ONWARD THROUGH SHENSI
Our good British host of Sian-fu conceived the nefarious project of
sending us on to Lanchow in “Peking carts”; but the few unavoidable
churnings in those of the Tuchun had firmly convinced us that anything
else was preferable. Anything else boiled down to a single choice,—the
transformation of pack-mules in the postal service into riding-animals
by the simple expedient of disguising them as such with the American
army saddles and bridles we had brought with us. For militarists had
drained the provinces of horses; good riding-mules could be bought, if
at all, only for a fortune, and could not be hired for so long and
hazardous a journey under any circumstances. We took two carts also, it
is true, a “large” and a “small” one in Chinese parlance, though the
difference in size was not great and the three mules of the one hardly
better than the two of the other. But these were for the baggage and our
two servants.
An inventory of the whole expedition may be mildly of interest, not so
much for the information of other travelers as to show that the most
modest of foreigners can scarcely escape a princely retinue when they
travel in the interior of China. The “large” cart exacted forty-four
dollars; the small one twenty-seven dollars; each pack-mule sixteen
dollars, with a dollar “tea-money” at the end (specified in the
contract). This included a driver for each cart, a _mafu_, or groom, on
foot to attend to the riding-animals—for most of the way, it turned out,
we had two of them—all self-sustaining, except their mere lodging at
inns and, of course, a certain inevitable “squeeze” through
understandings with innkeepers. For a journey of fifteen hundred _li_,
or four hundred and fifty miles, the sum total did not seem excessive,
particularly as it was merely in “Mex” and but little more than half
what it would have been in American currency. The trip, we learned, was
usually divided into eighteen stages and could scarcely be made with
such an outfit in less than sixteen days. We took the precaution of
promising a dollar a day _cumshaw_ to each of the cart-drivers for every
day they bettered the ordinary schedule.
Fifty _li_ beyond Sian-fu the alleged road went down into the broad
river-bed of the Wei, a sturdy tributary of the Hoang Ho and in certain
seasons several times wider than it was now. Far out at the edge of the
water was gathered a mighty multitude waiting for the very inadequate
ferry to set them across to the large walled town of Sienyang on the
further shore. A typical Chinese ferry is a marvelous example of the
worst way to cross a river, and this one was no exception to the rule.
Out in the sand close alongside the still broad stream there were
densely crowded together, in all the disorder of which the Chinese, who
are adepts at it, are capable, carts piled high with all sorts of
awkward cargo, mules, donkeys, and a few old hacks of horses, all under
cumbersome packs, laden wheelbarrows by the score, and coolies without
number, each carrying with him a donkey-load of something or other. All
this assortment, not to mention dozens of mere Chinese travelers of less
good-natured mien than the coolies, and all sorts of journeying odds and
ends scattered through the throng, was lying in wait for one of three
clumsy, home-made barges which at long intervals poled and singsonged
themselves from shore to shore. Wherever a Chinese crowd gathers there
quickly flock those eager to minister to its wants, so that out here on
the bare sand there had sprung up several straw-mat restaurants, a
shoemaker’s hasty establishment, a blacksmith-shop, which could have
been packed up entire in five minutes and carried off over the smithy’s
shoulder, for those who wished to take advantage of the delay by having
a horse shod or some unavoidable repair done, while the hawkers of
everything hawkable to such customers struggled through the chaotic mob
chanting their wares in all the tones from diphtheritic hoarseness to
the shrillest of falsettos. Then of course there were the inevitable
beggars, young and old, sickly and sturdy, slinking in and out through
every possible opening.
It would have been un-Chinese to take turns or conform to any other
system that might have made easier the task in hand, so that when the
first of the three craft, more overloaded than any American “trolley” in
the rush hour, began to show signs of where it purposed to land, there
was a helter-skelter in that direction which resulted in many personal
discomfitures. Luckily foreigners are usually given a wide berth in such
stampedes; whether it is out of sheer respect or merely due to some old
tradition of one of these strange-looking “outside-country people”
suddenly “making his hand into a ball” and chastising in an
unprecedented manner those who were so unfortunate as to jostle him,
there is almost always alacrity and generally respectful cheerfulness in
giving one of them full right of way. Personally we might not have taken
advantage of this attitude and made chaos more chaotic by demanding
first place; but Chang, like any Chinese in the service of a foreigner,
could not resist impressing that fact upon his fellow-countrymen; and
before we realized it he had somehow forced our expedition to the front
at the spot where the boat at last concluded to ground. For it would not
have been conventional to prepare a place where the craft might actually
land, any more than it would have been for it to carry a real gang-plank
in place of the two warped and writhing slabs that were at length
disentangled from the welter of everything on board and slid over the
side. For one thing, a real gang-plank could probably not have survived
some band of thieves for a single night; for another, how could the
swarms of tattered men hanging about either shore earn their meager food
if carts and wheelbarrows could be gotten aboard without their
assistance? Had there been any suggestion of authority to keep the one
throng back far enough for the other to disembark, the boat’s stay might
at least have been cut in half. But China is preëminently the land of
individual rather than communal liberty, and there ensued something
superior by many times to any college rush. That a few who wished to
disembark had been swept back again upon the boat, and vice versa, was
of course no unusual experience. When at last comparative quiet began to
settle down about us, and the half-dozen polemen at the stern took up
their weird chantey, we found that while we ourselves and most of our
animals were on board none of our carts had won the mêlée. Carts could
not get on board under their own natural motive-power, but, having been
unhitched, they must be bodily lifted and shouldered up the crazy
substitutes for gang-planks.
