Part 12

“Yes, it’s getting less warlike, I suppose,” said Liamin. “But it will be a long while before we are too effeminate to withstand the Mongols. But woe for us if there should ever come such a time! They are a devilish people. At first glance they seem artless and childlike, but you can never be sure what they are up to; they are secret and mysterious. It is an axiom with me that all Asiatics lie; but the Chinese particularly. You remember when San Francisco was destroyed by earthquake the Americans discovered a hitherto unknown and underground city run by the Chinese, and in it many white people who had long since disappeared nobody knew whither, people who had been advertised for and sought for by relatives and police and what not. Wherever the Chinese form colonies they turn to devilry of one kind or another. I remember the ghastly things the Chinese did in the Boxer insurrection, the originality of the tortures they invented. Fancy this as a torture! A Russian whom I knew fell into their hands, and their way of killing him was to fasten a corpse of a man to him, and day and night he lived with this corpse till the worms ate into him and he died of madness! The Russian villagers don’t mind doing business with the Chinamen, but always remember they are pagans, and many think they have direct dealings with devils. I was at Blagoveshtchensk when the Chinese opened fire on us, and our Siberian colonists drove all the Chinese out of the city, thirty thousand of them, and they were drowned in the river like rats.”

By this time the horses had been put in, Karachok left, and we were jogging gently through the night. The Kirghiz who drove slept; the horses also almost slept as they walked. Liamin at last, tired or made drowsy by the movement, nodded as he talked, and fell asleep in the middle of a sentence. The road climbed over high mountains, the moon bathed the track and the wild and empty landscape with light. How far on either hand stretched the uninhabited world! It was like posting across a new and habitable planet where men might have been expected to be living, but where all had died, or none but ourselves had ever come. The world itself poked up, its great back was shyly lifted as if it were some gigantic, timid animal that had never been disturbed. It was a wonderful night; quiet, gentle, and unusual. Liamin, at my side, slept silently and intensely. The Kirghiz looked as if cut out of wood. I lay back and looked out, my fingers locked behind my head. So the small hours passed. Night seemed to move over us and be left behind, and I saw ahead the creeping dawn, the morrow, the real morrow, golden and lucent on the eastern horizon. The sun rose and flooded into our sleepy and sleeping eyes as we clattered over the brow of a hill. We came to the Tartar hamlet of Kuan-Kuza, and it was morning.

XI

ON THE CHINESE FRONTIER

At Kuan-Kuza I parted company with Liamin. I went off for a walk on the hills; he went on with Vaska and Margarita. I had now reached mountainous country and a region of fresh air. There were green valleys and wild flowers, streams beside which I could make a pleasant repast, and I had a most enjoyable walk to Kopal. There were patches of snow on the heights, and I clambered up and fingered it just for the joy of realising the contrast to the heat of the deserts I had come through. The road went high over a green tableland to Altin-Emel, where I came to cross-roads for China. An enormous caravan of camels blocked all the ways here; two or three hundred ranks of camels, roped three in a rank, roped crossways and lengthways, bearing huge panniers of wool, but no passengers. Chinamen and little Chinese boys were in charge of them, and ran among the camels’ legs cursing and calling as the strings of bewildered or purposely contrary animals threatened to get into knots and inextricable tangles. Sarts were doing a good business here, selling hot lunch from wooden cauldrons with three compartments, in which were meat-pies, soups, potatoes, respectively, all cooking at the same time over charcoal. Altin-Emel is an interesting point on the road. Here may be seen upon occasion British sportsmen with Hindu servants, and two or three britchkas full of trophies and large antlers done up in linen and cotton-wool and fixed with rope. Before the war four or five British officers passed through Altin-Emel every year on their way to Chinese Tartary or India, or from those places, coming home. Some were out here at the time the war broke out, and were a long time in finding out exactly what had happened in Europe.

