CHAPTER XXIII

WHERE THE FISH WAGGED HIS TAIL

Whatever the dreadful hardships of our journey, they would have been increased by at least one had the loess country been as dry and arid as it looked, and thus compelled us to travel by camel-train. For, all trite humor about the ship-like motion of that worthy animal aside, he is an objectionable companion because he is an inveterate and incorrigible night-hawk. Or perhaps that word approaches the slanderous when applied to him, for the cause of his night-hawking is quite the opposite of that of his human prototype. The camel prowls about in the small hours because he can eat only by day and, given that unusual idiosyncrasy, must work by night. Frequently the beginning of our day’s journey was broken by a long camel-train looming up out of the first thin white light of dawn, the dull bells gently booming, each “string” of six or eight or ten camels led by a bearded man of red-brown, slightly surly features that often looked more Arabic than Chinese. This impression was increased by long white sheep- or goatskin cloaks, turned wool in, surmounted by what seemed to be turbans, though at closer sight and in the full light of day these last proved to be the dirty-white skullcaps of felt to which the Chinese Mohammedans are largely addicted, perhaps wound round with a soiled towel of cheap crash that is often the traveling coolie’s only concession to the worship of soap and water. One must take care, however, not to consider white caps and “Hwei-Hwei” as synonymous. For many a Mohammedan wears black, quite like his fellow-Chinese, while a wide white band about the cap is a sign, not of belief in the Prophet of Medina, but of mourning for father or grandfather. But, to come back to the camels: it would have required no great strain on the imagination to fancy oneself in Arabia as these endless lines of silent-footed beasts stalked disdainfully past in the half-lighted defiles, though one would have been forced to overlook such minor details as their two humps instead of one. Often we heard the muffled booming of their bells as they went by in the night; but by day they were seldom seen, unless it was kneeling in crowded contentment in an inn-yard or sauntering packless about some hillside thinly dotted with dead-brown tufts of coarse grass, under the care of a cat-napping driver or two.

A wide valley we had been following for some time narrowed until it drove the road high up above the river, whence it came down again into another fertile vale containing many graves and the city of Tsin-ching. There was an unusual animation about Tsin-ching. For though it had been more nearly destroyed by the earthquake than Long-te and other gloomy collections of ruins that lay behind us, it had many brand-new buildings, and great gangs of men and boys were rebuilding the city wall, quite irrespective of the fact that it was what should have been a quiet Sunday afternoon. Custom, fear of bandits, of another Mohammedan rebellion, of evil spirits, perhaps of cold winds, and no doubt the laudable desire of the authorities for an opportunity to make some “squeeze” that will be understood by many of our own city dwellers, seem to be the principal causes of this anachronistic repair of city walls; and the strongest of all these, probably, is custom. This one might have inferred from the fact that this one was being rebuilt exactly in the style in vogue centuries ago, with the crenelated top all the several miles around it pierced by thousands of little loopholes convenient in medieval warfare. But in China there is still some practical value to a city wall if it has gates that can be locked and is not so badly ruined that any one with a little diligence can find a place to climb over it. For it is a real protection against bandit raids if they are not too strong, against tough characters in general, and it is not without its use in those quarrels between towns which sometimes become serious. Besides, Tsin-ching seemed to be a kind of anti-Mohammedan stronghold, for there were few Moslems in town—the prevalence of pigs would have told us that, even if the human inhabitants had not—and who can tell when the next Islamite rebellion will sweep over Kansu?

The only foreigners in Tsin-ching or for many miles around were two Swedish ladies, one of them from Minnesota, who had recently established a mission station. They had not yet made any converts, but they had brought about a kinder and more tolerant feeling toward themselves, and toward “outside barbarians” in general, by which they hoped in time to profit. One of the richest and most significant men in town, who began as a declared and ruthless enemy, had sneaked over a few weeks before to let the detested missionaries of the despised sex cure him of an injury which neither the herbs of the local druggist nor the hocus-pocus of the local priests had helped, and, though he scarcely showed gratitude in the Western sense, rumors of the miracle had begun to have their influence. One of the difficulties these missionary ladies, like the few others we met on our journey, had to contend with was that the Chinese women with whom they tried to come in contact, especially in outlying districts, fled at sight of them because they took them to be men. This was largely due to their unbound feet and their skirts in place of ladylike trousers, but, quite aside from these details, there was, indeed, a wide difference both in appearance and manner between these big, vigorous Nordics and the tame little Chinese women.

Exchange-shops with their huge wooden “cash” signs out in front were more than numerous in Tsin-ching, and perhaps they were all needed. There a Mexican dollar was worth 2500 “cash,” but more or less in theory, since both the silver dollar and the brass coins with square holes in them had largely disappeared from circulation. In place of the former there were _taels_—irregular lumps of silver requiring a pair—or two—of scales for any transaction in which they were involved—and “Lanchow coppers.” Between these two extremes, as formerly between the silver dollar and the “cash,” there was nothing; and if the American, with his convenient little silver coins of fixed value, his unquestioned paper money, and his check-book, will pause a moment to visualize just what this means, he will understand why doing business is a complicated process, and why the streets seem to swarm with exchange-shops in such communities. Fortunately prices—and certainly wages—were low in Tsin-ching. The missionary ladies, who were their own architects, contractors, and bosses in the construction of their mission, had formerly paid their workmen 500 “cash” a day; but recently, food prices having gone up, this had been changed to 310 “cash” and food. It amounted to about the same thing for the ladies, since the two native meals furnished the gangs cost approximately two hundred “cash” a day per man, but they could buy and prepare the food in quantity at considerably less than the men themselves must otherwise have paid in native restaurants, where meals were less sanitary and nourishing. Native bosses got 400 “cash” a day, with food. Skilled carpenters, who need not have been ashamed of the samples of their work which we saw, were on a salary rather than a mere wage basis, as befits their higher caste; that is, they received, besides their food, 10,000 “cash” a month, in other words, fully two American dollars! Correspondingly, the ladies could buy chickens for the equivalent of our nickel, a leg of lamb for little more, and many other things in proportion. On the other hand, they had the task of counting their “cash,” for every string of a thousand was almost sure to be short, perhaps to have only ninety-two or so to the hundred; and even if it was not they had to be sure of that fact before paying the string to some carpenter who might otherwise return half an hour later with visible proof that he had been underpaid. Then recently their troubles had been appreciably increased by the influx of “Lanchow coppers.”

