TRAILING THE YELLOW RIVER HOMEWARD
The saddest part of seeing Lanchow was not that we had taken
twenty-seven days to reach it, but that it would require fully that
amount of time to undo again what we had done. The usual way of
returning from the Kansu capital to Peking is simply to float down the
Hoang Ho on goatskin rafts to where one can easily reach the advancing
Suiyuan railway. We had hoped to do this, but we were prepared for the
news that it was impossible so late in the season. November was nearing
its last lap, and while the river at Lanchow was still open, big chunks
of ice already drifting down it from the Tibetan highlands helped to
confirm the general opinion that it would be frozen solid in its broader
and more sluggish reaches farther north, where we would be left
virtually stranded.
We each bought a stout Kansu pony, therefore, and a less lively one for
the alleged _mafu_ who was willing to leave the employ of our host and
return to his family graves near Tientsin—if we would pay him to do so.
_Mafus_ usually walk by day and tend their masters’ horses by night, but
we concluded to be generous, and as a result we acquired a troublesome
companion rather than a useful servant; for the one thing which the
Chinese coolie cannot stand is prosperity. Then we hired two carts,
quite like those that had brought our belongings from Sian-fu, which
agreed for a consideration of one hundred _taels_ to set us down in
Paotouchen in time, with good luck in trains, for us to spend Christmas
with our families in Peking. We again set our plans to outspeed the
usual schedule if possible, by dangling before the drivers a gratuity of
a whole round dollar each for every day they made up.
This did not spare us from getting a late start, however, though that
did not worry us so much as it would have before we had learned from
experience that a delay in the first get-away is no proof that the
days that follow will be similarly blighted. The unavoidable
formalities of the last moment, such as the cartmen’s vociferous
leave-taking of the inn that had housed them, made up mainly of
shrieks of “_Ch’ien!_”—which, as I have said before, is the Chinese
notion of how the word “money” should be pronounced—were further
complicated by the task of getting rid of a man of unknown antecedents
whom our experienced host caught surreptitiously slipping his baggage
into one of the carts. He merely wished the pleasure of our company,
he wailed, kneeling before us in the by no means carpeted street, and
he would walk every step of the whole journey. Perhaps he would, but
we should have been foolish to harbor in our midst a man who might be
in league with the bandits, particularly after the Tuchun had taken
the trouble to wire the Mohammedan generals along the way asking for
guarantees of our safety. Besides, our expedition was quite unwieldy
enough as it was. Thus it was almost nine o’clock when we streamed out
across the incongruous American bridge and, striking northward along
the edge of the river and that of the suburb which piles into the air
behind it, were soon lost among an endless series of bare brown hills.
The homeward trip by the northern route was quite different from that by
which we had come. Instead of passing several walled cities almost every
day, there were often only two or three dreary little hamlets from dawn
till dark, and for days at a time nothing whatever but the single mud
compound or two where travelers stopped at noon and at night. There was
almost no loess, but instead desolate desert hills or broad plateaus
with few suggestions of even summer-time vegetation either on them or on
the more or less distant ranges that shut them in. Without loess, there
were of course few sunken roads—none worthy the name to any one who had
seen the other route—and no cave-dwellings, but in place of them
wind-swept mud hovels, sometimes enclosed within high walled compounds.
The hovels were particularly numerous on the first afternoon in the
almost rich grain district that succeeded the first stretch of
semi-desert—endless mud-walled compounds that looked like the ramparts
of small cities, yet housing only a single family, though in China
this may include as many as two score individuals of four, and even of
five, generations. Most of the fields were covered with the
moisture-protecting layer of stones. These are changed once in a
generation, we heard, and the custom becomes more prevalent farther
west, where the land grows ever drier until it merges into the Gobi
Desert. Groups of peasants were still winnowing grain in the breeze on
their threshing-floors, and everywhere sparrows enough to eat it all
as fast as it was separated from the chaff made the air vociferous
with their twittering. We plodded all day and well on into the
moonlight across what finally became almost an uninhabited waste; and
next day we climbed to an altitude of nearly eight thousand feet
through stony, dreary mountains without people, except for one little
surface coal-mine, and a rare shepherd, without vegetation except for
little bunches of brown tuft-grass. Always there was a new wrinkled
mountain range growing up ahead and another slipping away behind,
though these usually flanked the broad river valley instead of
crossing our trail.
