Some sage has asserted, in the face of ample proof to the contrary, that it never rains but it pours, and on that day at least we were inclined to agree with him. For barely an hour afterward, while we sat eating a cold lunch on the cold k’ang of a miserable little inn, with only hot tea to improve the situation, two more foreigners walked in upon us. They were big sturdy Catholic priests, Hollanders and twin brothers, also in great forests of beards, and wearing cassock-like Chinese gowns that showed signs of long and arduous travel. One had been for thirty years, and the other for three, in Sinkiang, or Chinese Turkestan, and having been ordered to another post in northern China, they had set out in August and been already three months on the road. The natural route to their new station would have been northward from Lanchow, down or along the Yellow River, but bandits were said to be so active along it that they had struck eastward instead. It would be unjust to assume another reason which may not have existed; but personally, if I had lived for thirty years, or even for three, in Sinkiang, I should have gone a little out of my way, bandits or no bandits, to travel on railways and see at least Peking and get a little bit in touch again with the Western world before burying myself once more in the far interior of China. The animation of the padres during our brief conversation in English and French and an occasional word of Chinese proved that they had not grown indifferent to Caucasian intercourse for all their long exile; indeed, they somewhat resembled in manner college boys who have just reached home after a freshman year without vacations. The new pope, they said, and we had confirmations of the statement on our western trip, was filling all the posts in a large area of central Asia with German priests, and moving the former incumbents, among whom Belgians predominate, to less strategic positions.
In all the sixteen days between the capitals of Shensi and Kansu we did not, unless my memory fails me, meet another traveling foreigner; hence our astonishment at seeing four in one morning. There was, indeed, appreciably less native travel in the new province, though great chunks of coal were still coming out on donkey-back, and wheelbarrows were creaking under all sorts of loads, particularly of huge pears for which the province is famous, and which, persimmons growing rare, constituted our chief dessert all the rest of the journey.
Several wandering trails that kept us out of the chasm—though on the plain above the unhampered wind threatened at any moment to lift us from the saddle—came to agreement at last with the road, and we went down a mighty descent, which toward the end was rudely stone-paved, into the populous town of Kingchow. Here the earthquake of two years before, greater reminders of which we were to see farther on, had among other feats neatly broken in two both a high hill and the temple that stood upon it, so that a score of heathen idols in intense discordant colors and devilish postures stood out only half protected from the cold windy world. A church steeple rather incongruously broke the sky-line of the lower town, and in the neat compound beneath it we found hospitality for the first time with those Scandinavian-American missionaries scattered all along our western route. The sturdy couple—sturdiness is an all but necessary asset for inland China mission-fields—who had been cultivating this not too promising human garden since the days of their youth, had had their share of adversities; but the one that came most nearly shaking their faith had happened within the last two years. After decades of struggle with contributors at home and workmen and contractors on the spot, they had at last reached the proud day when their imposing black brick church was not only completed but relieved of its mortgage. While his wife and coworker superintended important operations in the kitchen and dining-room, the pastor sat down to write the glorious news to his religious constituents in America. “At last, dear brethren,” he began, “our church, center of a vast district that has no other, is fin——” “Brrrrum!” came a sudden roaring and cracking of walls and ceiling, apparently even of the ground itself, while pictures swung to and fro from their pegs, and the furniture danced a sort of improvised Virginia reel. It was all over before the missionaries had wholly realized that a great earthquake had occurred, but when they went out to look at it the new church was cracked and split and broken, an all but useless ruin.
The threat of snow was gone next morning, which was calm and bright, with hardly a breeze where the raging wind had been. The route lay up a river valley all the way to Pingliang, and fully half the populace along the way, it seemed, was out sweeping up with their crude bundle-of-sticks brooms the last vestige of leaves and twigs from under the willow-trees. In this all but fuel-less land there is an added meaning to the old adage beginning with something about an ill wind. There were countless half-ruined mud-wall compounds along the valley, from the edge of which sprang the inevitable piles of terraced fields. Strings of donkeys, each with two huge yellow-brown glazed jars filled with smaller ones in straw, looked at a little distance like some curious type of land-crab. We had scarcely seen a soldier since leaving Sian-fu, but now we began meeting long lines of them again, whole armies, at least as the word is used in China, moving eastward in carts, on horses, and on mules, and once or twice on long strings of camels. They were dark, rather surly-looking fellows, I fancied, though this may have been only fancy, or the effect of an outdoor life on men with the higher bridged noses that suggested a considerable strain of Arab blood. In Shensi Moslems are not recruited as soldiers; but in Kansu, the stronghold of the Chinese Mohammedans, there are many thousands of them in uniform; and here they marched freely over the winter wheat, an inch high, with that complete indifference to the rights of the laborious peasants along the way which is typical of bandits and soldiers alike throughout China.
Yet our hosts of the night before had assured us that the soldiers of Kansu were well disciplined; for instance, they cited, they always took off their hats when they entered a church—perhaps, I reflected, as they would expect us to take off our shoes in their places of worship—and let down their cues. For it is as great a discourtesy to come indoors with the cue tied around the head as it is in the old-fashioned parts of China to speak to an equal or a superior without removing the eye-glasses.
The Chinese coolie gets his hair dressed about once a month by the itinerant barber. This one is just in the act of adding a switch. Note the wooden comb at the back of the head
An old countryman having dinner at an outdoor restaurant in town on market day has his own way of using chairs or benches