Though the opposite shore was a stone-paved road close under the city
wall, landing facilities were far worse than where we had embarked. For
one thing, the craft grounded fully ten feet from shore and could not be
coaxed to move in either direction until all the coolies, who made up
three fourths of the passenger-list, had been driven overboard, packs
and all, and left to scramble as best they could up the stone facing of
the bank. Many of them were carrying cotton in loose bundles or in high
cone-shaped baskets, and now and then in their shrieking, disorganized
struggles a boll or two of the precious stuff fell into the muddy water.
The dismay at such a disaster, though only on the part of the owner or
carrier, who screamed with excitement until he had rescued the
threatened bit of property, was not merely both absurd and pathetic, but
a striking commentary on the poverty of China’s great masses. Eventually
the boat was poled close enough to what should and could easily have
been a stone runway so that the frightened animals could be forced to
walk the teetering plank without more than two or three of them falling
overboard, and some two hours after we had reached the river our own
carts were manhandled ashore from a following boat and our expedition
was once more organized.
Thousands of people, and probably at least hundreds of carts, cross the
Wei at Sienyang every day in the year, and have done so for centuries;
yet the several simple little improvements that would make the crossing
a brisk matter of routine have evidently never been thought of—except by
critical foreigners—much less ever attempted. No Chinese concerned would
feel really happy if the thing were not done in the very hardest
possible way consistent with its being accomplished at all; that would
make him feel out of touch with his worshiped ancestors. Besides, whom
do you expect to make those improvements? Not the local authorities, for
they probably get more “squeeze” under the present system; not the
boatmen, for the longer the boat is in loading the fewer times they will
have to pole it across; not, certainly, the flocks of hangers-on who
find in the difficulties of embarking and disembarking their only source
of livelihood; and surely not the passenger, for his only interest is to
get across, not to make it easier for other people, for whose weal or
woe he has a Chinaman’s supreme indifference.
Beyond Sienyang the whole dust-hazy landscape was covered as far as the
eye could see with graves, not the little conical spatters of earth to
be seen in myriads all over China, but immense mounds by the score, some
of them veritable mountains—and nowhere a touch of any color but the
yellow brown of rainless autumn. Once perhaps there had been small
forests about these tombs, but at most now there was left a rare broken
stone horse of clumsy workmanship and perhaps the remnants of a few
other more or less mythological beasts. What noble beings had been
worthy the heavy task of piling these great hills over their mortal
remains, or when they had graced the earth, no one along the way could
tell us. Once or twice a day we passed a huge oblong old bell of
elaborate design that had once hung in a temple, and was now rusting
away in some moistureless mud-hole, like the abandoned sugar-kettles
which litter several islands of the West Indies. Perhaps the temples
themselves had fallen entirely away again into the dust from which even
holy edifices are constructed in the loess country, and left these
abandoned bells as the only remembrance of their former existence.
Sometimes one of these had been rescued, whether out of piety,
superstition, or some lucrative inspiration, and hung in the one and
only tree of which an occasional larger village boasted.
On the second midday we lunched in a cave, and paid even for the water
drunk by the mules, as well as their chopped straw and beans; or at
least their owners did. In fact, cave dwellings had become almost
universal, and were to remain so for many days to come; villages, whole
towns of caves, stretched in row after row up the face of great loess
cliffs, like the terraced fields that covered every foot of the
mountainous world from river-bottom to the crest of the farthest visible
range. In all this tumbled expanse often the only touch of color was the
persimmons, like big orange-tinted tomatoes—persimmons by the
ox-cart-load; wheelbarrows creaking under their double straw boxes of
persimmons; baskets of them hanging from the shoulder-poles of jogging
coolies; wandering persimmon-sellers everywhere singing their merits;
millions of them for sale, millions more being dried in the sun. Even
the dust which covered everything and everybody without distinction
could not disguise the persimmons’ splash of color, nor hamper the
natives from wolfing them entire as often as their worldly wealth
warranted the acquisition of one. Dust and skin aside, we also found
them the best thing late autumn had to offer—a drink, a lunch, and a
dessert all in one.