It is very beautiful country, with snow peaks in view in the distance and at your feet white iris, forget-me-not, and brilliant Scotch roses, those yellow blossoms thick on thorny stems. Then there are fields of mullein as thick as stalks of corn after the peasants’ sickles have cut the harvest. There are good-looking and frequent Russian villages and Cossack stations, Kugalinskaya, Polovinka, Kruglenkoe. I passed through a village started only in 1911, very clean, well kept, and promising. Kugalinskaya Stanitsa was an old settlement, the land probably given to the Cossacks when the conquest took place. This place was very drunken the time I stayed there, though now, since the war and prohibition, that characteristic must have vanished. The Cossacks apparently found life rather boring; they had a marionette show in the bazaar, lotto banks and roulette tables, where copecks were risked and bottles of vodka staked. The public-house was full of singing drunkards. I can imagine how cheered up the people were when war was declared.

After a wonderful night on a little green tableland covered with mulleins, where when I spread my bed I must crush mulleins, I went on to Tsaritsinskaya. There, on the pass over the mountains and the Kok-sa River, I got my first soaking on this vagabondage, soaked to the skin by mist and drizzle; but I did not seem much the worse for it, and dried naturally in the sun on the morrow, visibly steaming. It was quite like a Caucasus road now, steep, wild, magnificent with gorges and passes, foaming rivulets, villages threaded with the life of running water, the paradise of ducks and their broods. The outward roads were marked by heaps of mud and stones, and on these I went to Jangiz-Agatch, with its fine trees, and Karabulak and Gavrilovka; finally, a day over great sweeps of country illumined by gorse in bloom and yellow roses, over leagues of wolf-hunted moorland to Kopal.

Kopal is 825 miles from a railway station, and one of the last places on earth; a town without an inn, without a barber; a place you could run round in a quarter of an hour, and yet having jurisdiction over an immense tract of territory along the Russian frontier of China. It was late in the evening when I arrived there, and when I went to the post-house I found it crowded with Chinamen; Chinamen on the two beds, on the floor, in the passage; chop-sticks on the table. They were all travellers on the road to Pekin, making their way slowly northward to the Trans-Siberian Railway.

At once one of those who occupied a bed got up, apologised, and vacated his sleeping-place, offering it to me. Despite my refusal, he took off his blanket and quilt and spread them on the floor instead. His humility was touching--especially in contrast to my own instinctive loathing of a bed on which Chinese had lain. Fortunately, I did not feel tired.

I do not carry a watch on my travels, so the idea of what time it is gradually fades from the mind. The hour is not a matter of anxiety; dawn, noon, sunset, night are the quarters of the clock, and they suffice. But in the post-station at Kopal, whilst the Chinese were officiously effacing themselves, I found myself idly looking at the big clock hanging in a shadowy corner and trying to make out the hour. The face of the clock was a tiger looking at a snake. When it was twelve o’clock the hands were between the tiger’s eyes. At a quarter-past seven the hands held the serpent. The clock was very dusty, but imagine the start I got when suddenly I saw that the eyes in the tiger face were rolling at me. As I stared the pupils slowly moved across the whites of the eyes. The pendulum made the eyes roll.

It was only nine o’clock, and I had noticed as I came into the town a considerable flare of lights, a large white tent, and a notice of a Chinese circus. A Chinese circus was something not to be missed in this empty and outlandish country, so I put down my pack in the post-house and went out to see the performance. It was something truly original, a piquant diversion after a long day’s journeying in the wastes and wilds of the mountains of Alai Tau.

