Several trains run day and night the whole length of Formosa, covering
the 257 miles between the northern and the southern port in ten or
twelve hours. Besides, there are branch-lines, and growing extensions
above Keelung and below Takao in the south, while over on the
precipitous east side of the island work is progressing on the system
that before many years will encircle it entirely. But the railway
confines itself everywhere to the edges of the island, like Japanese
control and orderliness, and nowhere penetrates very far into the
magnificent mountainous interior that makes up three fourths of the area
and nearly all the beauty of Formosa.
Against the almost anarchistic background of travel, even by rail, in
the China of to-day, these real Japanese trains were like a return to
the modern world again. One could overlook the meter-gauge, as of Japan
proper, and the screechy, ear-torturing whistles of the locomotives
copied from Europe; for the trains take the time-table seriously;
ticket-collectors uncover and bow at the door even of third class—the
patronage of which is quite possible to the traveler without “face” to
lose and the habit of stretching his money over the greatest possible
distances; the constant watering and sweeping of the car-floors is an
enormous gain over China, where none but a few special first-class
coaches can vie in cleanliness with the cheapest class here, though the
mass of Formosans has not yet by any means reached the Japanese stage of
pulchritude. On the other hand it is not they who strip to scanty
underwear in the first- and second-class coaches.
Whether it is due to fear of the savages beyond or that more desirable
land is plentiful, the hills do not seem to be cultivated even near
Keelung and Taihoku. They are densely green, but with low shrubbery
rather than crops, while rice spreads everywhere across the bottom-lands
where they are not already covered with graves—acres of graves that are
merely green mounds, recalling Korea; graves of stone, horseshoe-shaped,
recalling southern China. Wide roads rather cheaply paved, with
unsubstantial-looking bridges, parallel and cross the track, bearing
bicycles, once in a long while an automobile, above all bullock- and
coolie-carts, which take the place of pole-burdened carriers jogging
along the narrow, winding, stone-flagged trails across the channel.
Here even the fields are orderly, the rows of beans or sugar-cane, of
sweet potatoes and indigo, stretching away in unwavering military lines,
sometimes clear to the distant foot-hills. Discipline is so omnipresent
that even the traveler direct from China soon ceases to be surprised
that there are no riots at stations between those getting on and off the
train, no bullying soldiers and other ticketless persons of influence or
special privileges crowding out honest passengers. Instead the stations
are so exactly alike, so standardized, that one feels sure the
resplendent station-master’s honorable chop-sticks inside are pointed in
such a direction—perhaps northeastward toward Tokyo. The very station
trees are disciplined, in military alignment and trimmed as precisely
alike as the hair of boys in an orphanage. Men stand at petrified
military attention at crossings and switches, a green flag in the hand
toward the approaching train, a red one on the side toward which, by
their gracious permission, it is permitted to proceed.
But out in the country there is some of the picturesqueness of China.
Rags on the ends of fish-poles, manipulated by old women, by broken
grandfathers, by children too young to wield a hoe, or merely by the
wind, do their best to scare away the crop-destroying birds. The
locomotive fronts of water-buffaloes now and then challenge the
screeching trespasser upon their domain, always to think better of it in
time and flounder away through the muddy rice-fields, perfect pictures
of the better part of valor. But at the larger stations men in red caps
wait discreetly, as in Japan, beneath the eaves to carry off the baggage
of travelers who summon them to life, and venders in green caps parade
the platform offering the ubiquitous “O-bento!” and crying other wares
which any one knowing English can, listening carefully, recognize by
ear,—“Matchi! Tabako! See-dare! See-tron! Bee-ru! Aisucureemu!”
Toward the center of the island the main line divides, to come together
again a hundred miles farther on, and that section close along the
barren seacoast is a dreary trip, the dirty low water only rarely
showing a patch of blue far out, a long region covered as far as the eye
can see, or to dismal mountain foot-hills, with cobblestones of all
sizes, only now and then a tiny oasis of thin cultivation among them.
Splendid dikes, made of these same cobblestones held together with wire
netting, protect the right of way against rivers undoubtedly turbulent
in the rainy season. The numerous streams of Formosa are short, but they
all lead merry lives while they last. Tunnels, of which the Japanese
seem inordinately fond, abound; and where else are telegraph-wires so
numerous as in the islands of the Nipponese? It is as if they were
suggestive of a spying disposition.
The south-bound traveler in Formosa comes at length frankly into the
tropics. Banana-groves become numerous; rice and sugar-cane stretch to
the very base of sometimes distant mountains; bamboos wave their plumes
languidly in the tepid air and dispute with palm-trees for foothold on
jungled hillsides that are gashed with precipitous stony watercourses
down which rage torrents in the season of the rains. Geographically,
too, the temperate zone has been left behind; for a sign-board just
below Kagi marks the Tropic of Cancer, which distributes the island
almost equally between the cool and the equatorial divisions of the
earth.
By this time the fair highways with poor bridges have degenerated into
dirt roads that grow rather pathy farther south, though four-wheeled
wagons, with tiny wheels in front and huge ones behind, drawn by
water-buffaloes at their own chosen speed, continue to the end of the
island. Chinese roofs cover the compact villages modestly, as if they
dared not toss their corners so picturesquely aloft as in the land
whence they came. Throughout the island there is but little color—or
odor—compared with China, but there is a certain gaiety in feminine
costumes, varying more or less by districts. These mingle together on
the railway, so that Cantonese women with flowers in their hair, Foochow
field-women with their historic three-dagger head-dress, women from Amoy
and Swatow with their own peculiar notions of propriety in personal
adornment jostle Formosan country women with still other ideas on this
important subject. For a considerable distance through the center of the
island the native women dress their coarse jet-black hair into what
looks like a clumsy imitation of the exaggerated style of Japan, so that
they suggest modest countrified geishas; but the custom is said to be
autonomous, and no daughter of Taiwan so low as to copy from the women
of their unloved rulers.
Below the imaginary line dividing the tropics from the less ardent zone
nearly every one except the Japanese takes to chewing the betel-nut, as
we miscall it. It is really the betel-leaf, from a climbing vine which,
for convenience sake, is often planted beside the areca-palm, the most
slender member of the palm family. The nut of this, together with lime
and sometimes other ingredients, added to the betel-leaves which are the
base and most important part of it, makes up the substance of this
repulsive habit. The gaping mouths of the Chinese are ugly enough under
normal circumstances; when they drivel with betel-juice they are a sight
to go far to avoid. Perhaps it is because the areca-palm and its
affectionate climbing companion will only grow in the tropics that the
people of a small island are geographically divided as to the habit,
though that is not a particularly satisfying explanation.
Persimmons, which the Japanese call _khaki_, papayas and pumalos, those
giant members of the citron family of which strangers do not always grow
so fond as the _geta_-wearing race, abound in southern Formosa. Up and
down the island country women, in the trousers, jacket, and mushroom
hats which make them all but indistinguishable from their husbands,
shovel cobble ballast along the railway. How our “straw bosses” would
shriek with laughter at that, or turn the circumambient air a dense
blue, according to their individual temperaments!