COMPLETING THE CIRCLE
We might as well have indulged in an extra nap next morning instead of
being as exacting as usual on the hour of departure, for the city gate
was still closed when we reached it. The rooster that all Chinese inns
maintain for the benefit of their watchless clients had already “sung”;
but on those moonlight mornings such a timepiece could easily be
regarded as out of order, which is no doubt the reason we not only had
to waken the soldiers in the little guard-house but that there was a
further delay of nearly half an hour while one of them wandered away
into the city to get the key, evidently ensconced under the pillow of
some other guardian of Ningsia’s safety. All we lacked to make the third
act of “La Bohème” complete was a light fall of snow and a more Parisian
atmosphere, for not only was there a brazier over which the soldiers
warmed their hands, and a collection of countrymen with produce waiting
to enter as soon as the gate was opened, but we had, though we did not
then suspect it, our _Mimi_ with us.
Our new cartman, it seemed, had come from Paotou accompanied by another
cart, and its driver had already found a fare for the return trip when
this expedition and ours were thrown together in the back yard of the
Moslem inn. In fact, the other might have started a week before had his
client not been afraid to travel alone through a region with a bad
reputation for bandits and thieves. Wholly unknown to us, therefore, we
were to constitute the escort of this timid person, of whose existence
we were still completely ignorant. We did notice that a third cart left
the inn close behind us, and that it trailed us all the way to the gate,
but there was nothing suspicious in some other traveler’s happening to
pick the same ill chosen hour of departure as we, nor in his setting out
in the same direction. Our first hint that something might be suspected
was the sight of the third cart still following on our heels through the
gate, as if it belonged to our party and was therefore free from paying
the twenty coppers required of every native conveyance.
All that morning it stuck to us across a great plain with much ice, here
and there covered with tall reeds. There was no doubt that it had
invited itself to join us; the only questions remaining were its
destination and who it was that lay ensconced behind its heavy blue
cloth front door. These mysteries were solved at the noonday halt. A
well dressed boy had already appeared on the front platform beside the
driver, and the instant the cart drew up in the yard of the inn we had
chosen out stepped a Chinese lady still well short of the age when
scandal ceases to wag its tongues about members of the attractive sex.
She was the wife of a silk merchant of Paotou, we gathered in a
roundabout way; the youth was her nephew or something of the sort; and
she had evidently joined us for the whole fortnight that remained of our
journey.
We both admit that we are not utterly devoid of sympathy or chivalry,
but somehow it did strike us that the lady might have gone to the
formality of letting us know, at least indirectly, that she was going to
grace our expedition. But they do things differently in China; and
perhaps this was a less scandalous way than frankly to make the
acquaintance of unrelated male traveling companions.
The three carts never once broke ranks that afternoon as we plodded on
across the plain, with another great lighthouse pagoda and more ox-cart
caravans with seven-foot wheels. The whole Yellow River valley seemed to
have been flooded a bare week ahead of us, and while this no doubt would
be repaid many fold in the spring, it would have made traveling a sad
experience if everything had not been frozen over. As it was, our
cartmen did much wandering in the rather vain hope of avoiding icy
roads, for, old as she is, China apparently has never learned to put
calks on her horseshoes. We had a hundred _li_ to make that day, which
did not seem difficult in the light of the fact that we had once covered
a hundred and forty on this leg of the journey, but the _li_ were
stretching perceptibly, and what with the zigzagging and the delay at
the city gate we were still well short of our goal when night fell. The
moon was rising later now, so that we had to feel our way across the
plain in utter darkness, for even by day the “road” was often only
faintly marked. The stillness of this great valley at night was
impressive—and fortunate, for the only thing to guide us was the sound
of our carts ahead, silent underfoot but with a constant thumping of the
heavy wheels on the loosely fitting axles.
At that the carts got out of our hearing, and for a long time we rode on
at random, keeping as straightforward a course as possible, until
finally we were lucky enough to see rising close before us out of the
night an imposing gateway of the walled town of Ping-lo. Our chief
impression of this is that if it had as much paving as it has ornamental
street arches there would be fewer streets to wade and stumble through,
hence less temptation to curse the stupidity of such inhabitants as were
faintly visible for not being able to put us on the track of our carts.
We found our way at last, however, to the inn-yard where they were
already unhitched—to discover that the trousered lady had followed us
even there. It had not mattered so much at the midday halt, but with
several inns to choose from we were tempted to protest when she clung to
us even by night, taking indeed the very next room to us, with a thin
mud wall between. We did protest, in fact, though for other reasons than
any real fear of being “compromised,” of hearing Peking whisper over its
bridge-tables and its cocktails at the club, “What’s this about the
major and that fellow bringing a Chinese girl along with them, eh?”
