But the automobile that used to carry passengers from there to the rail-head was not, so that we had to make a new arrangement with our cartmen to finish the journey. We were off again quite as usual, therefore, at five in the morning for a twenty-third day of travel; though, including stops, we had been less than twenty-one full days on the road from Lanchow, which is seldom bettered. The eastern city gate, unimposing as the opposite one by which we had entered, and not even similarly decorated, opened without great delay at sight of the major’s card, and we struck away across another great plain, fertile, no doubt, but dismally bare except for the few clumps of leafless trees about the mud farm-houses. It was inevitable that a fantastic range should appear close on the left as the darkness faded, and follow us all the rest of the day. A few miles out of Paotou, before daylight, in fact, we found ourselves riding parallel to a railway embankment. This was some ten feet high, but quite new and made only of the soft local soil without a suggestion of stone in it, and struck in company with a lone telegraph-wire due eastward across the flat country, quite unaccustomed to such directness. It was easy to imagine what would happen to the embankment when the rains came, to say nothing of the temporary track down on the floor of the plain, which we came upon only seven or eight miles out, with a work-train already using it. For there was the usual refrain of anything or any one connected with the Chinese Government: money was not available to build bridges across the gaps in the embankment and finish the line properly, and it was only in this imperfect form that the Suiyuan railway reached Paotou barely a month behind us.

The first station was still sixty li east of it, however, when we returned to civilization, by a bad road full of stones, now between mud field-walls that tried in vain to confine it, now zigzagging across the bare fields. We passed through one large dilapidated town, high above which a striking peak stood out from the range, with a lama temple that looked like some elaborate tourist-resort part-way up it. Then the road became more and more crowded with travel, with sometimes ten or a dozen “Peking carts” in a row taking passengers to the train; but it still skated occasionally across a patch of ice before we came at last, soon after noon, to a lone station congested with travelers, goods, and halted caravans. Acres covered with huge chunks of coal were the most conspicuous of the exports awaiting transportation at that season, but it was easy to see how badly a railway out of Paotou was needed.

There was, of course, a free-for-all mêlée about the ticket-window, with no attempt by the several men strutting around in new police uniforms to bring a suggestion of order; but we were duly installed in the daily freight and third-class train when it rambled away an hour or so after our arrival. All the expedition was still with us except the two carts and their drivers. For the least reward we could give the pleasant-mannered Kansu ponies that had carried us, except when we walked beside them, 770 miles in three weeks, was a journey to Peking, even though we found when it was too late that their transportation would be higher than the fare charged a mere human passenger in the highest class available, and their accommodations an open car in which boulders of coal might at any moment come down and do them serious injury. Taking the horses meant, of course, that we had to be accessories before the fact in inflicting upon Chihli Province our putative mafu; and naturally the cook and Chang must be returned to the place where we had picked them up.

We had covered, we found, when a train seat gave a chance for figuring, 4400 li between the two railways, in other words 1320 miles, all in the saddle except the scant hundred by mule-litter. The hardy Chinese passengers on all sides of us were so warmly dressed in their cotton-padded and sheepskin garments that they kept the windows wide open, even though the car was innocent of so much as the makings of a fire. Our feet in particular suffered, as those of foreigners usually do in North China in winter, and called our attention more closely to the contrivances which the Chinese use to keep theirs warm. Leather there was none, except in a rare pair of Mongol boots, large enough for a dozen woolen socks inside. Felt, often in four thicknesses, sometimes in six, was the material of most shoes; one old man at a cold wayside station had on a pair of Greek tragedy buskins that looked like two hams cut open to admit the feet.

That evening we reached Kweihwa, otherwise known as Suiyuan, just in time to transfer to the newly scheduled express to Peking. The major considered it suitable to the dignity of his calling to travel second class—there being no first on this line—and therefore had the pleasure of sitting up all night between two hard wooden bench-backs. Having myself no “face” to lose, I found the third-class coaches big and box-car-like, with plenty of room between the narrow benches along the walls to spread my cot and make my bed as usual. The car was full of men stretched out on the floor, the benches, or their saddlebag beds, but the small iron stove in the center of it did little to change it from a foreign to a Chinese bedroom—for night is the one part of the twenty-four hours when artificial heat is in great demand in wintertime China.

In the cold morning hours I found Mongols, Chinese who had turned Mongols and lamas, women of that race ugly with dirt and jewelry, surly-looking Mohammedans with long red-tinged chin-whiskers and features that seemed almost of exaggerated Jewish type, and every variety of the ordinary Chinese of both sexes, all among my traveling-companions or those who got on or off during the day. Sometimes the distinction was not certain, for in their many raids upon the ancient empire the Mongols carried off so many Chinese women that the northern Chinese and the Mongols often look much alike. We were struck with the fact that there was much less pleasing simplicity here than among the timid country people far from such modern things as railroads. The Great Wall, now quite imposing, stretched for hour after hour along the base of the mountain range still on our left; but the Hoang Ho was gone, having turned abruptly southward not far from where we had taken the train, to keep that course to Tungkwan, hundreds of miles away, where we had entered the province of Shensi. Kalgan, already familiar, appeared in the early afternoon, then in due season Nankou Pass, with the best known and most striking section of China’s great artificial barrier, and soon after dark of the shortest, yet in some ways the longest, day of the year our respective families might have been dimly seen striving to identify us beneath the long failure to shave which our hasty home-coming had imposed upon us, as the express discharged its multitude at Hsi-chi-men on the far northwestern corner of Peking.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

  1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
  2. Retained anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.