Fifty li beyond Sian-fu the alleged road went down into the broad river-bed of the Wei, a sturdy tributary of the Hoang Ho and in certain seasons several times wider than it was now. Far out at the edge of the water was gathered a mighty multitude waiting for the very inadequate ferry to set them across to the large walled town of Sienyang on the further shore. A typical Chinese ferry is a marvelous example of the worst way to cross a river, and this one was no exception to the rule. Out in the sand close alongside the still broad stream there were densely crowded together, in all the disorder of which the Chinese, who are adepts at it, are capable, carts piled high with all sorts of awkward cargo, mules, donkeys, and a few old hacks of horses, all under cumbersome packs, laden wheelbarrows by the score, and coolies without number, each carrying with him a donkey-load of something or other. All this assortment, not to mention dozens of mere Chinese travelers of less good-natured mien than the coolies, and all sorts of journeying odds and ends scattered through the throng, was lying in wait for one of three clumsy, home-made barges which at long intervals poled and singsonged themselves from shore to shore. Wherever a Chinese crowd gathers there quickly flock those eager to minister to its wants, so that out here on the bare sand there had sprung up several straw-mat restaurants, a shoemaker’s hasty establishment, a blacksmith-shop, which could have been packed up entire in five minutes and carried off over the smithy’s shoulder, for those who wished to take advantage of the delay by having a horse shod or some unavoidable repair done, while the hawkers of everything hawkable to such customers struggled through the chaotic mob chanting their wares in all the tones from diphtheritic hoarseness to the shrillest of falsettos. Then of course there were the inevitable beggars, young and old, sickly and sturdy, slinking in and out through every possible opening.
It would have been un-Chinese to take turns or conform to any other system that might have made easier the task in hand, so that when the first of the three craft, more overloaded than any American “trolley” in the rush hour, began to show signs of where it purposed to land, there was a helter-skelter in that direction which resulted in many personal discomfitures. Luckily foreigners are usually given a wide berth in such stampedes; whether it is out of sheer respect or merely due to some old tradition of one of these strange-looking “outside-country people” suddenly “making his hand into a ball” and chastising in an unprecedented manner those who were so unfortunate as to jostle him, there is almost always alacrity and generally respectful cheerfulness in giving one of them full right of way. Personally we might not have taken advantage of this attitude and made chaos more chaotic by demanding first place; but Chang, like any Chinese in the service of a foreigner, could not resist impressing that fact upon his fellow-countrymen; and before we realized it he had somehow forced our expedition to the front at the spot where the boat at last concluded to ground. For it would not have been conventional to prepare a place where the craft might actually land, any more than it would have been for it to carry a real gang-plank in place of the two warped and writhing slabs that were at length disentangled from the welter of everything on board and slid over the side. For one thing, a real gang-plank could probably not have survived some band of thieves for a single night; for another, how could the swarms of tattered men hanging about either shore earn their meager food if carts and wheelbarrows could be gotten aboard without their assistance? Had there been any suggestion of authority to keep the one throng back far enough for the other to disembark, the boat’s stay might at least have been cut in half. But China is preëminently the land of individual rather than communal liberty, and there ensued something superior by many times to any college rush. That a few who wished to disembark had been swept back again upon the boat, and vice versa, was of course no unusual experience. When at last comparative quiet began to settle down about us, and the half-dozen polemen at the stern took up their weird chantey, we found that while we ourselves and most of our animals were on board none of our carts had won the mêlée. Carts could not get on board under their own natural motive-power, but, having been unhitched, they must be bodily lifted and shouldered up the crazy substitutes for gang-planks.
Though the opposite shore was a stone-paved road close under the city wall, landing facilities were far worse than where we had embarked. For one thing, the craft grounded fully ten feet from shore and could not be coaxed to move in either direction until all the coolies, who made up three fourths of the passenger-list, had been driven overboard, packs and all, and left to scramble as best they could up the stone facing of the bank. Many of them were carrying cotton in loose bundles or in high cone-shaped baskets, and now and then in their shrieking, disorganized struggles a boll or two of the precious stuff fell into the muddy water. The dismay at such a disaster, though only on the part of the owner or carrier, who screamed with excitement until he had rescued the threatened bit of property, was not merely both absurd and pathetic, but a striking commentary on the poverty of China’s great masses. Eventually the boat was poled close enough to what should and could easily have been a stone runway so that the frightened animals could be forced to walk the teetering plank without more than two or three of them falling overboard, and some two hours after we had reached the river our own carts were manhandled ashore from a following boat and our expedition was once more organized.