While we never got a monosyllable out of her ourselves, the lady had in
a high degree that fault more or less unjustly charged against all her
sex; and as she slept most of the day, after the fashion of Chinese
travelers, to whom the horrors of a “Peking cart” seem to be like the
rocking of a cradle, it was natural that she needed to relieve herself
by chattering all night, with the youth or innkeepers’ wives as the not
unwilling listeners. Now, the Chinese language is anything but musical,
and the voices of Chinese women are evidently trained to sound as much
as possible like the tightening brakes of a freight-train on a swift
down grade, so that even in our most charitable moods we could scarcely
have lain silently bewailing the departure of our hitherto splendid
slumber for more than the two or three hours we did without attempting
to do something about it. The vigorous application of a boot-heel to the
mud partition, and a few terse remarks that were probably none the less
clear for being only partly couched in Chinese, had a desirable effect,
which was made more or less permanent by having Chang explain next day
to the third driver, who passed the information on through the youth to
the feminine part of our aggregation, certain rules of conduct that were
essential to a continued membership in it.
In the middle of the next afternoon irrigation suddenly ended, and a
stony, barren plain, rising into foot-hills on the left, grew up ahead.
Some time during the following day we crossed the unmarked boundary
between Kansu and Inner Mongolia and left the Mohammedan province
behind. From the town where we spent one of those nights there is a
short cut through the Ordos that takes but half the time required to
follow clear around the right-angled bend of the Yellow River, but even
if one is sure of being able to cross the river at both ends of that
trail there is nothing but an uninhabited desert wilderness between,
where a single well is worthy a name on the map, and which is
practicable only to camel-caravans. Thus there was nothing to do but let
the Hoang Ho force us farther and farther westward, though our goal lay
to the east, now by stony roads, now through half-days of the drifted
sand of genuine deserts, or by river bars spreading out in great masses
of ice which it was not always possible to pass without making a great
detour. There was a very good reason why we could not float down the
Yellow River, or skate or ice-boat either, for not only was it often
frozen over completely for long distances but the ice lay in broken
chunks a foot or two thick and so packed together that they sometimes
were piled high up on the shore. There were days during which we never
sighted the river, though we were always following it; at other times we
spent midday or night right on its banks, with it the only water
available.
Such a place was the one we reached unusually early one afternoon. In
spite of its three-barrel name of Hou-gway-tze it consisted of a single
cluster of mud buildings, which took all prizes for their filthy
condition. Moreover, every room was packed with more coolies than could
crowd together on the _k’angs_, and several of them were suffering from
what might easily have been malignant diseases or dangerous illnesses.
It looked as if we would have to commandeer one room by driving the
coolies out of it—and then take our lady in with us. But General Ma, the
uncle, Mohammedan ruler of all this western district, had very recently
built a new inn, with high crenelated walls of bright yellow mud and a
generally inviting appearance, a furlong or two beyond the unspeakable
hovels that had evidently for centuries been the only housing for
travelers at this point. Our cartmen seemed to take it for granted that
we would not be admitted to the new compound, for it was not only
strictly Mohammedan but had really been built to house soldiers. It took
Chang less than five minutes, however, to assure the man in charge that
we would not cook or eat pork on the premises, and to talk a soldier out
of the only one of the rooms that did not have its _k’ang_ crowded.
Evidently the hope of being given a few coppers in the morning, in which
he was, of course, not disappointed, or the privilege, unless he was
Mohammedan, of disposing of some of the scraps left over from our meals
and perhaps of getting an empty tin can or two was reward enough for
him. Where our feminine companion spent the night is still a mystery,
for though she promptly followed us to the new inn we saw nothing of her
after her descent from the cart until she crawled out of it again the
next noon fifty _li_ farther on.
There was time for a stroll before the sun withdrew its genial
companionship. Great masses of crumpled mountains, treeless and
velvet-brown, lay just across the river, which here was partly open,
with a current of perhaps five miles an hour. No wonder it had to turn
out for so mighty a barrier, and double the journey that was left us. On
our side of the stream stretches of tall, light-yellow bunchgrass and a
kind of sage, of slightly purplish tinge under the sinking sun, were
broken by long rows of sand-dunes. In the morning the north sides of
these were white with hoar-frost and helped a bit to light the way for
us before daylight. Files of coolies who might easily have been
bandits—we wondered if many of them were not brigands who had turned in
their weapons and disbanded for the winter—were constantly appearing out
of the brush and hillocks of this and the other uninhabited deserts
beyond. Many of them wore a kind of makeshift turban of pure unspun
wool, and all were dressed for cold weather, often in combinations of
skin coats and cotton-padded garments that made them picturesque
figures. How many hundreds of these we passed on our journey northward
there is no way of computing, nor of knowing whether they were followers
of some bandit chieftain who would take to the road again in the region
ahead, which had been so harassed of late, as soon as the weather made
banditry pleasant and travelers plentiful once more. Perhaps they were
all what the few we spoke with claimed to be,—men who had taken rafts
down the river, or coolies who had worked in Mongolia or Manchuria
during the summer and were now walking a thousand miles or more back to
their homes, as men do by the millions in overcrowded China.
