Truly the way to the great river through the mountains was hard. Taking all the difficulties in the lump, it would seem impossible to overcome them, but taking them one by one I managed it. And not the least of my troubles were the dogs.
Here in the mountains was a very handsome breed of large white dogs with long hair, at least I am sure they would have been handsome if they had been well fed and well eared for. If it had not been for Buchanan, whose heart it would have broken, I should certainly have got a puppy to bring home with me. These dogs one and all waged war on my little friend, who had a great idea of his own importance and probably aggravated the ill-fed denizens of the inn-yards. He would go hectoring down a yard, head up, white plume waving, with a sort of “Well, here we are! Now what have you got to say for yourselves?” air about him, and in two seconds more a big white scarecrow of a dog would have him by the neck, dragging him across the yard, designing to slay him behind the drinking troughs. He would give one shriek for help, and I would fly to that dog's head, catch him by the ears or the ruff round his neck and be dragged along in my turn till Tsai Chih Fu the resourceful appeared on the scene with a billet of wood, and then the unfortunate beast would be banished from the yard or tied up till we had gone. I remembered often the warning I had received on the subject of hydrophobia, but I never had time to think of that till afterwards, when, of course, if anything had happened it would have been too late.
There is one thing about a Chinese inn in the interior: it may be exceedingly uncomfortable, but it is also exceedingly cheap. A night's lodging as a rule costs forty cash. Eleven cash roughly is equal to a cent, and a cent, again roughly—it depends upon the price of silver—is a little less than a farthing. Forty cash, then, is hardly a penny. Hot water costs eight cash, eggs were six cash apiece and so were the wheaten scones I bought in place of the bread my servant could not make, and I could buy those last as low as three cash apiece. Of course I quite understand that I as a rich traveller paid top price for everything, probably twice or three times as much as the ordinary traveller; the missionaries, indeed, were shocked at the price I paid for eggs, and again I was always rooked in the matter of paper. For even though I preferred it, it often happened that it was impossible to sleep in my litter in the yard, it was too crowded with beasts—and it had to be very crowded—and then I stripped off the paper from the window of the room I occupied to let in the air, just a little air, and I was charged accordingly from thirty to eighty cash for my destructiveness. I found afterwards that a whole sheet of new paper can be had for ten cash, and the paper I destroyed was not half-a-sheet and was grimed with the dirt of ages! Glass, of course, in the mountains of Shansi is almost unknown and the windows are covered with white paper.
After the mountains came a high stony plateau, not dangerous but difficult, for though this is a great trade route there was not an inch of smooth roadway, every step had to be carefully picked among the stones, and presently the stream that when we entered the mountains was a trickle a hand's-breadth across was now a river meandering among the stones. We began by stepping across it; wider it grew and there were stepping-stones for the walking muleteers; then the mules waded and the muleteers climbed on to the beasts or on to the front of the litter, which last proceeding made me very uncomfortable, for I remembered my special man was likely at most only to have been washed twice in his life, and I was very sure his clothes had never been washed at all and probably had never been taken off his back since last October. Finally we crossed by bridges, fairly substantial bridges three planks wide, but the mules required a deal of encouraging before they would trust them and always felt the boards gingerly with their hoofs first as if they distrusted the Chinaman and all his engineering works. The engineering was probably all right, but as the state of repair often left much to be desired I could hardly blame the mules for their caution. And one day we crossed that river twenty-six times!
There is no charm in the country in Shansi beyond the sunshine and the invigorating air. There were fields, every patch of land that could possibly be made to grow a blade of wheat was most carefully tilled, there was not a weed, not a blade of grass out of place. In some fields the crops were springing green, in others the farmers were still ploughing, with a patient ox in the plough; but there were no divisions between these fields; there were no hedges; few and scanty trees; no gardens; no farmhouses, picturesque or otherwise. The peasants all live huddled together, literally in the hill-sides, and of the beauty of life there was none. It was toil, toil without remission and with never a day off. Even the blue sky and the sunshine and the invigorating dry air must be discounted by the dirt and darkness and airlessness of the houses and the underground yaos. The Chinese peasant's idea in building a house seems to be to get rid of the light and the air, the only two things I should have thought that make his life bearable. And in these dark and airless caves the crippled women spend their days. The younger women—I met them occasionally gaily clad and mounted on a donkey—looked waxen and had an air of suffering, and the older were lined and had a look of querulousness and irritability that was not on the men's faces. Many an old man have I seen whose face might stand for a model of prosperous, contented, peaceful old age looking back on a well-lived life, but never, never have I seen such a look on a woman's face.