Though the proper place for airing that scandal might be Lanchow itself, there were so many evidences of it before we reached there that clarity requires an earlier mention of it. As in other countries of poor transportation facilities and sluggish circulation, the back-waters of China are in many cases chronically short on coins, particularly on small change, for their interminable transactions. The Tuchun of Kansu, hoping to remedy this difficulty—and incidentally further to obviate the possibility of eventually leaving the province a poorer man than he entered it—hit upon what was to him perhaps a highly original scheme. He called in the “cash” and the rather scarce coppers in circulation, had them melted and mixed, and reissued them as new coin. This would not have been so bad, so atrocious, in fact, if he had actually minted the stuff into money. But what he did do was to give men all over the district the right—at 20,000 “cash” royalty a day, gossip whispered—to resmelt the current coins in their little dung-fire, box-bellows forges, mix in great quantities of sand, and pour the molten result into crude molds, from which issued such a caricature of a coin as has scarcely circulated in the civilized world since the last find of Roman money disappeared into the museums. They are light as glass, give out the ring of a hat-check, are barely legible, vary greatly in design and lettering, with misspelled attempts at English on one side of several styles of them, and are so hopelessly mixed with dross, according to experts, that the bit of metal in them can never again be reclaimed. At first they were made as single coppers, worth ten “cash” each; but when it was discovered that the cost of making a coin was three “cash,” the double copper, or twenty-“cash” piece, was substituted, though with but slight changes either in size or other details.

How a Chinese general, steeped as it were in the intricacies of exchange and familiar since childhood with the daily fluctuations of the money he used, could have overlooked the certainty of a swift decline in value of such alleged coins is hard to understand. Perhaps he realized all this, but lost no sleep over it so long as he got his own rake-off in real money. At any rate, whereas a “good” or “red” copper was valued in Kansu at two hundred or less to the Mexican dollar, and the new ones announce themselves to be worth the same, the latter had already fallen to about seven thousand to the dollar in the exchange-shops of Tsin-ching. Even if this rate had been uniform throughout the province, the situation might have been endurable. But not only did it wildly fluctuate every day, almost every hour; it varied greatly between towns only a few miles apart, with an upward tendency as one approached Lanchow, where the Tuchun’s power was at its height. Long before the borders of the province were reached this oozed away entirely, at least in so far as his experiments in currency and finance went. His autonomous subordinate in Pingliang had refused point-blank to allow the new coinage to enter his district; Liangchow and most other large towns had followed suit, and only within a certain limited area around the provincial capital itself had the Tuchun succeeded in imposing this substitute for what elsewhere was still “red” coppers and stringable “cash.” Where he actually ruled, it meant a heavy fine or a prison sentence to refuse to accept the miserable stuff; but he had little or no influence over the value set upon it by the money-changers. Any one with even a bowing acquaintance with the science of finance need not be told what disasters this condition of affairs brought upon shopkeepers and business men, especially upon those whose stocks were more or less imported from the outside world.

One of the amusing points of the affair was that Liangchow and Pingliang and many another town and district that would not use the stuff themselves were manufacturing vast quantities of the spurious coins and shipping them to Lanchow, without, of course, paying the Tuchun his “rake-off.” It is hard even for the Chinese to outwit the Chinese, and no sooner had the daily royalty rate been set than most coineries within the Tuchun’s influence put on two shifts and worked twenty-four hours a day. Moreover, it is no great task to counterfeit miserable counterfeits, and almost any little cave-village in the loess hills could mold coins to its heart’s content, so long as it could get the bit of copper and brass needed. Transporting the stuff was in itself a problem worthy an expert. “Cash” can at least be strung and hung round the neck, but to carry enough of this new stuff for his immediate wants would have taxed the endurance of any pedestrian above the coolie class. In fact it was a serious matter to others than pedestrians. Every little while we met some traveler, usually a merchant, no doubt, mounted on a mule and followed by a donkey sagging under the weight and noisy with the falsetto rattling of “Lanchow coppers”; and it was no uncommon thing to pass long lines of coolies with big bundles of the new coins oscillating at the ends of their shoulder-poles, jogging eastward, as if the false currency were spreading, like a plague. Indeed the towns toward the end of our outward journey sounded like brass check factories perpetually in the act of taking stock. The latest rumor, as we neared the capital of the province, was that the Tuchun had decided to coin dollars also; “and then,” as a merchant sadly put it, “we will have no money at all left.” However, the harassed people might have cheered themselves up with the hope that the day may come when Lanchow’s despised coppers will be worth their weight in gold among numismatists, for coins cast in a mold are a rarity in this day and generation.