We were constantly meeting these hardy fellows far from any other
evidences of human existence. Long lines of them, bundled up in all they
possessed, emerged from the darkness of early morning, one or two
perhaps singing in a mixture of minors and falsettos that recalled the
songs of the country people of Venezuela. Occasionally a straggler
limped past far out on the dreary plain; but with few exceptions they
kept the pace, and the cheerful countenances of perfect contentment. We
always came upon a group of them at the single lonely huts that were
often the only possible stopping-places during the whole day, sitting in
a sunny corner sheltered from the wind at noon, perhaps stripped to the
waist and diligently searching the seams of their thick padded garments,
or already stretched out on the crowded _k’angs_ where we halted for the
night; for they seemed to prefer to travel in the darkness of morning
rather than of evening. Probably, too, they had in mind the sharp
competition for _k’ang_ space, if not also for food and fuel, and the
necessity of arriving early if they would be sure of accommodations at
these only shelters for forty or fifty _li_ in either direction.
The fixed price of lodging for a coolie in these inns seemed to be five
coppers; then there was five “cash” or a copper for hot water for their
tea, and not more, probably, for each of their two meals than for
lodging; so that the innkeeper got about the equivalent of one to three
American cents from each guest, depending on whether he stopped at noon
or overnight, and the total expenditure of each coolie perhaps averaged
four cents a day, besides the bit of food some carried with them. Now
and again they no doubt cut down this extravagant figure by skipping a
meal or, like the several score we saw streaming away from a temple
early one morning, finding shelter at a lower price. Many of these
coolies hardly looked Chinese at all, though it might be difficult to
decide what other blood had modified their features. In fact, the
northern Chinese, especially outside the larger cities, with their
strong bodies and sturdy faces, bear little resemblance to the common
Western conception of the sly, slender, pigtailed Celestial; I doubt
very much whether the American boy whose only acquaintance with the race
has been through the “movies” or a rare laundryman from Kwangtung in the
far south would have recognized as Chinese our chief driver, with his
strong, almost Roman nose, his leather-dark complexion, and his
attributes of a real man even in the Occidental sense.
Though one seldom finds the doubtful joys of chewing tobacco appreciated
outside the confines of the Western hemisphere north of the Rio Grande,
it was something of a surprise to discover how many Chinese do not even
smoke it. Probably the chief reason is that they cannot afford it,
though ten cigarettes in gaily decorated packages can be bought for the
equivalent of two cents. This would have accounted for the fact that so
many of these coolie groups were abstainers. Those who did smoke used
the little pipes with long stems, of about the capacity of half a
hazelnut shell, familiar to Korea and Japan as well as to China; and
their pale tobacco of the texture of fine hay was so mild as hardly to
seem to Western taste derived from the dreadful weed at all. Whenever I
distributed a few pinches of a brand widely known in the United States
the result was a series of sudden coughing spells and the laughing
admission that _Mei-guo yen_ is painfully strong. Our cartmen, however,
who alternately smoked a larger pipe with a porcelain stem of the size
of a policeman’s club, either came to prefer the taste of American
tobacco or found it more economical to ask for an occasional pinch from
my can than to untie their own strings of “cash.” Several large
corporations, all, I believe, British or American, are expending great
efforts and vast sums to teach the Chinese the highest possible
consumption of cigarettes; and their wares and their “advertising
vandalism,” as a more serious-minded traveler has justly called it, are
to be found even in the villages and along the main roads of the far
interior. But they are hampered by the problem of how to produce a
cigarette that can be sold at prices the consumer can afford to pay,
even though the wages in their Chinese factories are in keeping with
those elsewhere in the country. The fact that the revenue-stamp, which
represents so large a proportion of the American’s smoking expenditures,
is missing still does not solve the difficulty. Like opium, tobacco was
brought to—not to say imposed upon—the Chinese from outside, and not
many centuries ago. The weed has not been known in China as long as it
has in Europe, to say nothing of America. Long after Sir Walter Raleigh
frightened his admirers by causing smoke to issue from his nostrils
tobacco was brought to Japan by the Portuguese or the Dutch; from there
it crossed to Korea, drifting naturally into Manchuria, and the Manchus
introduced it into China along with the cue in 1644.