We crawled out of our sleeping-bags at five each morning and were off at
six, except on the few days when we varied that program by making it an
hour earlier. With the sun so low that it only overtook us some twenty
_li_ away, those daily departures were not only dark but increasingly
cold. For though men working in the fields were still sometimes stripped
to the waist, at least when the cloudless sun was high, as late as the
tenth of November, any suggestion of shadow or of night air became more
tinged with serious meaning as the earth underfoot rose higher and
higher above sea-level. The roads for the most part were still cañons,
sometimes mightier cañons than we had even yet seen; at others they
clambered over loess ridges and hills, gashing themselves deeply into
these wherever time, traffic, and soil coincided sufficiently to do so.
In strict speech there were no roads at all, as there seldom are
anywhere in China; not that they were merely atrocious routes of
transportation, but because the Chinese scheme of things does not make
provision even for a place on which to build a road. Every foot of
territory pays a land-tax; the unfortunate landholder on whose property
the public chooses to trespass in its strenuous struggles to get itself
and its produce from one place to another must pay for that which
belongs to him only in name. The result is that a road is a homeless
orphan, welcome nowhere, driven from field to field, and ruthlessly done
away with by plow or shovel whenever an opportunity offers. The attempts
of each of China’s myriad tillers of the soil to chase the un-public
highway off his own precious little patches of earth, added to the fact
that a driver has only a limited control over the wanderings of his
lead-mule, and has no training in directness and time-saving himself,
make the average Chinese road the most incredible example of aimless
wandering on the face of the earth. There are no fences in this land of
walls; the Chinese walls in his home, his towns, his country, but never
his fields, which would seem to need it most. For traffic has not the
slightest consideration for the damage it may do. It marches serenely
over newly planted grain or ripening crops whenever there is the least
incentive to do so, and the only redress of the owner is some such
feeble protest as digging traverse trenches at frequent intervals along
the edge of his land in the usually vain hope that carts will be obliged
to keep outside them, or to take advantage of some favorable season of
slight travel to uproot the pesky road and throw it away entirely.
There were defiles so narrow through the great loess cañons that carts
could not have passed a sedan-chair; and through these came such a
constant train of traffic that it is strange the lighter west-bound
travel moved at all. Ponderous two-wheeled carts, weighing several times
as much as our farm-wagons, drawn by six or seven mules, were not
uncommon. All had at least three animals, one in the shafts—and many of
these shaft-mules were splendid specimens of mulehood—the rest in front
in pairs or trios, with perhaps a lone lead-mule setting the pace. Rope
traces running through a large iron ring suspended from each of the
shafts attached all the animals directly to the axle. A Chinese
shaft-mule’s life is no sinecure. At every incessant bump and lurch of
the massive cart he is similarly jolted by the two cumbersome logs that
imprison him; if the cart overturns he must go with it; and all day long
his head is held painfully erect, not by a mere bit, but by a rawhide
thong between his upper lip and the gums. The other animals get off
little more cheaply, and with the wicked loads of wheat in long slender
bags which endlessly poured in past us from the west, the gasping of the
animals as they toiled in the deep sand-like loess, particularly when
the cañon led steeply upward over the high ridges which here and there
cut across the route, was like the death-rattle of beasts suddenly
stricken down.
Under each axle of these carts hung a long bell of cylinder shape, and
the dull booming of scores of these could be heard for miles before or
behind them. Apparently these wheat-trains traveled day and night. We
met them at dawn with all the signs of having already been on the road
for hours; all through the night the booming of passing carts could be
heard by any one who cared to lie awake; very rarely did we come upon
them halted long enough even to feed the jaded animals. There were at
least two men on every load, one, whom we suspected to be the driver off
duty, stretched out at full length and apparently sleeping as soundly as
if the jolting, careening sacks of wheat were a sailor’s hammock. There
was really nothing strange in this; the Chinese are trained from birth
to sleep under all manner of catch-as-catch-can conditions. With the
loess soil constantly swirling about under the least disturbing
circumstances, and with a high wind often blowing, the Chinese on their
carts, as well as those astride or afoot for that matter, looked
ludicrously like an endless procession of clowns with flour-powdered
faces, or of mimes wearing death-masks.
Here and there the file was broken by some more leisurely conveyance,—a
cart with an ox in the shafts and perhaps a steer and a donkey in front,
sometimes with still more incongruous combinations. The narrow cañons
were often so congested with beast-drawn traffic that the hundreds of
wheelbarrows had to join the pole-shouldering coolies and other
pedestrians on the paths along the cliffs high above. These _tui-chu_
(push-carts), as the Chinese call them, had every manner of aid, from a
child to a donkey, which we had seen in use in the wheelbarrow brigades
east of Sian-fu, and one ingenious fellow had rigged up a large sail
over his load and was creaking along nicely before the strong west wind.
