In crossing the plain at a point where the road was good, I was remarking to Mr. Yi what a pleasant and prosperous journey we had had, and hoping our good fortune might continue, when there was a sudden clash and flurry, I was nearly kicked off my pony, and in a moment we were in the midst of disaster. One baggage pony was on his back on his load, pawing the air in the middle of a ploughed field, his mapu helpless for the time, lamed by a kick above the knee, sobbing, blood and tears running down his face; the other baggage animal, having divested himself of Im, was kicking off the rest of his load; and Im, who had been thrown from the top of the pack, was sitting on the roadside, evidently in intense pain—all the work of a moment. Mr. Yi called to me that the soldier had broken his ankle, and it was a great relief when he rose and walked towards me. Everything breakable was broken except my photographic camera, which I did not look at for two days for fear of what I might find!
Leaving the men to get the loads and ponies together, we walked on to a hamlet so destitute as not to be able to provide either wood or wadding for a splint! I picked up a thick faggot, however, which had been dropped from a load, and it was thinned into being usable with a hatchet, the only tool the village possessed, and after padding it with a pair of stockings and making a six-yard bandage out of a cotton garment, I put up Im’s right arm, which was broken just above the wrist, in splints, and made a sling out of one of the two towels which the rats had left to me. I should have been glad to know Korean enough to rate the gossiping mapu, three men to two horses, who allowed the accident to happen.
The animals always fight if they are left to themselves, and loads and riders are nowhere. One day Mr. Yi had a bit of a finger taken off in a fight, and if a strange brute had not kicked my stirrup iron (which was bent by the blow) instead of myself, I should have had a broken ankle. When we halted at midday the villagers tried hard to induce Im to have his arm “needled” to “let out the bad blood,” a most risky surgical proceeding, which often destroys the usefulness of a limb for life, and he was anxious for it, but yielded to persuasion.
Being delayed by this accident, it was late when we started to cross the pass of An-kil Yung, regarded as “the most dangerous in Korea,” owing to its liability to sudden fogs and violent storms, 3,346 feet in altitude, and said to be 30 li long.
The infamous path traverses a wild rocky glen with an impetuous torrent at its bottom, and only a few wretched hamlets, in which the hovels are indistinguishable from the millet and brushwood stacks, along its length of several miles. Poverty, limiting the people to the barest necessaries of life, is the lot of the peasant in that region, but I believe that his dirty and squalid habits give an impression of want which does not actually exist. I doubt much whether any Koreans are unable to provide themselves with two daily meals of millet, with clothes sufficient for decency in summer and for warmth in winter, and with fuel (grass, leaves, twigs, and weeds) enough to keep their miserable rooms at a temperature of 70° and more by means of the hot floor.
To the west the valley is absolutely closed in by a wall of peaks. The bridle-path, a well-engineered road, when it ascends the very steep ridge of the watershed in many zigzags, rests for 100 feet, and descends the western side by seventy-five turns. Except in Tibet, I never saw so apparently insurmountable an obstacle, but it does not present any real difficulty. The ascent took seventy minutes. Rain fell very heavily, but the superb view to the northeast was scarcely obscured. At the top, which is only 100 feet wide, there is a celebrated shrine to the dæmon of the past. To him all travellers put up petitions for deliverance from the many malignant spirits who are waiting to injure them, and for a safe descent. The shrine contains many strips of paper inscribed with the names of those who have made special payments for special prayers, and a few wreaths and posies of faded paper flowers. The woman who lives in the one hovel on the pass makes a good living by receiving money from travellers, who offer rice cakes and desire prayers. The worship is nearly all done by proxy, and the rice cakes do duty any number of times.
Besides the shrine and a one-roomed hovel, there are some open sheds made of millet stalks to give shelter during storms. The An-kil Yung pass is blocked by snow for three months of the year, but at other times is much used in spite of its great height. Excellent potatoes are grown on the mountain slopes at an altitude exceeding 3,000 feet, and round Tok Chhön they are largely cultivated and enter into the diet of the people, never having had the disease.
Darkness came on prematurely with the heavy rain, and we asked the shrine-keeper to give us shelter for the night, but she said that to take in six men and a foreign woman was impossible, as she had only one room. But it was equally impossible for us to descend the pass in the darkness with tired ponies, and after half an hour’s altercation the matter was arranged, Im, who retained his wits, securing for me a degree of privacy by hanging some heavy mats from a beam, giving me, I am sure, the lion’s share of the apartment. Really the accommodation was not much worse than usual, but though the mercury fell to the freezing point, the hot floor kept the inside temperature up to 83°, and the dread of tigers on the part of my hostess forbade my having even a chink of the door open!
The rain cleared off in time for the last sunset gleam on the distant mountains, which, when darkness fell on the pass, burned fiery red against a strip of pale green sky, taking on afterwards one by one the ashy look of death as the light died off from their snows. All about An-kil Yung the mountains are wooded to their summits with deciduous trees, the ubiquitous Pinus sinensis being rare; but to the northward in the direction of Paik-tu San the character of the scenery changes, and peaks and precipices of naked rock, and lofty mountain monoliths, with snow-crowned ranges beyond, form by far the grandest view that I saw in this land of hill and valley.
Then Im had to be attended to, and though I was very anxious about him, I could not be blind to the picturesqueness of the scene in the hovel, Mr. Yi sitting in my chair holding the candle, the soldier, with his face puckered with pain, squatting on the floor with his swollen arm lying on a writing board on my lap, and no room to move. I failed there as elsewhere to get a better piece of wood for the splint, which was too short, and I could only get wadding for padding it by taking some out of Im’s sleeve, and all the time and afterwards I was very anxious for fear that I had put the bandage on too tightly or too loosely, and that my want of experience would give the poor fellow a useless right arm. He was in severe pain all that night, but he was very plucky about it, made no fuss, and never allowed me to suffer in the slightest degree from his accident. Indeed, he was even more attentive than before. He said to Mr. Yi, “The foreign woman looked so sorry, and touched my arm as if I had been one of her own people, I shall do my best”—and so he did. I had indulged in a long perspective of pheasant curries, and I must confess that when the prospect faded I felt a little dismal. To a traveller who carries no “foreign food,” it makes a great difference to get a nice, hot, stimulating dish (even though it is served in the pot it is cooked in) after a ten hours’ cold ride. To my surprise, I was never without curry for dinner, and though before the accident I had only cold rice for tiffin, after it I was never without something hot.