In a moment of good-hearted thoughtlessness the major sent his card and our respects to the magistrate of Tsin-ching, who was of course of too low rank actually to be called upon. The latter acknowledged the high honor paid him by sending an official to ask whether he could do anything for us, and though we assured him that there was no way in which our contentment with the world could possibly be improved, we found next morning that he had detailed four soldiers to accompany us. Whether this was out of sheer respect for our rank, from actual fear that bandits might attack us, or because the soldiers needed the few coppers which we might, and which he could or would not, give them, was not clear; but we rather suspected the last-named motive. They were a cheery and picturesque detail. No two of them had two garments that were uniform; their rifles bore a resemblance to some harmless substitute for a weapon, hand-made by some very clumsy youth half a century ago, and habitually misused ever since. In place of the usual strap, each had a string by which to hang the gun over his shoulder, and the bore was such that the cartridges, if there were any, must have been of just about the right diameter for our shot-gun. One of these merry protectors was so filled with song, of a strictly Chinese nature, that had he waited a bit longer to abandon me and give his precious protection to some other part of our straggling expedition he would certainly have had impressed upon him the rights and privileges of extraterritoriality. At the noonday halt we told this escort that, while they were men of whom any army might be proud, we could not dream of putting them to the task of tramping through the earthquake country ahead merely to defend our unworthy selves; moreover, we mentioned, we should be glad to give them at once the little present that they would get at nightfall if they continued. This last was evidently a strong argument, for we had the satisfaction of seeing them accept the suggestion with thanks and alacrity.

In many parts of Kansu, we learned before we left it, there was much the same old story of the inert weight of military pressure as elsewhere in China. The soldiers in many districts were not paid, but were allowed to shift for themselves upon the population. In theory this escort of ours received four thousand “cash” a month! But they depended much more upon such windfalls as ourselves, upon catching their own people gambling or trafficking in opium and confiscating their belongings, or upon foraging pure and simple among the helpless country people. Those groups which had strength and audacity enough called upon chambers of commerce and similar organizations for “loans” without interest—and of course without principal, so far as the lenders are concerned; others wandered the country until they found similar openings to which their strength was equal.

Even before we reached Tsin-ching there had been many signs of the great earthquake that had befallen this district; but in a land naturally so split and gashed and broken beyond repair many of these had passed almost unnoticed. Beyond that battered town, however, the chaotic world on every hand impressed upon us all day long that we were in the heart of the earthquake district, in so far at least as the main route to Lanchow passes through it. Even worse damage was done, people said, in districts off the road, but what we saw was enough to make it clear that the big fish which sits bolt upright and holds the earth between its fore fins had wagged his tail at the wickedness of mankind to excellent advantage. This cause of the tragedy and the Chinese cosmogony it involves were, by the way, firmly and unquestioningly believed not only by our cart-drivers, who were in every-day matters paragons of common sense, but by more than one Chinese of much higher caste. Only Chang, who claimed to be so fervent a Christian as not even to believe in “squeeze,” laughed at this view of the catastrophe; and he could not give any other reasonable explanation for it.

Evidently such things had happened before in this part of the world, for not only does the broken and fissured loess country require some such interpretation but often pieces of old roof-tile protruded from the cliff-sides of the sunken roads a hundred feet or more below the surface. But this was the first quake within the memory of living inhabitants, and apparently within their traditions, though the region, and the inhabitants, too, for that matter, have been trembling ever since. The catastrophe came suddenly, without the slightest warning, at 7:30 in the evening of December 16, 1920, and had taken its appalling toll and gone almost before the survivors could catch their breath. Six hundred thousand people at least lost their lives; the official figures are one million, but the Chinese are prone to exaggerate, just as the Mohammedans habitually refuse to give accurate information in anything resembling a census. How many were injured is suggested by the fact that earthquake victims were still wandering into the hospital at Pingliang when we were there almost two years later. But cave-dwelling, especially in so frail a soil as this, is admirably designed to make an earthquake effective, and there is no computing how many were simply buried alive without any actual physical injury being done them.

The missionaries as well as the Chinese of Kansu assert that the earthquake was a blessing in disguise—some of them even recognize in it a direct interference from heaven with earthly designs; for a General Ma and three hundred Mohammedan leaders were killed in a mosque in which, say their antagonists, they were preparing for another great Moslem rebellion, to begin the very next day. Some went so far as to say that an army of many thousand men, ready to begin its work at dawn, was buried hundreds of feet deep in a great ravine in which it was encamped. These things may not be strictly true, but there seems to be little doubt that, but for the earthquake, there would have been a Mohammedan uprising very shortly afterward. Since the great Chinese Moslem rebellion of 1862, in which eighty thousand non-Moslems are reputed to have been slaughtered, and in which certainly large cities and great districts were so devastated that they have not recovered to this day, there have been three smaller revolts against Chinese rule, so that although Kansu may not recall her earlier earthquakes she has by no means forgotten the terrors which this one is credited with having averted.

The more pietistic of the missionaries make much of the belief that, while many thousands of the wicked followers of the false prophet were buried in their caves or dashed to pieces in their ravines, not a Christian was killed. One by one, it was said, they straggled into the mission stations with stories of the untold damage that had taken place all about them, but weeping reverently at the miracle by which they and theirs had in every case escaped injury and even property loss. Without a discount for the unconscious exaggerations of overworked and over-pious apostles, such a fact would not be absolute and final proof of wrath of God against the Moslems for having picked the wrong faith, for while there are several million of them in the province, the number of Christians would not entirely preclude the possibility of their having been spared by mere chance rather than by divine intercession. In Pingliang, for instance, after thirty years’ work there are fifty baptized Christians; in another district two hundred converts are claimed among two hundred thousand _families_.

