“Emerly and me was going to take a look-see at the Big Wall. I dunno why she quit. I can go by myself, I guess. I got a thousand bucks. Still, Emerly’s a piker.”
“You and I’ll go and see the Big Wall,” said Edward. “You and I’ll be buddies now. We’ll go tomorrow.”
They went to see the Great Wall. Stone Ponting found great pleasure in taking the tickets. Doc came with them, a stout, red, young man with a fixed smile, which only faded during his frequent and earnest seizures of laughter.
They went up to the pass on a pig train from Nankow; they sat on the running board of the train and their sight was haunted by walls creeping furtively round the mountains and by dead walled towns.
The Great Wall, however, was not furtive. It gloried in its fight with the mountains. It condescended to conquer only the fiercest slopes. It pursued splendidly terrible edges. Edward, looking down from the broad road on the wall at the pale bleak valleys towards Manchuria, was oppressed by a sense of tottering and fearful height. But when he leaned over the battlements and looked down expecting to see straight into dark, dragon-haunted abysses, there was the grass like an assurance of safety a few feet below him, and there were the little intimate blue and yellow flowers in the grass, holding out hands to break the fall of courage. All the way down the steep mountains there were flowers among the rocks. The rocks might have been the graves of enemies of China who had failed and fallen on the green grass, failed and fallen and never set foot on the land within the wall. The wall itself was low; it lay flat like a snake in the sun; it was more sinuous than anything built of brick had any right to be. When it linked crag with crag it was so steep that, to follow it, travellers must sometimes crawl on hands and knees up very steep steps, clinging to the rank weeds and grasses that grew between steep stones. Astride of the wall, at regular intervals, were the watch-towers, entered by arched doorways. The wall looped its length sometimes; there were wanderings of walls within the wall. Wherever one looked the mountains were crowned and mocked by the wall.
Doc hardly had time to look at the wall, he was so busy photographing it.
Stone was frankly bored.
“Can’t be but a dozen feet high,” he complained. “They ought to see the Capitol at Sacramento or some of the buildings on Montgomery Street in Frisco.”
They walked down to the train along the paved camel road that for two thousand years has carried travellers from Manchuria to Peking. It is a dead road now. Occasionally a string of camels or donkeys threads its way through the crowds of travelling ghosts, but a Ford car would disdain the road now, so it is dead.