We were luxuriating in the extraordinary experience of lying abed after daylight when there came a scratching on one of the paper windows of the dining-room where we had been accommodated, and we heard with astonishment Chang’s mellifluous voice murmuring, “Masters, what time like start this morning?” Our missing caravan had finally overcome the difficulties of the river passage and had reached Chungwei about two in the morning. Perhaps it was not so entirely out of sympathy for our weary employees as we fancied that we set ten o’clock as the hour of departure and turned over for another nap.
Our host very seriously doubted whether we could keep to our schedule and make Ningsia in four days, particularly with so late a start. But we had little difficulty in doing so, thanks mainly to the fact that the weather had turned bitter cold. For the peasants all along the cultivated part of the river valley had recently opened the irrigation sluices for the customary autumn flooding, and had it not chanced that thick ice formed a day or two ahead of us on all the streams thus created, we should have been at least a week in covering the four hundred and fifty li, as carts coming in from the northeast reported they had been. Even where the alleged road itself had not been frankly used as an irrigation ditch, it wandered and dodged and side-stepped in a sincere but more or less vain effort to keep out of the diked bare fields which in summer cover with green all this rich brown valley from sand-dunes to river. Now there were vast skating-rinks everywhere, doubly troublesome when they were half thawed in the early afternoons. By picking a roundabout way we could have skated much of the way home. But the crowded population of the valley took no advantage of the recreation offered them. Probably there was not a pair of skates in the province, certainly not unless they had been brought by a foreigner or some student returned from abroad; and Kansu sends no students overseas. Once in a while we saw a group of children timidly sliding on the ice, with the awkwardness and limited range of Mr. Pickwick, the boys often barefoot, the little girls in their bound feet usually only looking wistfully on. Now and again such road as remained jumped by an arched earth bridgelet over a larger irrigation ditch with an axle-cracking jolt, only to wallow on again through ice and half-frozen mud.
As if all this were not bad enough, the peasants here and there were felling big trees squarely across the road, and letting travel drag its way around them as best they could, or wait until the trunk had been sawed up. The traveler in rural China is constantly being reminded that he is an unwelcome trespasser on private domain.
Before we left Lanchow we had been warned that the road would “change gage” at Chungwei, and a day or two before we reached it our cartmen came to ask whether they should fit their carts with other axles there. That of course we recognized as a gentle hint for added cumshaw, which we met with innocent faces and the information that they might reduce their carts to one wheel, or increase them to six, with one under each animal, so far as we were concerned, as long as they made the hundred and some li a day which our schedule demanded. One of them, I believe, did change axles, for I recall that it was only the old opium-smoker with the three ill fed animals whose cart could never reach the two ruts at once. These were made by ox-carts peculiar to this region, their two wheels seven feet high and out of all proportion to the little load of chunk coal or bundles of straw which they carried in the small box between them. In places these cumbersome vehicles monopolized the road, but they were always quick to give us the right of way, even to the extent of climbing high banks or backing into ditches from which it could not always have been easy to extricate themselves. This seemed to be as much due to the natural good nature of the rustic drivers as to a certain fear, not so much of foreigners, since in this part of the journey we were usually so muffled as not to be easily recognized as such, as of an expedition whose equipment showed that it was not of local origin. One is constantly getting little hints that the Chinese feeling toward “outside-country” people may almost as easily exist toward those from another province, even another village, as toward those from foreign lands. Sometimes there were whole trains of these ostrich-legged carts crawling together across the uneven country—twenty-two of them in the caravan I counted one morning soon after sunrise, and they were carrying, among them all, about what an American farmer would consider one good load of straw. For some reason these contrivances do not shriek their ignorance of axle-grease anything like so loudly as they should, but instead are almost musical. For beneath the axle of each cart hangs a long bell, of scalloped bottom much like those in Chinese temples, with a clapper in the form of a baseball-bat hanging so far down that only its extreme upper edge strikes the bell, while the lower end gathers some of its impetus by bouncing off every hummock in the middle of the “road.”
Remnants of the Great Wall frequently appeared, and once the road passed through a half-ruined arch of it, one side still covered with the yellow bricks that had formerly made this gateway at least rather an imposing structure. Walnut and Chinese date-trees, willows and pencil-like poplars, all leafless now and showing their big stick nests of crows and magpies like some sort of tumor, clustered by the dozen about the farm-houses and were scattered here and there across the broad valley; but there were by no means enough of them, and the mountains above were totally bare. Many of the high-walled farm-yards looked at some little distance like great feudal castles, but on closer view the walls always proved to be merely of dried mud, with nothing but the usual dreary misery inside. Sometimes two or three score of these family dwellings were in sight at once, their flat roofs invariably piled high with bundles of wheat or straw, with corn and kaoliang stalks; but there was never any suggestion of comfortable prosperity about the interior or the inmates. Children in a single quilted rag, chapped and begrimed beyond belief on faces and hands and from the waist down, still huddled in sunny corners or ran halfheartedly about at some unimaginative game or other. When the weather is quite too bitter to be borne, they squat or lie upon the more or less heated k’angs indoors, to the injury of their growth and health. The American memorial hospital in Lanchow, by the way, treats many cases of cancer of the hips caused by burns from sleeping on these Chinese mud-brick beds.