In the stiff, short climb through a ruined world an hour or two out of Tsin-ching, trees that had once shaded the road were hanging so precariously over great abysses that even this fuel-starved people did not dare to try to cut them. Here and there great pieces of the road, big willows, poplars, and all, had been pitched pell-mell over the edge. Yet villages still lived on lumps of earth half broken off from the rest of the world and ready to collapse into mighty chasms below. The mountains had indeed “walked,” as the complicated yet sometimes childishly simple Chinese language has it. Whole sides of terraced peaks had slipped off and carried the road intact, trees and all, half a mile away, had bottled up deep-green unnatural lakes at the bottom of great holes in the loess earth—to become what; a future menace or mere salt?—unless released by the hand of man. Sometimes half a dozen mountains had all danced together and left the brown loess churned up as if it had been boiled, with a new self-made “road” and the telegraph-wire on new poles stretching away across it, yet without the suggestion of an inhabitant, nothing but a deathly stillness for long distances, rarely broken perhaps by a magpie whose gay manners were utterly out of keeping with the desolate scene. Farther to the north, they say, one may still see shocks of harvested grain rotted in the fields, where the population was entirely killed off and none has come to take its place. Sometimes only half the terraced mountain-side had come down to overwhelm the tree-lined highway, or to bury a village as deeply as beneath the sea, the other half still supporting an uninjured hamlet below, as if nothing whatever had happened to disturb this quiet, bucolic existence. Ends of the mud walls of former villages protruding from the yellow chaos were often the only suggestion that human beings had once lived and bred and died there. Sometimes the wide road bordered by its venerable willows ended suddenly against a mighty bank of convulsed earth where the mountain had piled high over it, the new route clambering away over the débris with that indifference of youth to the experiences of old age that keeps the world moving onward instead of crouched at the roadside weeping over its disasters. In several places hundred-yard pieces of the old haphazard highway, twenty yards wide, had been gently picked up and set at right angles to its former course, without so much as a crack in its dozen mule-paths and the narrow strips of turf between them.

Up over this broken and wrecked world came toward noon twenty coolies trotting under heavy loads of antlers oscillating from their pole-burdened shoulders. Wapiti and other deer are still found in the high mountains of Kansu, but the Chinese demand for their horns, preferably in the velvet, as medicine, is sure to exterminate them as completely as wanton destruction has the forests, probably pine and hemlock, that once covered all these tamed and terraced ranges. There is something strikingly un-Western, something akin to our own medieval ancestors, about the Chinese temperament in such matters, when they will continue century after century to pay fabulous prices—a good pair of elk-horns in the velvet will bring as much as fifty dollars gold in the large cities—for something of entirely imaginary value, without ever thinking of attempting to find out whether it is really good for anything or not. Their forebears thought so, and that settles the question. If once a custom can get a place with the Chinese, it need have little worry about holding its position, no matter how inefficient, useless, or even harmful it may become.

Well on in the afternoon we came upon a beautiful blue-green lake imprisoned in a ravine, miles long and with a side arm of unknown length, all in a barren brown world without any other form of water. One might have fancied that the people roundabout would have been delighted to have it, and thank the earthquake for blocking the tiny stream that had formed it; but what do the people of Kansu know of the beauty of water, or of its usefulness, beyond what is required for their own and their animals’ gullets? So, with the help of American relief funds, they had cut a great gap through the fallen hill at the head of the lake—how queer that Kansu had to be paid by people on the other side of the earth for repairing their own land!—to assure themselves against being flooded out by such unnatural lakes when they rise above their barriers or seep away through the loose loess soil.

We spent that night at the upper end of this lake in Tsing-kiang-yi, the town worst treated by the earthquake of any along the way. It was split into many fantastic forms, and threshing-floors had grown up in what were merely mighty earthquake cracks. This did not keep the inhabitants, however, from enjoying life in the orthodox Chinese fashion. A theatrical troupe had come to set up a makeshift stage of poles and matting on six-foot legs in a corner of a filthy open lot overhanging the mighty gorge into which much of the town had disappeared two years before, and most of Tsing-kiang-yi and the surrounding country stood crowded together in front of it. There is a difference only in degree between the theatrical performances given on such outdoor contrivances at country fairs and on village market-days and those in the most imposing theaters in Peking. The same nerve-racking “music” is torn off in hundred-yard strips by men at one side of the stage, who conduct themselves as freely all through the performance as if they were peanut-sellers in the market-place. There are the same more or less mythological beings in astonishing costumes, somewhat more soiled, surmounted by masked or painted faces, and these in turn by strange creations in wigs and head-dresses poorly joined to the wearers, who saunter out at intervals from the partly concealing mat dressing-room behind the stage proper and screech for long periods in the selfsame distressing falsetto with which Chinese theater-goers everywhere allow themselves to be tortured. The same property-man wanders incessantly about the stage, setting it to rights or bringing anything needed, like a nonchalant coolie at work in a coal-yard; the same unwashed ragamuffins, carelessly stuffed into absurd and multicolored garments which make them generals, gods, court attendants, or anything else the play may call for, are herded on and off in the wooden manner of “supers” the world over. Small boys—not to mention full-grown ones—clamber about the hasty structure in their eagerness to make the most of one of the rare treats of a dismal lifetime, even sitting in the edges of the stage itself, to the annoyance apparently only of a stray foreigner with his own queer notions of stage propriety. Down below, the standing audience may not behave with what the Western world would call rapt attention, but it has its own restless, free-for-all way of showing its delight.