Thousands of people, and probably at least hundreds of carts, cross the Wei at Sienyang every day in the year, and have done so for centuries; yet the several simple little improvements that would make the crossing a brisk matter of routine have evidently never been thought of—except by critical foreigners—much less ever attempted. No Chinese concerned would feel really happy if the thing were not done in the very hardest possible way consistent with its being accomplished at all; that would make him feel out of touch with his worshiped ancestors. Besides, whom do you expect to make those improvements? Not the local authorities, for they probably get more “squeeze” under the present system; not the boatmen, for the longer the boat is in loading the fewer times they will have to pole it across; not, certainly, the flocks of hangers-on who find in the difficulties of embarking and disembarking their only source of livelihood; and surely not the passenger, for his only interest is to get across, not to make it easier for other people, for whose weal or woe he has a Chinaman’s supreme indifference.
Beyond Sienyang the whole dust-hazy landscape was covered as far as the eye could see with graves, not the little conical spatters of earth to be seen in myriads all over China, but immense mounds by the score, some of them veritable mountains—and nowhere a touch of any color but the yellow brown of rainless autumn. Once perhaps there had been small forests about these tombs, but at most now there was left a rare broken stone horse of clumsy workmanship and perhaps the remnants of a few other more or less mythological beasts. What noble beings had been worthy the heavy task of piling these great hills over their mortal remains, or when they had graced the earth, no one along the way could tell us. Once or twice a day we passed a huge oblong old bell of elaborate design that had once hung in a temple, and was now rusting away in some moistureless mud-hole, like the abandoned sugar-kettles which litter several islands of the West Indies. Perhaps the temples themselves had fallen entirely away again into the dust from which even holy edifices are constructed in the loess country, and left these abandoned bells as the only remembrance of their former existence. Sometimes one of these had been rescued, whether out of piety, superstition, or some lucrative inspiration, and hung in the one and only tree of which an occasional larger village boasted.
On the second midday we lunched in a cave, and paid even for the water drunk by the mules, as well as their chopped straw and beans; or at least their owners did. In fact, cave dwellings had become almost universal, and were to remain so for many days to come; villages, whole towns of caves, stretched in row after row up the face of great loess cliffs, like the terraced fields that covered every foot of the mountainous world from river-bottom to the crest of the farthest visible range. In all this tumbled expanse often the only touch of color was the persimmons, like big orange-tinted tomatoes—persimmons by the ox-cart-load; wheelbarrows creaking under their double straw boxes of persimmons; baskets of them hanging from the shoulder-poles of jogging coolies; wandering persimmon-sellers everywhere singing their merits; millions of them for sale, millions more being dried in the sun. Even the dust which covered everything and everybody without distinction could not disguise the persimmons’ splash of color, nor hamper the natives from wolfing them entire as often as their worldly wealth warranted the acquisition of one. Dust and skin aside, we also found them the best thing late autumn had to offer—a drink, a lunch, and a dessert all in one.