We were always well on our way by sunrise, with two hours or more of
walking behind us, for it was too bitter cold then to ride; and sunset
often found us still in the saddle. On Thanksgiving day, for instance,
we were up at four and off at five, for there was a stretch of ninety
_li_ without a single human habitation to be crossed before we could
even make our noonday halt. A high wind and heavy clouds made riding for
long distances impossible, and there was little indeed to keep us in a
cheerful mood. A crumpled range of mountains lightly topped with newly
fallen snow beautified the left-hand horizon; now and again a group of
Gobi antelopes sped away like winged creatures through the kind of
sage-brush that recalled Arizona or Nevada, their white flags seeming a
saucy defiance to us; and in mid-morning we passed through the Great
Wall. It was fortunate that our map showed this, for we might easily
have mistaken it for the mud enclosure of rather an extensive field and
never have given it a second glance. Instead of the mammoth stone
barrier to be seen near Peking, it was a mere ridge of packed earth,
perhaps eight feet high and as many wide at the base, with broad gaps in
it here and there, through which wander the modern trails. The
contractors evidently had something of a sinecure out here in the west
where the emperor could not keep an eye upon them.
For miles before we reached the wall the sage-brush plain was piled
everywhere with Chinese graves of all sizes, some of them completely
covered over with drifted sand; but beyond it there was not a single
artificial mound of earth, as if there were no use in being buried at
all unless one could find a resting-place within the Great Wall. The
vastness of the brown uninhabited world was particularly impressive in
the absolutely dead silence which lasted for long periods, unbroken even
by the chirping of a stray bird. One might have been in some “death
valley,” yet only water seemed to be wanting in what might otherwise
have been excellent farming country.
Evidently this lack was increasing, for there were only abandoned ruins
left of what had once been a town, big temple and all, at the end of the
ninety _li_. There was one hole in the sandy earth, at which all trails
converged, and shepherds, cartmen, and miscellaneous travelers were
constantly using the cloth bucket on a stick with which crude troughs
about it were filled, and where great flocks of sheep disputed with
horses, cattle, mules, and donkeys; but this only water for many miles
in any direction was evidently growing insufficient for the demands made
upon it. We had a frozen luncheon in the lee of a ruin, from which we
could look across a vast section of the plain, dotted in the foreground
with the grazing camels of a great caravan that had pitched its tents
and piled its cargo within easy distance of the well, to where the
yellowish brown turned to purple and rolled up into the wrinkled,
snow-topped range that shut off the world on the west. All that
afternoon there was the same silent, rolling landscape, which ended at
last, just in time, as bitter cold night was settling down, at a single
mud compound in a little hollow of the great solitude.
The next day, in contrast, was absolutely cloudless, and so were nearly
all those of December. We rambled for more than twelve hours across a
lifeless wilderness where a human being was a sight to remember and in
which two rabbits were the only visible representatives of the rest of
the animal kingdom. Deep sand, here and there alternating with a sort of
sage-brush, made the progress of our carts exasperatingly slow—until I
suddenly discovered the ease and pleasure of reading on horseback, with
the result that I devoured every book we had with us and memorized a
primer of the Chinese language before the journey ended. Yet two inns
just rightly spaced greeted our eyes at noon and at nightfall, as two
others did on several similarly unpeopled days. It hardly seemed
possible that these had grown up so accurately by mere chance,
especially as there was no natural feature to attract and sustain them,
and sometimes water had to be brought thirty _li_ or more on
donkey-back, so that it cost us twelve coppers each to wash our faces
and hands. In every case in which we asked, the proprietor was the son
or grandson, born right here in the wilderness, of malefactors or
political prisoners who had been sentenced by the Manchu dynasty to keep
these inns at certain specified points along this old imperial highway.
On the sixth day north of Lanchow we reached the great sand-dunes which
make what might almost be a possible automobile trail impossible even
for Chinese carts. Great ridges of pure sand, everywhere given a
corrugated surface by the winds that had piled them up during the
centuries, stretch from some unknown distance back in the country,
perhaps clear from the foot-hills of the western ranges, down to the
very edge of the Yellow River. We might easily have fancied ourselves in
the midst of the Sahara as we waded for three hours, much more on foot
than on horseback, across this effective barrier to wheeled traffic, had
it not been for the sight of the Hoang Ho sweeping around it in a
half-circle so far below as to look like a mere brook, and the tumbled
masses of mountains beyond, culminating in a cone that has smoked
uninterruptedly, we were assured, for more then seven centuries. Boats
that seemed from this height mere boys’ rafts rather than cumbersome
barges capable of carrying two loaded carts glided up and down the
stream amid myriad floating chunks of ice; but we strained our eyes in
vain to make out, even through this brilliant, moistureless air,
anything resembling our own outfit. Beyond the dunes we came down upon a
cluster of mud compounds, most of them prepared to pose as inns if the
opportunity offered, and just then unusually crowded with west-bound
travelers. These were almost all soldiers, Mohammedan in faith and in
many cases so Turkish of features that with their big reddish beards
they seemed to be actors wearing masks above their cotton-padded Chinese
uniforms. They were the escort of a new governor on his way to Eastern
Turkestan, and the expedition was so large that though we came upon the
vanguard, accompanying some veritable houses on wheels, early in the
morning, we passed the last straggling carts and horsemen toward sunset.