In Chinese villages theatrical performances are usually a community undertaking, a way of spending the accumulated funds of this or that communal scheme, which it would of course be foolish to squander in building schools or cleaning the streets. Sometimes it is a treat offered by or forced from some prominent citizen, sometimes a sort of fine exacted from a neighboring village with which there has been a quarrel. That Chinese “actors” wandering through the provinces do not live in steam-heated hotels or ride in Pullman cars need scarcely be emphasized; indeed there is a strong suspicion from as far away as the outer edge of the audience that time and opportunity and inclination to remove the evidences of long cart-road travel very, very seldom coincide. But then, back in the interior players are still rated almost in the coolie class, however much they may suggest the romance of life to gaping yokels.

We actually saw a man mending the road next day; that is, he was chopping out pieces of sandstone from between deep ruts in a very narrow gully, though he may merely have been gathering them for his own use. It had been a crisp, brilliant morning, more pleasant to walk than to ride, white smoke rising from a mud town across a great gorge ahead that would otherwise probably never have been distinguished from the brown-yellow hillside on which it hung. Perhaps a distant mule-bell faintly reached the ear, a pair of coolies on the sky-line caught the eye, and that might be all for long distances except the tumbled verdureless immensity. That day we clambered over a two-thousand-meter pass, then caught a great crack in the earth, along the high edge of which the road went until mid-afternoon, prosperous hills on either hand, and tilted farm-yards surrounded by high mud walls, into which we could look down as from an airplane. The earth had grown harder, a bit less friable than pure loess, though still without a suggestion of stone, and casting itself if anything in still more fantastic formations. Boys herding sheep or goats, and muleteers plodding behind their animals, sang on far-away mountain-sides snatches of song that sounded more Western than Chinese. Always a chaotic world of impossibly sculptured cliffs and incredible hollows unrolled itself before us. Now and again the road crawled across some great earth bridge, in constructing which the hand of man had taken no part, over a vast chasm but an insignificant stream; in some places it had fallen away into another of those breathless abysses, to skirt along the sheer edge of which seemed foolhardy even on foot. Yet all manner of Chinese travel, our own carts included, toiled serenely over these spots, apparently quite oblivious of the fact that the outer wheels more than once dropped to the hub down the side of the mighty precipice. Now and again surely some one must have gone over it with a piece of the crumbling road; perhaps the others burned a little joss at the nearest ruined mud temple and dropped a few “cash” into the big bronze kettle-gong the old beggar priest so constantly beats out in front of it, but certainly they did nothing else to be spared a similar fate on their next journey.

However, it is not true that the Chinese are utterly incapable of learning by experience. In this earthquake country, where living in caves proved so disastrous, they had certainly come out of them. But they were conservative in architecture as in other things, and the new mud huts, set as far out from the dreaded mountain-sides as possible, wherever inhabitants remained, were built in exactly the same shape as the caves, with an arched mud roof and the general appearance of having been dug out of the mountain and carried to the new setting. Such innovations will no doubt continue to be erected in this region until a new generation has forgotten and prefers to tempt fate again rather than go to the extra labor of building houses where it is so much easier to dig them.

Speaking of building, a very false impression prevails in the Western world as to Chinese structures. Because of their scores of centuries of existence and their tendency to cling to old things, many of us have assumed that the Chinese people build for posterity. Quite the contrary is the case. The Chinese, one is constantly being impressed, have their chief interest in their ancestors, or themselves, not in their descendants. Their coffins are made of mighty slabs of wood that have much to do with the crime of deforestation; they may not only spend all they have for the funeral of a father but often bankrupt themselves for a generation. But their houses are the cheapest possible structures, almost wholly made of the earth of the fields—the only material left, to be sure, in many regions. Mud bricks, mud and straw walls, mud _k’angs_ in place of bed, chair, divan, and table—even the roof-tiles are merely a better baked form of mud. Nor is it only the humble homes that are reduced to this material. The dwellings of men of wealth, the palaces of the bygone dynasties, the very Temple of Heaven in Peking, the Great Wall itself, are impermanent structures largely put together with wet earth which is a sad substitute indeed for cement. It is as if, having an unlimited supply of dirt-cheap labor and a great paucity of good materials, the Chinese find something reprehensible in building too solidly, a waste of valuable substance as against inexpensive toil, perhaps a feeling that to build too well to-day will be unjust to those who will want work to-morrow. This point of view pervades everything, from imperial palaces to the tiniest of children’s toys, from temples and pagodas to water-jars and mud jugs; almost all of them are flimsy or easily destructible, whether by use, time, or the elements. The result is that the country from beginning to end is in a constant state of half-ruin or dismal disrepair, for the average life of most structures is so short that while one is being built up again another is sure to have fallen down.

In contrast to the endless processions of wheat-wagons and the like of a few days before, we met only two carts from dawn to sunset, and not many foot-travelers. Back in the crowded loess cañons it had been a pleasure to watch the expertness with which our chief cartman manipulated his loosely joined mules and awkward conveyance, taking advantage of every little break in the line of traffic, of every hesitation on the part of others to forge ahead, and keeping almost at our heels when such a feat seemed impossible. Here where travel was light his expertness was still needed to escape the many pitfalls of the road, and still the carts came close to keeping the pace we set. This was not breathless, to be sure; ninety _li_ a day almost as regularly as the days dawned—and walled cities or at least large villages seemed to have been exactly spaced to accommodate travel at that rate. Our cartmen might have done their best, anyway, but the promise of a dollar _cumshaw_ each for every day gained on the regular schedule assured it. This obviated arguments, worry, and a dozen other possible difficulties, and if our drivers insisted that it was better to spend the night at such a town rather than attempt to push on to the next we could take their word for it, which of itself was quite worth the extra money. In striking contrast to one of the serious drawbacks to cross-country travel in South America one could depend upon most road information. Ask almost any one how many _li_ it was to such a place, and the answer usually was not only quick but fairly accurate. The finest thing about the Chinese _li_ is that you need not worry about crossing a mountain or any other piece of unusually bad going; the _li_ are shortened accordingly, and so many hours of steady plodding will bring you to your destination irrespective of conditions along the way.

