Part 13

Poor little creature in her red woollen rags with her little hands outstretched! Poor little face hidden so that no one shall see it more before its final decomposition!

FOOTNOTE:

[2] A few days later, by order of the superior officers, those accusing statues were withdrawn from the market and the models destroyed. Only the statuettes of the French remained on sale, and they have become very rare.

VII

THE TOMBS OF THE EMPERORS

I

PEKIN, Friday, April 26, 1901.

At last the day has come for my departure for the sacred wood which encloses the imperial tombs.

At seven o'clock in the morning I leave the Palace of the North, taking with me my last autumn's servants, Osman and Renaud, as well as four African riflemen and a Chinese interpreter. We start on horseback on animals chosen for the journey, which will be transported by rail whenever we are.

First, two or three kilometres across Pekin in the beautiful morning light, along great thoroughfares magnificent in their desolation, the route of pageants and of emperors; through the triple red gates, between lions of marble and obelisks of marble, yellow as old ivory.

Now the railway station--it is in the centre of the city at the foot of the wall of the second enclosure, for the Western barbarians dared to commit the sacrilege of piercing the ramparts in order to introduce their submersive system.

Men and horses go aboard. Then the train threads its way across the devastated Chinese City, and for three or four kilometres skirts the colossal gray wall of the Tartar City, which continues to unfold itself, always the same, with the same bastions, the same battlements, without a gate, without anything, to relieve its monotony and its immensity.

A breach in the outer wall casts us forth at last into the melancholy country.

And for three hours and a half it is a journey through the dust of the plain, past demolished stations, rubbish, ruins. According to the great plans of the allied nations, this line, which actually goes to Pao-Ting-Fu, is to be extended several hundred leagues, so as to unite Pekin and Hang-Chow, two enormous cities. It would thus become one of the great arteries of new China, scattering along its way the benefits of Occidental civilization.

At noon we alight at Tchou-Tchou, a great walled city, whose high battlemented ramparts and two twelve-storied towers are perceived as through a cloud of ashes. A man is scarcely recognizable at twenty paces, as in times of fog in the north, so filled with dust is the air; and the sun, though dimmed and yellow, reflects a heat that is overpowering.

The commandant and the officers of the French port, which has occupied Tchou-Tchou since the autumn, were kind enough to meet me and to take me for breakfast to their table in the comparative freshness of the big dark pagodas where they with their men were installed. The road to the tombs,[3] they tell me, which latterly has seemed quite safe, has been less so for a few days, a band of two hundred marauding Boxers having yesterday attacked one of the large villages through which I must pass, where they fought all the morning,--until the appearance of a French detachment who came to the aid of the villagers sent the Boxers flying like a flock of sparrows.

"Two hundred Boxers," continued the commandant of the post, making a mental calculation; "let me see, two hundred Boxers: you will have to have at least ten men. You already have six horsemen; I will, if you wish, add four more."

I felt that I ought to make some suitable acknowledgment, to reply that it was too much, that he overpowered me. Then under the eyes of the Buddhas, who were watching us breakfast, we both began to laugh, struck all at once by the air of extravagant bluster in what we were saying. In truth it had the force of

"Paraissez, Navarrois, Maures et Castillans;"

and yet, ten men against two hundred Boxers are really all that are necessary. They are tenacious and terrible only behind walls, those fellows; but in a flat country--it is highly probable, moreover, that I shall not see the queue of one. I accept the reinforcement,--four brave soldiers, who will be delighted to accompany me; I accept so much the more readily, since my expedition will thus take on the proportions of a military reconnaissance, and this, it appears, will be a good thing just now.

At two o'clock we remount our horses, for we are to sleep in an old walled town twenty-five kilometres farther on, called Laï-Chow-Chien (Chinese cities seem to claim these names; we know of one called Cha-Ma-Miaou, and another, a very large, ancient capital, Chien-Chien).

We make a plunge and disappear at once in a cloud of dust which the wind chases over the plain,--the immense, suffocating plain. There is no illusion possible; it is the "yellow wind" which has arisen,--a wind which generally blows in periods of three days, adding to the dust of China all that of the Mongolian desert.

No roads but deep tracks, paths several feet below the surface, which could only have been hollowed there in the course of centuries. A frightful country, which has, since the beginning of time, endured torrid heat and almost hyperborean cold. In this dry, powdery soil how can the new wheat grow, which here and there makes squares of really fresh green in the midst of the infinite grays? There are also from time to time a few sparse clumps of young elms and willows, somewhat different from ours, but nevertheless recognizable, just showing their first tiny leaves. Monotony and sadness; one would call it a poor landscape of the extreme north, lighted by an African sun,--a sun that has mistaken the latitude.