Scrub trees rose above the tall light-yellow clumps of tough grass
during most of the day beyond the general’s inn. Pheasants flew up here
and there in large flocks. Once we passed a Mongol rounding up a herd of
shaggy, half-wild ponies. We should have known him by his bent-knee yet
cowboy-perfect riding in spite of his Chinese sheepskin dress, by his
full-blooded, red face, “like a brewer’s drayman in—England,” as some
one has put it, even if he had not been unable to understand Chang when
we found the road suddenly missing where the river had licked away the
side of a hill to which it formerly clung. Now and then we met a Mongol
riding a camel at a trot across the bushy country, and a large scattered
group or two of these animals were browsing on the tough yellow grass as
if it were delicious. Our horses invariably showed fright at a close
view of a camel, perhaps because they could not bear the sight of such
ungainly ugliness, for certainly the two-humped beasts never gave the
least indication either of the desire or of the ability to harm their
more graceful rivals in the business of transportation.
Tungkou on the further side of a large bay formed by the Hoang Ho was a
town of some importance, evidently a principal port during the season of
river traffic, for huge boats built of hand-hewn planks and divided into
several partitioned compartments were drawn up in considerable number on
the shore. There were half a dozen new fortresses, some of two stories,
or with a kind of cupola from which the coming of enemies, such as a
force of bandits, could be seen some distance off; and many of the large
compounds of the town were also freshly built of the same straw and
yellow mud, though there was nothing new or clean about the old
familiar, staring, easily laughing inhabitants. In certain moods, such
as come at the ends of many long days of hard travel, there is a feeling
of loneliness, of indescribable depression, in being long gazed at by
multitudes, as if one were a wild beast, or a circus clown. The
telegraph line of two wires which serves this region jumped the river at
Tungkou in one mighty leap between double and reinforced poles on the
two banks and plunged on into a Sahara of high drifted sand-ridges, over
which we found our way with difficulty during the first hours of the
next morning.
Then for several days irrigation took the place of desert again, and we
passed towns that claimed to be entirely Catholic. After the Mohammedan
rebellion a certain order of that faith began work in the almost
unpeopled region along this northwesternmost elbow of the Yellow River,
copying the irrigation systems of their Jesuit forerunners of centuries
before a bit farther south and building up town after town in which none
but Catholic converts are really welcomed. As the broad river valley was
barely used at all before the priests came, except for grazing, and was
but lightly populated, there can scarcely be any criticism of them on
that score. San-shun-gung and Poronor were perhaps the most important of
the dozen or more of these towns through which we passed, and which
appeared with great regularity every forty _li_, sometimes every twenty.
The first named was walled, rather recently and with mud bricks, perhaps
because it was the seat of the bishop, whose residence close to the
large church, with a belfry building distinct from it, might have looked
less imposing in other surroundings than the usual low, mud-built
Chinese village. Services were in full swing, with most of the
inhabitants audibly in attendance and the streets deserted, when we
passed through this place early one morning; but Poronor of the Mongol
name was a noonday halt and we had opportunity there for a chat with the
local ruler. He was a Belgian priest, as in the other larger towns, and
_bourgmestre_, too, as he called it; for the priest is always the town
mayor and chief authority, though there may also be a Chinese or Mongol
“mandarin.” While we were being entertained with wine and cigars in his
laboratory-office—for he took account of the bodily as well as the
political and spiritual ailments of his converts—a large group of
Mohammedan soldiers left a procession of them that was straggling down
from the northeast and gathered in the yard, to peer in at us through
the glass windows. They were pestering him to death, the priest said,
new groups coming every day to ask him to furnish them carts and
animals, and naturally drivers, in which to continue their journey. He
had done so several times, but was now refusing the request; and nothing
could be better proof of the real authority of the foreign priests of
that distant Yellow River valley than the fact that the soldiers did not
take transportation facilities by force when he declined to furnish
them.
On the other hand, any criminal whom the _bourgmestre_ wished to be rid
of was turned over to the Mohammedan commanders. The converts were
almost exclusively Chinese; for there were naturally no converted
Moslems, and only a few Mongol Catholics, who lived in two small
villages back toward the hills. In one town where we spent the night the
priest was for the moment absent, but this did not hinder us from
getting a fairly clear view of his establishment. The large windows of
glass—so unusual in western China—along the inner side of the church and
the priest’s study disclosed rather bare rooms, the former with a few
lithographed saints and benches or kneeling-boards some six inches high
and wide, the latter with a rough Chinese-made easy-chair and table and
the indispensable paraphernalia of the priestly calling, including a
score of rather dog-eared books. Barely had we entered the compound than
a flock of boys swooped noisily down upon us. They were “orphans” of the
little mud school in a corner of the enclosure, or sons of the
townspeople; and they were rather poor witnesses to the advantages of
Catholic training, at least in deportment. For not only were they
undisciplined but very decidedly “fresh,” and certainly there had been
no improvement over “heathen” Chinese children in the matter of wiping
their noses and using soap and water. While they were crowded about us
the priest’s native assistant appeared and put us through the usual
autobiographical catechism required of any lone foreigner surrounded by
Chinese, then reciprocated with shreds of information expressed in
scattered words of Chinese, French, and Latin. Finally he led the way
toward, but not into, the schoolroom, for the flock of unwiped noses
surged pell-mell ahead of us and when we entered they were all kneeling
in their places on tiny benches similar to those in the church, with
their forearms on their home-made desks, chanting at the tops of their
voices and at express speed some Latin invocation which probably had
about as little meaning to them as it had to us. The assistant proudly
announced himself the teacher and displayed his few treasures of
learning, among which a religious book printed in Latin and Chinese on
opposite pages was plainly the most revered. When at length he was moved
to silence the chanted uproar, and we pronounced a few of the Latin
words at his request, he gave extravagant signs of delight, much as a
great scientist might if a colleague unexpectedly confirmed some fine
point on which his own experiments had focused themselves.