Our road at length went down into the great cañon-bed of a little meandering stream that spent its days, and its nights, too, no doubt, in carrying away the cliffs which towered high above it, as they fell in clouds of dust and dissolved into silt. A few hours along this brought us to the rather striking town of Houei-ning, in a wide spot of the river valley with hills piling high above it close on every side. These and two distinct city walls enclosed what were virtually two towns, one somewhat more open and seeming to harbor an unusual number of religious edifices, the other crowded, with very narrow streets, still further darkened by many fantastic old wooden _p’ai-lous_. There were suggestions that the first was the Mohammedan quarter. Houei-ning was also repairing its walls, had indeed built a big new gate, and was now topping off the inner and principal defense with cream-colored brick parapets, loopholes and all. Pure mud was the only mortar, except between the topmost bricks, and the “masons” were small boys and old men. Boys barely eight years old were carrying great loads of bricks; those of ten or twelve had already been graduated into bricklayers. Almost all of them had glowing red cheeks, but their faces and hands were worse chapped than any one has ever seen, perhaps, outside China, where long sleeves are the poor substitutes for gloves or mittens, and hands toughened, not to say split and blackened, by exposure not only endure greater cold but water several degrees hotter than can our own.

Badly hit by the earthquake, Houei-ning was still full of cracks and chasms and ruins, and the “roads” leading down into or out of it seemed in many cases to drop into pitfalls and sometimes entirely to lose themselves, or at least their sense of direction. There were many times as many dead as living inhabitants. The almost golden-yellow landscape of the verdureless mountain slopes about the town were more thickly covered with graves than I could remember ever having seen before, either in China or Korea; the myriads of little conical mounds suggested spatters of raindrops on a rolling, golden sea. High in the hills close above were what seemed to be a plethora of temples and monasteries, while all the landscape bristled with stone monuments, most of them on the backs of turtles, the rest handsome old ornamental arches of carved stone, all more or less cracked and ruined. Houei-ning must have had something of a history in bygone centuries, like so many now sleepy old towns of China.

Now it seemed to be the big market for those crude forked sticks which do duty as pitchforks among the Chinese. All this region made a four-tined one, with a wooden crosspiece let into and tied to the tines and the end of the handle with tough grass, but Houei-ning evidently had a monopoly on those grown in the form of a two-pronged implement. In Honan perfect three-tined ones were grown in abundance, as rose-bushes and the like are trained into fantastic shapes in Japan. The flimsiness of construction which everywhere impresses itself upon the traveler in China is nowhere more noticeable than in such peasants’ tools,—rakes a mere bamboo pole with one end split, spread, and bent over in the form of teeth; woven-wicker buckets for use at open holes in the fields that do service as wells; little bent-willow shovels for the countless thousands of boys and men, and not a few women and girls, who wander the roads with their baskets—for gathering the droppings of animals seems to be the favorite outdoor sport of China; it is a lonely trail and a depopulated region indeed where these are left to mingle with the soil. It was in Houei-ning, too, that we saw offered for sale guns that must have been old when the Manchu dynasty began, guns slender as a lance, eight feet or more long, with tiny butts apparently meant to be used against the thumb instead of the shoulder, and some contraption for firing that probably antedated the flint-lock by many decades. A fetching touch of color that increased as the weather grew more bitingly cold were the earlaps worn by nearly every one. In Kansu these are almost always home-made and hand-embroidered in gaily colored designs of birds, flowers, and the like, with much less violation of artistic standards than one would expect.

All through this region a custom wide-spread in China was very generally practised. That is, almost all boys from perhaps four to twelve years of age wore round their necks an iron chain big enough to restrain an enraged bulldog, and usually fastened together with a large native-forged padlock, though there would have been no difficulty in lifting off the whole contraption. The object of this adornment is to protect the precious male offspring from ill luck—here, perhaps, to keep the big fish from wagging his tail again. If parents have any reason to suspect that evil spirits are on the trail of a son, they hasten to a temple and put him in pawn to an idol, as it were; that is, they have a priest hang a chain, with much hocus-pocus, about his neck, thereby deceiving the powers of evil into believing that he is not their son at all but that he belongs to the temple. In a way this is true, for before he can be “redeemed” again by the parents the priest, who keeps the key of the padlock, must be generously rewarded. Let a boy fall ill, and no time is lost in evoking this sure protection; especially if one dies, his surviving or later-born brother is chained at once. The constant efforts of evil spirits to do injury to a family through the still unmarried sons, of whom ancestor-worship requires posterity, is one of the greatest banes of Chinese existence. Not the least uncommon of the tricks resorted to for the discomfiture of these unseen enemies is to give the boy a girl’s name, for naturally no evil spirit is going to waste his time in trying to injure a mere female.

