WHERE THE FISH WAGGED HIS TAIL
Whatever the dreadful hardships of our journey, they would have been
increased by at least one had the loess country been as dry and arid as
it looked, and thus compelled us to travel by camel-train. For, all
trite humor about the ship-like motion of that worthy animal aside, he
is an objectionable companion because he is an inveterate and
incorrigible night-hawk. Or perhaps that word approaches the slanderous
when applied to him, for the cause of his night-hawking is quite the
opposite of that of his human prototype. The camel prowls about in the
small hours because he can eat only by day and, given that unusual
idiosyncrasy, must work by night. Frequently the beginning of our day’s
journey was broken by a long camel-train looming up out of the first
thin white light of dawn, the dull bells gently booming, each “string”
of six or eight or ten camels led by a bearded man of red-brown,
slightly surly features that often looked more Arabic than Chinese. This
impression was increased by long white sheep- or goatskin cloaks, turned
wool in, surmounted by what seemed to be turbans, though at closer sight
and in the full light of day these last proved to be the dirty-white
skullcaps of felt to which the Chinese Mohammedans are largely addicted,
perhaps wound round with a soiled towel of cheap crash that is often the
traveling coolie’s only concession to the worship of soap and water. One
must take care, however, not to consider white caps and “Hwei-Hwei” as
synonymous. For many a Mohammedan wears black, quite like his
fellow-Chinese, while a wide white band about the cap is a sign, not of
belief in the Prophet of Medina, but of mourning for father or
grandfather. But, to come back to the camels: it would have required no
great strain on the imagination to fancy oneself in Arabia as these
endless lines of silent-footed beasts stalked disdainfully past in the
half-lighted defiles, though one would have been forced to overlook such
minor details as their two humps instead of one. Often we heard the
muffled booming of their bells as they went by in the night; but by day
they were seldom seen, unless it was kneeling in crowded contentment in
an inn-yard or sauntering packless about some hillside thinly dotted
with dead-brown tufts of coarse grass, under the care of a cat-napping
driver or two.
A wide valley we had been following for some time narrowed until it
drove the road high up above the river, whence it came down again into
another fertile vale containing many graves and the city of Tsin-ching.
There was an unusual animation about Tsin-ching. For though it had been
more nearly destroyed by the earthquake than Long-te and other gloomy
collections of ruins that lay behind us, it had many brand-new
buildings, and great gangs of men and boys were rebuilding the city
wall, quite irrespective of the fact that it was what should have been a
quiet Sunday afternoon. Custom, fear of bandits, of another Mohammedan
rebellion, of evil spirits, perhaps of cold winds, and no doubt the
laudable desire of the authorities for an opportunity to make some
“squeeze” that will be understood by many of our own city dwellers, seem
to be the principal causes of this anachronistic repair of city walls;
and the strongest of all these, probably, is custom. This one might have
inferred from the fact that this one was being rebuilt exactly in the
style in vogue centuries ago, with the crenelated top all the several
miles around it pierced by thousands of little loopholes convenient in
medieval warfare. But in China there is still some practical value to a
city wall if it has gates that can be locked and is not so badly ruined
that any one with a little diligence can find a place to climb over it.
For it is a real protection against bandit raids if they are not too
strong, against tough characters in general, and it is not without its
use in those quarrels between towns which sometimes become serious.
Besides, Tsin-ching seemed to be a kind of anti-Mohammedan stronghold,
for there were few Moslems in town—the prevalence of pigs would have
told us that, even if the human inhabitants had not—and who can tell
when the next Islamite rebellion will sweep over Kansu?
The only foreigners in Tsin-ching or for many miles around were two
Swedish ladies, one of them from Minnesota, who had recently established
a mission station. They had not yet made any converts, but they had
brought about a kinder and more tolerant feeling toward themselves, and
toward “outside barbarians” in general, by which they hoped in time to
profit. One of the richest and most significant men in town, who began
as a declared and ruthless enemy, had sneaked over a few weeks before to
let the detested missionaries of the despised sex cure him of an injury
which neither the herbs of the local druggist nor the hocus-pocus of the
local priests had helped, and, though he scarcely showed gratitude in
the Western sense, rumors of the miracle had begun to have their
influence. One of the difficulties these missionary ladies, like the few
others we met on our journey, had to contend with was that the Chinese
women with whom they tried to come in contact, especially in outlying
districts, fled at sight of them because they took them to be men. This
was largely due to their unbound feet and their skirts in place of
ladylike trousers, but, quite aside from these details, there was,
indeed, a wide difference both in appearance and manner between these
big, vigorous Nordics and the tame little Chinese women.
Exchange-shops with their huge wooden “cash” signs out in front were
more than numerous in Tsin-ching, and perhaps they were all needed.
There a Mexican dollar was worth 2500 “cash,” but more or less in
theory, since both the silver dollar and the brass coins with square
holes in them had largely disappeared from circulation. In place of the
former there were _taels_—irregular lumps of silver requiring a pair—or
two—of scales for any transaction in which they were involved—and
“Lanchow coppers.” Between these two extremes, as formerly between the
silver dollar and the “cash,” there was nothing; and if the American,
with his convenient little silver coins of fixed value, his unquestioned
paper money, and his check-book, will pause a moment to visualize just
what this means, he will understand why doing business is a complicated
process, and why the streets seem to swarm with exchange-shops in such
communities. Fortunately prices—and certainly wages—were low in
Tsin-ching. The missionary ladies, who were their own architects,
contractors, and bosses in the construction of their mission, had
formerly paid their workmen 500 “cash” a day; but recently, food prices
having gone up, this had been changed to 310 “cash” and food. It
amounted to about the same thing for the ladies, since the two native
meals furnished the gangs cost approximately two hundred “cash” a day
per man, but they could buy and prepare the food in quantity at
considerably less than the men themselves must otherwise have paid in
native restaurants, where meals were less sanitary and nourishing.
Native bosses got 400 “cash” a day, with food. Skilled carpenters, who
need not have been ashamed of the samples of their work which we saw,
were on a salary rather than a mere wage basis, as befits their higher
caste; that is, they received, besides their food, 10,000 “cash” a
month, in other words, fully two American dollars! Correspondingly, the
ladies could buy chickens for the equivalent of our nickel, a leg of
lamb for little more, and many other things in proportion. On the other
hand, they had the task of counting their “cash,” for every string of a
thousand was almost sure to be short, perhaps to have only ninety-two or
so to the hundred; and even if it was not they had to be sure of that
fact before paying the string to some carpenter who might otherwise
return half an hour later with visible proof that he had been underpaid.