At last, after crossing a long bridge across the river, we came to Yung Ning Chou. The dark grey wall stood out against the blue sky and, unlike most Chinese cities that I have seen, there is no watch-tower over the gate. It has suburbs, suburbs like Fen Chou Fu enclosed in crumbling clay walls that are fast drifting to their inevitable end. They could not keep out a rabbit now, let alone a man, and yet they are entered through great brick gateways with a turn in them, and going under the archways I felt as usual as if I had gone back to Biblical days. The walls of the city proper, the crowded little city, are in better preservation, and tower high above the caravans that pass round them, for there are no inns in Yung Ning Chou and all caravans must stay in the eastern suburb. There are narrow, stony little streets of houses pressed close together, and the rough roadways are crowded with traffic: people, donkeys, laden mules and grunting camels are for ever passing to and fro. Looking up the principal street between the eastern and the western gate was like looking up a dark tunnel in which fluttered various notices, the shop signs, Chinese characters printed on white calico. Most of those signs, according to my interpreter's translation, bore a strong resemblance to one another. “Virtue and Abundance,” it seems they proclaimed to all who could read. But there was no one to tell me whether there was really any wealth in this little mountain city that is the same now as it probably was a thousand years ago. I wondered, I could not help wondering, whether it would be worth Pai Lang's while to attack. I wondered if he could get in if he did, for the walls were high and the gates, rising up straight and sheer without watch towers, such piles of masonry as might have been built by conquering Nineveh or Babylon. Here and there, though, in the walls the water had got under the clay and forced out the bricks in long deep cracks, and here if they were not carefully guarded were places that an invading force might storm, and in the suburbs and among the houses that clustered close under the protecting walls terrible things might be done. But the western gate, I should say, is well-nigh impregnable. Nobody but a Chinaman would have built a gate in such a place. It opens out on to a steep cliff that falls sheer sixty feet to the river below. Chinese towns are always built symmetrically; there should be at least one gate in each of the four walls, therefore a gate there is here. It seems to have occurred to no one that a gate is placed in those walls for the convenience of traffic, and that it is simple waste of time and labour to make a gate in a place by which no one could possibly pass. For that matter I should have thought a wall unnecessary on top of so steep a cliff.
The Scandinavian missionaries who have faithfully worked Yung Ning Chou for the last twenty years with so little result were absent when I passed through. Only two of them live here, the rest are scattered over the mountains to the north, and when I was in Fen Chou Fu I met a woman, a Norwegian, who was on her way to join them. She remains in my mind a pathetic figure of sacrifice, a wistful woman who was giving of her very best and yet was haunted by the fear that all she was giving was of very little worth, surely the most bitter and sorrowful reflection in this world. She had worked in China as a missionary in her girlhood. She explained to me how hard it was for these northern peoples, for to learn Chinese they have first to learn English. Then she married, and after her little girl was born her husband died and so she took her treasure home to educate her in Norway. But she died and, feeling her duty was to the Chinese, back came the lonely mother, and when I met her she was setting out for the little walled city in the hills where she dwelt with some other women. A strangely lonely life, devoid of all pleasures, theirs must have been. I was struck with the little things that pleased this devoted woman, such little things, and we who may enjoy them every day go calmly on our way and never appreciate them. She wore the unbecoming Chinese dress, with her white hair drawn baek from her face, and her blue eyes looked out wistfully as if she were loath to give up hope that somewhere, somehow, in the world individual happiness, that would be for her alone, would come to her. During the revolution they, remembering the troubles and dangers of the Boxer time, had refugeed in Tientsin, and the days there were evidently marked with a white stone in her calendar.
“It was so delightful,” she said in her pretty precise English, “to see the European children in the gardens.”
How her heart went out to those children. They reminded her, I suppose, of the little girl she had left behind sleeping her last sleep among the Norwegian mountains.
“Oh, the children!” she sighed. “It brought a lump in your throat to look at them!”