The city gates of Houei-ning do not open until six, after which we went down again into labyrinthian loess gullies, across a broad fertile valley, and finally into a river cañon. Nothing could have been more dull than the long morning through this dreary chasm, in utter silence except for our own noises, and a rare donkey-boy singing his way along the top of the cliff far above. But, as if to make up for this dismal stretch, the road clambered early in the afternoon to the summit of a high ridge, with perhaps the most marvelous series of vistas of all our journey. There were crazy-shaped fields at every possible height, ragged little hollows that looked exactly like shell-holes, even their tiny bottoms carefully cultivated, threshing-floors throwing up grain like bursts of shrapnel, clusters of farm buildings of the identical color of all the landscape, and always surrounded by high mud walls, a wildly chaotic yet completely tamed land, utterly bare brown, turned golden by the brightest of suns and the clearest of air, with only the faintest purple haze on the far edges of the horizon. The trail had taken again to one of the pell-mell slopes of a mighty stream-worn crack in the earth and worked its way in and out along the haphazard face of this, across natural earth bridges, over jutting spurs and perpendicular ridges, into pockets where, cut off from the breeze but still in the brilliant sunshine, it was almost uncomfortably warm, and gradually carried us higher and higher on a ridge that swung more and more to the south. The miserable half-ruined mud village in which we found lodging was so high that to step out into the night was like diving into ice-water. Yet we kept to the ridge for hours more next morning before the road abandoned it at last and plunged headlong down into a big valley supporting the ancient town of Ngan-ting. An unusually huge wall of irregular shape, with very fancy high gates, surrounded the same crowds of staring, dirty people, of filthy-nosed, half-naked children and crippled women, all huddled together in the cold shadows instead of spreading out in the sunshine of the open world all about them. Ngan-ting seemed to be an important garrison town, through which we passed just in time to become entangled in some manœver resembling formal guard-mount, amid the barbaric blaring of many Chinese bugles. Our carts meanwhile had scorned the town and were on their way down the widest river valley yet. Along this the avenue of trees, some of their trunks scarred with pictorial obscenities, kept up in a half-hearted way; but scrub-poplar and sometimes almost branchless trunks were poor substitutes for the magnificent old willows farther east. Many of these had been cut down in this region, as huge stumps on a level with the earth showed. Apparently there is nothing that so exasperates the Chinese as the sight of a live tree; it would look so much better shaped as a coffin or turned into temple doors.

Suddenly, just beyond Ngan-ting, both sexes and all ages took to making yarn, in the Andean style of twirling a bobbin as they wandered about, and to knitting, not merely caps and stockings, but whole suits. We had once or twice been shocked some days earlier at the sight of a camel-driver calmly twiddling his knitting-needles as he strode or rode along, a pastime bad enough in talkative old ladies and tea-party guests who decline to waste their time, and certainly far beneath the dignity of the great male sex! But some missionary, it seemed, had started the craze—for a generation or so ago knitting was as unknown in China as real peanuts or the weaving of woolen clothing—and had neglected to explain its proper segregation. There had been no rain in all this region for a whole year, they said, and we had been advised to buy rain-water only of the Mohammedans, even if they forced us to pay high for it, since that to be had from the mere Chinese might be rank poison even after boiling. Somewhere along the way I had seen a blind youth marching round and round one of those two-stone grist-mills to be found all over China, and most often operated by a blindfolded donkey. His short hair where cues were still the fashion, and a not unattractive young woman watching him from a near-by doorway with an expression that might easily have been taken for a satisfied leer, naturally called up the memory of Samson and Delilah. Indeed, the fellow swung his head from side to side and lifted his feet unnecessarily high at every step in a way to prove that the late Caruso had learned at least one stage trick from real life. But the Philistines in this case were only the filth and lack of care which leave so many Chinese children sightless. There was a little blind boy of five that morning, for instance, carrying a baby brother of two, each wearing a single rag; and the baby was telling the boy where to step, though he afterward ran a bit alone and made the threshing-floor without mishap through many pitfalls.

In the account of his travels in China a decade ago Professor Ross has a chapter entitled, “Unbinding the Women of China.” One of the professor’s finest traits, however, is over-optimism. Foot-binding most certainly showed no signs of dying out in any of the territory through which we passed in our two months’ journey out into the northwest. A group of little girls from six to eight years old toddling along the road on crippled feet, yet carrying heavy baskets and driven, like calves to market, by a sour-faced old woman whose own feet still seemed to pain her at every step, was no unusual sight. One might easily have fancied they were to be offered for sale—girls can be bought for a mere song in this region. How often we passed a child in her early teens astride a donkey urged on by a man on foot, her little tapering legs ending in mere knots, her face so whitened and rouged that she looked like some inanimate and over-decorated doll! Only another bride, or concubine, on her way to the home of a husband or a master she had never seen. Girls certainly not yet ten years old were already shuffling about house- and threshing-floors in their football knee-pads; little girls dismally crying in some mud pen to which they had been banished because they could not suppress such signs of pain from their newly bound feet, or hobbling a few yards along the road with set lips, emphasized the fact that there are far worse fates even than being born a boy in China.

Crippled feet would be bad enough in comfort and warmth and with plenty of servants to save steps, as probably most Westerners fancy Chinese women have who are thus “beautified.” But if there is any decrease in foot-binding at all, it is among the well-to-do, the wealthy in large cities who might sit perpetually in cushions and spare their little feet. Your peasant and countryman is most insistent that the old custom be kept up; he would sneer with scorn at the thought of taking a wife with natural feet; he sternly insists that his daughters’ feet be bound. Stumping about their filthy huts, shivering with mountain cold, probably never washing all over once in a lifetime, it is astonishing that these country women do not all die of gangrene or something of the sort. How they keep such feet warm, when they cannot move rapidly, when they ride sometimes all day in a cold so bitter that even we were forced to get off and walk at frequent intervals, is a question I have never yet heard answered. Perhaps the foot becomes a kind of hoof, devoid of feeling and incapable of freezing.