This extraordinary demand upon the ferrying facilities brought upon us
the dreadful experience of being separated from our commissary and
forced to shift for ourselves. The rights of extraterritoriality are one
thing, and the joy which Chinese soldiers sometimes take in putting a
foreigner to annoyance and delay even without reason when so good an
opportunity offers is quite another. The major had known of a colleague
who, traveling in Manchuria, had been deliberately held on a river-bank
for forty-eight hours because soldiers crossing to his side insisted on
sending the boats back empty rather than delay one or two of them long
enough for the “outside barbarian” to get his carts on board. With
neither of us in evidence, and without even one of the major’s cards in
his pocket, no doubt Chang was finding it impossible to prove that ours
was an expedition of foreigners and therefore in a hurry, whatever might
otherwise have been the attitude of these more western Moslems in
Chinese uniforms.
When our usual lunch-hour was long past, and still no word came from the
rest of our party, we mustered Chinese enough to get chopped straw and
peas put before our horses, and eventually to obtain for ourselves a
bowl of plain rice boiled and served under conditions and amid
surroundings that had best not be specifically described, lest the
major’s still unsullied reputation be seriously injured. Then we
suddenly realized that it was already three o’clock, that the only place
where we could possibly spend a night without our cots and our cook was
still forty _li_ away, and that this was a walled city where the gates
probably closed at sunset. The result was the most speed we had attained
since the spasmodic truck had dropped us in Sian-fu more than a month
before. In fact, even the several goatskin rafts plying from town to
town along an open stretch of the river could hardly keep up with us.
It was a curiously sudden change to a rich wide valley from the barren
unpeopled wastes that lay behind us; yet the only real difference was
irrigation. This had been brought to the western Hoang Ho centuries ago
by the Jesuits, who had introduced a complete system, still functioning,
with great sluices—ornamented in Chinese fashion with fancy water-gates
and bridges showing the heads and tails of great fish in stone. What the
good fathers probably did not introduce was the custom of turning all
the roads into irrigation ditches and making travel virtually impossible
whenever the peasants along the way chose to do so; for that one may see
just outside the walls of Peking, and listen in vain for any law or even
effectual protest against it. Clusters of trees that were almost
numerous rose from in and about farm compounds, which grew so frequent
before the day was done as to form nearly a continuous town, and every
little while we passed a new, or a very well preserved, temple, high
above each of which stood two slender and magnificent poplars that
recalled the “pencil minarets” of Cairo.
But we had no time to spare for mere sight-seeing, nor even for debating
the social effects of Jesuit foresight. For fast as we urged our horses
on, the sun seemed to outdistance us without effort, like some runner of
unlimited speed and endurance and a weakness for practical joking
sauntering easily along just in front of his breathless competitors. The
so-called roads, too, abetted this red-faced humorist; for they would of
course instantly have lost their certificates of Chinese nationality if
they had marched straight forward even when the goal was plainly in
sight, so that they wound and twisted incessantly here on the flat
valley just as they had in their random wandering across the uninhabited
rolling plains behind us, just as a Chinese road will always and
everywhere, though there is no more reason for it than for putting
mustard on apple-pie. Even the accuracy in distances that had hitherto
been almost praiseworthy had suddenly disappeared, as if still further
to worry us. For it seemed at least a dozen times that the same answer
was given to our question as to how far we still had to go, though we
spaced this at considerable intervals; and the very best we could do,
even at the risk of having to give our animals a day’s rest, was to hold
our own.
We arrived at length, however, just as dusk was spreading, to find the
gates of Chungwei still open and the sense of direction among its
inhabitants so much better than outside the walls that we brought up
before the home of the only foreigners in town without mishap and
without delay. Fortunately this couple were Americans, in fact, the most
American of all the missionaries we met on our western trip, so that
there was no more embarrassment on our side than hesitation on the other
when we walked in upon them to say, “Here we are, with nothing but the
clothes we stand in; please take care of us.” It is a long cry, of
course, from auxiliary work among American soldiers in Europe to the
establishing of a mission in a town of far western China where
foreigners had never lived before, so that we rather flattered ourselves
that we, the first visitors this new station had ever known, were almost
as welcome as we were made.
