Chapter 14

A village blacksmith of Korea. Note the bellows-pumper in his high hat at the rear

The interior of a native Korean school of the old type,—dark, dirty, swarming with flies, and loud with a constant chorus

In Kongo-san, the “Diamond Mountains” of eastern Korea

The monastery kitchen of Yu-jom-sa, typical of Korean cooking

Much of the east coast of Korea is a mountainous wilderness, culminating in one truly Alpine cluster which the Japanese, quite justly, are striving to make better known to the outside world. If there is anywhere in eastern Asia a more marvelous bit of scenery, or a finer place in which to wander away a few summer days or weeks, than Kongo-san, beginning to be known among foreigners as the Diamond Mountains, I have overlooked it. One might enthuse for pages over the cathedral spires, the colossal cliffs, the magnificent evergreen forests clinging by incredible footholds to the gray rock even of mighty precipices, and a hundred other unnamed beauties of this compact little scenic paradise without giving more than a faint hint of the charms it encloses.

From Gensan, railway terminus of the branch northeastward from Seoul and principal port on the east coast, a small steamer hobbles southward for half a day to a blistering little town called Chozen, swaps passengers with a diminutive wharf, and hurries away again as if the evil spirits of the mountains were after it. One can walk, rickshaw, or Ford it to Onseiri, five miles inland, where the Japanese have built a modern hotel lacking nothing but freedom from Japanese prices, and where there are several Korean inns which house virtually all visitors. Or, one may leave the train from Seoul long before reaching Gensan, and cover the eighty-eight miles from Heiko to Choan-ji Temple, one of the buildings of which the same Japanese have made over into a pleasant little hostelry, by a highway that will carry even full-grown automobiles whenever the rainy season does not suddenly and bodily wipe out great sections of it. For that matter there are sixty-four miles of a road similar in capacity and subject to the same lapses along a beautiful coast-line from Gensan to Onseiri direct. Everything so far mentioned, however, functions only in the summer season, for from October onward Kongo-san is snow-bound and its monks and simple mountaineers drift back into the bucolic existence they and their forerunners enjoyed for centuries before the noisy, hurrying outside world discovered their enchanted retreat.

If the Diamond Mountains were in China, chair-bearers would humor the lazy in their indolence and carry them around the circuit for a most inadequate compensation. Fortunately the Koreans are not so ready to take up the burdens of others, with the result that Kongo-san is spared the sight of the mere tourist, incapable of depending for a few days on his own legs and head. Ajiggy-coom, of whose intelligence I have already spoken elsewhere, and whose sturdiness, unfailing good cheer, and knowledge of the mountain paths were on a par with his other good qualities, kept my indispensable belongings within constant reach in spite of the swift pace circumstances forced me to set;otherwise my own feet paid the toll for whatever my eyes feasted upon. In fact, we made the circuit in three days, and saw in four everything that other visitors have considered worth making an exertion to see, which is reputed to be a record. But I admit this not in pride, but in contrition, for not to linger, to stroll, to camp for weeks hither and yon among the towering peaks, beside the torrential ravines, away in the scented recesses of the virgin forests of Kongo-san is to commit a sacrilege and to deny oneself one of the good things of life.

There are trails that pant upward for hours more steeply than any stairway built by man, revealing constantly changing vistas of fantastically carved rock pinnacles, of combinations of mountain and forest rarely seen even in the Alps, and, high enough up, glimpses of the sea itself, down into which Kongo-san comes tumbling in mighty cliffs, sheer as the walls of sky-scrapers. There are trails that wander hour after hour down great rock gorges where streams too clear to be described in words leap from pool to blue-green pool, and where the world rears up on either side so swiftly that only an eagle could escape from the ravine except by its natural exit. There are places which only the feet of intrepid and ardent lovers of nature have ever trodden, or, what is still better, ever will, and pinnacles of sharpened rock from the all but unattainable points of which myriads of others like them, yet each utterly different, stretch away in an endless forest of white granite spires among which sunshine and rain and the often swirling mists make new beauties each more beautiful than the last.

But we are wasting ink. The most expert weaver of words could not spin a pattern that would be more than a faint and caricature-like resemblance to the reality, even in some of the milder corners and aspects of the Diamond Mountains. Let us acknowledge plain impossibility at once therefore and see what hints can be conveyed by the matter-of-fact pigments at our disposal.

