From Pekin to Calais by Land

by Harry De Windt

Another missionary, Mr. C————, had arrived that morning from his post five hundred miles off, a hazardous and fatiguing journey, which he had made in under six weeks, bringing his little son, under two years old, with him, notwithstanding that some of the journey over the passes had to be done on foot. The natives of the regions through which he had passed, had, he told us, insisted upon it, that the little fellow was an old man, for he had very light, almost white hair. Most of them were “Tow-ists.” The founder of this sect is believed by its followers to have been born at the age of eighty-three, with grey hair. Hence their refusal to be persuaded, notwithstanding Mr. C————’s most earnest assurance that his son was not an old man! “Kalgan,” said Mr. C————, “is, in the eyes of Mahometans, the Bokhara of China, and there are large colleges here, where the teachers of the Mahometan faith are educated. Although the three great Chinese religions are Confucianism, Buddhism, and Tow-ism, there are many more Mahometans existing in China than is generally supposed; their faith in the Celestial Empire is governed by a consistory of as many as seventy persons.”

We stayed to dinner, and bade adieu to our hosts at sundown, having to be outside the city gates before seven o’clock. Mr. T————, the head of the mission, expressed a hope, before we left, that we should not follow the example of the last travellers (a German and a Frenchman), who had attempted the transit of Gobi, armed with a perfect arsenal of firearms and escorted by a large caravan. Ten days from the start they were back again in Kalgan, having fallen out on the way. That was their excuse; but I doubt, from subsequent experience, if the dreary monotony of the desert had not more to do with it, for they were good friends enough, when, after two days’ rest at the mission, they set off for Japan.

Arrived at the Great Gate of the city, on our homeward way, we found ourselves, together with some dozen other unfortunate beings, locked out, or rather in, for the night. All our efforts to induce the gatekeeper to let us out were fruitless, for he simply responded to our frantic signs and gestures with a grin and shrug of the shoulders, and crawled back into his foul-smelling den, to discuss the mess of pigs’ entrails, slugs, or some Chinese delicacy of a like description, which constituted his evening meal. The position was awkward. To climb the walls was out of the question. Their height precluded that, for the city walls of Kalgan are at this point actually part of the Great Wall of China itself. The only way out of the dilemma was to drop a distance of thirty feet or so on to some rocks at a point about three hundred to four hundred yards from the gate, but we preferred even a night in a tea-house, to a sojourn of a month or two at Kalgan, tied down with a broken leg. There was nothing for it but to sit down patiently and trust to Ivanoff’s coming to release us, though that seemed unlikely enough, seeing that he lived some distance from Batouyeff’s house, and never visited it after nightfall. Matters were not improved by a thin drizzling rain which began to fall after we had waited nearly an hour, and drove us to seek refuge in a crowded tea-house close by the gates, the resort of the gay dogs of Kalgan who are locked out of their homes for the night. The stench and smoke, though, soon drove us out again, to say nothing of the aggressive curiosity of the inmates, the greater part of whom were Mongols. Nine o’clock, ten, eleven o’clock passed, and yet no Ivanoff, or signs of a rescue from our awkward situation. We should long before have tried an expedient that seldom fails in any country, never in China, but alas! we had no cash. At one o’clock, a.m., we gave it up as a bad job, and had resolved to get what sleep we could on the ground, wet and miry as it was, when, in searching for a light, I came upon a hard round substance in my waistcoat pocket, and found a dollar that had reposed there ever since the day I last wore the garment, six weeks ago, in Shanghai. Armed with this, I entered the old janitor’s den. He was still awake, smoking and crooning over the dying embers of an argol fire. The effect was instantaneous. In less than five minutes the mercenary old wretch had summoned help from the tea-shop, which was still blazing with light, and crowded with people. After much difficulty and labour, unbolting and unbarring, the heavy gates, guided by the efforts of six men, swung slowly back upon their hinges and let us out, stiff, cramped, and in a fiendish temper, but free, and followed by the ragged rabble who had been our fellow-captives, and who luckily for us led us direct for Batouyeff’s house, for we should never have found our way alone. An excellent supper soon made amends for our discomfort. All had retired to rest, thinking we had slept at the Mission-house.