Chungwei is an ancient and more or less honorable town which claims
eight thousand _families_ within its walls, among whom only three
merchants, without families, were Mohammedans. The city has no north
gate because there is no more China north of it, the so-called Great
Wall being almost within rifle-shot, and beyond that lies Mongolia. The
broad plain on which it flourishes is shut in by mountains and
sand-dunes, but is divided by the Yellow River, from which all the
prosperity of the region comes. For in the autumn, after the harvest,
the top layer of soil is cut up everywhere into big mud bricks, held
together by the roots of the crops, and of these all buildings, even
walls, fences, and most furniture, are made, and still there are always
great piles of them left over. Then the river is let in upon the land
and covers it once more with a rich silt that produces splendid
rice—certainly there was no suggestion of a rice country on a cloudy
December day with a high wind blowing—wheat and linseed in abundance,
millet, _kaoliang_, buckwheat, potatoes as large as if they had come
from America, cabbage enough to keep the population from starving if
there were nothing else, magnificent grapes and peaches, and what our
host assured us were the finest walnuts in China. In other words, all
Chungwei needed to be a land of plenty and comfort, and possibly even of
cleanliness, was to be somehow broken of the apparently unbreakable
Chinese habit of bringing into the world, in the madness for male
offspring, every possible mouth which the land can feed, with an instant
increase to take up the slack offered by such improvements as the
irrigation projects of the Jesuits.
We were luxuriating in the extraordinary experience of lying abed after
daylight when there came a scratching on one of the paper windows of the
dining-room where we had been accommodated, and we heard with
astonishment Chang’s mellifluous voice murmuring, “Masters, what time
like start this morning?” Our missing caravan had finally overcome the
difficulties of the river passage and had reached Chungwei about two in
the morning. Perhaps it was not so entirely out of sympathy for our
weary employees as we fancied that we set ten o’clock as the hour of
departure and turned over for another nap.
Our host very seriously doubted whether we could keep to our schedule
and make Ningsia in four days, particularly with so late a start. But we
had little difficulty in doing so, thanks mainly to the fact that the
weather had turned bitter cold. For the peasants all along the
cultivated part of the river valley had recently opened the irrigation
sluices for the customary autumn flooding, and had it not chanced that
thick ice formed a day or two ahead of us on all the streams thus
created, we should have been at least a week in covering the four
hundred and fifty _li_, as carts coming in from the northeast reported
they had been. Even where the alleged road itself had not been frankly
used as an irrigation ditch, it wandered and dodged and side-stepped in
a sincere but more or less vain effort to keep out of the diked bare
fields which in summer cover with green all this rich brown valley from
sand-dunes to river. Now there were vast skating-rinks everywhere,
doubly troublesome when they were half thawed in the early afternoons.
By picking a roundabout way we could have skated much of the way home.
But the crowded population of the valley took no advantage of the
recreation offered them. Probably there was not a pair of skates in the
province, certainly not unless they had been brought by a foreigner or
some student returned from abroad; and Kansu sends no students overseas.
Once in a while we saw a group of children timidly sliding on the ice,
with the awkwardness and limited range of _Mr. Pickwick_, the boys often
barefoot, the little girls in their bound feet usually only looking
wistfully on. Now and again such road as remained jumped by an arched
earth bridgelet over a larger irrigation ditch with an axle-cracking
jolt, only to wallow on again through ice and half-frozen mud.
As if all this were not bad enough, the peasants here and there were
felling big trees squarely across the road, and letting travel drag its
way around them as best they could, or wait until the trunk had been
sawed up. The traveler in rural China is constantly being reminded that
he is an unwelcome trespasser on private domain.
Before we left Lanchow we had been warned that the road would “change
gage” at Chungwei, and a day or two before we reached it our cartmen
came to ask whether they should fit their carts with other axles there.
