CHAPTER FIVE
PEOPLE WHO HAVE SEEN DRAGONS
In spite of the fact that modern zoölogy has never included in the pages of its textbooks descriptions and pictures of the dragon as a creature of reality, yet there are men in China to-day who claim to have seen these animals, some of which have been described very accurately. The writer has had the pleasure of conversing with several Chinese who assert that they have seen the dragon at close range. He has also secured, at secondhand, information from others who are said to have looked upon this most marvelous of creatures. All of the men whom the writer interviewed were of sound mind and were accredited by their acquaintances with being men of reliable character. There is no reason to believe that any one of them were inebriate or under the power of hallucination at the time they witnessed the creatures of their description.
A teacher in a Tientsin school related that he once saw a dragon in his native province, Shantung. The animal had been killed, so it was [[32]]believed, by the order of heaven, as a punishment for some misdeed, and had fallen to the earth, where it lay as the center of attraction for hundreds of people who came in crowds from that whole countryside. Its appearance was identical with that of the popular pictures with which we are familiar. A school servant, who was also a native of Shantung, and whose home was near the sea, declared that he once saw a dragon. He told the writer that it was about fifteen feet long and that it fell to the earth during a severe rainstorm. It, too, attracted a large crowd of spectators. Although this man was unable to give very satisfactory details, yet his unusual earnestness and apparent sincerity were convincing evidence that he had really seen a monster of a remarkable type.
A third person, an elderly gentleman, who is a teacher of classics in one of the schools of Nanking, informed the writer that when he was a young man a dragon fell one night from the sky and lay for twenty-four hours near his home. The country folk respectfully covered it with matting, but he managed to raise the covering and saw its great cowlike head, its four legs, and its scale-covered body. It was about fifty feet long and blue in color. As in the other two cases, this dragon disappeared from the earth during a [[33]]heavy storm. It was generally believed that it came to life again and was taken up into the heavens upon a cloud, which formed beneath its body.
The artist who drew the picture of the cloud dragon recounted that, during the thirty-fourth year of the Emperor Kuang Hsu, while he himself was on his way to Peking to receive the seals of a district magistrate, he came across a dragon lying upon the banks of the Yellow River in Shantung province. It was blue in color and was several tens of feet in length. The whole air was filled with a very offensive salt sea odor, and out of respect for the creature, which was supposed to have fallen from heaven, the crowd of people that stood around was busily engaged in sprinkling water upon its body. The head resembled that of a cow and the artist said that except for the long eyebrows the picture of the cloud dragon represented very faithfully what he actually saw.
Another Chinese has related that a business partner of his, while on a journey up the Yangtze River, saw three dragons crossing a mountain range near the shore. Every person on board was spellbound as they watched the three monsters—one yellow, another white, and the third blue—as they majestically made their way with great [[34]]undulating strides up the mountain side. The dragons passed by so near the boat that the observers saw every detail of their heads and the lacelike scales of their bodies. The boat was respectfully stopped in mid-river, and only when the dragons had disappeared over the ridge did the boatmen resume their task at the oars.
Various stories have come to the writer, of dragons which have been seen either riding upon banks of fog or dangling from passing clouds during great windstorms or rainstorms. Invariably these have been described as having scale-covered bodies. One reasonable explanation for the suspended dragons may be found in insipient tornadoes and water spouts which never reach the ground. There seems, however, to be no explanation for the dragon visits described by the five observers, unless it be that strange monsters of the deep either crawled up out of the river and lay on the bank, in a dormant state, or were sucked up by ocean- or river-water spouts, and when the columns of water broke over the land the creatures were dropped far from their natural habitat. Two difficulties at once present themselves to combat this hypothesis. The first of these is the improbability that there are such creatures in existence, and the second difficulty [[37]]lies in the strangeness of their disappearance after coming to the earth. As a possible explanation of the first difficulty, we wish to ask whether it is not possible that there are still existing in the depths of the sea and in great rivers curious reptiles and strange monsters such as no human beings now living have ever seen, the descendants of the mighty saurians which lived upon the earth long ages ago, and which geologists tell us later entered the sea, making that their more secretive habitat? [[35]]
