Chapter 57

Coal is plentiful and cheap in Shensi, and comes to market in Sian-fu in wheelbarrows, there to await purchasers

The holy of holies of the principal Sian-fu mosque has a simplicity in striking contrast to the demon-crowded interiors of purely Chinese temples

Our carts crossing a branch of the Yellow River fiftyliwest of the Shensi capital

Women and girls do much of the grinding of grain with the familiar stone roller of China, in spite of their bound feet

The first night out of Kwanyintang we slept in the house from which a Greek, and ate in the house from which a Frenchman, both officials of the advancing railway, had been taken by bandits a few weeks before. They were still in captivity among the mountains somewhere to the southwest, the nucleus of the considerable little party of foreigners by whose unwilling assistance the brigands eventually won their way into the national army. In fact we slept on unfurnished beds and were offered unnecessary apologies by our polished French host and Japanese hostess at dinner because of the looting that had taken place at the time his predecessor was carried off. There was still a certain atmosphere of suppressed dread among the few foreign residents, for none of them was sure how soon he might become the next victim; but mankind quickly learns to live without discomfort under many unpleasant circumstances.

Our soldier escort changed each day, and we were entertained each evening with the long “face-saving” process that took place before the detail could accept the gratuity we offered them. The struggle, which we turned over to Chang as more finely versed in Chinese etiquette than we, was particularly arduous on that first evening, for the commander of the detachment was a real lieutenant, and instead of the thirty-two vociferous and violent refusals which seemed to be required of a mere sergeant or corporal before he accepted what he really had no intention in the world of declining, the lieutenant was still pushing back the detested silver with fine effect when we lost count and went inside. Three Mexican dollars distributed among ten men for a hot and arduous thirty-mile tramp for the possible protection of a pair of unknown foreigners might not strike one of our own “doughboys” as anything to write home about; but for men whose daily pay was nothing like their share of this sum, and who draw their pay much more often in theory than in practice, the major’s insistence that they “have a good feed on us” could not really have sounded so immoral to them as they pretended.

The second afternoon was still fairly young when we reached the large walled town of what its residents, at least, called Lüngbau. The escort was to stop here, but the sergeant in command thought he could get permission to go on with us another twentyli, or get the next detail to start at once, if we would let him go into town and see the commander, while we continued around the edge of it, as most through travel does in passing crowded walled cities. Near one of the farther gates a soldier sent by the local commandant overtook us. His chief, he said, could not send a detail on such short notice, and he did notthink it wise for us to go on without one. Bandits had been very active in the immediate region ahead and might even have heard of the “important” foreigners and be looking for them.

All this moved us little, for both the major and I knew from long experience that it is always thenextstage of the journey that is perilous for the traveler, never the one in which he actually is. Besides, ten straggling, poorly equipped soldiers of the Chinese type would scarcely prevent the bandits from adding us to their collection if they really meant to do so. But we were reckoning without our muleteers. They had already expressed a desire to stop in Lüngbau; the report from the commandant made them doubly anxious to stay. We were pooh-poohing their fears and deciding to order a new start when, following the eye of one of them, I glanced up at the city gate close beside us. It was a picturesque little portal, but that mere fact would not of course have drawn the attention of a Chinese muleteer. What had aroused his interest was two frail crates, thrown hastily together of narrow strips of wood, fastened to the face of the gate on either side just above the arch, and each containing a human head. I had often read of such dainty decorations on Chinese city gates, on those indeed of our medieval ancestors; but they had always seemed far away and long ago, something pertaining to the “good old days,” which a prosaic modern wanderer would never have the privilege of seeing. To come upon them, therefore, in the present year of grace and in the full light of the ordinary, every-day life about us, tacked up against two torn posters depicting the delights and excellencies of a widely known brand of cigarettes, was—well, was at least a pleasant reminder that the picturesque customs of old China had not yet all gone into the discard, that even the modern wanderer, if he wander long and far enough, may still once in a blue moon come upon some of those little details linking the phonographed, sewing-machined world of to-day with the cave-man, which he has so often envied the travelers of bygone centuries.