An extraordinary being called upon us next morning, and one looked upon as a character by the European population of Kalgan. The visiting-card which announced him told us but little; a piece of flimsy red paper about eight inches long by five broad covered with Chinese characters; and we wondered what the caller could possibly want, not without grave doubts that an order might have come from Pekin to stop us. Our visitor was then shown in, a short, intelligent-looking man of about fifty, who, to our astonishment, spoke English perfectly. We had a long chat (and many successive ones) with Captain Lew Buah (for such was the stranger’s name), of the Chinese Navy, who entertained the usual liking of his profession for cold brandy and water, and delighted in nothing more than in coming to spend the afternoon to fight his battles over again, rather to the detriment of our small stock of spirits. He had been exiled to Kalgan, he told us, for five years, in consequence of being the only man who had saved his ship from the French at Foochow. Ten other Chinese men-of-war were sunk on this occasion, but Lew Buah, seeing defence was useless, had run his steamer, a gunboat of three hundred tons, up a small creek of the river, and so saved her from the enemy. For this he was, unjustly enough, condemned to death, a sentence afterwards commuted to five years’ exile on the Mongolian border. If the captain’s yarn was true, he was certainly to be pitied, for his other exploits (which I have since ascertained were not exaggerated) make him out anything but a coward.

One of them was amusing enough. Having run the blockade of Formosa three times, he was on the fourth occasion, when carrying a cargo of soldiers, captured by a French man-of-war, the commander of which had for some time been trying in vain to catch him. Luckily for our friend, however, the soldiers were sent from Manchuria unarmed and disguised as peasants, and neither the captain nor officers of the Frenchman knew him by sight. He was, however, taken on board at once, and examined by a Chinese interpreter in presence of the French commander. Oddly enough the former was an old friend of Lew Buah’s, and intimated by a wink as soon as his countryman came on board that all would be right. Nothing suspicious was found on board Lew Buah’s ship, and he was allowed to depart in peace, the French captain observing as he left, “If you see that d————d scoundrel Lew Buah, tell him from me I’ll hang him to my main yard-arm whenever he crosses my path.” The telling of this yarn was the old gentleman’s greatest delight, and he would return with fresh vigour to the brandy bottle after telling us how he had done the foreign devil in the eye. The old fellow’s life had been a somewhat chequered one. It commenced at Canton where his father had been a street fruit-hawker, carrying his wares in two baskets slung across his shoulders by a bamboo; in one basket was the fruit, balanced by little Lew Buah in the other! An English lady who happened to meet the strange couple, took a violent fancy to the fat, chubby-cheeked baby, and having no children of her own, prevailed upon his father, nothing loth, to sell her his son for the modest price of ten dollars. He thus, at the early age of two years, fairly lit on his legs, and, after a residence of fifteen years with his benefactress, returned to China and obtained a commission in the Imperial Navy, in which, up to the time of the unfortunate contretemps at Foochow he had greatly distinguished himself. Though the captain spoke English fluently, some of his expressions were at times very original. We asked him one day if there was any sport to be got round Kalgan, upon which he informed us that the hills around abounded with “Scotch woodcock.” Still, for a Chinaman, the old fellow had charming manners, and was a thorough gentleman in thought and feeling.

As I have said, a bitter feud existed between Ivanoff and his confrère; but the postmaster, M. Kolestnikoff, and our host were firm friends. Both, too, were ardent sportsmen, and invited us one morning to join them in a day’s shooting in the hills and ravines round Kalgan. Ivanoff’s costume was somewhat singular, consisting of a suit of spotless white canvas, silk socks and dancing-pumps, while round his neck was slung an enormous field-glass. Politeness forbade my making inquiries till we got to the shooting-ground. I imagined, at least, that we were going deerstalking, judging from the caution our Russian friends displayed in climbing about the crags and peaks. It was terribly hard climbing, and our hands were torn and bleeding when we reached the summit of the mountain, about a mile from the house, where the day’s sport was to commence. Here I was somewhat surprised to see Ivanoff lay down his gun, and, gravely unslinging his huge pair of glasses, intently scan the rocks of a mountain separated from us by a narrow ravine. Evidently they are after deer, I thought, thankful that I had brought some bullet cartridges with me, when suddenly our host dropped the glasses and seized my arm. Following the direction in which he was pointing, I made out, with some difficulty, what looked like a covey of partridges sunning themselves on the plain eighty or a hundred feet below us. “Will you shoot first?” said Ivanoff, cocking a huge muzzle-loader almost the size of a duck gun. “But are we not going to walk them up?” asked Lancaster, who, like myself, was somewhat bewildered at their strange proceedings. “Walk them up?” inquired the Russian, with a puzzled look, “walk them up? what do you mean? No, no, shoot from here, I will show you,” and lying flat on his stomach, he took deliberate aim at the unconscious victims. Bang went the old field-piece with a report that woke a thousand echoes from the hills around, and must have been heard distinctly at Kalgan, over a mile off. When the thick white smoke had cleared away, there was but one little brown body lying extended on the ground, a sight which was received with rapturous applause by the postmaster, who was watching the proceedings from a rock higher up. We shot, or rather climbed and fell about, till mid-day, but saw no more birds. If the sport was not first-class, the excitement was intense. In some of the places we literally had to hold on by our eyelids, and squeeze past sheer falls of two hundred or three hundred feet, on to the sharp, rugged rocks below. Ivanoff afterwards told us that a brace is accounted a good bag at Kalgan, which seems curious when the desert hard by teems with game of all kinds. Perhaps, though, the method practised by our Kalgan friends had something to do with the small bags.