It is about fifty miles around the base of Kongo-san and the whole playground of nature covers only an area of seventy-five square miles, but not even in the Andes has the builder of mountains so nearly outdone himself within so limited a compass. A range over which no one has yet found a way divides this into what is called the Inner and the Outer Kongo, each with its endless variety of peerless scenic features. In places the trails crawl along the face of granite precipices by causeways or stairs of logs laid corduroy fashion and held in place by big iron spikes driven into the solid rock. In others there are huge chains by which to drag oneself to the top of some all but inaccessible summitthat repays a hundredfold all the exertion of reaching it. Twice we had to wade and swim Bambakudo (the “Cañon of Myriad Cascades”) where man-built aids of chiseled rock or chained logs failed us, and where no human legs would have been frog-like enough to carry us from boulder to boulder across the foaming stream. To see the best of the region needs often hands as well as feet, and there are many times when the agility and steel nerves of the steeple-jack and the endurance of the Marathon runner are indispensable to the man who cannot bear the shame of turning back from an attempted undertaking.

If its delicious sylvan isolation and its marvelous scenery were all Kongo-san had to offer, it would be well worthy of world-wide fame; but to these are added about twoscore of Buddhist temples and monasteries so old and so withdrawn from the world that they alone would be worth climbing far to see. Ever since the introduction of Buddhism into Korea, some four centuries after Christ, this chaotic cluster of peaks and abysses has been a kind of holy land of that faith. Converted kings outdid each other in aiding the priests and monks who retired to this secluded region, sending workmen and sculptors to build them temples and cloisters in many and strange places, to chisel images of Buddha in isolated gorges on the faces of immense cliffs, ordering the laymen roundabout the mountains to furnish the recluses sustenance in perpetuity. Tradition has it that there were at one time a hundred and eight separate religious establishments scattered among these compact mountains; but it came to be the kingly custom toward the end of the fifteenth century to persecute Buddhism, and many of the retreats were burned or fell into ruin, while the rest cut themselves off from the outside world as completely as possible. After they were rediscovered, so to speak, some thirty years ago by, strangely enough, an English woman, their almost utter solitude of centuries began to be more and more broken by visitors of the nature-loving rather than the purely pious turn of mind.

The largest of the temples of Kongo-san is Yu-jom-sa, in which we spent the night following the perpendicular climb into the Inner Kongo, and it is quite typical of the others. A log bridge led across the acrobatic stream we had been trailing from near the summit, to a cluster of a dozen or more buildings, widely varying in size but all in the rather gaudy yet not unpleasing flare-roofed style common to Korean temples, and more or less so to those of Japan and China. Built of wood throughout, they had a dark and venerable aspect, even though they are credited since their establishment with having been destroyed more thanforty times by fire—an extremely common affliction to the monkish residents of Kongo-san. Of the multicolored bogies and painted wooden gods within the temples, of the colorful wall scenes which give these background, even of the dainty pagoda rising slenderly as high as the highest roof, with tinkling little bells at each corner of its many stories, I need say nothing in particular, for these are things to be found in any Korean sanctuary. What was less familiar were the great kitchens from which the big establishment and its visitors are fed, or the wooden trough that brings the finest of mountain water down from miles away to a series of huge hollowed logs ranged closely side by side on the slightly sloping space between the two clusters of buildings. Those who wished to drink dipped with a quaint little wooden dipper from the upper logs, those supplying the kitchen took water from a little farther down; hands and faces were washed lower still, and finally came the reservoirs in which kitchen utensils and the like might be rinsed. To say that these descending orders of use were strictly obeyed either by visitors or the monks themselves, however, would be to overdraw any Korean picture.

Most of the temples and monasteries of Kongo-san supply food, and many of them sleeping-quarters, to all who apply for them, as there are neither inns nor the suggestion of shops or laymen venders in the mountains. A novice met us at the temple end of the bridge and assigned me a room, quite bare until it came time for boys to bring the little table on which I was served in a squatting position, but with the usual brown-paper floor of Korean dwellings. Cleanliness, at least as far as anything came to my eyes, was quite general. We had arrived before sunset, and there was time to see something of the daily life of the place before it retired early for the night. Big piles of cord-wood and brush in back courts testified to quite different weather than this delightful August evening at many hundred feet elevation. Numbers of the younger inmates were playing a medieval kind of cross between tennis and handball when we came; on the edge of the graveled temple terrace that served as court were two crude gymnastic turning-bars on which some of the priests and novices did tolerably difficult feats. A roar of laughter went up when, having been jokingly invited to join in this sport, I had almost to duck my head to pass under the bars that most of the others could only reach by jumping. They trotted out the tallest man in the establishment, and roared again when he proved to be several inches shorter than I; and I am sure I lost the reputation for veracity among them because I asserted that, as people of my country go, I am not particularly tall. There were many boys about the place, but I saw no signs of women, though the recluses of Kongo-san are reputed to obey their vows of celibacy much more in the breach than in the observance. The yellow robe which makes the Buddhist priest so picturesque a figure in some other lands had no counterpart here, at least in their outdoor, every-day wear. They wore almost the ordinary Korean male costume, in most cases of sackcloth, like men in mourning, though there were some white and others with a bluish tint. Heads of course were cropped, and there were no head-dresses of any kind in evidence.

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