Long lines of soldiers presented arms as we passed through the various compounds of the yamen in the wake of our visiting-cards, held high aloft as usual. At length there came the period of innumerable waist-hinged bows, attended by the difficulty, now so familiar in China, as to whether hats or caps should be lifted or left undisturbed. For by Chinese custom it is bad form to uncover the head before guests or hosts, even indoors, while the European style is not only quite the opposite but is here and there followed by Chinese who consider themselves progressive, though one can never be sure when or where such alien manners, perhaps including the unsanitary hand-shake, will break out. After the preliminary formalities in the every-day guest-room, we streamed away through the compound of the bugling wapiti and across the now barren garden to a huge room on the edge of the city wall and overlooking the Yellow River. Not only was this open and cold but its walls were mainly of glass, which did not improve the temperature. It was not easy to find our places by the red place-cards bearing merely our Chinese names, but when we did we found that America had been signally honored. For on the Tuchun’s left, which is nearest the heart in Chinese custom, sat the major, while a Mongol prince who ruled a tribe in the Kokonor region of Tibet had been relegated to his less important right hand. However, the prince, who was also a lama, and according to some uncertain authorities a “Living Buddha,” cast far into the shade not only the major, but the Tuchun himself, this time in a black gown instead of uniform, to say nothing of the civil governor—in practice merely an underling of the military ruler of any Chinese province and as pale a moon as a vice-president in the shadow of the White House. For his Highness, or whatever familiar title he answered to, wore a brilliant saffron jacket embroidered with dragons, a cap of similar color with a large pink tourmaline—perhaps, for I am no expert in colored stones—a purple skirt, and dull-red Mongol boots! With him had come a princely suite, one member of which, swarthy as a mulatto and with a curiously eagle-like eye, stood between his master and the Tuchun and acted as interpreter. But the prince was anything but talkative, possibly because he was not garrulous by temperament, perhaps because he shared the common dislike of hearing his remarks relayed in a foreign tongue, but most likely for the reason that his attention was fully taken up with the intricacies of what purported to be a foreign meal. The strange eating-tools were evidently quite new to him; but he had the wisdom of common sense as well as the unexcitability of Mongol princes, and by watching the Tuchun at one end of the table and the civil governor at the other he came off very well indeed. How deep was his wisdom is shown by the fact that whenever he was in doubt he merely “passed.” Perhaps he really did not smoke or drink, as he stated with a word and a gesture, but there could hardly have been any religious motives for refusing half the countless courses, beginning with sharks’ fins—no simple luxury this far from the coast—and ending with macaroons, which he plainly avoided as another unknown, and therefore possibly dangerous, form of food.
How the soldier servants, to whom a boy picked up from the dump-heap brought things from the kitchen, handled not only slices of bread but the eating end of forks and spoons without any apparent consciousness of the absence of manicurists in Lanchow need not of course be mentioned. Besides the lama-prince there were Protestant missionaries, a Catholic or two, ordinary Buddhists, Taoists, and Confucianists, probably fetishists pure and simple as well as mere pagans, and certainly there were Mohammedans among the soldiers swarming within and about the room, though not, of course, among the guests. Conversation never rose above the gossip plane, and glancing along the table I realized that one possible reason for this, besides custom at semi-public Tuchuns’ dinners, was the fact that there were eight different mother-tongues among the bare score of men about the festive board.
Night had fallen before the servants had cut up the fruit and distributed it piecemeal, and had snatched away from any unwary guest the cigar laid before him a moment before, slipping it deftly up their sleeves, and we were at length in a position to bid Lanchow an official farewell. The final scene was not without its picturesqueness. When the last polite controversy on precedent at the many yamen gateways and the final bows had subsided, the blue embroidered night turned to a whirlpool of big oval Chinese lanterns, as the chair-bearers gathered in the outer courtyard prepared to take up their masters and trot. Each chair was tilted forward until its owner had doubled himself into it, his cushions were adjusted by ostensibly loving hands, and the curtain which formed the front wall closed upon him. The chief of his carriers shouted out orders that were repeated as well as executed by the others, and each group shouldered its burden in turn and jogged away into the night, its big paper lanterns swinging gently to and fro. Even the Belgian representative of the salt administration was attended by soldiers as well as his four chair-bearers, for high officials cannot overlook the matter of “face” in China merely because they chance to be foreigners. The Mongol lama-prince, like one who deeply scorned any such effeminate form of locomotion, mounted the red-saddled horse led up by one of his rather poorly mounted escort, which clattered away over the flagstones behind him, bugles blowing and scattered groups of soldiers presenting arms, while we simple Americans wandered out and away on foot.
