By the jangling of the bells and the yells of the rest of the company I knew that the other animals felt equally bad, and more than once I saw my luckless interpreter, who evidently was not much of a hand at sitting on a pack, ruefully picking himself up and shaking the dust from his person, his mule having flung him as a protest against the polluting of the road by a train of camels.
The camels march along with a very supercilious air, but mules, horses and donkeys all fear them so much that there are special inns for them and they are supposed only to travel by night, but this rule is more honoured, I imagine, in the breach than in the observance. Most parts of the road I don't see that any caravan could pass along at night. The special inns do not present any difference to my unprejudiced eyes from the discomfort of an ordinary mule and donkey inn. I stopped at one one day in the loess for tiffin, and it consisted of a courtyard round which were rooms (yaos) that were simply caves with the mouths bricked up and doors in them. Inside, the caves were dark and airless, with for all furniture the universal, k'ang; a fireplace is either in the middle or at one of the ends, and the flues underneath carry the hot air under the k'ang to warm it. I have never before or since seen such miserable dwelling-places as these yaos, and in the loess country I saw hundreds of them, inhabitated by thousands of people. Wu Ch'eng particularly commended itself to my notice because here I first realised that in expecting a room to myself I was asking too much of the country.
We crossed the mountain pass the first day out of Fen Chou Fu. Steep it was, steep as the roof of a house, and we scrambled down the other side and, just as the dusk was falling, we came to Wu Ch'eng, a village mostly of yaos in the mountain-side. Wu Ch'eng, where hundreds of people live and die, was short of most things that make life worth living: water was very scarce indeed, and there were no eggs there. It was necessary that our little company should move on with what speed we might. Also the inn only had one room.
“The k'ang is large,” said my interpreter, as if he thought that a woman who would come out on this journey would not mind sharing that k'ang with all the other guests, the innkeeper and his servants. It was rather large. I looked into an earthen cave the end of which, about thirty feet away, I could hardly make out in the dim light. There were great cobwebs hanging from the ceiling—dimly I saw them by the light that filtered through the dirty paper that did duty for a window—and the high k'ang occupied the whole length of the room, leaving a narrow passage with hard-beaten earth for a floor about two feet wide between the k'ang and the left-hand wall. It was about as uninviting a room as I have ever seen. Also it was clearly impossible that Buchanan and I should turn out the rest of the company, so I decreed that I should have it to myself for half-an-hour for the purposes of washing and changing, for whieh privilege I paid about twenty cash, roughly a ha'penny, and then we slept in the litter, as we did on many other occasions, outside in the yard among the donkeys and mules. The last thing I saw was the bright stars peeping down at me, and the last thing I heard was the mules munching at their well-earned chaff, and I wakened to the same stars and the same sounds, for early retiring is conducive to early rising, and yet the muleteers were always before me and were feeding their beasts. Always I went through the same routine. I went to bed despairing and disgusted and a little afraid. I slept like the dead, if I slept outside, and I wakened to watch the sun rise and renew my hopes.
There are hundreds, probably thousands, of villages like Wu Ch'eng in China. The winter in Shansi in the mountains is Arctic and no words can describe what must be the sufferings of these people; especially must the women suffer, for the poorest peasant binds his daughter's feet, his wife can hardly crawl. In Chihli you may see the women tottering round on their stumps grinding the corn, in Shansi lucky is the woman who can do so much. The ordinary peasant woman is equal to nothing but a little needlework, if she have anything to sew, or to making a little porridge, if she can do so without moving off the k'ang.
The getting something for the men to cook must be a hard job. Potatoes are sold singly, other vegetables are cut in halves or quarters, a fowl is always sold by the joint. There may be people who do buy a whole fowl, but they are probably millionaires. I suppose a whole section of a community could not possibly exist on other folks' old clothes, but that is how the people of this part of Shansi looked as if they were clothed. They had not second-hand clothes or third-hand, they were apparently the remnants that the third buyer could find no use for.
I shall never forget on one occasion seeing a ragged scarecrow bearing on the end of a pole a dead dog, not even an ordinary dead dog, but one all over sores, a most disgustingly diseased specimen. I asked Mr Wang what he was carrying that dog away for and that young gentleman looked at me in surprise. He would never get to the bottom of this foolish foreigner.
“For eat,” said he simply!
The people of the loess cannot afford to waste anything save the health of their women. A dog, a wonk, shares the scavenging work of the Chinese towns with the black and white crows, and doubtless the citizens do not care so much for eating them as they would a nice juicy leg of mutton, but they would no more throw away a wonk that had found life in a Chinese town too hard and simply died than I would yesterday's leg of mutton in favour of the tender chicken I prefer.
This, the first camel inn I particularly noticed, was not far from Fen Chou Fu, and they told me how many years ago one of the medical missionaries touring the country found there the innkeeper's wife with one of her bound feet in a terrible condition. She had a little baby at her breast and she was suffering horribly—the foot was gangrenous. The doctor was troubled and puzzled as well. He had no appliances and no drugs, but left as they were, mother and baby, already half starved, were doomed. Therefore, like a brave man as he was, he took his courage in both hands, made a saw of a piece of scrap iron from an American packing-case and with this rude instrument and no anaesthetics he amputated that foot. And the woman survived, lived to see her child grow up, was living when I passed along that way, and I sat in her courtyard and had my tiffin of hard-boiled eggs and puffed rice washed down by tea. It was her son's courtyard then, possibly that very baby's whose life the missionary had saved by saving his mother's. For the Chinese have no milch cows or goats and know little about feeding infants artificially.