I never ceased to wonder where the never ending stream of coolies was
coming and going from and to, and why. Their toilsome tramps to change
places, bag and baggage, seemed a mere waste of effort, like carrying
sand from one river-bed to another.
The coolies of Shensi, or at least most of those we saw in that
province, seem to long to be mistaken for scholars—an honor, of course,
which would bring joy to any Chinese heart, in contrast to the insult it
would often convey in some other lands. Some clever salesman had
profited by this strange Celestial longing by selling to more than half
the coolies we met a huge pair of rimless spectacles made of plain
plate-glass, and of course of no optical value whatever. Had they been
in the form of goggles, one might have concluded that they were merely a
protection from the dust, but there was nothing about them that could by
any stretch even of a coolie imagination be considered anything but
ornamental.
Cues have appreciably decreased in China since the fall of the alien
dynasty which required them as a badge of submission; but once a custom
is established among the conservative Chinese it is harder to eradicate
than ragweed, however uncomplimentary may have been its origin. It may
be a slight exaggeration to say that every other man we met on our
western trip wore a cue, but certainly there is still wound about coolie
heads material enough for all the hair-nets that America can consume in
another century. Old men, though only a tiny gray braid may be left
them, would, it is said, “rather lose their heads than their tails.” In
this west country boys are as likely to be adorned with them as not; in
any busy street the itinerant hair-dresser may be seen combing out the
long black tresses of his coolie clients, calmly seated out of doors
even in the depths of winter, and often adding a switch for good
measure. Among upper-class Chinese the cue has largely disappeared, but
with the masses it is as common a feature in many provinces as the long
pipes protruding from the backs of coolie necks when not in use.
A corpse journeying to its ancestral home between two pole-joined mules,
the white rooster demanded by ancient custom sitting on top of the
ponderous coffin in a little wicker cage, was one of the infrequent,
though not rare, sights of the journey. Sometimes we met a long file of
black pigs moving slowly eastward under the impulse of several patient
men, one marching in front unarmed, the rest with very long but rather
harmless whips, and all singing to coax on their charges. It was an
addition to my slight knowledge of natural history to learn that hogs
are moved by music; but there is no telling what Chinese music may
accomplish until it has been tried. We rode, of course, or rested our
cramped legs by walking, up out of the cañons as much as possible. Here
the variance in the point at which a man or a mule registers dizziness
sometimes led to serious differences of opinion between ourselves and
our mounts. Along most of the cliffs high above the sunken roads there
are several paths, some of them already appreciably wearing down toward
the ultimate common level, others narrow ridges of a rather harder
streak of earth with barely room on them for two feet at a time.
Invariably, whenever there was a choice in paths, the mule would choose
the one closest to the edge of the road chasm, the very edge of it, if
possible, often with a sheer drop of a hundred feet or more directly
under the off stirrup—and the loess soil everywhere seeming ready to
collapse at any moment. Sometimes a path worked its way out on the face
of the cliff before one noticed, to where it would have been as
impossible to dismount as to turn about, and the helpless rider could
only prayerfully intrust his future to the mule, wholly free apparently
from any suggestion of the trepidation which ran in hot sprays up the
human spine. Certainly a mule has no worry-bacteria in his system—and
probably has fewer troubles in a lifetime than almost any other living
creature, which should be food for reflection to worrying humanity. Once
I had the hair-lifting experience of seeing most of the rear end of the
major’s mule just in front of me go over the cliff with a crumbling bit
of path, but the animal never for a moment lost his mulish poise, nor
hesitated when the next chance offered to take the most edgy of the
paths again.
On the evening of the second day out of Sian-fu our muleteers
respectfully sent word that they would like us to start “ten _li_
earlier” next morning, “because the road went up-stairs.” That was one
of the contrasts between Chinese mule-drivers and those, for instance,
of South America. Here they were always ready to start at any hour we
named, and sometimes asked us to advance it. We accordingly got up three
miles earlier, and before the day was done congratulated ourselves on
having done so. All morning the road, freeing itself from loess cañons
and taking to river-valleys and ever higher plains, ascended at so
gradual a pace that we hardly realized we were rising unless we glanced
back at the lower and lower world behind. But just beyond the village
where we made our usual hour-and-a-half noonday halt, the earth surged
up like some tidal wave suddenly commanded to stand still. The road did
indeed go up-stairs; nothing could have been a more exact description of
its zigzagging course, which at length, hours after we had left the
village, brought us in straggling formation to the summit, four thousand
feet above it, then plunged even more swiftly down into the bed of a
slight stream which trickled away through a region of huge rocks and a
formation for a time more solid than pure loess. But this was only a
brief and imperfect respite. The crumbling soil soon monopolized the
landscape again, and for many days afterward filled our eyes and
nostrils with its stifling and all-penetrating dust. Peculiar sights,
indeed, the loess often gives. Fertile enough with sufficient water, one
might easily have concluded that not a drop of rain had ever fallen
here. Mud would have meant more prosperity, but when it does rain these
already ankle-deep roads at the bottoms of the great cañons must surely
be in close proximity to the infernal regions.
