I have chosen to travel by junk as far as the course of the Pei-Ho will permit, the junk serving as a lodging in this country where I am forced to dally.
This makes necessary many little preparations.
The first thing is to make a requisition for this junk and to appropriate this species of sarcophagus where I am to live under a roof of matting. The next is to buy in the more or less ruined shops of Tien-Tsin the things necessary for a few days of nomadic life, from bedding to arms; and lastly, to hire from the Lazarist Fathers a Chinese person to make tea,—young Toum, aged fourteen, with the face of a cat and a queue reaching to the ground.
I dined with General Frey, who, with his small French detachment, was, as every one knows, the first to enter the heart of Pekin, the Imperial City. He was good enough to relate to me in detail this magnificent journey, the taking of the Marble Bridge and his final entrance into the Imperial City,—that mysterious place which I shall soon see, and into which before him no European had ever penetrated.
As to my own small personal expedition, which in comparison with his appears so easy and unimportant, the general kindly concerned himself with what we were to drink en route, my servant and I, in this time of infection, when the water is a constant danger on account of human remains, thrown there by the Chinese, left lying in all the wells; and he made me a present of untold value,—a case of eau d'Evian.
II
THE TWO GODDESSES OF THE BOXERS
Sunday, October 14.
An old Chinese woman, wrinkled as a winter apple, timidly opens the door at which we have loudly knocked. It stands in the deep shadow of a narrow passageway exhaling unhealthy fetid smells, between walls blackened by filth, where one feels as shut in as in the heart of a prison.
The old woman, an enigmatical figure, looks us all over with a blank impenetrable gaze; then recognizing among us the chief of the international police, she silently steps aside and permits us to enter. We follow her into a dark little court. Poor late autumn flowers are growing in the old walls, and we breathe faint sickly odors.