Chapter 56

I take my turn at leading our procession of mule litters and let my companions swallow its dust for a while

The road down into Shensi. Once through the great arch-gate that marks the provincial boundary, the road sinks down into the loess again, and beggars line the way into Tungkwan

Hwa-shan, one of the five sacred mountains of China

An example of Chinese military transportation

However, we were by no means confined to the bottoms of the cañons. A mule-litter, we quickly discovered, resembles many another contrivance in this imperfect world, in that it has both its advantages and its drawbacks. Shaped like a bath-tub, it might perhaps be quite cozy could one merely make it up as a bed and crawl into it. But when it is already half filled with such odds and ends as steamer-trunks and bedding-rolls, there is only a limited space left for the mere passenger. Moreover, the straw mattings are neither sun- nor dust-proof, and while one may in time and with patience learn either to sleep or to read in a litter, in spite of the camel-like motion varied by a sudden disconcerting lurch every quarter-hour or so, when the plodding driver outside concludes that the poles need leveling on one or the other mule, the average traveler is more apt to pass his time drowsily gazing at the plethora of red pompons and trappings on his lead-mule and listening to the monotonous tinkling of his bell. Litter-riding is an art that must be learned. As the rolling motion is prone quickly to unbalance the contrivance, proper bestowal of the body is closely akin to tight-rope walking. If one be of a restless disposition and accustomed to change the lower leg for the upper at certain intervals, one must not let the attention grow drowsy; if one persists in the reprehensible habit of smoking, then in laying down the pipe in the right hand great care must be exercised that the can of tobacco be at the same instant deposited with the left, lest the excess of weight prove fatal. In all our journey my own litter turned over upon me but once, and that was in an inn-yard where assistance was at hand to drag me out from under the trunks, cots, suit-cases, and what not under which the mishap buried me; but if there were ten consecutive minutes when I did not expect it to do so, they were probably during the many times that I was not inside it. We met in the west foreigners of long Chinese experience who did all their traveling in litters, some indeed who lined and carpeted theirs with felt, put a stove inside, and journeyed for weeks at a time, even in the depths of winter, reading many volumes during the journey. But while we are quite ready to admit without controversy the comfort of a mule-litter as compared with a “Peking cart,” I for one found the finest thing about it the fact that one could get out and walk.

This we did early and often, and thereby frequently kept out of the dust-swirling cañons entirely for long stretches. For the constant procession of coolies plodding up and down this route had worn at least one, and often as many as half a dozen, hard smooth paths alongthe brink of the chasm, paths undulating and meandering just enough to be delightful. From them we could look far down the sheer cliffs, seldom fifteen feet apart, upon the endless mule-trains, broken here and there by cumbersome two-wheeled carts, ox or horse drawn, or by a disdainfully leisurely string of camels, all so tiny with the depth sometimes that they seemed a procession of children’s toys. At the same time we enjoyed a brilliant sunshine—often too brilliant, in fact, though October was all but gone—now and then a delicious breeze, and views of the life of the region and landscapes frequently approaching the magnificent, all of which were unknown to the man who was drowsing or attempting to read in his litter far below. The average speed of our conveyances, though they were the swiftest things in the defiles, was scarcely equal to a reasonable walking pace, so that we could here and there wander a bit from the straight and narrow paths for a glimpse of something that seemed worth the deviation.

