As we leave the village, and enter the deep tunnelled gateway where the crowd is already assembled to see us, the whole procession is engulfed with us,—the long, striding princesses, the gods who play the cithern or the tambourine, the red beast, and the green beast. In the semi-obscurity of the arched way, to the noise of all the citherns and of all the gongs, in the clouds of black dust which blind us, there is a compact mêlée, where our horses prance and jump, troubled by the noise and terrified by the two frightful monsters undulating above our heads.
After conducting us a quarter of a league beyond the walls, the procession leaves us at last, and we find silence again on the burning plain, where we have about twenty kilometres to go through the dust and the "yellow wind" before reaching Y-Tchou, another old walled city which is to be our halting-place for the night.
Not until to-morrow do we arrive at the tombs.
III
Chinese Peasant cultivating Rice Fields with Native Plow
The plain resembles that of yesterday, yet it is a little more green and wooded. The wheat, sown in rows, as with us, grows miraculously in this soil, made up of dust and cinders though it apparently is. Everything seems less desolate as one gets farther away from the region of Pekin, and ascends almost imperceptibly towards those great mountains of the west, which are appearing with greater and greater distinctness in front of us. The "yellow wind," too, blows with less severity, and when it dies down for a few moments, when the blinding dust decreases, it is like the country in the north of France, with its ploughed fields and clumps of elms and willows. One forgets that this is the heart of China, on the other side of the globe, and one expects to see peasants from home pass along the paths. But the few toilers who are bending over the earth have long braids, coiled about their heads like crowns, and their bare backs are saffron-colored.
All is peace in these sunshine-flooded fields, in these villages built in the scanty shade of the willows. The people seem to live happily, cultivating the friendly soil in primitive fashion, guided by the customs of five thousand years ago. Aside from the possible exactions of a few mandarins,—and there are many who are kind,—these Chinese peasants still live in the Golden Age, and I can hardly conceive of their accepting the joys of the "New China" dreamed of by Occidental reformers. Up to this time, it is true, the invasion has scarcely reached them; in this part of the country, occupied solely by the French, our troops have never played any other rôle than that of defender of the villagers against pillaging Boxers. Ploughing, sowing, all the work of the fields, has been quietly done in season, and it is impossible not to be struck with the very different look of other parts of the country which I will not designate, where there has been a reign of terror, and where the fields have been destroyed and have become desert steppes.