Then recently their troubles had been appreciably increased by the
influx of “Lanchow coppers.”
Though the proper place for airing that scandal might be Lanchow itself,
there were so many evidences of it before we reached there that clarity
requires an earlier mention of it. As in other countries of poor
transportation facilities and sluggish circulation, the back-waters of
China are in many cases chronically short on coins, particularly on
small change, for their interminable transactions. The Tuchun of Kansu,
hoping to remedy this difficulty—and incidentally further to obviate the
possibility of eventually leaving the province a poorer man than he
entered it—hit upon what was to him perhaps a highly original scheme. He
called in the “cash” and the rather scarce coppers in circulation, had
them melted and mixed, and reissued them as new coin. This would not
have been so bad, so atrocious, in fact, if he had actually minted the
stuff into money. But what he did do was to give men all over the
district the right—at 20,000 “cash” royalty a day, gossip whispered—to
resmelt the current coins in their little dung-fire, box-bellows forges,
mix in great quantities of sand, and pour the molten result into crude
molds, from which issued such a caricature of a coin as has scarcely
circulated in the civilized world since the last find of Roman money
disappeared into the museums. They are light as glass, give out the ring
of a hat-check, are barely legible, vary greatly in design and
lettering, with misspelled attempts at English on one side of several
styles of them, and are so hopelessly mixed with dross, according to
experts, that the bit of metal in them can never again be reclaimed. At
first they were made as single coppers, worth ten “cash” each; but when
it was discovered that the cost of making a coin was three “cash,” the
double copper, or twenty-“cash” piece, was substituted, though with but
slight changes either in size or other details.
How a Chinese general, steeped as it were in the intricacies of exchange
and familiar since childhood with the daily fluctuations of the money he
used, could have overlooked the certainty of a swift decline in value of
such alleged coins is hard to understand. Perhaps he realized all this,
but lost no sleep over it so long as he got his own rake-off in real
money. At any rate, whereas a “good” or “red” copper was valued in Kansu
at two hundred or less to the Mexican dollar, and the new ones announce
themselves to be worth the same, the latter had already fallen to about
seven thousand to the dollar in the exchange-shops of Tsin-ching. Even
if this rate had been uniform throughout the province, the situation
might have been endurable. But not only did it wildly fluctuate every
day, almost every hour; it varied greatly between towns only a few miles
apart, with an upward tendency as one approached Lanchow, where the
Tuchun’s power was at its height. Long before the borders of the
province were reached this oozed away entirely, at least in so far as
his experiments in currency and finance went. His autonomous subordinate
in Pingliang had refused point-blank to allow the new coinage to enter
his district; Liangchow and most other large towns had followed suit,
and only within a certain limited area around the provincial capital
itself had the Tuchun succeeded in imposing this substitute for what
elsewhere was still “red” coppers and stringable “cash.” Where he
actually ruled, it meant a heavy fine or a prison sentence to refuse to
accept the miserable stuff; but he had little or no influence over the
value set upon it by the money-changers. Any one with even a bowing
acquaintance with the science of finance need not be told what disasters
this condition of affairs brought upon shopkeepers and business men,
especially upon those whose stocks were more or less imported from the
outside world.
One of the amusing points of the affair was that Liangchow and Pingliang
and many another town and district that would not use the stuff
themselves were manufacturing vast quantities of the spurious coins and
shipping them to Lanchow, without, of course, paying the Tuchun his
“rake-off.” It is hard even for the Chinese to outwit the Chinese, and
no sooner had the daily royalty rate been set than most coineries within
the Tuchun’s influence put on two shifts and worked twenty-four hours a
day. Moreover, it is no great task to counterfeit miserable
counterfeits, and almost any little cave-village in the loess hills
could mold coins to its heart’s content, so long as it could get the bit
of copper and brass needed. Transporting the stuff was in itself a
problem worthy an expert. “Cash” can at least be strung and hung round
the neck, but to carry enough of this new stuff for his immediate wants
would have taxed the endurance of any pedestrian above the coolie class.
In fact it was a serious matter to others than pedestrians. Every little
while we met some traveler, usually a merchant, no doubt, mounted on a
mule and followed by a donkey sagging under the weight and noisy with
the falsetto rattling of “Lanchow coppers”; and it was no uncommon thing
to pass long lines of coolies with big bundles of the new coins
oscillating at the ends of their shoulder-poles, jogging eastward, as if
the false currency were spreading, like a plague. Indeed the towns
toward the end of our outward journey sounded like brass check factories
perpetually in the act of taking stock. The latest rumor, as we neared
the capital of the province, was that the Tuchun had decided to coin
dollars also; “and then,” as a merchant sadly put it, “we will have no
money at all left.” However, the harassed people might have cheered
themselves up with the hope that the day may come when Lanchow’s
despised coppers will be worth their weight in gold among numismatists,
for coins cast in a mold are a rarity in this day and generation.
In a moment of good-hearted thoughtlessness the major sent his card and
our respects to the magistrate of Tsin-ching, who was of course of too
low rank actually to be called upon. The latter acknowledged the high
honor paid him by sending an official to ask whether he could do
anything for us, and though we assured him that there was no way in
which our contentment with the world could possibly be improved, we
found next morning that he had detailed four soldiers to accompany us.
Whether this was out of sheer respect for our rank, from actual fear
that bandits might attack us, or because the soldiers needed the few
coppers which we might, and which he could or would not, give them, was
not clear; but we rather suspected the last-named motive. They were a
cheery and picturesque detail. No two of them had two garments that were
uniform; their rifles bore a resemblance to some harmless substitute for
a weapon, hand-made by some very clumsy youth half a century ago, and
habitually misused ever since. In place of the usual strap, each had a
string by which to hang the gun over his shoulder, and the bore was such
that the cartridges, if there were any, must have been of just about the
right diameter for our shot-gun. One of these merry protectors was so
filled with song, of a strictly Chinese nature, that had he waited a bit
longer to abandon me and give his precious protection to some other part
of our straggling expedition he would certainly have had impressed upon
him the rights and privileges of extraterritoriality. At the noonday
halt we told this escort that, while they were men of whom any army
might be proud, we could not dream of putting them to the task of
tramping through the earthquake country ahead merely to defend our
unworthy selves; moreover, we mentioned, we should be glad to give them
at once the little present that they would get at nightfall if they
continued. This last was evidently a strong argument, for we had the
satisfaction of seeing them accept the suggestion with thanks and
alacrity.