Bound and unbound feet were about equally in evidence in these Catholic
towns, as if in such minor matters as this and the use of handkerchiefs
converts might do as they saw fit. Nor could we see any appreciable
advance in living conditions, though the school-girls of Poronor, in
their bright red trousers and jackets, were a picturesque touch which
made up somewhat for the annoyance of eating in the presence of as
mighty a mob audience as in regions never blessed with Christianity.
Chang reported, too, that people along the way told him that the
Catholic Chinese were heartily disliked, because they were not only
unusually dishonest and rather haughty, but because they might do any
mean trick that suggested itself, and the priests invariably upheld
them, even to using their influence in resultant lawsuits.
The broad valley between hazy and even invisible mountain ranges on one
side and, on the other, a river which we hardly saw during the last week
of the journey was sometimes a sea of yellow grass high as a horseman’s
head and sometimes a big bare plain deliberately cut up by irrigation
ditches so wide that there was often no crossing them without many miles
of detour. There were times when a compass seemed necessary, so
uncertain was the course of the meandering “road,” which even the
experienced carters now and again lost completely. Travel was slight,
and every few miles a herdsmen’s hut all but hidden in the tall grass
was the only sign of population. Thousands of acres of these
uncultivated plains had been dug up and burned over, probably by men who
make their living by gathering marmot skins, though there were no
visible evidences of these gopher-like animals, which retire to their
holes for the winter. Snow fell during the night that we spent in
Hoang-yang-muto—“Antelope Woods,” so named, no doubt, because there is
not a tree and certainly not a “yellow sheep” to be seen for many miles
roundabout, and all the next morning our horses were hampered by great
balls of snow and earth that formed beneath their hoofs, and which we
were forced to remove ourselves, for our brave _mafu_ avoided any
unnecessary familiarity with his charges. But by the middle of the
afternoon the landscape had resumed its brown-yellow coloring and never
lost it again during the journey.
Not long after the Catholics disappeared, big Mongol lamaseries began to
rise every few hours above the horizon. These were much more pretentious
than anything else between Ningsia and Paotou, the big main building
always two and sometimes three stories high and constructed of good
modern brick. From a distance they looked like ugly summer hotels that
had been foisted upon the simple country, but a nearer view always
showed the dozen or more big windows in each wall to be mere bricked-up
pretenses of the openings they resembled. Evidently the “Living Buddhas”
who graced these establishments had attempted to copy what they
considered to be the glories of Shanghai or Tientsin, but could not rid
themselves of the notion that a proper dwelling must be as stuffy as a
Mongol felt tent. Even the clusters of white houses about these poor
imitations of modern Italian villas bore false windows, and only the
turnip-shaped dagobas had anything suggestive of the picturesque about
them. Swarms of dirty lamas in yellow, red, and purple robes, big stout
fellows of every age from boy novices to those whose already almost
visible skulls would soon be the playthings of dogs, poured forth from
these places if we rode in among the buildings, from which sometimes
came ritual noises that were a mixture of the terrifying and the
childishly ridiculous. Nor was there any lack of women about these
monasteries, in quantities of gaudy jewelry and with real feet.
The plain had been unbroken for days as far as the eye could see, giving
the impression that the country was tilted and that we were for ever
riding uphill, when a low mountain rose above the horizon at dawn on
Friday which we barely reached by sunset on Saturday. All Sunday we
plodded close along the foot of this, here and there passing a cluster
of huts within a compound more often than not in ruins, but with the
assertion in big characters whitewashed on their mud walls that they
were “hotels.” Once or twice we stopped at Mongol or Chinese inns, but
most of them were still “Hwei-Hwei,” which did not matter so much after
the cook hit upon the happy expedient of telling the proprietors that
the bacon he served us for breakfast was “American salt beef.”