These two bandits, explained the soldier messenger, prompted now and then by the solicitous crowd that always gathers in China about any suggestion of a controversy, or of a foreigner, had been caught four days before in the very town where we must spend the night, if we persisted in pushing on. I suppose the crated heads were what any ladylike person would have called a “gruesome sight,” but I fear they struck me merely as interesting. In China one quickly and unconsciously gets a sense of the cheapness of human life, so that things which would ruin a night’s sleep at home are forgotten around the nextcorner. The heads each lay on one ear in the bottom of their open-work crates, half grinning down upon passers-by. Having a southern exposure, they had already greatly profited by the three or four days they had been separated from their original, evidently rather youthful, possessors to disguise their identity. They were yellow, not the mere yellow of the Chinese, who so far north are scarcely yellow at all, but of the yellow of a pile of crude sulphur, of a ripe lemon; and they were in that state in which even the most careless housewife would quickly send a cut of meat out to be buried—deep. Moreover—and all the writers on head-adorned gates I had ever read had never given me a hint of this little detail—they were swarming with flies, which seemed to consider this a particularly luscious feast.

We yielded to the reluctance of our muleteers and turned back to a near-by inn. The sun was still high enough for a stroll through the extramural suburb, often the most crowded part of a Chinese town, then across Lüngbau itself, and around a half-circuit of its broad wall, from which we could look down into many of what in other lands would have been domestic secrets. We saw by chance, for instance, that the big sturdy man who had followed us into the inn-yard on his knees, because he had carelessly frozen his feet off one night, had a big family with whom to share the remnant of a roast leg of lamb we had given him. Somewhere among the crowded bazaars some one succeeded in telling us that bandits were worse in this region because it was fairly rich and they could live on the country; but the teeming life of Chinese streets certainly flowed on its even way in complete indifference to those heads upon the gate and to the dangers they stood for. What was still more to the point, there was time to take a leisurely view of the silky-brown terraced mountains that bounded the southern horizon, and to watch the unclouded sun sink into a fiery furnace behind them.

But for that more or less forced stop at Lüngbau we should have ended the mule-litter stage of our journey late on the third day. However, that might have interfered with the major’s extraordinary success as a hunter, which was not a commonplace, vulgar matter of quantity, but of a finesse that even a Buddhist could have applauded. We had waded through a considerable mountain pass—at least this wearing down of roads into cañons sometimes appreciably shortens a climb—and had come down a steep incline to the broad flat shores of the Yellow River. Castor oil in its native state grew head-high for some distance along the deep sandy trail; but what roused our genuine interestwas the fact that the lowland, half a mile wide, between us and the river, was swarming with magnificent wild ducks, and probably geese. The major snatched the shot-gun which some trusting sky-pilot in Peking had unwisely lent him for the journey, and strode out into a forty-acre field literally covered with the birds. Now and again a great flock of them rose and circled in a great curtain across the lower sky, but this mattered little, for there were always more where those came from; in fact, had they all risen at once, the air could scarcely have contained them.

Nothing of course could be more reprehensible, more dastardly, in fact, than to breathe a breath of criticism upon the marksmanship of a host, as it were, who has risen so high in the profession in which marksmanship is so essential; and fortunately there is not the slightest occasion to do so. For surely the failure to make a perfect score can honestly be accounted for by the fact that the weapon used was already doing service long before our forefathers began to laugh at the idiot who fancied that some day some one would invent a “horseless carriage.” If birds will have the decency to stay where they are until the hunter can step on their tails before firing, such a contrivance leaves nothing to be desired. But wild ducks and geese, even in so rarely hunted a paradise as the Yellow River valley, are not especially cordial to strangers; one might, indeed, almost charge them with aloofness.

However, the major did fire at last, both barrels at once, so that at least there would not be a second recoil to embitter his disappointment, and in spite of the fact that he had not succeeded in getting quite near enough to his quarry to make it really worth while to throw the weapon itself after them. Strangely enough, one of the birds gave every evidence of having been struck, or else of having had the scare of its life. For instead of following its myriad fellows into the now teeming air it ran erratically along the ground, with the major and Chang, and, I believe, two or three of the muleteers, possibly even the cook, in hot pursuit. The most fleet-footed of this throng—I chanced at that moment to be hovering between turning and not turning over with my litter, and hence can give no trustworthy testimony on the subject—at length laid hands upon the fugitive. If it had been struck, the shot, naturally, had not penetrated the thick feathers; perhaps it had careened off its lightly clad skull and left it a hazy view of the situation until it was for ever too late. At any rate, the major has the distinction of having captured in perfect health a magnificent specimen of the wildduck family, larger than any domestic one and beautiful as a pheasant—with a shot-gun!

One of the soldiers carried it the rest of the morning, as another had carried his hooded falcon the day before. Our entourage attempted to convince us that such birds were not fit to eat, but its superiority to a Thanksgiving turkey when it appeared before us again next day suggested that they may merely have been offering, Chinese fashion, to throw it away for us.

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