CHAPTER XXON TO SIAN-FU
Early on the fourth day we climbed up out of a great road cañon to a mammoth stone archway that marks the boundary between Honan and Shensi provinces, and immediately pitched down again into another chasm of equal depth. Nor was there any improvement in the fragile soil, in the endless lines of coolies going and coming, or in the mangy beggars who squatted, loudly lamenting, in the dust here and there along the sunken road all the way into strongly walled Tungkwan. This important outpost of Shensi Province lies just over the Honan border, on the Hoang Ho, yellow river indeed here at this shallow season, across which one may see the loess hills of the province of Shansi, just then suffering acutely from drouth. The world had worn away from about the massive wall that surrounds the town, as it does from about even a mud shrine in the loess country, so that we had to climb again, rather stiffly, to reach the imposing city gate that admitted us.
In strict duty, no doubt, the soldiers straggling about it should have demanded our passports, which the Wai-chiao-pu in Peking, whose privilege it is to look after “outside-country people,” had smeared with half an acre of red-ink-stamped characters purporting to be permission to visit five specified provinces, after which they must, officially at least, be returned to Peking for further desecration. But all the soldiers said was “Pien-tze,” and the Chinese visiting-cards we produced in answer to that laconic request were evidently all they wanted as proof of our identity. Since the major’s name chances to begin with Ph, forcing him also to pass as Mr. Fei in Chinese, we were at once taken for brothers, even in the face of decided facial proof to the contrary, and passed on our way unquestioned.
The native pastor of theFu-ying-tong, as the Chinese call a Protestant mission, was not in town. But in the interior of China any Caucasian passes at face value, at least until he has definitely been proved a counterfeit, and we were soon installed in several dusty, slightly furnished rooms of the rambling, temple-like compound, whileChang and the cook explored the kitchen with the caretaker. Had we arrived an hour earlier we might perhaps have gone on at once and reached Sian-fu that same night. For, strange as it sounded, there was a motor-bus line running more or less daily half-way across “Hidden Shensi,” from Tungkwan to the capital. But the buses started early in the morning; moreover, with all our dunnage we should probably need a special car, and there was just then none in town. If we really wished to go on next day, it would be best, they told us, if the major in his official capacity should wire the Tuchun at Sian-fu, to whom this little venture in less sluggish transportation personally belonged. Meanwhile, there was the matter of settling with our muleteers, and deciding how muchcumshaw—without which no transaction in China is considered properly closed—we cared to give them. Tungkwan, too, was large and interesting enough, with a wall which clambered for a long way along the crest of a ridge high above us; but there is much sameness to most Chinese cities, and this one seemed to offer nothing unique. But at least there was something of that quality in a leisurely half-day for the ablutions, razor-wieldings, resorting, and repose of which we were in arrears.
It did indeed require a special car for all our expedition, and even at that I was forced to banish to the running-board the chauffeur’s assistant, who habitually fills out the front seat of any public conveyance of this sort in China. His duties seemed to be to crank the car, to attend the wants of a perpetually parched radiator, to tinker with the engine whenever there was the slightest chance to do so, and in general to help the imported chauffeur to reduce the exiled vehicle from a movable to an immovable object as soon as possible. The driver had been brought all the way from Tientsin to grace Shensi’s new enterprise, having been chosen evidently because of what he did not know about automobile engines and their proper manipulation, and therefore sure to be free from prejudice. If we understood rightly, the conveyance had been carried piecemeal through the loess cañons on mule-back, and no doubt some of the parts had been assigned tasks for which they had never been trained. But it is axiomatic that nothing short of total dissolution will prevent a Ford truck from functioning, and less than two hours after this one had been requested to start we were staggering in spasmodic jerks out through the western city gate.
It is 290lifrom Tungkwan to Sian-fu, almost exactly the same distance as we had made in mule-litters in more than three days; so that though we never attained breathless speed the journey felt rapid bycomparison. Once through the massive stone archway that separated city from country, the going did not at first seem to be appreciably better than the alleged road behind us; one gasped at the temerity of any one, especially the timid Chinese, actually setting out on so ideal a route for an obstacle race with the expectation of really reaching a destination nearly a hundred miles away. But in time we came to realize that it was what the Chinese consider an unusually fine road. Loess had for the most part given way to a somewhat more cohesive soil, and there were no real cañons. When he was Tuchun of the province, the “Christian general” had built, mainly with soldier labor—the two words seem incompatible in China—this raised highway beside the old haphazard route all the way from the frontier to the capital. His intentions had been excellent; but his funds were limited, the soil available contains not a hint of stone or gravel, and public coöperation was of course wholly lacking. The general had done his best to replace this last un-Chinese asset by board signs set up at frequent intervals along the way, with a warning that the highroad was reserved for automobiles only, and that any other use of it would be severely punished. His successor had evidently tried to keep in force this unprecedented interference with Chinese freedom of individual action, and his authority was certainly considerable, as witness the fact that only here and there had the sign-boards even yet been turned into fuel. But the Tuchun could scarcely be expected to patrol the famous highway personally, and even at that he could not have kept an eye on all parts of it at once. Therefore it was much more densely thronged than the typical Chinese road down below it. Donkeys, mules, pack-cattle, rickshaws—these often run the eighty-seven miles in less than two and a half days, and make the round trip in five, at a cost to the passenger of about two American dollars—innumerable wheelbarrows, especially coolies in never ending procession, prefer to ignore the sign-boards, if indeed even the slight minority who can read them consider the prohibition as really meant. Worst of all, whole regiments of the Tuchun’s own soldiers were moving eastward, evidently in order to be more immediately available to their real commander-in-chief, Wu Pei-fu, and more than half the carts that carried these and their helter-skelter paraphernalia were themselves frankly disobeying the placarded order. These sharp-tired, two-wheeled contrivances are magnificently designed for ruining a road, particularly one built merely of earth, in the shortest possible time, and the result of the trespassing of even the few thousand we passed during the one day can readily be imagined. Then there were many spots where the Chinese genius for never repairing anything until repair is absolutely unavoidable manifested itself, and here and there some farmer had frankly chopped the highway in two to make a passage for his irrigation-ditch, a privilege as time-honored as China’s written language.