Though we had expected it almost any day on this journey northward, it
was not until this last Sunday night of the trip that we could not get a
room to ourselves. The isolated inn at which darkness overtook us
consisted of one huge room surely a hundred feet long, with an alleyway
from door to “kitchen” and a narrow lateral passage to the end walls,
otherwise completely taken up by the four _k’angs_ thus divided. These
were already crowded with scores of coolies, ox-cart drivers, and
similar travelers much more interesting to look upon than as bedfellows.
Luckily there was one paper window in a far corner, and there we gave
orders to have the last ten feet of the _k’ang_ swept, the walls dusted,
and a blanket and the reed mat we did not need hung up as curtains. If
there were drawbacks to this improvised chamber, such as listening to
the eating, sleeping, and drinking noises of our fellow-guests, the
place at least was warm, thanks not only to the bodily heat of the
several scores of men but to as roaring a fire as poor fuel could
produce in the mud cook-stove that passed its surplus warmth into the
flues beneath the general beds. For the last few days inn “kitchens” had
been fitted with an immense shallow iron kettle set permanently into the
adobe stove, and from this any one who wanted boiled water dipped it.
About such inconveniences our cook competed with the flocking coolies
who prepared their own humble fare, but it rarely needed even the
commanding word of Chang to impress them with the fact that such great
personages as ourselves naturally should have precedence over the mere
garden variety of mankind.
Possibly the anxious reader is wondering how our lady companion met the
trying situation of the total lack of privacy on that Sunday night. But
there was no such problem. For when we had stepped forth into the
darkness at the usual hour on the eighth morning out of Ningsia, the
“tai-tai’s” cart was still sitting on its tail, thills in air, with a
care-free something about it that should have made our own battered and
road-weary wains envious. To our inquiry came the response, with more
than a hint at our having been so unjust, that our pace was too swift
for the lady, that rather than continue to get up every day long before
daylight and ride often until after dark, with never a chance of getting
out of her cart except at the noonday halt, she preferred to run the
risk of being robbed or ill treated, even killed, by bandits, for she
could endure it no longer. We refrained from making the obvious reply
that, as far as our moderately tenacious memories informed us, we had
never even suggested that she try to keep a foreigner’s pace; and thus
we had parted, without an embrace, or even a kind word. Indeed, she had
never spoken to us during all that intimate week, though I had caught
her once or twice exchanging smiles with the major.
[Illustration:
A typical farm hamlet of the Yellow River valley in the far west where
some of the
farm-yards are surrounded by mud walls so mighty that they look like
great armories
]
[Illustration:
The usual kitchen and heating-plant of a Chinese inn, and the kind on
which our cook competed with hungry coolies in preparing our dinners
]
[Illustration:
The midwinter third-class coach in which I returned to Peking
]
[Illustration:
No wonder I was mistaken for a Bolshevik and caused family tears when
I turned up in Peking from the west
]
Hers was not the only complaint at our speed. The cook, who always sat
huddled, nose in collar and hands in sleeves, on the front platform of
one of the carts, a striking contrast to the cheery, well washed, and
often-shaved driver beside him, confided to Chang one morning that he
would not make this trip again, not even if we offered him a hundred
dollars a month. As that is from five to twenty times the pay of a
Chinese cook, even though he was speaking only in “Mex,” it may be
surmised how bitterly he must have suffered during the journey. It never
seemed to occur to him, however, that he would suffer less from cold, at
least, if he would now and then get off and walk, like all the rest of
us. Chang, on the other hand, prided himself on being a “coolie” able to
endure anything, as well as having no “face” to lose, and though he
visibly showed wear from his constant two months’ service under all
conditions, he very seldom failed to produce not only whatever we asked
for but a smiling countenance and a cheerful disposition in addition. It
is considered bad form in China to show any human interest in one’s
servants; in fact, it is usually unwise, as in much of the Orient, and
likely to result in deterioration both of deportment and service. With
Chang it was fairly safe, however, and I frequently indulged myself to
the extent of inquiring whether he and the cook had a comfortable place
to sleep. His unvarying reply was the smiling assertion, “Oh, I can
sleep anywhere, master”; and the only night on the journey that I
actually saw his quarters was this one in the crowded coolie inn. This
he spent on a corner of the _k’ang_ opposite our improvised chamber,
where he could keep one eye on our belongings and the other on any of
our fellow-guests overcome by curiosity to see how these wealthy and
exclusive persons from some other world slept on the folding platforms
they carried with them—as if the _k’ang_ itself were not good enough for
any one.