Any suggestion of this was spared us, however, as we were denied any
hint of the great transformation that spring brings to the loess
country, turning it from the delicate light brown that is as unbroken
during the autumn and winter as the blue of the cloudless sky overhead
to a vernal green which those who have seen it say is seldom surpassed
in beautiful landscapes. Such loess cliffs as no words can describe
became commonplace, almost unnoticed sights along the way, cliffs
falling gradually from sky to abyss so far below as almost to seem
bottomless. All the population for long distances burrowed in human
rabbit-warrens dug in these cliffs, row above row of caves, like cities
of ten- or twelve-story cliff-dwellings. Many of the caves proved at
close sight to be ruined and abandoned; usually these were fallen in,
with a great round hole in the roof. Of course the former inhabitants
had dug a new home elsewhere—unless they were buried in the old one—and
the population was not so dense as the myriad holes in the
mountain-sides suggested. There was a great difference, too, in the
grades of dwellings even among such unlikely homes as these. A cave
could be as noisome a hut as any hovel out on a plain; sometimes a mere
hole in the cliff looked like nothing in particular, until a closer
glance showed it to be the entrance to a long passageway leading to
several courts that were surrounded by a dozen or more arched
cave-dwellings, perhaps all well below the level of the sunken road.
Sometimes the proud family had even gone to the trouble of putting an
elaborate inscription over the doorway, and had fitted it with wooden
sills. But this was unusual, for with such slight exceptions literally
everything was made of the quickly crumbling earth,—the “devil screen”
across the way from the entrance (though this very important feature of
Chinese architecture was rare in the west), the wall filling up the
great arch of the cave, with a small door cut in it, even the _k’ang_,
or stone-hard family bed, inside.
Thus everything, walls, houses, cliffs, terraced hillsides, even the
dreary cave-dwellers themselves, had the selfsame monotonous color, and
in all the autumn landscape there was nothing to break it, to give it
the faintest contrast. A sad place surely was this for man to live, like
an aged world that was wearing out and would soon be fit only to be
discarded. Indeed, the process of dissolution was going on under our
very eyes. There were often places where the road had very recently
dropped away into a mammoth cañon so deep that to peer over the brink
was to catch the breath in what might easily have been a spasm of
dizziness; yet heavily laden carts still shrieked and lashed their way
along the sheer edge of it, and all the miscellaneous traffic passing
the spot where the next crumbling might carry it to perdition gave it no
more attention than Chinese give to the open, unprotected, curbless
wells that abound all over China like gopher-holes in our western
prairies.
A world wearing away, and apparently there is no cure for it. The trees
which might have held it together with their roots, to say nothing of
the rain they would bring, were completely grubbed out centuries ago by
those very ancestors whom the wretched modern inhabitants so highly
honor. Those short-sighted forebears were all for the past, or at best
for what was to them the present; and their living descendants have no
choice but to follow the same short-sighted course, for the present is
an unremitting struggle for mere existence now, and the future surely
holds out little promise. To repair the fatal tree-wastefulness of their
revered ancestors would require something like forcing every man in
China to plant a tree a week, promptly lopping off the head of any one
who cuts one down, and keeping this up as long as their ancestors took
to grub out the forests that once graced the land; that is, for
hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
We think we know something of poverty and physical suffering in America,
but in crowded, despoiled China we realize our ignorance. Here are
perhaps the lowest forms of human beings, creatures in the image of man
who are not merely akin to beasts but a kind of living offal. Nor are
the dregs of the population to be found in this more roomy western part
of the country; there the poorest might be called a middle class, though
they are so poor that they burrow in caves and are out long before dawn
and late into the night with basket and wicker shovel wandering the
roads ready to fight for the droppings of passing animals. Perhaps there
are some of them who take life by the forelock and force it more or less
to do their bidding. But though here and there were what we would call
“tough-looking characters,” even they seemed to be harmless, at least
where foreigners were concerned. We hear much in these days of the
anarchy of China, and in so far as a responsible, effective government
goes the word is not ill chosen. Yet there is a cohesion, a momentum in
Chinese society, in the great masses that populate the land, which makes
a failure of formal government mainly a surface manifestation, with
often scarcely a ripple disturbing the even flow of life in general, as
it has gone on for centuries and perhaps will for centuries to come. In
all west Shensi we saw hardly a soldier, and almost as little of any
other coercive force; yet though there may not have been any bandits
left in the province, as its Tuchun boldly asserted, nothing would have
been easier than for any group of these thousands upon thousands of
sturdy coolies for ever plodding to and fro, or the village crowds which
gathered in the inn-yards to watch us eat modest noonday lunches which
must have seemed to them princely, to fall upon a few stray foreigners
lost in the great sea of Chinese humanity and despoil them of what in
this land of utter poverty was their great riches. Not only was there no
suggestion of such a thought, not only did they show us all the respect
which the most haughty participant in extraterritoriality could demand;
they were frankly friendly, neither out of fear nor hope of favor. Given
the slightest provocation and they invariably smiled; the men, that is;
the cripple-footed women never, and small wonder. Behind us lay a
constant trail of childlike comment on our appearance, and especially on
the stirrups of our army saddles. The Chinese are so minutely
conservative that even to wrap a patch of leather about something which
they have always hitherto seen without it is to arouse amazement. Often
this amazement expressed itself in a burst of laughter, but never once
was there anything about its unforced heartiness which could have been
taken for ridicule. Possibly they did find covert ways to make fun at
our expense; they nearly always called us _moo-sha_, for instance, which
means missionary. But there was every reason to believe that this
startling error was due to pure honest ignorance, perhaps once in a
while to a desire to be complimentary; never, I feel sure, was there a
deliberate attempt even to be unkindly.
