At the turn of the winding track, bordered by the paddy-fields or acres of golden barley, oats and tobacco, lies a village. It is but a cluster of some dozen straw-thatched hovels, dirty and unprepossessing, but infinitely quaint and picturesque. The walls of the houses are crumbling and stayed up with beams and massive timbers; the latticed windows are papered, the doorways low. A hole in the wall serves the purposes of a chimney; a dog is sleeping in the porch; a pig squeaks, secured with a cord through the ears to a peg in the wall. Cocks and hens are anywhere and everywhere, the family latrine—an open trough, foul and nauseous, used without disgust by all members of the family save the older women-folk, stands upon the verandah. Somewhere, near the outer limits of the small settlement, an erection of poles and straw matting distinguishes the village cesspool, the contents of which are spread over the fields in the proper season.
A glimpse into a house, as one rides through the village shows a man combing his long hair, a woman beating her husband’s clothes or ironing with a bowl heated with charcoal; many naked children, the progeny of child-wives, scarce out of their teens. For the moment the village seems devoid of life. As the clatter of the cavalcade resounds, a child, feeding itself from a basin of rice, emerges from a window; a man tumbles to his feet yawning noisily. Women, with infants hanging at their breasts or bearing children strapped to their backs in dirty clothes, the usual naked band of well-developed breast and unwashed back showing, crowd into the streets. All eye the newcomers with indifferent curiosity, until we wish them a plenteous rain—“May the rain come soon, good people.” Then they bend their heads respectfully at the salutation, and instantly become bright and smiling. Winsome kiddies, muddy and naked, offer us flowers, and bowls of water from the streams upon which their elders have settled.
COUNTRY CARTS
As the road threaded through the mountains, long valleys, widely and richly cultivated, the yellow lustre of the golden crops blazing in the sunlight, lay below. Granite peaks towered upwards, their rugged faces scored by time and tempest, their ragged outlines screened with firs and birch. The still air was laden with the aromatic scent of the pine-woods; the sky was clear and blue. In the distance, snow-white clouds hung in diaphanous festoons about a curve in the mountains. The rough contour broke where the heights were bleakest and most barren. A twist in the broad valley which our road traversed limited the prospect, but the direction lay beneath the shadows of those distant peaks, and the perspective already compensated for the precipitous climb.
Indeed, from a few li beyond Chyök-syöng, a magistracy of the fourth class, where the houses are roofed with thick slabs of slate supported by heavy beams, where the streets are clean, and where road and river alike make a détour, the views by the wayside became increasingly impressive. For mile upon mile we saw no wayfarers. The villages were widely distant; fertile valleys gave place to green-black gorges, without cultivation, peaceful, grandly beautiful, and uninhabitable. The perfect stillness and the wonderful magnificence of the panorama held one spell-bound. There was no change in the character of the scenery until, riding slowly forward, the road dropped from the comfortable shade of a mountain temple into the blazing sunshine of the plain. Pushing forward, the rice and cornfields receded, giving place to the ranges, whose lofty peaks, dressed with their mantling clouds, had been already dimly discerned. Throughout the journey of the next two days the road rose and fell, winding in a steady gradient across the mountain sides.
The march to Tong-ko-kai was laborious, and one day, when within easy distance of the concession in a tiny hamlet, the colour of the slate and granite boulders, nestling among waving bushes, almost unconscious of the outer world and hardly alive to its own existence, an ideal spot in which to pitch the evening camp was found. It was early in the afternoon, but the road ahead looked rough and stony. Our horses were fatigued, the ford had been troublesome and we were wet, cold and hungry. Within the bush the shadows were deepening. No one knew the site of the next village nor the precise direction in which we were moving, so we halted. That night we snuggled down with our faces to the cliffs. Our horses were tethered in a patch of corn, and the kit, the servants, interpreters and grooms lay in one confused and hungry tangle round us. Within sound of the deep roar of the river we slept peacefully. Indeed, I am not certain that this one hour when, invigorated by a swim in some mountain pool, refreshed by a slight repast, we rocked in our camp beds, smoking and chatting, looking into the cool black depths of the canopy above us, was not the best that the day held. There was something intensely restful in those long, silent watches. The mighty stillness of the surrounding heights of itself gave a repose, to which the night winds, the murmurs of the running water and our own physical fatigue, insensibly added. It was pleasant to hear the ponies eating; to watch the stars come out, the moon rise; to listen to the bull-frog in the water weeds and the echoes of the song of a peasant, rising and falling among the peaks of the high mountains, until, at length, all sounds had passed away and the great world around us, above us, and below, lay at peace.
A PITCHED BATTLE