The Chinese persistence in maintaining the highest possible birthrate in proportion to the available nourishment, and the constant subdivisions of agricultural holdings among the multiplying sons of succeeding generations, makes comfortable prosperity out of the question, whatever the fertility of the soil, the industry of the cultivators, or even such improvements as those introduced by the sixteenth-century Jesuits. There is much prattle of education as a cure. If by education is understood, among other things, the teaching that it is unwise, not to say criminal, for even the most poverty-stricken, the lame, the halt, and the blind, the mentally defective and the morally perverted, to marry as early and as often as possible, that there shall be no lack of sons to worship at the family mud-heaps, then it is sadly needed. But is it possible to educate, even to the point required for a republican form of government to function at all, a people whose entire time, strength, and energy are constantly required to keep it from slipping over the brink of starvation, even though that education come from some outside source and be widely adjusted to the problem in hand?
At this season there was no work to be done in the fields, and little anywhere else except the gathering of twigs and dried grass for fuel, or roadway droppings for use in the spring. Hence it was naturally the time for the dedicating of temples and worshiping within them. The attitude of the Chinese toward their gods has been excellently summed up as “respectful neglect”; but the treatment accorded them varies greatly in different regions. There is no means of computing how many religious edifices we passed on our way to Lanchow that were falling or had fallen into decay, that had been abandoned entirely except for a beggar or two posing as priests, or had become noisome dens in which thieves divide their booty and vagrants scatter their filth; that the traveler may see in almost any part of China. But the people in this far western valley of the Yellow River were above the average in piety, treating their gods with much more respect than neglect, perhaps because their good offices are so constantly needed to keep back from one side or the other the sand or the water that would mean quick ruin. At any rate, temples, field-shrines, monasteries, and numerous lesser signs of superstitions were so plentiful that the valley might have been mistaken for holy ground; and not only were those in a state of repair by no means common in China, but new ones were growing up. Early one afternoon we began to meet, first men and women, the latter all astride donkeys or packed into carts, in their gayest raiment and an unusually frolicsome mood, and then dozens of youths carrying furled banners; and at length the auditory tortures of Chinese “music” were wafted more and more painfully to our ears as our animals brought us nearer the focal uproar. A bright little temple, newly built back near the foot-hills, across which a sanddune seemed to be creeping, was being dedicated; and every village, every cluster of farm compounds for many li roundabout had come in person to bring their respects and to share in whatever benefits might accrue. It was a Taoist temple, according to Chang, but as he said something later about a statue of Buddha, and as a Confucian scroll was plainly in evidence, no doubt the new building conformed to the general Chinese rule of seating the three spiritual leaders of the race harmoniously side by side, with Buddha, the foreigner, courteously granted the central place of honor. The banners, it seemed, gay with colors and Chinese characters, were brought either to bless or to be blessed, after which they were carried back to their respective villages oozing a kind of deputy godliness. Inside, energetic young men were beating drums and shooting firecrackers to scare off devils—the timid Chinese are always exorcising evil spirits, but never tackle the real ones of graft, banditry, filth, the over-production of children, and all their other real ailments. Long after we had turned the ridge that shut off this corner of the valley, the charivari of droning priests and misused instruments drifted to our hearing.
The days had grown so short that we were forced to use both ends of the nights to piece them out. But for a week or more this was no great hardship, as a brilliant moon lighted both morning and evening and gave the landscape touches that were unknown to it by day. Under the rising or the setting sun the wrinkled ranges of rich-brown mountains wrapped the horizon in velvets of constantly varying shades. I recall particularly the heaped-up mass just across the river from an unusually picturesque walled town which we came upon just as the day was fading out, and the tint of old red wine, blending momentarily until it became the purple of the grape itself, seemed a masterpiece which even nature seldom attains. But the town, though it awakened again that hope of the romantic within its walls, was so miserable a den of broken stone “lions” and ruined former grandeur, of comfortless people staring like monkeys at merely strolling strangers, that we were only too glad to accept the hospitality of an inn outside the walls.
Beyond this there lay forty li of rolling half sand, utterly uninhabited, then another broad fertile valley with the same oversupply of big mud bricks and Jesuit irrigation works, or more modern but less effective imitations of them. Here there were even more skating-rinks, and incredible clouds of blue pigeons, from which the major easily gathered all the fowl we needed to vary our diet to the end of the trip, though much to the dismay of Chang, who whispered in my ear the horrible information that “they home-side pigeon.” The li suddenly grew longer, as they have a habit of doing unexpectedly, so that it was well after dark when we reached Yeh-shih-pu, a “Hwei-Hwei” town where we could not even have our own bacon for breakfast, because the innkeeper would not admit our cook to his kitchen until he had promised to bear in mind his religious scruples. Such mishaps, added to the fact that every article of food containing the slightest moisture was habitually frozen solid, made our repasts less Cleopatran than they might have been. Cold chicken or pigeon with little sheets of ice dropping from between the muscles as the famished traveler tears them apart may not be so bad, but the big Lanchow pears gained nothing by coming to the table as hard as stones, and certainly there is no call to praise the taste of frozen hard-boiled eggs, if they have any. Yet most such dainties, the pears in particular, were far worse if they were thawed out before serving.
It seemed almost summer again on the brilliant afternoon without wind when an almost good road picked us up and staggered erratically toward Ningsia. Perhaps there was some slight excuse for its vagaries, for much of the plain was covered with ice-fields thickly grown with tall reeds, which were being gathered and carried to town on every type of conveyance from coolie shoulders to giant-wheeled ox-carts. Among the constant processions of travelers in both directions Mohammedans appeared to be in the majority, with white felt skullcaps, or dirty “Turkish” towels worn like turbans, greatly predominating over any other form of head-gear. From a distance the city wall seemed merely a glorified example of those about farm compounds; and high above it, high in fact above the city gates, towered two pagodas against the distant horizon of the inevitable crumpled range of low mountains or high hills, hazy with shade along the base, bright with a slight fall of snow along the top, where the low winter sun could still strike them.