The major likened the rank and file, the coolies at least, to our
Southern negroes, with whom his army experience had given him a
considerable acquaintance. There is a certain similarity of temperament;
one might, indeed, follow up the thought and find a resemblance between
the more morose, yet still Chinese, non-laboring classes and the mulatto
or lighter types of negro, who so often have an air of brooding over
their intermediate state of heredity. But one could easily carry the
thought too far. There is much the same easy-going view of life—laughter
easily provoked, often in the face of things which seem rather to call
for tears; but beyond that the two races part company. The negro still
loves his African leisure; if there is any one on earth without a trace
of laziness in his make-up, surely it is the Chinese workman—though this
be due merely to centuries of bitter competition for existence. Nor do
the poorest of our cabin-dwelling blacks suffer anything like the
poverty of the toilsome masses of China; even those of Haiti do not
approach it. There are worse places in China, but even in this
comparatively thinly populated northwest thousands of people quite
willing to toil from sun to sun at anything promising them the slightest
remuneration live under conditions in which it would literally be
illegal to keep pigs in any well governed section of the Occident. You
can always get men to do anything do-able, on short notice, in China;
there is such an enormous surplus of them. If there is a little stream
across the trail, there are sure to be men waiting to set those who are
shod across it for a brass “cash” or two; if there is a load too
cumbersome or too heavy for a donkey or a pack-mule, you can easily pick
up men to carry it. Most of us have the comforting impression that,
being inured to them for countless generations, they do not feel their
hardships and sufferings as we should. No doubt they do not, for if they
did it would be beyond human power to produce that cheerful atmosphere,
as wholly devoid of surliness as of melancholy, with which they seem to
surround their bitter lives.
It was one of the surprises of our journey that feathered game was more
than abundant where every other thing, down to the last grass-blade and
the tiniest bit of offal, is laboriously gathered and fully utilized,
where hunger drives into the pot everything that can possibly be made
quasi-edible. Wild ducks and geese all but obscured the sun along every
important river-valley; partridge, quail, and beautiful pheasants
covering many a bushy slope, often even the planted fields themselves,
as thickly as sparrows a barn-yard, were to be had almost for the
shooting. Cliff-sides blue with pigeons, the air filled with
drapery-like swirls of them, ceased in time even to draw the attention.
Were the major less sensitive to the difference between this and big
game stalking, I might mention that single shot which brought down eight
of these silky-blue birds; though that, to be sure, was before the
attempt to coerce a recalcitrant mule with the butt of a not too young
and sturdy—not to say borrowed—shot-gun resulted so disastrously. There
seldom was a time during all our long journey out through the west that
a little exertion could not add wild fowl to our canned larder; yet, as
far as we were ever able to discover, the hungry people of that region
made no attempt to kill or capture them—nor to destroy the swarms of
magpies, crows, sparrows, and rooks which it was hard to believe left
anything of the crops for the men and beasts who toiled to raise them.
The laws had nothing to say on the subject; we saw it proved that there
is no prejudice against such food when it can be had, and granted that
guns are rare and ammunition too expensive for a Chinese peasant,
certainly the race has given proof enough of ingenuity and of
accomplishing under difficulties to warrant astonishment at the apparent
indifference to what in many regions is the most valuable product still
ungathered.