At a turn of the crooked road a band of laborers who see us suddenly spring up, are frightened, and throw down their spades to run away. But one of them stops the others, crying, "Fanko pink" (French soldiers). "They are French, do not be afraid." Then they bend again over the burning earth, and peaceably continue their work, looking at us as we pass by from the corners of their eyes. Their confidence speaks volumes on the somewhat exceptional kind of "barbarians" our brave soldiers have known how to be, in the course of a European invasion.

The few clumps of willows scattered over the plains almost always shelter under their sparse foliage the villages of tillers of the soil,--little houses of clay and of gray brick, absurd little pagodas, which are crumbling in the sunshine. Warned by watchmen, men and children come out as we pass to look at us in silence with naïve curiosity; bare to the waist, very yellow, very thin, and very muscular; pantaloons of the ever similar dark blue cotton. Out of politeness each one uncoils and allows to hang down his back his long plaited hair, for to keep it on the crown of the head would be a disrespect to me. No women; they remain concealed. These people must have much the same impression of us that the peasants of Gaul had when Attila, chief of the army, passed with his escort, except that they are less frightened. Everything about us is astonishing,--costumes, arms, and faces. Even my horse, which is an Arabian stallion, must seem to them a huge, unusual, superb animal beside their own little horses, with their big rough heads.

The frail willows, through which the sunlight sifts upon the houses and tiny pagodas of these primitive lives, scatter over us their blossoms, like tiny feathers or little tufts of cotton-wool, which fall in a shower, and mingle with the never-ending dust.

On the plain, which now begins again, level and always the same, I keep two or three hundred metres in advance of my little armed troop, to avoid the excessive dust raised by the trot of the horses' feet; a gray cloud behind me when I turn around shows me that they are following. The "yellow wind" continues to blow; we are powdered with it to such an extent that our horses, our moustaches, our uniforms have become of the color of ashes.

Toward five o'clock the old walled town where we are to pass the night appears before us. From afar it is almost imposing in the midst of the plain, with its high crenellated ramparts so sombre in color. Near by, no doubt, it would show but ruin and decrepitude, like the rest of China.

A horseman, bringing along with him the inevitable cloud of dust, comes out to meet me. It is the officer commanding the fifty men of the marine infantry who have occupied Laï-Chou-Chien since October. He informs me that the general has had the kindly thought of having me announced as one of the great mandarins of Occidental letters, so the mandarin of the town is coming out to meet me with an escort, and he has called together the neighboring villages for a fête which he is preparing for me.

In fact, here the procession comes, from out the crumbling old gates, advancing through the wasted fields, with red emblems and music.

Now it stops to await me, ranged in two lines on each side of the road. And following the usual ceremonial, some one, a servant of the mandarin, comes forward, fifty feet in advance of the others, with a large red paper, which is the visiting-card of his master. He himself, the timid mandarin, awaits, standing, with the people of his house, having come down from his palanquin out of deference. I extend my hand without dismounting, as I have been told to do, after which, in a cloud of gray dust, we make our way toward the great walls, followed by my cavaliers, and preceded by the procession of honor with music and emblems.

At the head are two big red parasols, surrounded with a fall of silk like the canopies in a procession; than a fantastic black butterfly, as large as an owl with extended wings, which is carried at the end of a stick by a child; then two rows of banners; then shields of red lacquered wood inscribed with letters of gold. As soon as we begin to march gongs commence to sound lugubriously at regular intervals as for a military salute, whilst heralds with prolonged cries announce my arrival to the inhabitants of the village.

Here we are at the gate, which seems like the entrance to a cavern; on each side are hung five or six little wooden cages, each one containing a kind of black beast, motionless in the midst of a swarm of flies; their tails may be seen hanging outside the bars like dead things. What can it be that keeps itself rolled up like a ball, and has such a long tail? Monkeys? Ah, horrors, they are heads that have been severed from their bodies! Each one of these pretty cages contains a human head, beginning to grow black in the sunshine, with long, braided hair which has been intentionally uncoiled.

We are swallowed up by the big gate, and are received by the inevitable grinning old granite monsters which at right and at left raise their great heads with the squinting eyes. Motionless, against the inner wall of the tunnel, the people press to see me pass, huddled together, climbing one upon the other,--yellow nakedness, blue cotton rags, ugly faces. The dust fills and obscures this vaulted passage where men and horses press, enveloped in the same gloom.

We have entered old provincial China, belonging to another era entirely unknown to us.

II

Ruin and dilapidation within the walls, as I expected, not from any fault of the Boxers or of the Allies, for the war did not come near here, but as a result of decay, of the falling into dust of this old China, our elder by more than thirty centuries.

