelbarrows, there to await purchasers
]
[Illustration:
The holy of holies of the principal Sian-fu mosque has a simplicity in
striking contrast to the demon-crowded interiors of purely Chinese
temples
]
[Illustration:
Our carts crossing a branch of the Yellow River fifty _li_ west of the
Shensi capital
]
[Illustration:
Women and girls do much of the grinding of grain with the familiar
stone roller of China, in spite of their bound feet
]
The first night out of Kwanyintang we slept in the house from which a
Greek, and ate in the house from which a Frenchman, both officials of
the advancing railway, had been taken by bandits a few weeks before.
They were still in captivity among the mountains somewhere to the
southwest, the nucleus of the considerable little party of foreigners by
whose unwilling assistance the brigands eventually won their way into
the national army. In fact we slept on unfurnished beds and were offered
unnecessary apologies by our polished French host and Japanese hostess
at dinner because of the looting that had taken place at the time his
predecessor was carried off. There was still a certain atmosphere of
suppressed dread among the few foreign residents, for none of them was
sure how soon he might become the next victim; but mankind quickly
learns to live without discomfort under many unpleasant circumstances.
Our soldier escort changed each day, and we were entertained each
evening with the long “face-saving” process that took place before the
detail could accept the gratuity we offered them. The struggle, which we
turned over to Chang as more finely versed in Chinese etiquette than we,
was particularly arduous on that first evening, for the commander of the
detachment was a real lieutenant, and instead of the thirty-two
vociferous and violent refusals which seemed to be required of a mere
sergeant or corporal before he accepted what he really had no intention
in the world of declining, the lieutenant was still pushing back the
detested silver with fine effect when we lost count and went inside.
Three Mexican dollars distributed among ten men for a hot and arduous
thirty-mile tramp for the possible protection of a pair of unknown
foreigners might not strike one of our own “doughboys” as anything to
write home about; but for men whose daily pay was nothing like their
share of this sum, and who draw their pay much more often in theory than
in practice, the major’s insistence that they “have a good feed on us”
could not really have sounded so immoral to them as they pretended.
The second afternoon was still fairly young when we reached the large
walled town of what its residents, at least, called Lüngbau. The escort
was to stop here, but the sergeant in command thought he could get
permission to go on with us another twenty _li_, or get the next detail
to start at once, if we would let him go into town and see the
commander, while we continued around the edge of it, as most through
travel does in passing crowded walled cities. Near one of the farther
gates a soldier sent by the local commandant overtook us. His chief, he
said, could not send a detail on such short notice, and he did not think
it wise for us to go on without one. Bandits had been very active in the
immediate region ahead and might even have heard of the “important”
foreigners and be looking for them.
All this moved us little, for both the major and I knew from long
experience that it is always the _next_ stage of the journey that is
perilous for the traveler, never the one in which he actually is.
Besides, ten straggling, poorly equipped soldiers of the Chinese type
would scarcely prevent the bandits from adding us to their collection if
they really meant to do so. But we were reckoning without our muleteers.
They had already expressed a desire to stop in Lüngbau; the report from
the commandant made them doubly anxious to stay. We were pooh-poohing
their fears and deciding to order a new start when, following the eye of
one of them, I glanced up at the city gate close beside us. It was a
picturesque little portal, but that mere fact would not of course have
drawn the attention of a Chinese muleteer. What had aroused his interest
was two frail crates, thrown hastily together of narrow strips of wood,
fastened to the face of the gate on either side just above the arch, and
each containing a human head. I had often read of such dainty
decorations on Chinese city gates, on those indeed of our medieval
ancestors; but they had always seemed far away and long ago, something
pertaining to the “good old days,” which a prosaic modern wanderer would
never have the privilege of seeing. To come upon them, therefore, in the
present year of grace and in the full light of the ordinary, every-day
life about us, tacked up against two torn posters depicting the delights
and excellencies of a widely known brand of cigarettes, was—well, was at
least a pleasant reminder that the picturesque customs of old China had
not yet all gone into the discard, that even the modern wanderer, if he
wander long and far enough, may still once in a blue moon come upon some
of those little details linking the phonographed, sewing-machined world
of to-day with the cave-man, which he has so often envied the travelers
of bygone centuries.
