"I am content."
With the benediction the Chinese softly withdrew. The sick man fell back exhausted on the pillows, soon to be tossing and raving in delirium again. But over in the little college building the native Christians, led by their two new-made pastors, bowed themselves continuously in prayer for the life which was more than any other life to them.
Was it in answer to those prayers that ice was unexpectedly brought into that port in that tropic clime? Who knows? So many things are veiled from our eyes! But certain it is that when the ice was heaped about his fevered head, MacKay fell into a sweet, childlike sleep, from which he did not awake for thirty-six hours. And when he awoke he was saved.
A few days later, under compulsion from the three doctors, he sailed on board the Fokien to join his family in Hong-Kong and rest. The day afterwards the French admiral declared a blockade, and Formosa was sealed against the world.
XXXIV
THE SOLDIER OF THE LEGION
For the five months from October till March Dr. Sinclair and Sergeant Gorman were with the Chinese forces before Keelung. For those five months rain fell almost continuously. Clouds drifted in from the sea, trailed through the valleys, and crept up the mountain sides, discharging their burdens of water as they went. The earth was sodden under foot. Walls and roofs sweated moisture. Tents and clothing mildewed. Food moulded and rotted in the constant wet. Scarcely ever a gleam of sunshine broke through the leaden canopy of cloud to cleanse the reeking earth and atmosphere. For one period of forty-five days the rain never ceased for an hour.
All through the wretched winter French transports arrived bringing reinforcements, and left again carrying sick and wounded men. All through the winter a succession of petty conflicts took place, a series of harassing, ineffectual actions was fought. A French column would issue from Keelung, plunge through roads which were nought but channels of liquid mud, struggle up dripping heights, through the tall grasses and ferns and brush, exposed to the fire of concealed sharp-shooters, and drive the enemy from the top at the point of the bayonet, only to find that their labour and the price of blood paid was all in vain. In some cases the small forces they were able to spare could not hold the heights against the rallying Chinese. In others immediately behind they discovered higher and more strongly fortified posts dominating those that they had captured.
All the while the French cemetery on the east side of the harbour, which they had named La Galissonière, was growing more and more populous at an alarming rate. Typhoid fever, malarial fever, cholera were far more dangerous than the bullets and knives of the Chinese. In spite of the numbers of sick and wounded men sent home to France, by the time the winter had passed into summer seven hundred of the small force employed had been laid away in the rain-soaked, wave-beaten beach at Keelung.
Meanwhile still heavier losses were suffered by the Chinese. The superior discipline and arms of the French more than compensated for their inferiority in numbers, and enabled them to work havoc in the close-set ranks of the Chinese. The little hospital at Loan-Loan was always filled with wounded. Sometimes they overflowed into the neighbouring houses requisitioned by the military authorities for the purpose.