The last town in which we were forced to pass a night was a miserable collection of filth and half-baked mud, though rich in grain, stacks covering the flat roofs and surrounding the hard-earth floors on which it was still being threshed; though two brand-new temples gleamed forth from the general ugliness. All next morning a half-witted road, evidently bent on outdoing itself as a fitting climax of the journey, wandered along a wide river valley cut up everywhere not only by the meandering stream itself but by hundreds of irrigation ditches. All these were frozen over more or less solidly, with the result that progress was a constant struggle with our mules, already jaded with fatigue and fright and covered with icicles when we climbed at last to the bank and made our way through almost continuous villages by a narrow road. Even here irrigation ditches still made trouble, and strings of carts and camels reduced progress materially, though this did not greatly matter, since there was no difficulty in keeping up with our carts that had been obliged to continue along the river bottom. Pure loess had disappeared some days before, but the soil was merely a bit more solid along the road that had been deliberately cut through a hill beyond which I came out sooner than I had expected upon the Yellow River, here racing swiftly through a deep rocky gorge and rather gray than yellow in color. Extraordinary activity had broken out in the large town forty li from the end of our journey, for hundreds of men were building a real embankment, hauling stone from far up the river-bed, and preparing to throw a bridge across the tributary down which we had come. But the enterprise, it turned out, was not the complete nullification of the opinion we had formed of the Chinese inability to accomplish public works, for it was being done with American relief funds under the supervision of the host who was awaiting us.
Tobacco grew all along the last fertile miles of the journey, and the increasing population busied itself in stripping leaves instead of winnowing grain. These were carried home in two-man litters made of matting, while the stripped stalks evidently served as fuel. For some reason, which no one could explain to us, many of the fields were still covered with the grown plants, shriveled and brown from the early winter frosts, and in many cases covered with a kind of straw cap. Then the road thought better of the short respite it had given us and plunged uphill through another genuine loess cañon, where cliffs seemed ready to fall in clouds of dust and camel-trains crowded. Out of this we broke an hour or more later upon a far-reaching view of the wide, open plain walled by mountains, across which, still twenty li distant, lay the capital of China’s westernmost province.
CHAPTER XXIV
IN MOHAMMEDAN CHINA
High up above the plain of Lanchow, on the topmost hillock of the partly terraced mountains that bound it on the south, stands a new pagoda. It was built by the wife of the former Tuchun, but as neither he nor she, nor her particular brand of Buddhism, were popular favorites, the people say that their prosperity departed on the day it was completed. Conspicuous as it is from many li away, no one seems to visit it. At least there was not another footstep in the snow that had fallen some days before when I climbed to it one morning, and its three stories, open to all the world, showed not a single recent human trace. The mere fact that it took three hours of steady and not easy climbing, first by a mountain trail to some distant village, then at random up and across terraces where the feet floundered in snow and loose earth, could hardly have accounted for this abandonment; for no holy place in the Orient is too difficult of access for an occasional zealot. No, the pagoda of the Tuchun’s wife was plainly not a welcome addition to the landscape.
It was unsurpassed, however, for its bird’s-eye view of Lanchow and its environs; though, to be sure, a steam-heated lounging-room would have improved it at this season. While the capital of China’s most western province is on the thirty-sixth parallel, like Memphis, Tennessee, it is five thousand feet above sea-level, and the wind-swept pagoda was much more so. The snow had now laid the dust that swirled so easily when we rode into the city, but it had not fallen deep enough to hide any important features of the great oval plain stretching from the foot of this southern barrier to the Yellow River, beyond which the world piled itself up again in what would have been the familiar brown, utterly barren tumbled hills of northwestern China but for its light mantle of winter white. The plain was not a mighty checker-board, for the myriad divisions into which the little low mud barriers between its fields marked it were altogether too numerous and fantastic in shape. But as a whole it gave that impression, or, still more exactly, it resembled a mammoth pane of glass that had been shattered into many more than a thousand pieces, and then laid together again on a flat surface by some artist in Chinese puzzles.
When we had first ridden across this oasis many slender, misformed trees caught the eye, but from this height these barely relieved the vast expanse of an appearance of total treelessness. On that day we had noticed many fields of gray, a color so out of keeping with an autumn Kansu landscape that we were eager with curiosity until we found that acres after acres had been carefully covered, apparently by hand, with small stones. This was a method of keeping the precious moisture in the ground, which, our host explained, was common to all this region; when the fields are tilled or planted the stones are merely raked away from a small space at a time and then quickly replaced. We resolved to tell the next group of New England farmers we met that there are people who purposely cover their fields with stones.
The snow of course had obliterated these mere variations in color, though it had not disguised the fact that by far the greater part of this fertile flat-land was wasted in graves. Under the thin white layer thousands upon thousands of the little cones of earth that serve as tombstones to the garden variety of Chinese looked like peas, or, let us say, mustard-seeds under a sheet, while the p’ai-lous and stone monuments scattered among these would of themselves have filled a very large graveyard. The huge barracks which had oozed and absorbed soldiers incessantly when we passed it lay half-way or more toward the eastern end of the plain, where we had descended upon it out of the last loess cañon. In the other direction, the eye, sweeping hastily across Lanchow itself, hurdling several clusters of temples and many nondescript heaps of mud buildings, fell at length upon the four big round forts erected on the crests of the ridge shutting in the valley on the southwest, against the next Mohammedan rebellion. During the several uprisings of the Moslem Chinese Lanchow itself has never been taken, but it was at least once so long and closely besieged that cannibalism is said to have flourished within its walls. After the last revolt the defenders saw the wisdom of fortifying this high ridge, from which the city had been so easily bombarded, and which is the last barrier between it and Hochow, the “Mohammedan capital,” only two hundred li away.
An ahong, or Chinese Mohammedan mullah of Lanchow