The gong in front of me continues to sound lugubriously at fixed intervals, and the heralds continue to announce me to the people by prolonged cries, resounding through the little powdery streets under the still burning evening sun. One sees unused land and cultivated fields. Here and there granite monsters, defaced, shapeless, half buried, worn by years, indicate what was formerly the entrance to a palace.

Before a door which surmounts a tricolored pavilion the procession stops, and I dismount. For seven or eight months our fifty soldiers of the marine infantry have been quartered here, spending a whole long winter at Laï-Chou-Chien, separated from the rest of the world by snow and icy steppes, and leading a Crusoe-like existence in the midst of the most perplexing surroundings.

It is a surprise and a joy to come among them, to see again their honest home faces, after all the yellow ones we have met along the road, darting sharp enigmatical glances at us. This French quarter is like a bit of life, gaiety, and youth in the midst of mummified old China.

It is plain that the winter has been good for our soldiers, for the look of health is on their cheeks. They have organized themselves with a comical and somewhat marvellous ingenuity, creating lavatories, douche rooms, a schoolroom where they teach French to the little Chinese, and even a theatre. Living in intimate comradeship with the people of the town, who will before long be unwilling to see them go, they cultivate vegetable gardens, raise chickens and sheep, and bring up little ravens by hand like orphan babies.

It is arranged that I should sleep at the house of the mandarin after having supped at the French post. So at nine o'clock they come for me to conduct me to the "Yamen" with lanterns of state, decorated in a very Chinese fashion and as big as barrels.

The Chinese Yamen is always of tremendous extent. In the cool night air, picking my way by the light of lanterns, amongst huge stones and between rows of servants, I pass through a series of courts two hundred metres long, with I don't know how many ruined porticoes and peristyles with shaky steps, before reaching the crumbling and dusty lodging which the mandarin intends for me,--a separate building in the midst of a sort of yard, and surrounded by old trees with shapeless trunks. There, under the smoky rafters, I have a great room, with whitewashed walls, containing in the centre a platform with seats like a throne, also some heavy ebony arm-chairs; and as wall decorations some rolls of silk spread out, on which poetry, in Manchou characters, is written. In the wing on the left is a small bedroom for my two servants, and on the right one for me with window-panes of rice paper. On a platform is a very hard bed with covers of red silk, and, lastly, an incense burner, in which little sticks of incense are burning. All this is rural, naïve, and superannuated, antiquated even for China.

My timid host, in ceremonial costume, awaits me at the entrance, and makes me take a seat with him on the central throne, where he offers me the obligatory tea in porcelain a hundred years old. Then he had the discretion to bring the audience to a close and to bid me good-night. As he withdrew he told me not to be disturbed if I heard a good deal of coming and going over my head, as the space above was frequented by rats. Neither was I to be disturbed if I heard on the other side of my paper window-panes people walking up and down in the yard playing castanets; they would be the night watchmen, thus informing me that they were not asleep, and were doing their duty.

"There are many brigands in this country," he added; "the city with its high walls closes its gates at sunset, but the workmen going to the fields before daybreak have made a hole in the ramparts,--this the brigands have discovered, and do not hesitate to enter by it."

When this deep-bowing mandarin was gone, and I was alone in the darkness of my dwelling, in the heart of an isolated city whose gates were guarded by human heads in cages, I felt myself at an infinite distance away, separated from my own world by immense space as well as by time, by ages; it seemed to me that I was going to sleep amongst a people at least a thousand years behind our era.

SATURDAY, April 27.

The crowing of cocks, the singing of little birds on my roof, awoke me in my strange old room; and by the light that came in through my paper panes I guessed that the warm sun was shining out of doors.

Osman and Renaud, who were up before me, came to tell me that they were hurriedly making great preparations in the courtyard of the Yamen in order to give me a fête, a morning fête, because we had to continue our route to the imperial tombs soon after the mid-day meal.

It began about nine o'clock. I was given a seat in an arm-chair beside the mandarin, who seemed weighed down beneath his silken gowns. In front of me, in the dazzling sunshine, was the series of courts with porticoes of irregular outline and old monsters on pedestals. A crowd of Chinese--always the men alone, it is understood--have assembled in their eternal blue rags. The yellow wind which had died down at night, as usual, begins to blow again, and to whiten the heavens with dust. The acacias and the monotonous willows, which are almost the only trees scattered over this northern China, show here and there on their slender old branches little pale-green leaves just barely out.

First comes the slow, the very slow, passing of a band with many gongs, cymbals, and bells all muffled; the melody seems to be carried by a sweet, melancholy, and persistent unison of flutes,--large flutes, with a deep tone, some of which have several tubes, and resemble sheaves of wheat. It is sweet and lulling, exquisite to hear.