Every few hours we came upon a walled city. I never broke myself of the
feeling that romance and the picturesqueness of the Middle Ages were
sure to be found within them, a welcome relief from the sordid, filthy
monotony outside. Yet invariably, when we had made our way through the
long dusty suburb, crowded with outdoor eating-places and miserable
shops full of everything to a coolie’s taste, with the din of the eager
shouting of wares in our ears, and had passed through the big frowning
gate towering above the massive old crenelated wall, we found the same
filthy, uneven earth streets lined by the same miserable shops, in fact,
shops often poorer and less energetic, conservative old establishments
which had grown effete, while the comparative new-comers outside the
walls still had the activity of youth. Black swine wandering at will,
pariah dogs covered with great open sores, human beings in little better
condition, were as common to the enclosed town as to the suburbs. Often
the city itself seemed half deserted, with as many ruins and open spaces
as occupied mud-dwellings, though its extramural outskirts might be
densely crowded. Many towns were so poor and uninviting that our cartmen
drove around them—always on the south side, we noticed, close beside the
walls—and stopped at inns outside. There was at least one advantage in
this, and perhaps one disadvantage. Though the city gates are in theory
opened “when the chicken first sing,” as Chang put it, they might still
be closed as late as six, and thus hold up our departure until we could
rout out several sleepy soldiers with candle-lanterns, present
visiting-cards to prove our rights to extra attention, and perhaps not
be on our way again until the eastern horizon began to pale. On the
other hand, there was, of course, whatever danger existed that bandits
coming upon us in the night would have us at their mercy outside the
walls. Yet I confess to having ridden through those outwardly mysterious
old walled towns whenever it was reasonably possible, and to going for a
stroll within them when we lodged outside, always in quest of that
romantic something that seemed sure to be found there, yet never was.
[Illustration:
In the Mohammedan section of Sian-fu there are men who, but for their
Chinese garb and habits, might pass for Turks in Damascus or
Constantinople
]
[Illustration:
Our chief cartman eating dinner in his favorite posture, and holding
in one hand the string of “cash,” one thousand strong and worth
about an American quarter, which served him as money
]
[Illustration:
A bit of cliff-dwelling town in the loess country, where any other
color than a yellowish brown is extremely rare
]
[Illustration:
A corner of a wayside village, topped by a temple
]
The smaller towns and hamlets that lay scattered along the way, and
often thickly over the surrounding country, were also monotonously
alike, always filthy and miserable, a few women in crippled feet
hobbling about the doors of their caves or mud huts, numerous children
with running noses and bare buttocks making the most of the dismal world
about them, usually a group of the older men squatting in a circle in a
sunny corner out of the wind and gambling for brass “cash” with small
cards bearing no resemblance to our own. Throughout China it seems to be
the convenient custom to dress small children in trousers cut out at the
seat, so that they need no attention; and in this northwest country, at
least, the people believe in hardening their offspring by exposure. In
the depths of winter both boys and girls, between about five and ten,
wear nothing but a ragged jacket of quilted cotton reaching barely to
the waist, and wander disconsolately about with the lower half of the
body naked, chapped, and begrimed, like the mittenless hands of the
otherwise fully dressed adults. Undoubtedly this Spartan treatment makes
those who survive less susceptible to cold, which is an important asset
in the life of the Chinese masses.
If something caused one of us to halt a moment in town or village, all
the community that had no possessions requiring a watchful eye quickly
flocked closely about us,—dogs, boys, youths, men of all ages, and very
young girls, though never, of course, the women. Did we chance to
scribble in our note-books or fill a pipe, the crowding all but pinned
our elbows to our sides. In larger towns or places where market-day had
brought a throng, the dust raised by the dense crowd encircling us
became a menace to the lungs. Fortunately timidity equals curiosity in
such a gathering. Sometimes when suffocation seemed imminent I have
sprung suddenly to my feet with a shout, and a kick or a blow that
purposely fell short, and the stampede that ensued would wholly clear
the vicinity for a hundred yards around in scarcely the time it takes to
draw a long breath. It might be that two or three of the dispersed
throng were men of higher caste, the town’s most important merchants or
its scholars, and these, being more fearful of “losing face” before the
common herd than of having an injury done them by the dubious stranger
from another world, would retreat to a lesser distance with as leisurely
dignity as their legs would permit, and stand there with an expression
which seemed to say, “I dare you to maltreat a great man like me as if
he were a common coolie, though I admit that I will retreat if you
attempt to do so.” Then, the atmosphere having been cleared and one’s
elbows freed from pressure, one had only to smile, implying that it had
all been a joke, to have the crowd instantly roar with laughter at its
own discomfiture—and soon close in again as tightly as ever.
Especially exasperating to the photographer is this tendency of the
Chinese quickly to crowd about any one or anything unusual, for it is
often impossible to get far enough away to get them in focus. My old
trick of looking sidewise into the finder and pretending to photograph
something else at right angles to the real victim was also not so
effective as among the stolid, solemn, incurious Indians of the Andes.