In many parts of Kansu, we learned before we left it, there was much the
same old story of the inert weight of military pressure as elsewhere in
China. The soldiers in many districts were not paid, but were allowed to
shift for themselves upon the population. In theory this escort of ours
received four thousand “cash” a month! But they depended much more upon
such windfalls as ourselves, upon catching their own people gambling or
trafficking in opium and confiscating their belongings, or upon foraging
pure and simple among the helpless country people. Those groups which
had strength and audacity enough called upon chambers of commerce and
similar organizations for “loans” without interest—and of course without
principal, so far as the lenders are concerned; others wandered the
country until they found similar openings to which their strength was
equal.
Even before we reached Tsin-ching there had been many signs of the great
earthquake that had befallen this district; but in a land naturally so
split and gashed and broken beyond repair many of these had passed
almost unnoticed. Beyond that battered town, however, the chaotic world
on every hand impressed upon us all day long that we were in the heart
of the earthquake district, in so far at least as the main route to
Lanchow passes through it. Even worse damage was done, people said, in
districts off the road, but what we saw was enough to make it clear that
the big fish which sits bolt upright and holds the earth between its
fore fins had wagged his tail at the wickedness of mankind to excellent
advantage. This cause of the tragedy and the Chinese cosmogony it
involves were, by the way, firmly and unquestioningly believed not only
by our cart-drivers, who were in every-day matters paragons of common
sense, but by more than one Chinese of much higher caste. Only Chang,
who claimed to be so fervent a Christian as not even to believe in
“squeeze,” laughed at this view of the catastrophe; and he could not
give any other reasonable explanation for it.
Evidently such things had happened before in this part of the world, for
not only does the broken and fissured loess country require some such
interpretation but often pieces of old roof-tile protruded from the
cliff-sides of the sunken roads a hundred feet or more below the
surface. But this was the first quake within the memory of living
inhabitants, and apparently within their traditions, though the region,
and the inhabitants, too, for that matter, have been trembling ever
since. The catastrophe came suddenly, without the slightest warning, at
7:30 in the evening of December 16, 1920, and had taken its appalling
toll and gone almost before the survivors could catch their breath. Six
hundred thousand people at least lost their lives; the official figures
are one million, but the Chinese are prone to exaggerate, just as the
Mohammedans habitually refuse to give accurate information in anything
resembling a census. How many were injured is suggested by the fact that
earthquake victims were still wandering into the hospital at Pingliang
when we were there almost two years later. But cave-dwelling, especially
in so frail a soil as this, is admirably designed to make an earthquake
effective, and there is no computing how many were simply buried alive
without any actual physical injury being done them.
The missionaries as well as the Chinese of Kansu assert that the
earthquake was a blessing in disguise—some of them even recognize in it
a direct interference from heaven with earthly designs; for a General Ma
and three hundred Mohammedan leaders were killed in a mosque in which,
say their antagonists, they were preparing for another great Moslem
rebellion, to begin the very next day. Some went so far as to say that
an army of many thousand men, ready to begin its work at dawn, was
buried hundreds of feet deep in a great ravine in which it was encamped.
These things may not be strictly true, but there seems to be little
doubt that, but for the earthquake, there would have been a Mohammedan
uprising very shortly afterward. Since the great Chinese Moslem
rebellion of 1862, in which eighty thousand non-Moslems are reputed to
have been slaughtered, and in which certainly large cities and great
districts were so devastated that they have not recovered to this day,
there have been three smaller revolts against Chinese rule, so that
although Kansu may not recall her earlier earthquakes she has by no
means forgotten the terrors which this one is credited with having
averted.
The more pietistic of the missionaries make much of the belief that,
while many thousands of the wicked followers of the false prophet were
buried in their caves or dashed to pieces in their ravines, not a
Christian was killed. One by one, it was said, they straggled into the
mission stations with stories of the untold damage that had taken place
all about them, but weeping reverently at the miracle by which they and
theirs had in every case escaped injury and even property loss. Without
a discount for the unconscious exaggerations of overworked and
over-pious apostles, such a fact would not be absolute and final proof
of wrath of God against the Moslems for having picked the wrong faith,
for while there are several million of them in the province, the number
of Christians would not entirely preclude the possibility of their
having been spared by mere chance rather than by divine intercession. In
Pingliang, for instance, after thirty years’ work there are fifty
baptized Christians; in another district two hundred converts are
claimed among two hundred thousand _families_.
In the stiff, short climb through a ruined world an hour or two out of
Tsin-ching, trees that had once shaded the road were hanging so
precariously over great abysses that even this fuel-starved people did
not dare to try to cut them. Here and there great pieces of the road,
big willows, poplars, and all, had been pitched pell-mell over the edge.
Yet villages still lived on lumps of earth half broken off from the rest
of the world and ready to collapse into mighty chasms below. The
mountains had indeed “walked,” as the complicated yet sometimes
childishly simple Chinese language has it. Whole sides of terraced peaks
had slipped off and carried the road intact, trees and all, half a mile
away, had bottled up deep-green unnatural lakes at the bottom of great
holes in the loess earth—to become what; a future menace or mere
salt?—unless released by the hand of man. Sometimes half a dozen
mountains had all danced together and left the brown loess churned up as
if it had been boiled, with a new self-made “road” and the
telegraph-wire on new poles stretching away across it, yet without the
suggestion of an inhabitant, nothing but a deathly stillness for long
distances, rarely broken perhaps by a magpie whose gay manners were
utterly out of keeping with the desolate scene. Farther to the north,
they say, one may still see shocks of harvested grain rotted in the
fields, where the population was entirely killed off and none has come
to take its place. Sometimes only half the terraced mountain-side had
come down to overwhelm the tree-lined highway, or to bury a village as
deeply as beneath the sea, the other half still supporting an uninjured
hamlet below, as if nothing whatever had happened to disturb this quiet,
bucolic existence. Ends of the mud walls of former villages protruding
from the yellow chaos were often the only suggestion that human beings
had once lived and bred and died there. Sometimes the wide road bordered
by its venerable willows ended suddenly against a mighty bank of
convulsed earth where the mountain had piled high over it, the new route
clambering away over the débris with that indifference of youth to the
experiences of old age that keeps the world moving onward instead of
crouched at the roadside weeping over its disasters. In several places
hundred-yard pieces of the old haphazard highway, twenty yards wide, had
been gently picked up and set at right angles to its former course,
without so much as a crack in its dozen mule-paths and the narrow strips
of turf between them.