That of course we recognized as a gentle hint for added _cumshaw_, which
we met with innocent faces and the information that they might reduce
their carts to one wheel, or increase them to six, with one under each
animal, so far as we were concerned, as long as they made the hundred
and some _li_ a day which our schedule demanded. One of them, I believe,
did change axles, for I recall that it was only the old opium-smoker
with the three ill fed animals whose cart could never reach the two ruts
at once. These were made by ox-carts peculiar to this region, their two
wheels seven feet high and out of all proportion to the little load of
chunk coal or bundles of straw which they carried in the small box
between them. In places these cumbersome vehicles monopolized the road,
but they were always quick to give us the right of way, even to the
extent of climbing high banks or backing into ditches from which it
could not always have been easy to extricate themselves. This seemed to
be as much due to the natural good nature of the rustic drivers as to a
certain fear, not so much of foreigners, since in this part of the
journey we were usually so muffled as not to be easily recognized as
such, as of an expedition whose equipment showed that it was not of
local origin. One is constantly getting little hints that the Chinese
feeling toward “outside-country” people may almost as easily exist
toward those from another province, even another village, as toward
those from foreign lands. Sometimes there were whole trains of these
ostrich-legged carts crawling together across the uneven
country—twenty-two of them in the caravan I counted one morning soon
after sunrise, and they were carrying, among them all, about what an
American farmer would consider one good load of straw. For some reason
these contrivances do not shriek their ignorance of axle-grease anything
like so loudly as they should, but instead are almost musical. For
beneath the axle of each cart hangs a long bell, of scalloped bottom
much like those in Chinese temples, with a clapper in the form of a
baseball-bat hanging so far down that only its extreme upper edge
strikes the bell, while the lower end gathers some of its impetus by
bouncing off every hummock in the middle of the “road.”
Remnants of the Great Wall frequently appeared, and once the road passed
through a half-ruined arch of it, one side still covered with the yellow
bricks that had formerly made this gateway at least rather an imposing
structure. Walnut and Chinese date-trees, willows and pencil-like
poplars, all leafless now and showing their big stick nests of crows and
magpies like some sort of tumor, clustered by the dozen about the
farm-houses and were scattered here and there across the broad valley;
but there were by no means enough of them, and the mountains above were
totally bare. Many of the high-walled farm-yards looked at some little
distance like great feudal castles, but on closer view the walls always
proved to be merely of dried mud, with nothing but the usual dreary
misery inside. Sometimes two or three score of these family dwellings
were in sight at once, their flat roofs invariably piled high with
bundles of wheat or straw, with corn and _kaoliang_ stalks; but there
was never any suggestion of comfortable prosperity about the interior or
the inmates. Children in a single quilted rag, chapped and begrimed
beyond belief on faces and hands and from the waist down, still huddled
in sunny corners or ran halfheartedly about at some unimaginative game
or other. When the weather is quite too bitter to be borne, they squat
or lie upon the more or less heated _k’angs_ indoors, to the injury of
their growth and health. The American memorial hospital in Lanchow, by
the way, treats many cases of cancer of the hips caused by burns from
sleeping on these Chinese mud-brick beds.
The Chinese persistence in maintaining the highest possible birthrate in
proportion to the available nourishment, and the constant subdivisions
of agricultural holdings among the multiplying sons of succeeding
generations, makes comfortable prosperity out of the question, whatever
the fertility of the soil, the industry of the cultivators, or even such
improvements as those introduced by the sixteenth-century Jesuits. There
is much prattle of education as a cure. If by education is understood,
among other things, the teaching that it is unwise, not to say criminal,
for even the most poverty-stricken, the lame, the halt, and the blind,
the mentally defective and the morally perverted, to marry as early and
as often as possible, that there shall be no lack of sons to worship at
the family mud-heaps, then it is sadly needed. But is it possible to
educate, even to the point required for a republican form of government
to function at all, a people whose entire time, strength, and energy are
constantly required to keep it from slipping over the brink of
starvation, even though that education come from some outside source and
be widely adjusted to the problem in hand?
At this season there was no work to be done in the fields, and little
anywhere else except the gathering of twigs and dried grass for fuel, or
roadway droppings for use in the spring. Hence it was naturally the time
for the dedicating of temples and worshiping within them. The attitude
of the Chinese toward their gods has been excellently summed up as
“respectful neglect”; but the treatment accorded them varies greatly in
different regions. There is no means of computing how many religious
edifices we passed on our way to Lanchow that were falling or had fallen
into decay, that had been abandoned entirely except for a beggar or two
posing as priests, or had become noisome dens in which thieves divide
their booty and vagrants scatter their filth; that the traveler may see
in almost any part of China. But the people in this far western valley
of the Yellow River were above the average in piety, treating their gods
with much more respect than neglect, perhaps because their good offices
are so constantly needed to keep back from one side or the other the
sand or the water that would mean quick ruin. At any rate, temples,
field-shrines, monasteries, and numerous lesser signs of superstitions
were so plentiful that the valley might have been mistaken for holy
ground; and not only were those in a state of repair by no means common
in China, but new ones were growing up. Early one afternoon we began to
meet, first men and women, the latter all astride donkeys or packed into
carts, in their gayest raiment and an unusually frolicsome mood, and
then dozens of youths carrying furled banners; and at length the
auditory tortures of Chinese “music” were wafted more and more painfully
to our ears as our animals brought us nearer the focal uproar. A bright
little temple, newly built back near the foot-hills, across which a
sanddune seemed to be creeping, was being dedicated; and every village,
every cluster of farm compounds for many _li_ roundabout had come in
person to bring their respects and to share in whatever benefits might
accrue. It was a Taoist temple, according to Chang, but as he said
something later about a statue of Buddha, and as a Confucian scroll was
plainly in evidence, no doubt the new building conformed to the general
Chinese rule of seating the three spiritual leaders of the race
harmoniously side by side, with Buddha, the foreigner, courteously
granted the central place of honor. The banners, it seemed, gay with
colors and Chinese characters, were brought either to bless or to be
blessed, after which they were carried back to their respective villages
oozing a kind of deputy godliness. Inside, energetic young men were
beating drums and shooting firecrackers to scare off devils—the timid
Chinese are always exorcising evil spirits, but never tackle the real
ones of graft, banditry, filth, the over-production of children, and all
their other real ailments. Long after we had turned the ridge that shut
off this corner of the valley, the charivari of droning priests and
misused instruments drifted to our hearing.