We covered a hundred and twenty _li_ on Monday, across a stony
half-desert, never far from the base of the crumpled range that stuck
persistently beside us on the left. White Mongol lamaseries clustered
here and there well off the road in less accessible places, such as
half-way up the face of the mountain wall. Now and again a Mongol high
lama and his followers, all in brilliant yellow or a slightly dulled
red, rode by with the motionless motion of good horsemen, on sturdy,
sweating ponies. Ox-cart-wheels were again small and were usually solid
disks of wood, and numbers of them were leisurely bringing in from the
rail-head boxes and bales, marked with such names as Hamburg and
Shanghai. Once we passed one of the crudest of these conveyances, drawn
by two small, gaunt red oxen and driven by a man and a boy, with no
other cargo than a dead man on his way to his ancestral home for burial.
Over the massive coffin, which left room for nothing else beside it, was
thrown a big brown bag or two of fodder, and beside this stood the
inevitable rooster, in a willow-withe cage. It was not the pure white
cock required by Chinese custom, however, but one almost as red as the
big brilliant paper label, daubed with black characters, on the front of
the coffin. Probably this was the best color available, for we could not
recall having seen white fowls for many days, and no doubt the gods in
charge of the souls thus kept united with every Chinese corpse take the
difficulties of such a situation duly into consideration. Besides, there
were evidences that the journey before the dead man was a long one;
perhaps his ancestral home was away down in Shantung, in which case, at
this rate of travel, the cock might be bleached to an approximate white
by the time the expedition reached its destination.
We finished the last seventy-five _li_ on the run, and reached Paotou in
time for a late lunch. Towns grew more and more frequent as we neared
the city; the mountains closed in and began to push the Hoang Ho
southward; a constant stream of traffic, of camels, cattle, donkeys,
mules, horsemen, and pedestrians, grew up and increased in volume; our
_mafu_ climbed the steps of a little shrine in the wide dusty hollow
that passed for a road to offer his thanks for his safe arrival—or for
aid in avoiding work and gathering “squeeze” along the way; and at last
the first suggestion of a city since Ningsia, twelve days behind, grew
up out of the dust-haze ahead. Across the utterly treeless plain a poor
makeshift wall climbed away up a barren hill colored with great patches
of dyed cotton cloth drying in the sun. Some of this, which here and
there brightened the town itself, was lama cloth, of saffron or maroon,
contrasting with the blue so universally favored by the Chinese coolie.
Perfect weather continued, but dust was thick as a London fog when we
passed through the simple gate that separated an extensive suburb from
the city proper, a gate on which hung the dried head of a bandit and
inside which soldiers politely demanded some proof of our identity, such
as a visiting-card, perhaps in order to be sure that we were real
foreigners and not mere Russians, whom they might bully to their hearts’
content. For the last week of our journey there had been much talk of
bandits. Earlier in the autumn many trips out from Paotou had been
abandoned for fear of them; two or three times nervous innkeepers
announced that _tu-fei_ had been in their very courtyards a night or two
ahead of us; several rumors that they were operating in the immediate
vicinity reached our ears as we made our way placidly homeward; but that
dried head on the gate was the only visible proof we ever had of their
existence.
Paotouchen proved to be mainly a new town, built up by a constantly
increasing population as the advance of the Suiyuan railway improves its
importance as a trading-center. It is hilly enough so that we could see
only portions of it at a time, and even those had nothing particularly
new to offer. Moslems were here and there in evidence; Mongols rode
silently through the soft earth streets; furs and sheepskins were a bit
more numerous than the other wares, comprising everything sold in
northern China, with which the principal thoroughfare was lined. Big
shops, women with the tiniest of feet, extensive courtyards, some gaudy
architecture, singsong-girls and the noisy hotel parties that go with
them, and all the other attributes of a Chinese city, as distinguished
from a village, even though the village be walled and populous, were to
be seen in Paotouchen.
But the automobile that used to carry passengers from there to the
rail-head was not, so that we had to make a new arrangement with our
cartmen to finish the journey. We were off again quite as usual,
therefore, at five in the morning for a twenty-third day of travel;
though, including stops, we had been less than twenty-one full days on
the road from Lanchow, which is seldom bettered. The eastern city gate,
unimposing as the opposite one by which we had entered, and not even
similarly decorated, opened without great delay at sight of the major’s
card, and we struck away across another great plain, fertile, no doubt,
but dismally bare except for the few clumps of leafless trees about the
mud farm-houses. It was inevitable that a fantastic range should appear
close on the left as the darkness faded, and follow us all the rest of
the day. A few miles out of Paotou, before daylight, in fact, we found
ourselves riding parallel to a railway embankment. This was some ten
feet high, but quite new and made only of the soft local soil without a
suggestion of stone in it, and struck in company with a lone
telegraph-wire due eastward across the flat country, quite unaccustomed
to such directness. It was easy to imagine what would happen to the
embankment when the rains came, to say nothing of the temporary track
down on the floor of the plain, which we came upon only seven or eight
miles out, with a work-train already using it. For there was the usual
refrain of anything or any one connected with the Chinese Government:
money was not available to build bridges across the gaps in the
embankment and finish the line properly, and it was only in this
imperfect form that the Suiyuan railway reached Paotou barely a month
behind us.