For if the instantly gathering crowd did not cut off the light or
obscure the subject, the latter was almost sure to dash forward for a
close view of the kodak. More than once, in trying to catch some street
scene, I have pretended to be interested elsewhere until all the
floating population in the vicinity was packed about me, then, dashing
suddenly through the throng, I have sprinted to the spot previously
chosen and snapped the shutter; yet in almost every such case there are
at least several blurred objects in the foreground of the picture which
in real life were Chinese youths or men who led the throng that pursued
me.
Pinchow was the largest town we saw in western Shensi, evidently a place
of bygone glories, for a great wall climbing the crest of a high hill
surrounded it, and just beyond stood the largest pagoda we had seen in
the province. Terraces and caves were piled high, like mammoth walls, on
two sides of it, and the road by which traffic from the east descends
had been one of the steepest of all the journey, a dust-swirling gully
down a mountain-side reëchoing from top to bottom with the panting, as
if in death-throes, of the hundreds of mules still bearing eastward
wicked cart-loads of wheat. It was in Pinchow, too, that we were forced
to drive a sleeping coolie out of one miserable room and hang a
saddle-cloth across the door of another in order to find accommodations
in a miserable ruin of an inn, where Chang and the cook had to do their
best over a little fire of dung and twigs out in the bare, wind-swept
yard. By this time the nights had grown bitter cold, and the broken
paper windows of a room did not need an open door to aid them.
Here, too, things came to a head with the owner of our riding-mules.
Evidently the man who contracts for the carrying of the mails out of
Sian-fu had agreed to furnish us animals and had accepted the advance on
them first, and had turned his attention to getting the animals
afterward. For the first man who accompanied them turned out to be a
mere coolie, without money even to buy them food; and when he was
overtaken by the owner himself on the evening of the second day, the
latter had the unwillingness of one who had been forced to do something
against his will. He had with him, in a long sock-like purse worn inside
his quilted garments, most of the silver dollars we had paid in advance,
the contractor having kept the rest as his commission or “squeeze.” But
he hated to transform those dollars into food for his mules, and he was
constantly hinting that he should be allowed to take the animals and go
home. Just why was not apparent, since we were paying him more than he
habitually got for the same journey with loads of mail weighing half
again what we did, and which never got off and walked; and of course he
had always plodded on foot after his mules just as he was doing now.
It was still black night and we were about to leave Pinchow behind when
this fellow suddenly fell on his knees in the yard before us, and,
bowing to the earth, like a suppliant before a Chinese emperor, implored
us to let him go home, for he was losing money on the journey and so on.
The average American, I fancy, does not like to be prayed to; in fact
his reaction is likely to be what ours was, such a mixture of disgust
and anger at such degraded nonsense as to make it difficult to keep from
administering a kick. Yet there was a hint of the pathetic about the
fellow—until we reflected that of the dollar a day he was getting for
each mule he was paying out only a hundred “cash” or so to feed him. He
could not spend more on them, he wailed, because he had a family of
twenty to feed and clothe. Chinese families, however, are elastic
institutions, and we advised him to let a few of his useless dependents
starve and feed the mules, who were doing the work. For if he did not
give them a reasonable amount, we warned him, we would feed them, and
take the cost of it out of what was to be paid him at the end of the
journey. This was not a completely effective cure, but at least it
substantially increased the share which the animals had in the reward of
their labor.
For many _li_ beyond Pinchow we followed the valley of the King Ho,
walled with cliff-dwellers on either side as far as the eye could see.
There were persimmon orchards in the rich flatlands close to the stream,
the last of the fruit being picked from pole-and-vine ladders, and acres
of it drying in the sun by day, with reed-mat covers over them to keep
off the night frosts, and little cave-shaped watch-houses near-by to
protect them from the omnipresent crop-thieves. Some of the cliffs above
us were of sandstone, and the caves dug in these were much smaller than
those in the loess. Once we passed a big temple carved in the sandstone
mountain-side, with huge colored Buddhas smirking at us from the foot of
it farther on; and in two or three places the river crowded our side of
the valley so closely that the road had dug itself in along the face of
the cliff. Donkeys each carrying two huge lumps of what looked like
magnificent anthracite coal began to clutter the way, for some of the
best of Shensi’s many mines are in this vicinity. Small wonder the
traffic of centuries had worn cañons in the soft loess; we passed places
that day and the next where cart-wheels had worn gullies axle-deep in
solid rock. Let a cart get caught in one of these, and not a wheel of
the long procession could move until some means had been devised to drag
it out again. Jang-wu—to spell it as it sounded—was a once high-walled
and important city which both man and nature seemed to have decided to
scrap. It appeared to be mainly Mohammedan, with a mournful, surly
atmosphere, and was mostly deserted, except perhaps on market-days, the
loess worn away in mammoth moats on both sides of its half-ruined wall,
and all about it myriads of graves. Then one morning, almost
unexpectedly, we found that we had left the province of Shensi behind
us.