Then came the happy welcomings which make absences worth while; excited children; everybody talking at once; explanations begun and never finished; interruptions by customs officials—American soldiers in those days; comments on the heat and the bright white light, and laughing assurances that it wasn’t hot at all and that the climate was perfect; transferring baggage to the launch; glimpsing, occasionally, strange scenes and strange peoples; asking and answering a thousand questions; busy, bustling, delightfully confusing hours of landing in the farthest orient.
Our husbands turned themselves into willing “Baedekers” and instructed us on the way. We steamed up in our little launch to the mouth of the Pásig River, wide and deep and swift, and covered with what looked to me like millions of small, green cabbages.
“Carabao lettuce; the river’s full of it,” explained Mr. Taft, but I was much too occupied just then to stop and ask what “carabao lettuce” might be.
We came up past a bristling fort at the corner of a great, grey, many-bastioned and mediæval wall which stretched as far as I could see down the bay shore on one side and up the river on the other.
“The Old Walled City,” said General Wright, and I knew at once that I should love the old Walled City.
“The oldest parts of the walls were built in the seventeenth century,” continued our animated guide-book, “and the fort on the corner is Santiago. The big dome is the Cathedral and all the red tile roofs are convents and monasteries. The twentieth century hasn’t reached here yet. To all intents and purposes the Walled City is still in the Middle Ages.” The truth is that only part of the walls are really very old—some parts have been built within seventy years.
The river was full of strange craft; long, high prowed, cumbersome looking boats, with rounded deck-houses roofed with straw matting and painted in every conceivable colour and pattern, which, we were told, were cascoes—cargo boats which ply the length of the Pásig and bring down the cocoanuts and sugar-cane and other products from the middle provinces. The only visible propelling power on these cascoes—and the only power they have—are natives, naked to the waist, armed with long bamboo poles upon which, having fixed them firmly in the mud at the bottom of the river, they push steadily as they walk the length of the narrow running board along the outer edge of the deck. I should say they might make a mile in about two hours.
Then there were the curious little bancas; narrow canoes, hewn out of single logs and kept on an even keel, usually, by graceful outriggers of bamboo.
Across the river from the Walled City is the Custom House, and there, in a few moments, we drew up at a slippery, low, stone landing and climbed ashore. My feet, at last, were on Philippine soil.
If I had, for the time being, forgotten that a war was going on I was immediately reminded of it. The Custom House was in the hands of the Military Government and it was surrounded by khaki-clad guards who all stood stiffly at attention as my husband and General Wright passed. All our necessary luggage had been released and put into the hands of orderlies to be delivered, so we were free to start at once for home.