There were places, for instance, where rows of old earthenware jars were set up in ridges of earth and filled with water, often carried from long distances, for the watering of passing animals—trust the people of cruelly crowded China not to overlook any chance to pick up a few stray “cash.” The latter, by the way, were now almost the only money seen, and passing coolies carried a string of them looped over a shoulder or some other convenient projection. Sometimes a row of enormous bowls formed a wall, shutting off a compound, instead of the commonplace structure of yellowish dried mud so generally serving that purpose. Naked children swarming everywhere and men with bronzed torsos bared to the waist working in the fields seemed to give the calendar the lie. Blindfolded animals plodding an endless round, a pair of men, or a man and his crippled wife, manipulating a big, crude windlass, brought up water from the field-wells scattered hither and yon, and unsuspected, if the superstructures were lacking, until one had all but stumbled into them. The vagaries of the loess soil were often fantastic, sometimes incredible. Extremely friable, wholly unstratified, yet surprisingly solid, too, its contrasts were a constant astonishment. There were villages in which it had split and gashed and fallen away into some adjoining rivulet cañon to such an extent that the mud houses seemed to be strewn helter-skelter among a forest of cathedral-spires and Gothic roofs, perched at every possible height and dozing serenely on perpendicular chips of earth which it seemed impossible that the first slight breath of mind should not precipitate in a mere cloud of yellow dust into the terrifying chasm below. Its persistence in standing long afterit must surely have fallen was one of the wonders of the sunken roads. Here a great slice of it, split wholly free from the main precipice and seeming to hang like a curling wave a hundred feet or more directly above our passing litters, gave every appearance of being on the very point of breaking and burying a score of travelers beneath it, yet somehow it never did, at least in our presence. Innumerable such catastrophes must have come to pass during the long centuries in which this “national road” had become a cañon; but the Chinese way, no doubt, had been for the survivors to plod calmly on over the collapsing earth before the dust had settled, secure in the knowledge that if their own particular godlets held them in favor they were free from similar danger, while, if they were not, precautions were mere wasted breath.

Many a time the paths we followed along the crests seemed to have reached the day when they must spill down the face of the precipice, yet they always carried us safely past. Of cave-dwellings cut far back into these cliffs there was no end, by far a majority of the population having only such homes. But what perhaps was most startling of all the astounding caprices of this strange soil was to come, in a stroll across what gave every appearance of being a flat unbroken field, suddenly upon a great square hole in the ground, fifty or more feet in length and breadth, and as many deep, which was nothing more nor less than a family courtyard. Farm-implements and domestic animals littered its floor; into its side walls, sheer and exact as those of a box, were cut a dozen caves, high arched but with the usual small doors in each mud-bricked front—the dwelling-places of the numerous family, probably of three generations. There was nothing about such a farm-yard different from the ordinary ones all over China, except that the high mud wall surrounding it is the solid earth, with an inconspicuous tunnel often of considerable length connecting it with the outside world. Let this fall in, and there is not a ladder in rural China long enough to bring the hole-dwellers to the surface, on which lie their hard earth threshing-floor and their fields.

The threshing-floors were everywhere busy at this season, beating out the last of the grain with flails or rolling it out with huge stone rollers drawn by languidly ambling animals. Whole families took part in the operation, the more than half-naked children teasing the leisurely beasts to keep on the move; the women, who generally knelt to spare their crippled feet, pawing about through the straw and now and then even helping the men to toss the grain up into the chaff-clearing wind. About the edges of every floor were stacks of hay and straw,all plastered over with a kind of clay roof, as seems to be the fashion in Honan.

But the prize sight of all was the terraced fields. I had seen some in the Inca lands of South America that seemed remarkable examples of human persistence, but they are mere children’s pastimes compared with these of western China. Those in the Andes are faced with stout stone walls and run only part-way up an occasional hillside, or bring a too steep valley under cultivation. Here a most remarkable series of terraces, of thirty, forty, even fifty levels, rose to the very summit of every mountain we saw not only for days but for weeks, covering it completely with low steps of endless giant stairways. Yet here stone is unknown; the facing of each field is merely the loess itself, constantly crumbling away upon the field next below. Geologists are more or less agreed, I believe, that the loess regions of North China, covering a quarter of a million square miles, are due to the destruction of the forests centuries ago, a destruction so complete that even the roots were grubbed out for fuel, so that a soil which with its natural share of rainfall and vegetation was all that man could wish has become a powder-like earth ready to break down and fly away at the first breath of wind. If they are right, what a splendid justice it would be to send those who are doing their best to deforest our own fair land to struggle for existence with the hordes of China, where the pressure of population has driven the farmer not only to the very crest of arid mountains but into every tiniest depression in the soil! Absolutely treeless, with never a suggestion even of brush or grass, these loess regions were everywhere for day after day the same bare yellow brown, beautiful enough in the changing phases from sunrise to sunset, but of a monotony that wearies the eye for all the extraordinary forms in which the ages have cast it. In spring and summer perhaps, when the terraces are waving with crops, there may be green enough. But it was hard to believe it in this autumn season, when even the rare remnants of a cotton or a corn field have the same shriveled, moistureless, yellow-brown hue as all the far-spreading and tumbled landscape.