It was a circular tent, small enough for a circus tent, having only three rows of seats around the arena. The price to sit down was thirty copecks, to stand behind, fifteen copecks. Soldiers came in free, and there were some thirty of them, with their dull peasant faces and dusty khaki uniforms. Near the entrance there was a box covered with red bunting, free for the chief of police and his friends. The chief of police has a free box at nearly every local entertainment in Russia--he can permit or forbid the show. There were three musicians--Russian peasants, paid a shilling a night, I understand--and they gave value for money unceasingly on a concertina, a violin, and a balalaika. The public on the bare, rickety forms ringed round the as yet empty stage numbered from 100 to 120, and were a mixture of Russians, Tartars, and Kirghiz. All the Russian officers and officials of the town seemed to be there, and were accompanied by their smartly dressed wives and daughters. The Tartar merchants looked grim in their black skull-caps, their women queenly, with little crowns on the tops of their heads and long veils falling over their hair and their backs. There was a row of these crowned Tartar women together; a row also of Kirghiz women, in high, white turbans wrapped about their broad brows. There were colonists and their _babas_--open-faced, simple-souled peasant women who came to be petrified by the seeming devilry of the heathen Chinee. To them the fact that the Chinese are heathen--not Christian--is no joke, but a fierce reality. They look upon the Chinese as being comparatively near akin to devils.

Naphtha lamps swung uneasily from the high beams of the tent, and flung unequal volumes of light from dangerous-looking ragged flames. The sandy arena and all the eager people round were brightly shown in the plenitude of light.

The first item on the programme was not particularly striking. A bell was rung, and a little Chinaman in black came out and twirled and juggled a tea-tray on a chopstick. Then followed a Russian clown with painted face, old hat, and yellow wig, who proceeded to be very serious and show the public various tricks. He had three Chinese servants, and the fun consisted in their stealing his things and spoiling his efforts. Finally, he took a big stick and chased them round and round the arena--to the great delight of all the children present.

The clown’s turn ended, there came forward a very handsome Chinee in black satin knee-breeches, tight stockings, scarlet jersey, and English collar and tie. He was rather tall, had a big, womanish face, gleaming teeth, and long, black hair. He walked jauntily in little slippers, and carried a handful of ten knives. Another Chinaman came out with an old tree trunk, which he held up on end. A child came and stood up against the trunk. The handsome Chinee then stood and flung the knives as if to pin the boy to the wood, and he planted them between the child’s arm and his body, over his arm, between his legs and beside his legs, on each side of his neck, on each side of his ears, and over his head--and all the time as he flung them he smiled. He repeated his feat, placing all the knives round about the boy’s head, never raising the skin.

Number four was the owner of the troupe, an old fellow in a light blue, voluminous smock and long pigtail. He conjured a platter of biscuits and cakes, glasses, a teapot, a steaming samovar, all out of nothingness, inviting the public to come and have tea with him, and talking an amusing broken Russian:

“You laugh, you think this fine trick, but I show you ’nother mighty juggle; took me ten years to learn this juggle ...” and so on.

As the applause dies down the bell rings again, and out comes the “Chinaman with the cast-iron head.” All the time “the orchestra” plays Russian dances, plays them very noisily. He with the iron head lies down on the sand and puts two bricks on his temple. At a distance of ten yards another Chinaman holds a brick and prepares to aim it at the head of his prostrate fellow-player. He aims it, but the iron-headed one pretends to lose his nerve and jumps up with a terrible scream, pointing to the music. The music must be calmed down. The audience holds its breath as the trick is repeated to gentle lullaby airs. This time the prostrate man receives the bricks one by one as they are aimed--square on the bricks lying on his temple--and, of course, is none the worse, though he takes the risk of a bad shot.

The old conjurer came out again and danced to the Russian Kamarinsky air, holding a bamboo as if it were his partner, and doing all manner of clever and amusing turns. The young man who juggled the tea-tray on the chopstick reappeared, and did a difficult balancing trick, raising himself on a trestle which rested on little spheres on a table. Then came two most original items, the dancing of an old man in a five-yard linen whip, and the rolling round the body of a rusty eight-foot iron sceptre.

The man who danced made the long whip of linen crack and roll out over the arena in splendid circles and waves, and he was ever in the midst of it. The juggler of the sceptre contrived to roll the strange-looking implement all over his body, about his back and his shoulders and his stomach, and never let it touch the ground and never touched it with his hand--and at the same time to dance to the music. This was a most attractive feat, and was as pleasant to watch as anything I had ever seen in a large city.

