CHAPTER XV—THE HILLS
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MOST of the day, advised by Brachey. Betty kept closed the swinging litter doors. The little caravan settled into the routine of the highway, the muleteers trudging beside their animals. The gait was a steady three miles an hour. John rode his pack-saddle hour after hour, until six' o'clock in the evening, without a word. Just behind him, the cook, a thin young man with dreamy eyes, sang quietly a continuous narrative in a wailing, yodling minor key.
Before the end of the first hour they had lost sight of T'ainan-fu and buried themselves in the hills; buried themselves in a double sense, for wherever water runs in Northwestern China the roads are narrow canyons. At times, however, the way mounted high along the hillsides, on narrow footways of which the mules all instinctively trod the outer edge. Brachey found it alarming to watch the litter as it swayed over some nearly perpendicular precipice. For neither up here on the hillsides nor along the path nor in the depths below was there a sign of solid rock; it was all the red-brown earth known as loess, which is so fine that it may be ribbed into the pores like talc or flour and that packs down as firmly as chalk. Along the sunken ways were frequent caves, the dwelling-places of crippled, loathsome beggars, with rooms cut out square and symmetrical doors and windows.
In the high places one might look across a narrow chasm and see, decorating the opposite wall, strata of the loess in delicately varied tints of brown, red, Indian red and crimson, with blurred soft streaks of buff and yellow at times marking the divisions.
The hills themselves were steep and crowded in, as if a careless Oriental deity had scooped together great handfuls of brown dice and thrown them haphazard into heaps. Trees were so few—here and there one might be seen clinging desperately to a terrace-wall where the narrow fields of sprouting millet and early shoots of vegetables mounted tier on tier to the very summits of the hills—that the general effect was of utter barrenness, a tumbling red desert.
Much cf the time they were winding through the canyons or twisting about the hillsides with only an occasional outlook wider than a few hundred yards or perhaps a half-mile, but at intervals the crowded little peaks would separate, giving them a sweeping view over miles of shadowy red valleys.... At such times Betty would open one of her windows a little and lean forward; riding close behind, Brachey could see her face, usually so brightly alert, now sad, peeping out at the richly colored scene.
Frequently they passed trains of camels or asses or carts, often on a precipice where one caravan hugged the loess wall while the other flirted with death along the earthen edge. But though the Hansean or Chihlean muleteers shouted and screamed in an exciting confusion of voices and the Mongol camel drivers growled and the ponies plunged, no animal or man was lost.