But walking always became a perspiring form of locomotion long before noon, and some convenient cañon-mouth or a stretch where the road came to the surface for a breathing-spell found us climbing into our litters. From then on until toward evening our view of the world about us was likely to be confined to the triangular bit of it visible between the red pompons on the lead-mule’s back and the straw roofof the litter, often still further reduced by the walls of the narrow ditch which so frequently was the road nearly all day long. Through this we saw more, however, than might be expected. A camel-train, or one of many mule-drawn soldiers’ wagons, loomed up out of a dust-fog so thick that collisions were narrowly averted in spite of our slow speed. Loess soil would not be so bad, at least so far as the traveler is concerned, if only it would lie still, instead of insisting on exploring the innermost recesses of any one or anything with which it comes in contact. Let a breath of air sweep down the road—which was certainly no unusual experience—and we could barely see the next litter before us. Then there was nothing to do but cover the face with a handkerchief and lie listening to the endlessdingle-dingleof the little mule-bells and the slight creak of the swaying litter, broken frequently by the “mule-train coughing in the dust”—cough the weary animals did, indeed—and now and again by the vociferous “Ta! Ta!” of the drivers whose footsteps made no sound in the powdered earth, or a long-drawn “Trrrrrrrrrrr!” when they wished to bring the animals to a halt. An old and very experienced traveler is authority for the assertion that the road from Honan to Sian-fu is perhaps the most trying bit of cart-road in China, and, strong as such language is, we were inclined to agree with him. Yet it is a journey I would not have missed for several times its many minor discomforts.

Sometimes the road escaped from the cañon for several miles, and then there was sure to be plenty to catch the eye. Perhaps it was a little house, temple, or dove-cote at the top of a high slender pillar of earth, for rain and wind may have washed the world away from about it and left an unbelievably frail support. Soldiers we were constantly meeting in great numbers; occasionally we passed large groups of recruits not yet furnished with weapons, simple-faced boys who might much better have been left in their native cave-villages to till the terraced mountains than to add still more to China’s most serious problem. But this draining of the country districts of able-bodied young men goes merrily on all over the republic—and the training of eventual bandits seems to have no end. Our own escort and long files of their armed fellows bound in the opposite direction now and then showed themselves on the sheer edge of the cliffs high above us, they and their guns silhouetted against the cloudless sky. We constantly met veritable crowds of travelers, mainly pedestrians. Endless strings of coolies came and went, their beds and tools and all their earthly belongings in blue denim rolls on their backs, or balancing from theswaying pole over their shoulders. I often caught myself wondering why they could not all stay where they were and save themselves all this laborious shuttling back and forth, so exactly alike were the long files of them plodding eastward and going west. There were very few women travelers; compared with the great throngs of men there were almost none, and they were always riding, naturally, since the most they could do otherwise would be to hobble a few hundred yards an hour on their dwarfed feet. Sometimes one of them loomed up out of the dust astride a donkey, always with a man prodding the animal on from behind, his easy stride seeming to emphasize the helplessness of the crippled legs tapering down to all but useless little feet on either side of the biblical animal. Children, swarming everywhere, were rarely on the move along the road, though occasionally we passed the cart or litter of a better-to-do Chinese carrying his family with him. But even if the heavy cloth front door of his conveyance was not closed, we rarely caught more than a glimpse of the peering faces of women and children tucked away behind the man and the driver in what must have been extremely tight quarters.

Several times widows in white or sackcloth passed, usually seated alone Turkish fashion on an uncovered cart, as if to make their grief as conspicuous as possible. Some of them were surprisingly young; generally their faces were completely covered; and invariably they rocked back and forth on their haunches and wailed at the tops of their voices, whether in passing through a town or out in the open country, at least whenever there was any one except their plodding driver to hear them. This public display of grief seemed to be a custom of Honan; at least, we seldom if ever saw it farther west. One morning while we were still walking we heard a choral wailing from afar off, and at length came upon the mother, wife, son of six, and baby of a man who had just died, all squatting together on the outdoor threshing-floor at the edge of their village, and all of them, including even the infant, pouring forth their sorrow to the four winds. A pathetic, almost touching scene it was to me—until I chanced to glance back just in time to see the old woman pinch the boy in a very sensitive spot, and thereby redouble the wailing which the sight of a passing foreigner had almost silenced.