There was an interval and a great buzz of talking and surmise. After the interval came wrestling matches and trick-riding on bicycles. A clever little Mongol had no difficulty in disposing of those who offered to wrestle with him, and a Russian cyclist who rode on his handle-bars received great applause from the people of Kopal, most of whom had not seen a bicycle before.

So the entertainment ended, and everyone was well pleased. The juggling was a great mystification to the simple Russians, and I heard many amusing comments from those behind me and beside. The conjuring forth of the steaming samovar was especially troubling to the minds of the peasant women, and I heard one say to another:

“God knows where he got it from.”

And the other replied seriously:

“What has God got to do with it? It’s the power o’ Satan.”

* * * * *

I returned to my post-house in a pleasant frame of mind; it was one by the clock with the tiger face, and I took out my sheets and blanket and slept in a wagon in the yard. All the Chinese were snoring.

I said Kopal had no barber, but next day I found a Sart who shaved. I entered a dwelling in the bazaar, half home, half cave. Picture me sitting on a rag of carpet on the floor of a mud hut, a red handkerchief tied tightly round my neck. A bald-headed old Mohammedan holds in his hand a broken mug containing vinegar. He dips his thumb in the vinegar, and then massages my cheeks and chin and neck. It was queer to feel his broad thumb pounding against my skin and chinbone. He made no lather, but he thought that he softened my skin with his hard thumb and the vinegar. Then he brandished a broken razor over my head, and fairly tore the hair off my face with it. He gave me no water with which to rinse, but as he finished his job he put into my hand three inches of broken mirror so that I could survey my new countenance and judge whether he had done well.

The Chinese at the post-house behaved like Christians, or, rather, as Christians should, with great humbleness and altruism, giving up the samovar to Russian visitors, fetching water to fill the washing-bowls, cleaning and drying the dishes after their breakfast, and sweeping the post-room floor before they went away. The postmaster’s wife said there was a constant flow of Chinese, and they always behaved in that way.

Kopal, four thousand feet above the sea level, is in the midst of fine scenery, and the frontier all the way to Chugachak and the shoulder of the Altai mountains is wild and desolate. The boundary is marked by numbered poles, but there are few soldiers or excisemen to question you if you cross either way. There is a certain amount of smuggling done, one of the articles brought through from China being Havana cigars, of which the local bureaucracy is said to be fond.

Sportsmen on the road to Kuldja sometimes put up at Kopal. They are given facilities to make such journeys and receive honourable treatment, their names being forwarded to all the postmasters on the way and instructions being posted in all the post-houses along the road. It was interesting to read on the post-house walls notices of the following type:

“There will pass this way” (then would come an English name). “You are to give him horses and all of which he may stand in need. In the case of his being hindered for any reason, you will be severely punished.”

These English often possess their own _tarantasses_, and sleep in them at night. In that way they avoid the unpleasantness of sleeping in a room full of Chinese. On the whole it is better to sleep out of doors than in.

XII

“MIDSUMMER NIGHT AMONG THE TENT-DWELLERS”

I walked forth from Kopal on a broad moorland road, and after several hours’ upland tramping came to the Cossack village of Arazan--a typical willow-shaded settlement with irrigation streamlets rushing along the channels between the roadway and the cottages. Here, at the house of a herculean old soldier, I was offered for dinner a dish of hot milk, ten lightly boiled eggs, and a hunch of black bread--the typical meal of the day for a wanderer in these parts. In the pleasant coolness of five o’clock sunshine I passed out at the other end of the only street of the village and climbed up into the hills beyond. I turned a neck in the mountains, descended by little green gorges into strange valleys, and climbed out of them to high ridges and cold, windswept heights. All about me grew desolate and rugged. It was touching to look back at the little collection of homes that I had left--the compact, little island of trees in the ocean of moorland below me and behind me--and look forward to the pass where all seemed dreadful and forbidding in front.