Now the musicians seat themselves near us, in a circle, to open the fête. All at once the rhythm changes, grows more rapid, and becomes a dance. Then from afar, from the retirement of the courts and the old porticoes, one sees above the heads of the crowd, through the dust that grows thicker and thicker, a troop of dancing creatures two or three times taller than men, swinging along, swinging in regular time and playing citherns, fanning themselves, and comporting themselves generally in an exaggerated, nervous epileptic manner.--Giants? Jumping Jacks? What can they be? They are approaching rapidly with long, leaping steps, and here they are in front of us. Ah, they are on stilts, enormously high stilts. They are taller on their wooden legs than the shepherds of the Landes, and they hop like big grasshoppers. They are in costume and made up,--painted, rouged. They have wigs, false beards; they represent gods, genii such as one sees on old pagodas; they represent princesses also, with beautiful robes of embroidered silk, with cheeks too pink and white, and with artificial flowers in their chignons,--princesses all very tall, fanning themselves in an exaggerated way, and swinging along like the rest of the company, with the same regular, continuous movement, as persistent as the pendulum of a clock.

All these stilt-walkers, it seems, are merely young men of a neighboring village, who have formed themselves into a gymnastic society, and who do this for amusement. In the smallest villages in the interior of China, centuries, yes, thousands of years, before the custom reached us, the men--fathers and sons--began to devote themselves passionately to feats of strength and skill, founding rival societies, some becoming acrobats, others balancers, or jugglers, and organizing contests. It is especially during the long winters that they exercise, when all is frozen, and when each little human group must live alone in the midst of a desert of snow.

In fact, in spite of their white wigs and their centenarian beards, it is obvious that all these people are young, very young, with childlike smiles. They smile naïvely, these droll, pleasant princesses with the over-long legs, whose fan motions are so excited and who dance more and more disjointedly, bending, reversing, and shaking their heads and their bodies in a frenzy. They smile naïvely, these old men with children's faces; they play the cithern or the tambourine as though they were possessed. The persistent unison of the flutes seems to bewitch them, to put them into a special condition of madness, expressed by more and more convulsive movements.

At a given signal each one stands on a single stilt, the other leg raised, the second stilt thrown back over the shoulder; and by prodigies of balancing they dance harder than ever, like marionettes whose springs are out of order, whose mechanism is about to break down. Then bars two metres high are brought in, and they jump over them, every one taking part, including the princesses, the old men, and the genii, all keeping up an incessant play of fans and a beating of tambourines.

At last, when they can hold out no longer and go and lean against the porticoes among the old acacias and willows, another company just like the first comes forward and begins again, to the same tune, a similar dance. They represent the same persons, the same genii, the same long-bearded gods, the same beautiful mincing dames. In their accoutrements, so unknown to us, and with their curiously wrinkled faces, these dancers are the incarnation of ancient mythological dreams dreamed long ago in the dark ages by human beings at an infinite distance from us; and these customs are handed down from generation to generation, and from one end of the country to the other in that unchanging way in which rites, forms, and property in China are invariably transmitted.

This fête, this dance, extremely novel as it is, retains its village, its rustic character, and is as simple as any truly rural entertainment.

They finally cease jumping the bars, and now two terrible beasts come forth, one red and one green. They are big, heraldic dragons at least twenty metres long, with the raised heads, the yawning mouths, the horns, and claws, and horrible squinting eyes that everybody knows. They advance rapidly, throwing themselves onto the shoulders of the crowd with the undulations of a reptile; they are light, however, made of pasteboard, covered with some sort of stuff, and each beast is supported in the air by means of sticks, by a dozen skilful young men who have a subtle knack of giving to their movements a serpentine effect. A sort of master of the ballet precedes them, holding in his hand a ball which they never lose sight of, and which he uses as the leader of an orchestra uses his baton, to guide the writhings of the monsters.

The two great creatures content themselves with dancing before me, to the sound of flutes and gongs, in the centre of the circle of Chinese, which is extended in order to make room for them. At length the struggle becomes quite terrible, while the gongs and cymbals rage. They become entangled, they roll on top of one another, they drag their long rings in the dust, and then, all at once, with a bound they get up, as though in a passion, and stand shaking their enormous heads at one another, trembling with rage. The ballet master, nervously moving his director's ball, throws himself about and rolls his ferocious eyes.

The dust on the crowd grows thicker and thicker, and on the invisible dragon-bearers; it rises in clouds, rendering this battle between the red beast and the green beast almost fantastic. The sun burns as in a tropical country, and yet the sad Chinese April, anæmic from such a drought following the frozen winter, is barely heralded by the tender color of the few tiny leaves on the old willows and acacias of the court.