Once in a while a bride passed, conspicuous in all her finery, and looking as if she, too, could easily weep the length of her tedious journey, did custom permit it. Then there was the wheelbarrow-brigade, in some ways the most interesting part of all the endlessprocession. The thought of a man wheelbarrowing a heavy load clear across a province or even farther had a mixture of the pitiable and the ludicrous about it—something reminiscent of a nonsensical election-bet. Yet it is doubtful whether any man in all our broad land, with the possible exception of champion athletes at the climax of their exertions, perform such grueling labors as do these Chinese wheelbarrow-men, who passed us in veritable regiments, sometimes in close unbroken file for a mile at a time. Given the weight of the big clumsy, creaking contrivances themselves, an incredibly heavy and often awkward load, a “road” which no untraveled Westerner would recognize as such, with steep hills, cañons ankle-deep in dust, and the constant struggle for right of way on the crowded caricature of a thoroughfare, and it was no wonder that the man straining at the handles, with the stout strap from them passing over his shoulders, all but invariably resembled a marathon runner at the end of his greatest contest. In northwest China thetui-chuis not a passenger vehicle, as in some parts of the country; but this ceaseless one-wheeled cavalcade carried almost everything except human beings. The luckiest seemed to be those whose bulky load was merely cotton; the heaviest burdens, with rare exceptions, were evidently the two to four black-brown bags of wheat, a bit smaller in circumference than our two-bushel sack, but nearly twice as long.

All possible manner of aids had been enlisted by the sweating men at the handles, though the great majority toiled onward without assistance. Sometimes another man, perhaps a donkey, once in a while a mule, an aged horse, a small ox, pulled in front of the wheelbarrow. More than one man had pressed his son and heir into service, and boys of all ages added their by no means insignificant bit to the drudgery. The detailed picture still stays with me of one child who could not have been more than six, his little bronzed body completely naked except for the red or blue diamond-shaped stomacher which most Chinese consider indispensable to health, steadily tugging away for all he was worth at the rope over his bare shoulder. He and his brawny father behind were plainly many toilsome days away both from home and their destination, yet on the child’s face there was not a suggestion of protest, but more than a hint of joy at this splendid opportunity to see the world. Indeed, the generally contented, not to say joyful, attitude toward their arduous fragment of life of these slaves of the wheelbarrow, of the coolies, of the toiling masses of China in general, is one of the astonishments, and delights, of Chinese travel. Possibly these men were paid the equivalentof fifteen American cents a day for their cart-horse exertions, furnishing their own food and lodging on the way; yet a surly face was as rare as a lazy body, and laughter always burst forth upon the slightest provocation. Those who pulled in front, I noticed, no matter how young or how weak, were never reproved or admonished to greater exertions from behind; it seemed to be as natural for them to do their unflagging best as for water to run downhill, and the thought of their slacking or of being capable of more never appeared even to suggest itself to the man at the handles.

Twice, possibly three times, I saw a woman tugging at a wheelbarrow rope, but in each case the load was light and the distance evidently short; it must have been, in fact, for she could not have struggled far on the little goat-like feet and muscleless legs which time-honored custom had left her. I suppose the several brilliant Western “authorities” that are at the moment engaged in “interpreting” China to us would cite as another proof of the ascendancy of esthetic over material things in the Chinese mind the fact that, though her unhampered labor is very necessary to him, the Chinese peasant and coolie still insists on having his wife beautified at the sacrifice of her physical usefulness. On the threshing-floor or in the cotton-fields the women could be worked to somewhat better advantage than on the road, and there one saw more of them. For they could do most of this work kneeling, and nearly all of them, even girls of eleven or twelve, wore thick knee-pads, not unlike the shin-guards of a football-player, to soften a bit the hard lot that had befallen them. In the towns one often saw wives or servants crawling about the dirty earth floors on their knees in the performance of their household duties.

The cotton-fields, by the way, were almost endless, though not much else could be said in their favor. The plants, from six inches to a foot high, were of a dead-dry brown, of the same color as all the landscape to the summit of the terraced mountains, and the miserable little bolls that remained did not seem worth even the trouble of such poverty-stricken pickers as here and there still wandered about in search of them. There had been no rain all summer in this region, they told us, and unless some fell within the next two months and saved the winter wheat, there would be another famine as serious as that of 1920.

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