Up over this broken and wrecked world came toward noon twenty coolies
trotting under heavy loads of antlers oscillating from their
pole-burdened shoulders. Wapiti and other deer are still found in the
high mountains of Kansu, but the Chinese demand for their horns,
preferably in the velvet, as medicine, is sure to exterminate them as
completely as wanton destruction has the forests, probably pine and
hemlock, that once covered all these tamed and terraced ranges. There is
something strikingly un-Western, something akin to our own medieval
ancestors, about the Chinese temperament in such matters, when they will
continue century after century to pay fabulous prices—a good pair of
elk-horns in the velvet will bring as much as fifty dollars gold in the
large cities—for something of entirely imaginary value, without ever
thinking of attempting to find out whether it is really good for
anything or not. Their forebears thought so, and that settles the
question. If once a custom can get a place with the Chinese, it need
have little worry about holding its position, no matter how inefficient,
useless, or even harmful it may become.
Well on in the afternoon we came upon a beautiful blue-green lake
imprisoned in a ravine, miles long and with a side arm of unknown
length, all in a barren brown world without any other form of water. One
might have fancied that the people roundabout would have been delighted
to have it, and thank the earthquake for blocking the tiny stream that
had formed it; but what do the people of Kansu know of the beauty of
water, or of its usefulness, beyond what is required for their own and
their animals’ gullets? So, with the help of American relief funds, they
had cut a great gap through the fallen hill at the head of the lake—how
queer that Kansu had to be paid by people on the other side of the earth
for repairing their own land!—to assure themselves against being flooded
out by such unnatural lakes when they rise above their barriers or seep
away through the loose loess soil.
We spent that night at the upper end of this lake in Tsing-kiang-yi, the
town worst treated by the earthquake of any along the way. It was split
into many fantastic forms, and threshing-floors had grown up in what
were merely mighty earthquake cracks. This did not keep the inhabitants,
however, from enjoying life in the orthodox Chinese fashion. A
theatrical troupe had come to set up a makeshift stage of poles and
matting on six-foot legs in a corner of a filthy open lot overhanging
the mighty gorge into which much of the town had disappeared two years
before, and most of Tsing-kiang-yi and the surrounding country stood
crowded together in front of it. There is a difference only in degree
between the theatrical performances given on such outdoor contrivances
at country fairs and on village market-days and those in the most
imposing theaters in Peking. The same nerve-racking “music” is torn off
in hundred-yard strips by men at one side of the stage, who conduct
themselves as freely all through the performance as if they were
peanut-sellers in the market-place. There are the same more or less
mythological beings in astonishing costumes, somewhat more soiled,
surmounted by masked or painted faces, and these in turn by strange
creations in wigs and head-dresses poorly joined to the wearers, who
saunter out at intervals from the partly concealing mat dressing-room
behind the stage proper and screech for long periods in the selfsame
distressing falsetto with which Chinese theater-goers everywhere allow
themselves to be tortured. The same property-man wanders incessantly
about the stage, setting it to rights or bringing anything needed, like
a nonchalant coolie at work in a coal-yard; the same unwashed
ragamuffins, carelessly stuffed into absurd and multicolored garments
which make them generals, gods, court attendants, or anything else the
play may call for, are herded on and off in the wooden manner of
“supers” the world over. Small boys—not to mention full-grown
ones—clamber about the hasty structure in their eagerness to make the
most of one of the rare treats of a dismal lifetime, even sitting in the
edges of the stage itself, to the annoyance apparently only of a stray
foreigner with his own queer notions of stage propriety. Down below, the
standing audience may not behave with what the Western world would call
rapt attention, but it has its own restless, free-for-all way of showing
its delight.
In Chinese villages theatrical performances are usually a community
undertaking, a way of spending the accumulated funds of this or that
communal scheme, which it would of course be foolish to squander in
building schools or cleaning the streets. Sometimes it is a treat
offered by or forced from some prominent citizen, sometimes a sort of
fine exacted from a neighboring village with which there has been a
quarrel. That Chinese “actors” wandering through the provinces do not
live in steam-heated hotels or ride in Pullman cars need scarcely be
emphasized; indeed there is a strong suspicion from as far away as the
outer edge of the audience that time and opportunity and inclination to
remove the evidences of long cart-road travel very, very seldom
coincide. But then, back in the interior players are still rated almost
in the coolie class, however much they may suggest the romance of life
to gaping yokels.
We actually saw a man mending the road next day; that is, he was
chopping out pieces of sandstone from between deep ruts in a very narrow
gully, though he may merely have been gathering them for his own use. It
had been a crisp, brilliant morning, more pleasant to walk than to ride,
white smoke rising from a mud town across a great gorge ahead that would
otherwise probably never have been distinguished from the brown-yellow
hillside on which it hung. Perhaps a distant mule-bell faintly reached
the ear, a pair of coolies on the sky-line caught the eye, and that
might be all for long distances except the tumbled verdureless
immensity. That day we clambered over a two-thousand-meter pass, then
caught a great crack in the earth, along the high edge of which the road
went until mid-afternoon, prosperous hills on either hand, and tilted
farm-yards surrounded by high mud walls, into which we could look down
as from an airplane. The earth had grown harder, a bit less friable than
pure loess, though still without a suggestion of stone, and casting
itself if anything in still more fantastic formations. Boys herding
sheep or goats, and muleteers plodding behind their animals, sang on
far-away mountain-sides snatches of song that sounded more Western than
Chinese. Always a chaotic world of impossibly sculptured cliffs and
incredible hollows unrolled itself before us. Now and again the road
crawled across some great earth bridge, in constructing which the hand
of man had taken no part, over a vast chasm but an insignificant stream;
in some places it had fallen away into another of those breathless
abysses, to skirt along the sheer edge of which seemed foolhardy even on
foot. Yet all manner of Chinese travel, our own carts included, toiled
serenely over these spots, apparently quite oblivious of the fact that
the outer wheels more than once dropped to the hub down the side of the
mighty precipice. Now and again surely some one must have gone over it
with a piece of the crumbling road; perhaps the others burned a little
joss at the nearest ruined mud temple and dropped a few “cash” into the
big bronze kettle-gong the old beggar priest so constantly beats out in
front of it, but certainly they did nothing else to be spared a similar
fate on their next journey.
However, it is not true that the Chinese are utterly incapable of
learning by experience. In this earthquake country, where living in
caves proved so disastrous, they had certainly come out of them. But
they were conservative in architecture as in other things, and the new
mud huts, set as far out from the dreaded mountain-sides as possible,
wherever inhabitants remained, were built in exactly the same shape as
the caves, with an arched mud roof and the general appearance of having
been dug out of the mountain and carried to the new setting. Such
innovations will no doubt continue to be erected in this region until a
new generation has forgotten and prefers to tempt fate again rather than
go to the extra labor of building houses where it is so much easier to
dig them.