We crawled out of our sleeping-bags at five each morning and were off at six, except on the few days when we varied that program by making it an hour earlier. With the sun so low that it only overtook us some twenty li away, those daily departures were not only dark but increasingly cold. For though men working in the fields were still sometimes stripped to the waist, at least when the cloudless sun was high, as late as the tenth of November, any suggestion of shadow or of night air became more tinged with serious meaning as the earth underfoot rose higher and higher above sea-level. The roads for the most part were still cañons, sometimes mightier cañons than we had even yet seen; at others they clambered over loess ridges and hills, gashing themselves deeply into these wherever time, traffic, and soil coincided sufficiently to do so. In strict speech there were no roads at all, as there seldom are anywhere in China; not that they were merely atrocious routes of transportation, but because the Chinese scheme of things does not make provision even for a place on which to build a road. Every foot of territory pays a land-tax; the unfortunate landholder on whose property the public chooses to trespass in its strenuous struggles to get itself and its produce from one place to another must pay for that which belongs to him only in name. The result is that a road is a homeless orphan, welcome nowhere, driven from field to field, and ruthlessly done away with by plow or shovel whenever an opportunity offers. The attempts of each of China’s myriad tillers of the soil to chase the un-public highway off his own precious little patches of earth, added to the fact that a driver has only a limited control over the wanderings of his lead-mule, and has no training in directness and time-saving himself, make the average Chinese road the most incredible example of aimless wandering on the face of the earth. There are no fences in this land of walls; the Chinese walls in his home, his towns, his country, but never his fields, which would seem to need it most. For traffic has not the slightest consideration for the damage it may do. It marches serenely over newly planted grain or ripening crops whenever there is the least incentive to do so, and the only redress of the owner is some such feeble protest as digging traverse trenches at frequent intervals along the edge of his land in the usually vain hope that carts will be obliged to keep outside them, or to take advantage of some favorable season of slight travel to uproot the pesky road and throw it away entirely.
There were defiles so narrow through the great loess cañons that carts could not have passed a sedan-chair; and through these came such a constant train of traffic that it is strange the lighter west-bound travel moved at all. Ponderous two-wheeled carts, weighing several times as much as our farm-wagons, drawn by six or seven mules, were not uncommon. All had at least three animals, one in the shafts—and many of these shaft-mules were splendid specimens of mulehood—the rest in front in pairs or trios, with perhaps a lone lead-mule setting the pace. Rope traces running through a large iron ring suspended from each of the shafts attached all the animals directly to the axle. A Chinese shaft-mule’s life is no sinecure. At every incessant bump and lurch of the massive cart he is similarly jolted by the two cumbersome logs that imprison him; if the cart overturns he must go with it; and all day long his head is held painfully erect, not by a mere bit, but by a rawhide thong between his upper lip and the gums. The other animals get off little more cheaply, and with the wicked loads of wheat in long slender bags which endlessly poured in past us from the west, the gasping of the animals as they toiled in the deep sand-like loess, particularly when the cañon led steeply upward over the high ridges which here and there cut across the route, was like the death-rattle of beasts suddenly stricken down.
Under each axle of these carts hung a long bell of cylinder shape, and the dull booming of scores of these could be heard for miles before or behind them. Apparently these wheat-trains traveled day and night. We met them at dawn with all the signs of having already been on the road for hours; all through the night the booming of passing carts could be heard by any one who cared to lie awake; very rarely did we come upon them halted long enough even to feed the jaded animals. There were at least two men on every load, one, whom we suspected to be the driver off duty, stretched out at full length and apparently sleeping as soundly as if the jolting, careening sacks of wheat were a sailor’s hammock. There was really nothing strange in this; the Chinese are trained from birth to sleep under all manner of catch-as-catch-can conditions. With the loess soil constantly swirling about under the least disturbing circumstances, and with a high wind often blowing, the Chinese on their carts, as well as those astride or afoot for that matter, looked ludicrously like an endless procession of clowns with flour-powdered faces, or of mimes wearing death-masks.
Here and there the file was broken by some more leisurely conveyance,—a cart with an ox in the shafts and perhaps a steer and a donkey in front, sometimes with still more incongruous combinations. The narrow cañons were often so congested with beast-drawn traffic that the hundreds of wheelbarrows had to join the pole-shouldering coolies and other pedestrians on the paths along the cliffs high above. These tui-chu (push-carts), as the Chinese call them, had every manner of aid, from a child to a donkey, which we had seen in use in the wheelbarrow brigades east of Sian-fu, and one ingenious fellow had rigged up a large sail over his load and was creaking along nicely before the strong west wind. I never ceased to wonder where the never ending stream of coolies was coming and going from and to, and why. Their toilsome tramps to change places, bag and baggage, seemed a mere waste of effort, like carrying sand from one river-bed to another.