We could have had plenty of fun with the pigeons, which flew about in huge flocks in the mountain-paths about Kalgan; but as we were the guests of a Russian we did not like to shoot them.[^[4]] We saw many hundreds of specimens of a peculiar kind of beetle in the lower and swampy grounds, an animal rather larger than a mouse, with a long whip-tail, and short broad black body, covered with bright red bands. I was unable to discover its name. They do no harm to the crops, Ivanoff said, living chiefly on smaller insects, and are largely eaten by the natives, who consider them a great delicacy.

We crossed the Great Wall of China on our way home, or rather a portion of it that had broken away and left a mass of shapeless stone and rubble. Its height is wonderfully deceptive. Seen from the valley it looked five or six feet high at the very most, but on taking the trouble to measure its dimensions we found it to be twenty-three feet in height, about twelve feet wide at the base, and seven at the top. It has a tumble-down, dilapidated appearance, for, saving the square battlemented towers that are built in it at every four hundred yards or so, it is uncemented, and composed of huge loose stones gradually decreasing in size as they near the coping. Though the stones have rolled away in places and left great gaps in the structure, one only realizes on approaching it close——at Kalgan no easy matter——what a herculean work the building of this barrier two thousand miles long must have been. The stones of which it is composed are so time-worn and moss-covered that it is almost impossible to say to what species they belong; they seemed mostly of one kind, and extremely heavy. I managed to secure three small ones for paper weights, while Ivanoff and Kolestnikoff “kept cave,” the Mongols and Chinese being very jealous of any interference with their property or institutions. At the same time no one ever dreams of repairing the gaps, though it would be easy enough. As the reader is probably aware, the Great Wall of China was built about 300 B.C. by the Chinese, as a defence against the Tartar hordes who were then ravaging the countries bordering on their frontier.

We had now been at Kalgan nearly ten days, and our carts were approaching completion, but there were as yet no signs of the camels. Two suspicious-looking gentlemen (a Mongol and a Chinese) called on us one evening with a plausible tale of being able to bring us eight camels on the morrow, and, that we might be delayed no longer, themselves undertook to guide us across the desert to Ourga. Ivanoff was then away for two days, and on my replying that I could give no definite answer without consulting him, the faces of our visitors lengthened considerably. Their intention was probably to rob and desert us, for on seeing that we were determined to await our host’s return before closing with them, they vanished to return no more. A more villainous-looking couple I have seldom seen, and, if appearance goes for anything, there is no doubt they meant mischief.

Comfortable as were our quarters and host, we were getting a little tired of Kalgan, for besides strolling about the streets and loafing about on the caravan track, there was absolutely nothing to do. Our chief occupation of a morning was to ramble round the city, whiling away an hour or two at the Chinese theatre, booths or shops. In the afternoon it was amusing to watch the long strings of wood-carts come jingling and rattling along the stony river-bed from Mongolia, and lazy, sleepy-looking camel caravans crawling along under their burdens of furs and other products of Siberia. Some were a hundred and fifty to two hundred strong, and one wondered why, when there were so many of them about, they could not afford to let us have half a dozen or so to fit out our modest expedition across the Great Hungry Desert, as it is called by the Chinese. We had learnt by now, however, that suggestions do not hurry this journey, but retard it, however feasible the project, so wisely held our peace.