Speaking of building, a very false impression prevails in the Western
world as to Chinese structures. Because of their scores of centuries of
existence and their tendency to cling to old things, many of us have
assumed that the Chinese people build for posterity. Quite the contrary
is the case. The Chinese, one is constantly being impressed, have their
chief interest in their ancestors, or themselves, not in their
descendants. Their coffins are made of mighty slabs of wood that have
much to do with the crime of deforestation; they may not only spend all
they have for the funeral of a father but often bankrupt themselves for
a generation. But their houses are the cheapest possible structures,
almost wholly made of the earth of the fields—the only material left, to
be sure, in many regions. Mud bricks, mud and straw walls, mud _k’angs_
in place of bed, chair, divan, and table—even the roof-tiles are merely
a better baked form of mud. Nor is it only the humble homes that are
reduced to this material. The dwellings of men of wealth, the palaces of
the bygone dynasties, the very Temple of Heaven in Peking, the Great
Wall itself, are impermanent structures largely put together with wet
earth which is a sad substitute indeed for cement. It is as if, having
an unlimited supply of dirt-cheap labor and a great paucity of good
materials, the Chinese find something reprehensible in building too
solidly, a waste of valuable substance as against inexpensive toil,
perhaps a feeling that to build too well to-day will be unjust to those
who will want work to-morrow. This point of view pervades everything,
from imperial palaces to the tiniest of children’s toys, from temples
and pagodas to water-jars and mud jugs; almost all of them are flimsy or
easily destructible, whether by use, time, or the elements. The result
is that the country from beginning to end is in a constant state of
half-ruin or dismal disrepair, for the average life of most structures
is so short that while one is being built up again another is sure to
have fallen down.
In contrast to the endless processions of wheat-wagons and the like of a
few days before, we met only two carts from dawn to sunset, and not many
foot-travelers. Back in the crowded loess cañons it had been a pleasure
to watch the expertness with which our chief cartman manipulated his
loosely joined mules and awkward conveyance, taking advantage of every
little break in the line of traffic, of every hesitation on the part of
others to forge ahead, and keeping almost at our heels when such a feat
seemed impossible. Here where travel was light his expertness was still
needed to escape the many pitfalls of the road, and still the carts came
close to keeping the pace we set. This was not breathless, to be sure;
ninety _li_ a day almost as regularly as the days dawned—and walled
cities or at least large villages seemed to have been exactly spaced to
accommodate travel at that rate. Our cartmen might have done their best,
anyway, but the promise of a dollar _cumshaw_ each for every day gained
on the regular schedule assured it. This obviated arguments, worry, and
a dozen other possible difficulties, and if our drivers insisted that it
was better to spend the night at such a town rather than attempt to push
on to the next we could take their word for it, which of itself was
quite worth the extra money. In striking contrast to one of the serious
drawbacks to cross-country travel in South America one could depend upon
most road information. Ask almost any one how many _li_ it was to such a
place, and the answer usually was not only quick but fairly accurate.
The finest thing about the Chinese _li_ is that you need not worry about
crossing a mountain or any other piece of unusually bad going; the _li_
are shortened accordingly, and so many hours of steady plodding will
bring you to your destination irrespective of conditions along the way.
Our road at length went down into the great cañon-bed of a little
meandering stream that spent its days, and its nights, too, no doubt, in
carrying away the cliffs which towered high above it, as they fell in
clouds of dust and dissolved into silt. A few hours along this brought
us to the rather striking town of Houei-ning, in a wide spot of the
river valley with hills piling high above it close on every side. These
and two distinct city walls enclosed what were virtually two towns, one
somewhat more open and seeming to harbor an unusual number of religious
edifices, the other crowded, with very narrow streets, still further
darkened by many fantastic old wooden _p’ai-lous_. There were
suggestions that the first was the Mohammedan quarter. Houei-ning was
also repairing its walls, had indeed built a big new gate, and was now
topping off the inner and principal defense with cream-colored brick
parapets, loopholes and all. Pure mud was the only mortar, except
between the topmost bricks, and the “masons” were small boys and old
men. Boys barely eight years old were carrying great loads of bricks;
those of ten or twelve had already been graduated into bricklayers.
Almost all of them had glowing red cheeks, but their faces and hands
were worse chapped than any one has ever seen, perhaps, outside China,
where long sleeves are the poor substitutes for gloves or mittens, and
hands toughened, not to say split and blackened, by exposure not only
endure greater cold but water several degrees hotter than can our own.
[Illustration:
This begging old ragamuffin is a Taoist priest
]
[Illustration:
A local magistrate sent this squad of “soldiers” to escort us through
the earthquake district, though whether for fear of bandits, out of
mere respect for our high rank, or because the “soldiers” needed a
few coppers which he could not give them himself, was not clear
]
[Illustration:
Where the “mountain walked” and overwhelmed the old tree-lined
highway. In places this was covered hundreds of feet deep for miles;
in others it had been carried bodily, trees and all, a quarter-mile
or more away
]
[Illustration:
In the earthquake district of western China whole terraced
mountain-sides came down and covered whole villages. In the
foreground is a typical Kansu farm
]
Badly hit by the earthquake, Houei-ning was still full of cracks and
chasms and ruins, and the “roads” leading down into or out of it seemed
in many cases to drop into pitfalls and sometimes entirely to lose
themselves, or at least their sense of direction. There were many times
as many dead as living inhabitants. The almost golden-yellow landscape
of the verdureless mountain slopes about the town were more thickly
covered with graves than I could remember ever having seen before,
either in China or Korea; the myriads of little conical mounds suggested
spatters of raindrops on a rolling, golden sea. High in the hills close
above were what seemed to be a plethora of temples and monasteries,
while all the landscape bristled with stone monuments, most of them on
the backs of turtles, the rest handsome old ornamental arches of carved
stone, all more or less cracked and ruined. Houei-ning must have had
something of a history in bygone centuries, like so many now sleepy old
towns of China.
Now it seemed to be the big market for those crude forked sticks which
do duty as pitchforks among the Chinese. All this region made a
four-tined one, with a wooden crosspiece let into and tied to the tines
and the end of the handle with tough grass, but Houei-ning evidently had
a monopoly on those grown in the form of a two-pronged implement. In
Honan perfect three-tined ones were grown in abundance, as rose-bushes
and the like are trained into fantastic shapes in Japan. The flimsiness
of construction which everywhere impresses itself upon the traveler in
China is nowhere more noticeable than in such peasants’ tools,—rakes a
mere bamboo pole with one end split, spread, and bent over in the form
of teeth; woven-wicker buckets for use at open holes in the fields that
do service as wells; little bent-willow shovels for the countless
thousands of boys and men, and not a few women and girls, who wander the
roads with their baskets—for gathering the droppings of animals seems to
be the favorite outdoor sport of China; it is a lonely trail and a
depopulated region indeed where these are left to mingle with the soil.