The days had grown so short that we were forced to use both ends of the
nights to piece them out. But for a week or more this was no great
hardship, as a brilliant moon lighted both morning and evening and gave
the landscape touches that were unknown to it by day. Under the rising
or the setting sun the wrinkled ranges of rich-brown mountains wrapped
the horizon in velvets of constantly varying shades. I recall
particularly the heaped-up mass just across the river from an unusually
picturesque walled town which we came upon just as the day was fading
out, and the tint of old red wine, blending momentarily until it became
the purple of the grape itself, seemed a masterpiece which even nature
seldom attains. But the town, though it awakened again that hope of the
romantic within its walls, was so miserable a den of broken stone
“lions” and ruined former grandeur, of comfortless people staring like
monkeys at merely strolling strangers, that we were only too glad to
accept the hospitality of an inn outside the walls.
Beyond this there lay forty _li_ of rolling half sand, utterly
uninhabited, then another broad fertile valley with the same oversupply
of big mud bricks and Jesuit irrigation works, or more modern but less
effective imitations of them. Here there were even more skating-rinks,
and incredible clouds of blue pigeons, from which the major easily
gathered all the fowl we needed to vary our diet to the end of the trip,
though much to the dismay of Chang, who whispered in my ear the horrible
information that “they home-side pigeon.” The _li_ suddenly grew longer,
as they have a habit of doing unexpectedly, so that it was well after
dark when we reached Yeh-shih-pu, a “Hwei-Hwei” town where we could not
even have our own bacon for breakfast, because the innkeeper would not
admit our cook to his kitchen until he had promised to bear in mind his
religious scruples. Such mishaps, added to the fact that every article
of food containing the slightest moisture was habitually frozen solid,
made our repasts less Cleopatran than they might have been. Cold chicken
or pigeon with little sheets of ice dropping from between the muscles as
the famished traveler tears them apart may not be so bad, but the big
Lanchow pears gained nothing by coming to the table as hard as stones,
and certainly there is no call to praise the taste of frozen hard-boiled
eggs, if they have any. Yet most such dainties, the pears in particular,
were far worse if they were thawed out before serving.
It seemed almost summer again on the brilliant afternoon without wind
when an almost good road picked us up and staggered erratically toward
Ningsia. Perhaps there was some slight excuse for its vagaries, for much
of the plain was covered with ice-fields thickly grown with tall reeds,
which were being gathered and carried to town on every type of
conveyance from coolie shoulders to giant-wheeled ox-carts. Among the
constant processions of travelers in both directions Mohammedans
appeared to be in the majority, with white felt skullcaps, or dirty
“Turkish” towels worn like turbans, greatly predominating over any other
form of head-gear. From a distance the city wall seemed merely a
glorified example of those about farm compounds; and high above it, high
in fact above the city gates, towered two pagodas against the distant
horizon of the inevitable crumpled range of low mountains or high hills,
hazy with shade along the base, bright with a slight fall of snow along
the top, where the low winter sun could still strike them.