CHAPTER XXV
TRAILING THE YELLOW RIVER HOMEWARD
The saddest part of seeing Lanchow was not that we had taken twenty-seven days to reach it, but that it would require fully that amount of time to undo again what we had done. The usual way of returning from the Kansu capital to Peking is simply to float down the Hoang Ho on goatskin rafts to where one can easily reach the advancing Suiyuan railway. We had hoped to do this, but we were prepared for the news that it was impossible so late in the season. November was nearing its last lap, and while the river at Lanchow was still open, big chunks of ice already drifting down it from the Tibetan highlands helped to confirm the general opinion that it would be frozen solid in its broader and more sluggish reaches farther north, where we would be left virtually stranded.
We each bought a stout Kansu pony, therefore, and a less lively one for the alleged mafu who was willing to leave the employ of our host and return to his family graves near Tientsin—if we would pay him to do so. Mafus usually walk by day and tend their masters’ horses by night, but we concluded to be generous, and as a result we acquired a troublesome companion rather than a useful servant; for the one thing which the Chinese coolie cannot stand is prosperity. Then we hired two carts, quite like those that had brought our belongings from Sian-fu, which agreed for a consideration of one hundred taels to set us down in Paotouchen in time, with good luck in trains, for us to spend Christmas with our families in Peking. We again set our plans to outspeed the usual schedule if possible, by dangling before the drivers a gratuity of a whole round dollar each for every day they made up.
This did not spare us from getting a late start, however, though that did not worry us so much as it would have before we had learned from experience that a delay in the first get-away is no proof that the days that follow will be similarly blighted. The unavoidable formalities of the last moment, such as the cartmen’s vociferous leave-taking of the inn that had housed them, made up mainly of shrieks of “Ch’ien!”—which, as I have said before, is the Chinese notion of how the word “money” should be pronounced—were further complicated by the task of getting rid of a man of unknown antecedents whom our experienced host caught surreptitiously slipping his baggage into one of the carts. He merely wished the pleasure of our company, he wailed, kneeling before us in the by no means carpeted street, and he would walk every step of the whole journey. Perhaps he would, but we should have been foolish to harbor in our midst a man who might be in league with the bandits, particularly after the Tuchun had taken the trouble to wire the Mohammedan generals along the way asking for guarantees of our safety. Besides, our expedition was quite unwieldy enough as it was. Thus it was almost nine o’clock when we streamed out across the incongruous American bridge and, striking northward along the edge of the river and that of the suburb which piles into the air behind it, were soon lost among an endless series of bare brown hills.
The homeward trip by the northern route was quite different from that by which we had come. Instead of passing several walled cities almost every day, there were often only two or three dreary little hamlets from dawn till dark, and for days at a time nothing whatever but the single mud compound or two where travelers stopped at noon and at night. There was almost no loess, but instead desolate desert hills or broad plateaus with few suggestions of even summer-time vegetation either on them or on the more or less distant ranges that shut them in. Without loess, there were of course few sunken roads—none worthy the name to any one who had seen the other route—and no cave-dwellings, but in place of them wind-swept mud hovels, sometimes enclosed within high walled compounds.
The hovels were particularly numerous on the first afternoon in the almost rich grain district that succeeded the first stretch of semi-desert—endless mud-walled compounds that looked like the ramparts of small cities, yet housing only a single family, though in China this may include as many as two score individuals of four, and even of five, generations. Most of the fields were covered with the moisture-protecting layer of stones. These are changed once in a generation, we heard, and the custom becomes more prevalent farther west, where the land grows ever drier until it merges into the Gobi Desert. Groups of peasants were still winnowing grain in the breeze on their threshing-floors, and everywhere sparrows enough to eat it all as fast as it was separated from the chaff made the air vociferous with their twittering. We plodded all day and well on into the moonlight across what finally became almost an uninhabited waste; and next day we climbed to an altitude of nearly eight thousand feet through stony, dreary mountains without people, except for one little surface coal-mine, and a rare shepherd, without vegetation except for little bunches of brown tuft-grass. Always there was a new wrinkled mountain range growing up ahead and another slipping away behind, though these usually flanked the broad river valley instead of crossing our trail.
We were always well on our way by sunrise, with two hours or more of walking behind us, for it was too bitter cold then to ride; and sunset often found us still in the saddle. On Thanksgiving day, for instance, we were up at four and off at five, for there was a stretch of ninety li without a single human habitation to be crossed before we could even make our noonday halt. A high wind and heavy clouds made riding for long distances impossible, and there was little indeed to keep us in a cheerful mood. A crumpled range of mountains lightly topped with newly fallen snow beautified the left-hand horizon; now and again a group of Gobi antelopes sped away like winged creatures through the kind of sage-brush that recalled Arizona or Nevada, their white flags seeming a saucy defiance to us; and in mid-morning we passed through the Great Wall. It was fortunate that our map showed this, for we might easily have mistaken it for the mud enclosure of rather an extensive field and never have given it a second glance. Instead of the mammoth stone barrier to be seen near Peking, it was a mere ridge of packed earth, perhaps eight feet high and as many wide at the base, with broad gaps in it here and there, through which wander the modern trails. The contractors evidently had something of a sinecure out here in the west where the emperor could not keep an eye upon them.