It was in Houei-ning, too, that we saw offered for sale guns that must
have been old when the Manchu dynasty began, guns slender as a lance,
eight feet or more long, with tiny butts apparently meant to be used
against the thumb instead of the shoulder, and some contraption for
firing that probably antedated the flint-lock by many decades. A
fetching touch of color that increased as the weather grew more bitingly
cold were the earlaps worn by nearly every one. In Kansu these are
almost always home-made and hand-embroidered in gaily colored designs of
birds, flowers, and the like, with much less violation of artistic
standards than one would expect.
All through this region a custom wide-spread in China was very generally
practised. That is, almost all boys from perhaps four to twelve years of
age wore round their necks an iron chain big enough to restrain an
enraged bulldog, and usually fastened together with a large
native-forged padlock, though there would have been no difficulty in
lifting off the whole contraption. The object of this adornment is to
protect the precious male offspring from ill luck—here, perhaps, to keep
the big fish from wagging his tail again. If parents have any reason to
suspect that evil spirits are on the trail of a son, they hasten to a
temple and put him in pawn to an idol, as it were; that is, they have a
priest hang a chain, with much hocus-pocus, about his neck, thereby
deceiving the powers of evil into believing that he is not their son at
all but that he belongs to the temple. In a way this is true, for before
he can be “redeemed” again by the parents the priest, who keeps the key
of the padlock, must be generously rewarded. Let a boy fall ill, and no
time is lost in evoking this sure protection; especially if one dies,
his surviving or later-born brother is chained at once. The constant
efforts of evil spirits to do injury to a family through the still
unmarried sons, of whom ancestor-worship requires posterity, is one of
the greatest banes of Chinese existence. Not the least uncommon of the
tricks resorted to for the discomfiture of these unseen enemies is to
give the boy a girl’s name, for naturally no evil spirit is going to
waste his time in trying to injure a mere female.
The city gates of Houei-ning do not open until six, after which we went
down again into labyrinthian loess gullies, across a broad fertile
valley, and finally into a river cañon. Nothing could have been more
dull than the long morning through this dreary chasm, in utter silence
except for our own noises, and a rare donkey-boy singing his way along
the top of the cliff far above. But, as if to make up for this dismal
stretch, the road clambered early in the afternoon to the summit of a
high ridge, with perhaps the most marvelous series of vistas of all our
journey. There were crazy-shaped fields at every possible height, ragged
little hollows that looked exactly like shell-holes, even their tiny
bottoms carefully cultivated, threshing-floors throwing up grain like
bursts of shrapnel, clusters of farm buildings of the identical color of
all the landscape, and always surrounded by high mud walls, a wildly
chaotic yet completely tamed land, utterly bare brown, turned golden by
the brightest of suns and the clearest of air, with only the faintest
purple haze on the far edges of the horizon. The trail had taken again
to one of the pell-mell slopes of a mighty stream-worn crack in the
earth and worked its way in and out along the haphazard face of this,
across natural earth bridges, over jutting spurs and perpendicular
ridges, into pockets where, cut off from the breeze but still in the
brilliant sunshine, it was almost uncomfortably warm, and gradually
carried us higher and higher on a ridge that swung more and more to the
south. The miserable half-ruined mud village in which we found lodging
was so high that to step out into the night was like diving into
ice-water. Yet we kept to the ridge for hours more next morning before
the road abandoned it at last and plunged headlong down into a big
valley supporting the ancient town of Ngan-ting. An unusually huge wall
of irregular shape, with very fancy high gates, surrounded the same
crowds of staring, dirty people, of filthy-nosed, half-naked children
and crippled women, all huddled together in the cold shadows instead of
spreading out in the sunshine of the open world all about them.
Ngan-ting seemed to be an important garrison town, through which we
passed just in time to become entangled in some manœver resembling
formal guard-mount, amid the barbaric blaring of many Chinese bugles.
Our carts meanwhile had scorned the town and were on their way down the
widest river valley yet. Along this the avenue of trees, some of their
trunks scarred with pictorial obscenities, kept up in a half-hearted
way; but scrub-poplar and sometimes almost branchless trunks were poor
substitutes for the magnificent old willows farther east. Many of these
had been cut down in this region, as huge stumps on a level with the
earth showed. Apparently there is nothing that so exasperates the
Chinese as the sight of a live tree; it would look so much better shaped
as a coffin or turned into temple doors.
Suddenly, just beyond Ngan-ting, both sexes and all ages took to making
yarn, in the Andean style of twirling a bobbin as they wandered about,
and to knitting, not merely caps and stockings, but whole suits. We had
once or twice been shocked some days earlier at the sight of a
camel-driver calmly twiddling his knitting-needles as he strode or rode
along, a pastime bad enough in talkative old ladies and tea-party guests
who decline to waste their time, and certainly far beneath the dignity
of the great male sex! But some missionary, it seemed, had started the
craze—for a generation or so ago knitting was as unknown in China as
real peanuts or the weaving of woolen clothing—and had neglected to
explain its proper segregation. There had been no rain in all this
region for a whole year, they said, and we had been advised to buy
rain-water only of the Mohammedans, even if they forced us to pay high
for it, since that to be had from the mere Chinese might be rank poison
even after boiling. Somewhere along the way I had seen a blind youth
marching round and round one of those two-stone grist-mills to be found
all over China, and most often operated by a blindfolded donkey. His
short hair where cues were still the fashion, and a not unattractive
young woman watching him from a near-by doorway with an expression that
might easily have been taken for a satisfied leer, naturally called up
the memory of Samson and Delilah. Indeed, the fellow swung his head from
side to side and lifted his feet unnecessarily high at every step in a
way to prove that the late Caruso had learned at least one stage trick
from real life. But the Philistines in this case were only the filth and
lack of care which leave so many Chinese children sightless. There was a
little blind boy of five that morning, for instance, carrying a baby
brother of two, each wearing a single rag; and the baby was telling the
boy where to step, though he afterward ran a bit alone and made the
threshing-floor without mishap through many pitfalls.