[Illustration:
The Chinese protect their boys from evil spirits (the girls do not
matter) by having a chain and padlock put about their necks at some
religious ceremony, which deceives the spirits into believing that
they belong to the temple. Earlaps embroidered in gay colors are
widely used in Kansu in winter
]
[Illustration:
Many of the faces seen in western China hardly seem Chinese
]
[Illustration:
A dead man on the way to his ancestral home for burial, a trip that
may last for weeks. Over the heavy unpainted wooden coffin were
brown bags of fodder for the animals, surmounted by the inevitable
rooster
]
[Illustration:
Our party on the return from Lanchow—the major and myself flanked by
our “boys” and cook respectively, these in turn by the two
cart-drivers, with our alleged _mafu_, or groom for our riding
animals, at the right
]
There was nothing really unusual about Ningsia, except perhaps its
distance from any other city. The only foreigners we found there—a
Scandinavian lady and a Belgian priest who maintained one of the
mightiest beards in captivity, bitterly rival propagandists of
Christianity—both assured us that the people of Ningsia were a “bad
lot,” but we had no personal experiences to bear out the statement. Of
the forty-five thousand reputed to dwell within the walls, a generous
third were Moslems, as in Kansu as a whole, but as usual they were
credited with a more industrious, aggressive character than the others,
and a more united front in spite of internal disagreements. The
Mohammedan general, who ruled the place, nephew of the powerful Moslem
Ma Fu-hsiang, looked and acted quite like any other Chinese official,
perhaps because the percentage of Moslem blood that runs in his veins is
the same as the proportion of people of that faith in the city and the
province. His yamen and his extensive barracks were noticeably spick and
span for China, and his soldiers seemed to be well drilled and
disciplined, thanks perhaps to the Russian officer or two who were
giving the general the benefit of their training. But there was much
recent building all about the town; even two elaborate wooden
_p’ai-lous_ were in course of construction. These fantastic memorial
street arches are without number in China, but it is a rare experience
to see new ones under construction, or to find old ones undergoing
repairs, for that matter.
Chinese, Manchus, Mongols, “and all the thieves and rascals from four
directions,” to quote the hirsute Belgian, make up the rest of the
population. Mutton-shops and sheepskins were naturally in considerable
evidence, though there was no lack of black pigs to be seen from the
wall. A slight yet conspicuous detail that we had not seen elsewhere was
slats or small poles set upright at close intervals in front of many
business houses, evidently as a protection against thieves, which would
bear out, I suppose, the assertion as to the make-up of the population.
“Lanchow coppers” had quickly died out and were virtually forgotten by
the time we reached Ningsia, though in theory its ruler was subordinate
to the provincial Tuchun; and “cash” was again everywhere in evidence. A
half-circuit of the city wall showed much vacant space, and even some
farming, within it. Of the two pagodas standing like lighthouses above
the surrounding country, one proved to be far outside the city, toward
the wrinkled mountain range beyond which lies the ancient capital of
Ala-shan. Many-sided but plain-faced, certainly of no great age, they
seemed as high as the Washington Monument, though this may have been an
exaggeration of the imagination, and beneath each of them stood a temple
covering a great reclining Buddha.
We spent a whole day in Ningsia, the only one without travel between
Lanchow and Peking, and could not see how we should have gained much by
staying longer—unless perhaps for years, so that to our superficial
impression would be added the detailed experience of the “old-timer.”
Nor was our attention entirely given to mere sight-seeing and calls of
respect. There were our three horses to be shod—though the timid Chinese
blacksmiths who wander the streets, shop in hand, refuse to risk their
precious lives at the rear end of the most harmless of such animals,
even though they are tied hand and foot to stout stanchions. Any
American worth his salt at the same trade would shoe any quadruped in
China single-handed, behind as well as before, and he certainly would
not leave the long, all but untrimmed hoofs which help to make the
Chinese pony famous for stumbling, though he would of course throw the
first hammer within reach at the man who proposed to pay him only twice
as much for one shoe as his Chinese colleague gets for four. Then there
was the task of getting rid of our opium-smoking driver without either
violently breaking our contract with him or showing undue harshness.
For, after all, he had kept up with the other cartman, who was as
faultless a driver as one could ask for; and there had been times when
his silly grin of doped contentment with life made up somewhat for the
sogginess of his intellect during most of the journey. But we were tired
of seeing his shaft-horse do all the work, while the two starved mules
out in front only now and then staggered taut their rope traces; we were
tired of furnishing opium pills for eating and smoking with money that
should have been spent in food for beast and man; and we were
particularly weary of wondering every time we got out of sight of our
caravan whether the “old man” and his miserable animals had at last
failed us.
When it came to a showdown his elimination proved simple and easy.
Perhaps the pace of the past ten days had cured him of any desire to
keep it up for twelve or thirteen more, over worse going. He had told
Chang one night that he might shoot him if he wished, but that he could
not go a step farther, though this had proved to be a mere figure of
speech. Perhaps there were other arguments, of a monetary nature, such
as a commission for selling his part of the contract to some one else;
for even jobs are bought and sold in China. But of this we knew nothing,
and cared less. For he agreed without argument to resign in favor of the
new cartman whom his companion brought in, and thanked us profusely for
the _cumshaw_ which no doubt quickly went up in fumes.
