Up we went and up. There were stone steps put together without mortar, all the way, and there were platforms every here and there, where the weary might rest, and because the hill was so steep, these platforms were generally made by piling up stones that looked as if a touch would send them rolling to the bottom of the mountain, a step and one would be over oneself, for there were no barriers. It was twelve li, four miles up, and the way was broken by smaller temples dedicated to various gods, among them one to the goddess who takes pity on barren women. This one was half-way up the mountain, and here we met a small-footed woman toiling along with the aid of a stick. Half-way up that cruel mountain she had crawled on her aching feet, and every day she would come up, she told us, to burn incense at the shrine. And she looked old, old. It would be a miracle indeed, I thought, if she bore that longed-for child. Hope must be dying very hard indeed. And yet she must have known. Poor thing, poor weary woman, what was the tragedy of her life? Children, one would think, were a drug in the market in China, they swarm everywhere. I burned an incense stick for her and could only hope the God of Pity would answer her prayer, and take away her reproach before men.
Up and up and up, and so steep it grew I was fain to shut my eyes else the sensation that I would fall off into space would have been too much for me. From the doorways of the wayside temples we passed through we looked into space, and the mountains at the other side of the valley seemed farther away than ever. A cuckoo called and called again “Cuckoo! Cuckoo!” As we waited once a coolie passed with a bamboo across his shoulder from which were slung two very modern kerosene tins—Babylon and America meeting—and they told me there was no water on the mountain, every drop had to be carried up; and then the men took up the poles on their shoulders and tramped on again, and every time they changed the pole from one shoulder to the other I felt I would surely fall off into the valley, miles below. Up and up and up, they were streaming with perspiration, and at last when it seemed to me we had arrived at the highest point of the world, and that it was very like a needle-point, they set down my chair at the bottom of the flight of steps that led up to the entrance to the main temple, and the abbot and a crowd of monks stood at the top to greet me.
They swarmed everywhere, it was impossible to estimate their numbers, young men and old, all with shaven heads and dark, rusty red robes, and then others, blind, and halt, and maimed, evidently pensioners on their bounty. It seemed to me it could hardly be worth while to climb up so steep a place for the small dole that was all the monks had it in their power to give. It must have been so little, so little. They showed me the shrine, a poor little shrine to one who had seen the wonders of the Lama Temple in Peking. I took a picture of the abbot standing in front of it, and they showed me their kitchen premises, where were great jars of vegetables salted and in pickle, and looking most unappetising, but that apparently, with millet porridge, was all they had to live on.
It was crowded, it was dirty, it was shabby, but there were great stone pillars, eighteen of them, that they told me had been brought from a great distance south of Peking, and had been carried up the mountain in the days of the Mings, long before there were the steps, which were only put there a little over a hundred years ago—quite recently for China. How they could possibly get them up even now that there are four miles of steep stone steps I cannot possibly imagine. Babylon! Babylon!! I shut my eyes and saw the toiling slaves, heard the crack of the taskmaster's whip, and the hopeless moan of the man who sank, crushed and broken, beneath the burden.
The abbot bowed himself courteously over a gift of thirty cents which Tuan, and I am sure he would not have understated it, said was the proper cumshaw, and I bade them farewell and turned to go down that hill again. The thought of it was heavy on my soul. Outside was a beggar, men are close to starvation in China. The wretched, forlorn creature, with wild hair and his nakedness hidden by the most disgusting rags, had followed my train up all those four steep miles in the hope of a small gift. For five cents he too bowed himself in deepest gratitude. It was a gift I was ashamed of, but the important interpreter considered he had the right to regulate these things, and he certainly led me carefully on all other occasions. Then I looked at my chair and I looked at the steep steps down which we must go. How could I possibly manage it without getting giddy and pitching right forward, for going down would be much worse than coming up had been. And then the men showed me that I must get in and be carried down backwards.
Would they slip? I could but trust not. I was alone and helpless, days, and they must have known it, from any of my own people. They might easily have held me up and demanded more than the three dollars for which they had contracted, but they did not. Patient, uncomplaining, as the Babylonish slaves to whom I had compared them, they carried me steadily and carefully from temple to temple all the way down, and at every altar we stopped I sat and looked on, and Tuan burned incense sticks, the officiating priest, he was very poor, dirty and shabby, struck a melodious gong as the act of adoration was accomplished and Tuan, in all his best clothes, knelt and knocked his head on the ground. I wondered whether I, too, was not acquiring merit, for my money had bought the incense sticks, and my money, it was only a trifling ten cents, paid the wild-looking individual, with torn coat and unshaven head, who carried them up the mountain.