In the account of his travels in China a decade ago Professor Ross has a
chapter entitled, “Unbinding the Women of China.” One of the professor’s
finest traits, however, is over-optimism. Foot-binding most certainly
showed no signs of dying out in any of the territory through which we
passed in our two months’ journey out into the northwest. A group of
little girls from six to eight years old toddling along the road on
crippled feet, yet carrying heavy baskets and driven, like calves to
market, by a sour-faced old woman whose own feet still seemed to pain
her at every step, was no unusual sight. One might easily have fancied
they were to be offered for sale—girls can be bought for a mere song in
this region. How often we passed a child in her early teens astride a
donkey urged on by a man on foot, her little tapering legs ending in
mere knots, her face so whitened and rouged that she looked like some
inanimate and over-decorated doll! Only another bride, or concubine, on
her way to the home of a husband or a master she had never seen. Girls
certainly not yet ten years old were already shuffling about house- and
threshing-floors in their football knee-pads; little girls dismally
crying in some mud pen to which they had been banished because they
could not suppress such signs of pain from their newly bound feet, or
hobbling a few yards along the road with set lips, emphasized the fact
that there are far worse fates even than being born a boy in China.
Crippled feet would be bad enough in comfort and warmth and with plenty
of servants to save steps, as probably most Westerners fancy Chinese
women have who are thus “beautified.” But if there is any decrease in
foot-binding at all, it is among the well-to-do, the wealthy in large
cities who might sit perpetually in cushions and spare their little
feet. Your peasant and countryman is most insistent that the old custom
be kept up; he would sneer with scorn at the thought of taking a wife
with natural feet; he sternly insists that his daughters’ feet be bound.
Stumping about their filthy huts, shivering with mountain cold, probably
never washing all over once in a lifetime, it is astonishing that these
country women do not all die of gangrene or something of the sort. How
they keep such feet warm, when they cannot move rapidly, when they ride
sometimes all day in a cold so bitter that even we were forced to get
off and walk at frequent intervals, is a question I have never yet heard
answered. Perhaps the foot becomes a kind of hoof, devoid of feeling and
incapable of freezing.
At first thought one might fancy that at least a few mothers who had
suffered all their lives would spare their daughters similar misery.
For, they have told missionary women, their bound feet hurt whenever
they walk, and generally they have pains also in the legs and the back
as long as they live. Knowing how serious a mere broken arch may be, it
is not hard for us to imagine what it must mean to have the arch doubled
back upon itself by turning the toes under and squeezing the heel up to
meet them, and then insisting that the victim walk. But even if the
mothers were devoid of that wide-spread human cussedness which makes
misery love company, even if the father did not absolutely insist, there
is the economic question. Girls must have husbands—“or they will
starve,” as even experienced Peking _amas_ put it. There is no provision
in the Chinese scheme of family for old maids. But granting that all
these insuperable difficulties have been overcome, there is the girl
herself with whom to reckon. If she has reached the age—six to
seven—when the binding should begin, and it has not begun, she is likely
to commence by insisting, and to advance to weeping and tearing her hair
unless the oversight is corrected. In other words, girls cry if their
feet are not bound; and they certainly cry if they are, so that there is
apparently no escape from tears. You would hardly expect a modest
American school-girl willingly to consent to mingle with her companions
if she were obliged to wear trousers, or to cut her hair boy fashion;
and in China “face,” the fear of ridicule and public opinion, is much
stronger than in the United States, and customs and precedents are far
more solidly intrenched. Naturally the Chinese girl would rather face a
little suffering—for at her age she probably has only a hazy idea of the
length of the ordeal and the severity of the pain involved—than to be
made fun of all her life for her “boy’s feet,” and, worse still, to lose
all chance of getting a husband, which she has been taught to think is
the most dreadful, in fact the most unsurvivable, fate that can befall
her. Once in a while some poor orphan girl is so “neglected” that no one
takes the trouble to bind her feet; and she becomes the village slattern
and a horrible example to all “decent” girls. For of course she cannot
get a husband; she will be unusually fortunate if some one gives her a
job as a barn-yard drudge.
Our hostess at one of the mission stations knew a girl whose feet had
not been bound but who turned out to be very pretty. One day an
important official happened to see her as he was passing through the
district. “What a pity,” he said, “that her feet are not bound, for if
they were I would take her as a concubine.”
“Oh, do not let that stand in the way of your desire, your Excellency,”
cried the enchanted mother; “give me a year and I will have her ready
for you.”
“But you cannot bind her feet in a year,” replied the official.
“Only leave it to me, your Excellency, and I shall not fail you,”
persisted the mother.
A year later the girl took the proud position that had been offered her,
as concubine to what, to the simple country people, was a very great
man; but to this day, though she still keeps her precarious place, she
cannot walk a step. For instead of starting gradually, by bending the
toes under and wrapping them in wet cloths that shrink, then tying them
down more tightly and beginning to draw up the heel the following year,
and so on, this mother was working against time. So she literally cut
much of the flesh off the girl’s feet, broke nearly every bone in them,
and by the time the year was up she had made her as helpless a cripple
as any mandarin could have wanted for a plaything.
The best style of bound feet, it seems, have the bones broken. Exacting
men ask if this has been done, and show worth-while approval at an
affirmative answer. Feet seem to vary in size and style by localities.
In some places on our western trip they were so small that no real foot
remained; the leg tapered down without a break to the end, almost as if
it had been cut off at the ankle. In fact we often wondered if it would
not have been much simpler and far less painful to amputate the feet
entirely. In other places the big toe was left, and with it something of
the shape of a foot. But under this the tiny shoe was generally fitted
with a miniature heel, often red in better-to-do cases, which made
walking next to impossible. With no give and take of the leg-muscles,
these of course soon dry up, so that the leg resembles a tapering wooden
stump and the gait bears out the likeness. Foot-binding is certainly a
wonderful scheme to keep the women from gadding about; and in a land
where they are seldom expected to leave the compound in which they are
delivered to the husband—or mother-in-law—this no doubt is considered a
great asset. Earlier writers have told of districts in which the feet
are no longer bound because of the sad experiences of fleeing women who
could not keep up with their men-folks at the time of the great
Mohammedan rebellion. But we never saw any such districts. Probably the
experiences have been forgotten, and custom has reasserted itself. The
Mohammedans, by the way, are just as bad as the mere Chinese in this
matter of foot-binding; if I remember rightly, the Koran has nothing to
say against it.