The new driver, like the one that was left, called our destination home,
and had been waiting for sixteen days for a paying chance to return
there. Except for a slightly less cheery temperament, he was no less
excellent a cartman than the other, though only a hired driver; while
his companion owned not merely his outfit but an inn at the end of our
trail. In the company of such fellows as these, one is struck with the
sturdiness of the Chinese character. All about them were moral pitfalls,
of which their opium-aged colleague was a striking example. They, too,
and millions more like them, could easily get the poppy’s deadly juice
and smoke themselves away from their at best dismal reality into the
land of beautiful dreams; in fact, most of those whose duty it should be
to remove this particular temptation do all they can, short of reducing
their own “squeeze” from it, to make the wicked stuff available; yet
they had never succumbed to it. Nor is the sturdiness of the Chinese
coolie confined to the negative virtues. There was Chang, for instance,
born a tiller of the soil in cruelly crowded Shantung, with a bare three
years’ elementary schooling, who had taught himself to read, and to
write a goodly number of characters, who in a few years as a foreign
servant had acquired powers that to his simple parents probably seemed
supernatural, who in his two months with us had so improved in poise and
the ability to command the respect of his fellow-men that a trained
scholar of many generations of similar experiences could scarcely have
outdone him, either in deportment or the actual business in hand, when
he was called upon to act as interpreter between us and the Mohammedan
general, the very thought of meeting whom face to face would probably
have set him trembling a few years before. Best of all, he had not let
his rise in the world make him ashamed to do the most menial task that
came to hand, on the ground that he was no longer a coolie, which is the
stumbling-block over which rising young China is so apt to come a
cropper. Chang and our cart-drivers were, of course, only individual
instances; but I like to think of them—believe, in fact, that I can
rightly think of them—as typical of millions of their class, as proofs
that, given anything like a decent opportunity, the Chinese coolie can
rise to a genuinely higher plane just as well as the American farmer
can. If such is the case, it is not too much to hope that China may in
time, even though it be centuries distant, advance to real democracy,
that the name “republic” by which she now styles herself may some day
become a reality and not merely a mockery and a catchword.
But to come back to Ningsia, which is still a long way from democracy of
even the present imperfect type. Yet more important than matters of
horseshoeing and the moral repair of our caravan was the question of a
bath, which was eventually settled more or less in our favor by the
placing of two large tin cans of warm water in our respective rooms.
These were in Ningsia’s best hotel; in fact, the best hotel we graced
during all our western journey, though that still does not bring it to
the forefront of the world’s hostelries. Probably the main reason for
its preëminence was the simple fact that it was quite new, and hence had
never had an opportunity to grow filthy and unrepaired. Perhaps the
Mohammedan proprietor—or should I call him “manager,” since it was
several times confided to us that the real owner was Ningsia’s Moslem
general?—had something to do with it, for he was so incessantly on the
job that we could not push aside the cloth door across the street portal
without finding him bowing us his respects behind it, though always
without any violation of his Islamite dignity and certainly with no
acknowledgment of inferiority. We might have taken only one of the
identical rooms at either end of the unoccupied hall backing the long
narrow courtyard, but one of the advantages of roughing it is that
whenever the least possible excuse offers one can be extravagant without
a twinge of conscience.
The most remarkable feature, perhaps, about the establishment was that
it had no earth floors, but that courtyard, hall, and even our rooms
were paved in brick. The _k’angs_ were so new that their straw mats were
almost inviting; the flue was of some modern improved type which
actually gave out more heat than smoke and there was a little baked-mud
coal-stove in addition. This detail was important, for the almost summer
weather in which we had reached the city had modified the instant we
passed through its gate and had disappeared entirely by sunset. I trust
it will not unduly shock Western readers to be told that an ox-cart-load
of the splendid anthracite coal in huge lumps which is so plentiful in
northwestern China sold in this region for about an American dollar, for
in that case I should not even dare to mention another kind of coal,
evidently of an unusually oily composition, which may be lighted with a
match and burns anywhere—on the brick or earth floor, in shallow pans
built for that purpose, in an old wash-basin—without smoke enough to be
worth mentioning and with a sturdy heat that makes a little of it highly
effective. But mankind is never satisfied with his blessings; even
missionaries complained that in the good old days a cart-load of coal
cost less than half what the wicked profiteers owning ox-carts were now
demanding.