The first station was still sixty _li_ east of it, however, when we
returned to civilization, by a bad road full of stones, now between mud
field-walls that tried in vain to confine it, now zigzagging across the
bare fields. We passed through one large dilapidated town, high above
which a striking peak stood out from the range, with a lama temple that
looked like some elaborate tourist-resort part-way up it. Then the road
became more and more crowded with travel, with sometimes ten or a dozen
“Peking carts” in a row taking passengers to the train; but it still
skated occasionally across a patch of ice before we came at last, soon
after noon, to a lone station congested with travelers, goods, and
halted caravans. Acres covered with huge chunks of coal were the most
conspicuous of the exports awaiting transportation at that season, but
it was easy to see how badly a railway out of Paotou was needed.
There was, of course, a free-for-all mêlée about the ticket-window, with
no attempt by the several men strutting around in new police uniforms to
bring a suggestion of order; but we were duly installed in the daily
freight and third-class train when it rambled away an hour or so after
our arrival. All the expedition was still with us except the two carts
and their drivers. For the least reward we could give the
pleasant-mannered Kansu ponies that had carried us, except when we
walked beside them, 770 miles in three weeks, was a journey to Peking,
even though we found when it was too late that their transportation
would be higher than the fare charged a mere human passenger in the
highest class available, and their accommodations an open car in which
boulders of coal might at any moment come down and do them serious
injury. Taking the horses meant, of course, that we had to be
accessories before the fact in inflicting upon Chihli Province our
putative _mafu_; and naturally the cook and Chang must be returned to
the place where we had picked them up.
We had covered, we found, when a train seat gave a chance for figuring,
4400 _li_ between the two railways, in other words 1320 miles, all in
the saddle except the scant hundred by mule-litter. The hardy Chinese
passengers on all sides of us were so warmly dressed in their
cotton-padded and sheepskin garments that they kept the windows wide
open, even though the car was innocent of so much as the makings of a
fire. Our feet in particular suffered, as those of foreigners usually do
in North China in winter, and called our attention more closely to the
contrivances which the Chinese use to keep theirs warm. Leather there
was none, except in a rare pair of Mongol boots, large enough for a
dozen woolen socks inside. Felt, often in four thicknesses, sometimes in
six, was the material of most shoes; one old man at a cold wayside
station had on a pair of Greek tragedy buskins that looked like two hams
cut open to admit the feet.
That evening we reached Kweihwa, otherwise known as Suiyuan, just in
time to transfer to the newly scheduled express to Peking. The major
considered it suitable to the dignity of his calling to travel second
class—there being no first on this line—and therefore had the pleasure
of sitting up all night between two hard wooden bench-backs. Having
myself no “face” to lose, I found the third-class coaches big and
box-car-like, with plenty of room between the narrow benches along the
walls to spread my cot and make my bed as usual. The car was full of men
stretched out on the floor, the benches, or their saddlebag beds, but
the small iron stove in the center of it did little to change it from a
foreign to a Chinese bedroom—for night is the one part of the
twenty-four hours when artificial heat is in great demand in wintertime
China.
In the cold morning hours I found Mongols, Chinese who had turned
Mongols and lamas, women of that race ugly with dirt and jewelry,
surly-looking Mohammedans with long red-tinged chin-whiskers and
features that seemed almost of exaggerated Jewish type, and every
variety of the ordinary Chinese of both sexes, all among my
traveling-companions or those who got on or off during the day.
Sometimes the distinction was not certain, for in their many raids upon
the ancient empire the Mongols carried off so many Chinese women that
the northern Chinese and the Mongols often look much alike. We were
struck with the fact that there was much less pleasing simplicity here
than among the timid country people far from such modern things as
railroads. The Great Wall, now quite imposing, stretched for hour after
hour along the base of the mountain range still on our left; but the
Hoang Ho was gone, having turned abruptly southward not far from where
we had taken the train, to keep that course to Tungkwan, hundreds of
miles away, where we had entered the province of Shensi. Kalgan, already
familiar, appeared in the early afternoon, then in due season Nankou
Pass, with the best known and most striking section of China’s great
artificial barrier, and soon after dark of the shortest, yet in some
ways the longest, day of the year our respective families might have
been dimly seen striving to identify us beneath the long failure to
shave which our hasty home-coming had imposed upon us, as the express
discharged its multitude at Hsi-chi-men on the far northwestern corner
of Peking.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
2. Retained anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as
printed.
3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
End of Project Gutenberg's Wandering in Northern China, by Harry A. Franck