As far as we noticed, the missionaries in the northwest did not seem to
be making any great effort to reduce this most atrocious of Chinese
customs. Some of them appeared to be more eager to save souls than
soles, though in general they were men and women of sound common sense,
with their own feet on the ground rather than with their heads lost in
the clouds. Suffering and misery, immorality and wicked superstitions
are so general in China that the mere crippling of the feet soon becomes
but one of many possible points of attack. Christian converts are not
allowed to bind their feet; if they are already bound, they are
expected, in theory at least, to unbind them, though this in the case of
older women is not always possible. Girls with bound feet are refused
admission to most, if not all, Christian schools; and a few of the best
government institutions are commencing to follow suit. The best argument
of all against the practice is the plain economic one. If you bind your
daughter’s feet she cannot marry within the church, the missionaries
tell a convert, for Christian boys will not have her. As available
husbands of that point of view increase, the girls are of course more
and more willing to run the risk of not having themselves adorned with
lily feet. But, to be frank, Christianity is not rapidly increasing, and
bound feet seem to be as prevalent, at least in northern China, as ever,
except in Peking and a few coast cities, where it is against the law, in
Manchuria, where it is contrary to custom, in the rather small and
scattered Christian communities, and among a few of the more progressive
families in the larger cities.
Custom is not only a curiously tenacious weed but often a quick-growing
one. I was impressed with the latter thought one morning when, in riding
into a town of some size, I caught sight of a woman with natural feet,
such as I had not seen perhaps for a week; and the first flash to cross
my mind might have been expressed in some such exclamation as, “My, but
isn’t she ugly!” The abnormal type is always ugly, and if, in a mere
week, a foreigner can become so accustomed to the normal Chinese woman,
who tapers down like a sharpened stake, that an uncrippled one strikes
him, even momentarily, as a kind of monstrosity, it is easy to
understand why the Chinese have come in many centuries to consider this
alteration of the human form both an improvement and a necessity. Nor is
the custom so universally injurious to the health as the rest of the
world naturally supposes. Women with cheeks bright red without the aid
of rouge, yet with the tiniest of feet, were no more unusual in Kansu
than the filthy, old, and totally unattractive ones who scuttled away
into their holes as if they were in imminent danger when two harmless
foreigners rode by on travel-weary pack-mules.
Beyond “Dry Straw Hotel”—most Chinese place names are quaint and simple
if you translate them—where we made the noonday halt on the next to the
last day of the journey, the hills were no longer terraced, perhaps
because they were too steep, but lay piled up in a thousand folds and
wrinkles that made them even more beautiful. Wheat was flowing the other
way now, toward Lanchow, mainly on donkeys. There was much stone in the
soil of the great plain across which we jogged with a growing sensation
of eagerness that afternoon, and to the left, hazy under the low sun,
the beginning of the high ranges bordering Tibet. Large towns were
frequent, though there was no decrease in dirt and poverty.
[Illustration:
Kansu earlaps are very gaily embroidered in colored designs of birds,
flowers, and the like. Pipes are smaller than their “ivory”
mouthpieces
]
[Illustration:
It is a common sight in some parts of Kansu to see men knitting, and
still more so to meet little girls whose feet are already beginning
to be bound
]
[Illustration:
The village scholar displays his wisdom by reading where all can see
him—through spectacles of pure plate-glass
]
[Illustration:
A Kirghiz in the streets of Lanchow, where many races of central Asia
meet
]
Toward sunset we were accosted at the beginning of a defile by two
Chinese on sleigh-bell-jingling horses, one of whom handed us a letter.
It was from the chief Protestant missionary of Lanchow, a friend of the
major’s, to whom he had written from Sian-fu announcing our coming.
Rapidly as we had traveled, the coolie-borne fast mail had so far
outstripped us that here was the reply, welcoming us to the city and
regretting that, since we were to arrive on a Sunday, services made it
impossible for the writer to come out and meet us in person. To be met
thirty miles out by a host, even by proxy, struck us as real
hospitality; and the fact that the messengers had no difficulty in
identifying us is all that need be said as to the scarcity of Caucasian
travelers in Kansu. Even had they missed us among the labyrinthian paths
and gullies, they would not have gone far before some one would have
told them that the two foreigners had already passed. In all the sixteen
days we saw on the road two pairs of Russian Jews and two Dutch Catholic
priests, and had spent the night with two sets of missionaries and dined
with a third. One of the messengers was to return to Lanchow post-haste
with news of our arrival, and the other was to serve us as guide. They
do some things in a regal fashion in the far interior of China.
The last town in which we were forced to pass a night was a miserable
collection of filth and half-baked mud, though rich in grain, stacks
covering the flat roofs and surrounding the hard-earth floors on which
it was still being threshed; though two brand-new temples gleamed forth
from the general ugliness. All next morning a half-witted road,
evidently bent on outdoing itself as a fitting climax of the journey,
wandered along a wide river valley cut up everywhere not only by the
meandering stream itself but by hundreds of irrigation ditches. All
these were frozen over more or less solidly, with the result that
progress was a constant struggle with our mules, already jaded with
fatigue and fright and covered with icicles when we climbed at last to
the bank and made our way through almost continuous villages by a narrow
road. Even here irrigation ditches still made trouble, and strings of
carts and camels reduced progress materially, though this did not
greatly matter, since there was no difficulty in keeping up with our
carts that had been obliged to continue along the river bottom. Pure
loess had disappeared some days before, but the soil was merely a bit
more solid along the road that had been deliberately cut through a hill
beyond which I came out sooner than I had expected upon the Yellow
River, here racing swiftly through a deep rocky gorge and rather gray
than yellow in color. Extraordinary activity had broken out in the large
town forty _li_ from the end of our journey, for hundreds of men were
building a real embankment, hauling stone from far up the river-bed, and
preparing to throw a bridge across the tributary down which we had come.
But the enterprise, it turned out, was not the complete nullification of
the opinion we had formed of the Chinese inability to accomplish public
works, for it was being done with American relief funds under the
supervision of the host who was awaiting us.
Tobacco grew all along the last fertile miles of the journey, and the
increasing population busied itself in stripping leaves instead of
winnowing grain. These were carried home in two-man litters made of
matting, while the stripped stalks evidently served as fuel. For some
reason, which no one could explain to us, many of the fields were still
covered with the grown plants, shriveled and brown from the early winter
frosts, and in many cases covered with a kind of straw cap. Then the
road thought better of the short respite it had given us and plunged
uphill through another genuine loess cañon, where cliffs seemed ready to
fall in clouds of dust and camel-trains crowded. Out of this we broke an
hour or more later upon a far-reaching view of the wide, open plain
walled by mountains, across which, still twenty _li_ distant, lay the
capital of China’s westernmost province.