In such a view I spread my bed and slept. The hill-side was covered with mullein stalks, and as it grew dark these stalks seemed to grow taller and taller and blacker all about me till they looked like a great wood of telegraph poles. The vast dark masses of the mountains dreamed, and in the lightly clouded heaven stars peeped across the world, rain-laden winds blew over me, and I had as lief it rained as not, so dry was everything after weeks of summer heat. But no rain came, though the winds were cool and the night was sweet.

Next morning, with great difficulty, I collected roots and withered grass enough to boil a pot and make my morning tea, and I sat and ate my breakfast in the presence of Mrs. Stonechat and her four fluffy little youngsters, gurgling and chirping and not afraid to sit on the same bank with me, while their mother harangued them on “How to fly.” While sitting there the large raindrops came at last, and they made deep black spots in the dust of the road, the lightning flashed across my knife, the thunder rolled boulders about the mountains, and I sped to a cave to avoid a drenching shower.

I was in a somewhat celebrated district. The Pass and the Gorge of Abakum are among the sights of Seven Rivers Land, and are visited by Russian holiday-makers and picnickers. All the rocks are scrawled with the names of bygone visitors, and by that fact alone you know the place has a name and is accounted beautiful. When the rain ceased, and I ventured out of the cave again, I saw a Russian at work writing his name. He had a stick dipped in the compound with which the axles of his cart-wheels were oiled, and the wheels of the cart were nearly off for him to get it. For the first time I saw how these intensely black scrawls of names and signatures are written on the rocks. We are content to scratch our names with a bit of glass or a nail, or to chalk them, or cut them with a pocket-knife; but the Russians are fond of bold, black signatures two or three feet long, and they make them with this pitch and oil from the wheels of their carts.

It was a pleasant noontide on the narrow road, between crumbling indigo rocks and heaped debris. The stony slopes were rain-washed, the air fresh, and all along the way these dwarf rose bushes which I had seen on the road to Kopal, thorny, but covered with scores of bright yellow blossoms on little red stems. The jagged highway climbed again high up--to the sky, and gave me a vision of a new land, the vast dead plain of Northern Semi-retchie and of Southern Siberia. Northward to the horizon lay deserts, salt marshes, and vast lakes with uninhabited shores, withered moors and wilted lowlands. I saw at a glance how uninteresting my road was to become if I persevered straight ahead towards Semipalatinsk, and I resolved to keep to the mountains in which I found myself, and follow them eastward and north-eastward to the remoter town of Lepsinsk.

From that height, which was evidently the famous pass, I descended into the pretty gorge of Abakum. The road was steep and narrow, the cliffs on each side sheer. A little foaming stream runs down from the cliffs, over rubbish heaps of rocks, and accompanies the highway in an artificially devised channel. A strange gateway has been formed in a thin partition of rock, and through this runs the stream below and the telegraph wire overhead; there is a footway, but carts are obliged to make a detour. At this gateway and on the rocks I saw a further intimation of commercial Siberia. Commercial travellers had scrawled:

BUY PROVODNIK GALOSHES AT OMSK

and

BUY INDIAN TEA AND GET RICH

which was almost as if I had seen in the midst of the wilderness something like “Owbridge’s Lung Tonic: 4,000 miles to London.” Still, these advertisements of galoshes and tea were scrawled, not printed, and were done voluntarily by enthusiastic travellers who probably received no fee for doing such a thing. In England you cut your Rosalind’s name on the tree; in Russia your own name; in America you write what O. Henry called “your especial line of graft,” and all the New World is scrawled with hand-written advertisements of trade. So in the far-off gorge of Abakum I saw a suggestion of the America of the future-great commercial Siberia, to which perchance, some day, Americans will emigrate for work as the Russians emigrate to America to-day.