These two bandits, explained the soldier messenger, prompted now and
then by the solicitous crowd that always gathers in China about any
suggestion of a controversy, or of a foreigner, had been caught four
days before in the very town where we must spend the night, if we
persisted in pushing on. I suppose the crated heads were what any
ladylike person would have called a “gruesome sight,” but I fear they
struck me merely as interesting. In China one quickly and unconsciously
gets a sense of the cheapness of human life, so that things which would
ruin a night’s sleep at home are forgotten around the next corner. The
heads each lay on one ear in the bottom of their open-work crates, half
grinning down upon passers-by. Having a southern exposure, they had
already greatly profited by the three or four days they had been
separated from their original, evidently rather youthful, possessors to
disguise their identity. They were yellow, not the mere yellow of the
Chinese, who so far north are scarcely yellow at all, but of the yellow
of a pile of crude sulphur, of a ripe lemon; and they were in that state
in which even the most careless housewife would quickly send a cut of
meat out to be buried—deep. Moreover—and all the writers on head-adorned
gates I had ever read had never given me a hint of this little
detail—they were swarming with flies, which seemed to consider this a
particularly luscious feast.
We yielded to the reluctance of our muleteers and turned back to a
near-by inn. The sun was still high enough for a stroll through the
extramural suburb, often the most crowded part of a Chinese town, then
across Lüngbau itself, and around a half-circuit of its broad wall, from
which we could look down into many of what in other lands would have
been domestic secrets. We saw by chance, for instance, that the big
sturdy man who had followed us into the inn-yard on his knees, because
he had carelessly frozen his feet off one night, had a big family with
whom to share the remnant of a roast leg of lamb we had given him.
Somewhere among the crowded bazaars some one succeeded in telling us
that bandits were worse in this region because it was fairly rich and
they could live on the country; but the teeming life of Chinese streets
certainly flowed on its even way in complete indifference to those heads
upon the gate and to the dangers they stood for. What was still more to
the point, there was time to take a leisurely view of the silky-brown
terraced mountains that bounded the southern horizon, and to watch the
unclouded sun sink into a fiery furnace behind them.
But for that more or less forced stop at Lüngbau we should have ended
the mule-litter stage of our journey late on the third day. However,
that might have interfered with the major’s extraordinary success as a
hunter, which was not a commonplace, vulgar matter of quantity, but of a
finesse that even a Buddhist could have applauded. We had waded through
a considerable mountain pass—at least this wearing down of roads into
cañons sometimes appreciably shortens a climb—and had come down a steep
incline to the broad flat shores of the Yellow River. Castor oil in its
native state grew head-high for some distance along the deep sandy
trail; but what roused our genuine interest was the fact that the
lowland, half a mile wide, between us and the river, was swarming with
magnificent wild ducks, and probably geese. The major snatched the
shot-gun which some trusting sky-pilot in Peking had unwisely lent him
for the journey, and strode out into a forty-acre field literally
covered with the birds. Now and again a great flock of them rose and
circled in a great curtain across the lower sky, but this mattered
little, for there were always more where those came from; in fact, had
they all risen at once, the air could scarcely have contained them.
Nothing of course could be more reprehensible, more dastardly, in fact,
than to breathe a breath of criticism upon the marksmanship of a host,
as it were, who has risen so high in the profession in which
marksmanship is so essential; and fortunately there is not the slightest
occasion to do so. For surely the failure to make a perfect score can
honestly be accounted for by the fact that the weapon used was already
doing service long before our forefathers began to laugh at the idiot
who fancied that some day some one would invent a “horseless carriage.”
If birds will have the decency to stay where they are until the hunter
can step on their tails before firing, such a contrivance leaves nothing
to be desired. But wild ducks and geese, even in so rarely hunted a
paradise as the Yellow River valley, are not especially cordial to
strangers; one might, indeed, almost charge them with aloofness.
However, the major did fire at last, both barrels at once, so that at
least there would not be a second recoil to embitter his disappointment,
and in spite of the fact that he had not succeeded in getting quite near
enough to his quarry to make it really worth while to throw the weapon
itself after them. Strangely enough, one of the birds gave every
evidence of having been struck, or else of having had the scare of its
life. For instead of following its myriad fellows into the now teeming
air it ran erratically along the ground, with the major and Chang, and,
I believe, two or three of the muleteers, possibly even the cook, in hot
pursuit. The most fleet-footed of this throng—I chanced at that moment
to be hovering between turning and not turning over with my litter, and
hence can give no trustworthy testimony on the subject—at length laid
hands upon the fugitive. If it had been struck, the shot, naturally, had
not penetrated the thick feathers; perhaps it had careened off its
lightly clad skull and left it a hazy view of the situation until it was
for ever too late. At any rate, the major has the distinction of having
captured in perfect health a magnificent specimen of the wild duck
family, larger than any domestic one and beautiful as a pheasant—with a
shot-gun!
One of the soldiers carried it the rest of the morning, as another had
carried his hooded falcon the day before. Our entourage attempted to
convince us that such birds were not fit to eat, but its superiority to
a Thanksgiving turkey when it appeared before us again next day
suggested that they may merely have been offering, Chinese fashion, to
throw it away for us.