At first thought one might fancy that at least a few mothers who had suffered all their lives would spare their daughters similar misery. For, they have told missionary women, their bound feet hurt whenever they walk, and generally they have pains also in the legs and the back as long as they live. Knowing how serious a mere broken arch may be, it is not hard for us to imagine what it must mean to have the arch doubled back upon itself by turning the toes under and squeezing the heel up to meet them, and then insisting that the victim walk. But even if the mothers were devoid of that wide-spread human cussedness which makes misery love company, even if the father did not absolutely insist, there is the economic question. Girls must have husbands—“or they will starve,” as even experienced Peking _amas_ put it. There is no provision in the Chinese scheme of family for old maids. But granting that all these insuperable difficulties have been overcome, there is the girl herself with whom to reckon. If she has reached the age—six to seven—when the binding should begin, and it has not begun, she is likely to commence by insisting, and to advance to weeping and tearing her hair unless the oversight is corrected. In other words, girls cry if their feet are not bound; and they certainly cry if they are, so that there is apparently no escape from tears. You would hardly expect a modest American school-girl willingly to consent to mingle with her companions if she were obliged to wear trousers, or to cut her hair boy fashion; and in China “face,” the fear of ridicule and public opinion, is much stronger than in the United States, and customs and precedents are far more solidly intrenched. Naturally the Chinese girl would rather face a little suffering—for at her age she probably has only a hazy idea of the length of the ordeal and the severity of the pain involved—than to be made fun of all her life for her “boy’s feet,” and, worse still, to lose all chance of getting a husband, which she has been taught to think is the most dreadful, in fact the most unsurvivable, fate that can befall her. Once in a while some poor orphan girl is so “neglected” that no one takes the trouble to bind her feet; and she becomes the village slattern and a horrible example to all “decent” girls. For of course she cannot get a husband; she will be unusually fortunate if some one gives her a job as a barn-yard drudge.

Our hostess at one of the mission stations knew a girl whose feet had not been bound but who turned out to be very pretty. One day an important official happened to see her as he was passing through the district. “What a pity,” he said, “that her feet are not bound, for if they were I would take her as a concubine.”

“Oh, do not let that stand in the way of your desire, your Excellency,” cried the enchanted mother; “give me a year and I will have her ready for you.”

“But you cannot bind her feet in a year,” replied the official.

“Only leave it to me, your Excellency, and I shall not fail you,” persisted the mother.

A year later the girl took the proud position that had been offered her, as concubine to what, to the simple country people, was a very great man; but to this day, though she still keeps her precarious place, she cannot walk a step. For instead of starting gradually, by bending the toes under and wrapping them in wet cloths that shrink, then tying them down more tightly and beginning to draw up the heel the following year, and so on, this mother was working against time. So she literally cut much of the flesh off the girl’s feet, broke nearly every bone in them, and by the time the year was up she had made her as helpless a cripple as any mandarin could have wanted for a plaything.

The best style of bound feet, it seems, have the bones broken. Exacting men ask if this has been done, and show worth-while approval at an affirmative answer. Feet seem to vary in size and style by localities. In some places on our western trip they were so small that no real foot remained; the leg tapered down without a break to the end, almost as if it had been cut off at the ankle. In fact we often wondered if it would not have been much simpler and far less painful to amputate the feet entirely. In other places the big toe was left, and with it something of the shape of a foot. But under this the tiny shoe was generally fitted with a miniature heel, often red in better-to-do cases, which made walking next to impossible. With no give and take of the leg-muscles, these of course soon dry up, so that the leg resembles a tapering wooden stump and the gait bears out the likeness. Foot-binding is certainly a wonderful scheme to keep the women from gadding about; and in a land where they are seldom expected to leave the compound in which they are delivered to the husband—or mother-in-law—this no doubt is considered a great asset. Earlier writers have told of districts in which the feet are no longer bound because of the sad experiences of fleeing women who could not keep up with their men-folks at the time of the great Mohammedan rebellion. But we never saw any such districts. Probably the experiences have been forgotten, and custom has reasserted itself. The Mohammedans, by the way, are just as bad as the mere Chinese in this matter of foot-binding; if I remember rightly, the Koran has nothing to say against it.

As far as we noticed, the missionaries in the northwest did not seem to be making any great effort to reduce this most atrocious of Chinese customs. Some of them appeared to be more eager to save souls than soles, though in general they were men and women of sound common sense, with their own feet on the ground rather than with their heads lost in the clouds. Suffering and misery, immorality and wicked superstitions are so general in China that the mere crippling of the feet soon becomes but one of many possible points of attack. Christian converts are not allowed to bind their feet; if they are already bound, they are expected, in theory at least, to unbind them, though this in the case of older women is not always possible. Girls with bound feet are refused admission to most, if not all, Christian schools; and a few of the best government institutions are commencing to follow suit. The best argument of all against the practice is the plain economic one. If you bind your daughter’s feet she cannot marry within the church, the missionaries tell a convert, for Christian boys will not have her. As available husbands of that point of view increase, the girls are of course more and more willing to run the risk of not having themselves adorned with lily feet. But, to be frank, Christianity is not rapidly increasing, and bound feet seem to be as prevalent, at least in northern China, as ever, except in Peking and a few coast cities, where it is against the law, in Manchuria, where it is contrary to custom, in the rather small and scattered Christian communities, and among a few of the more progressive families in the larger cities.

Custom is not only a curiously tenacious weed but often a quick-growing one. I was impressed with the latter thought one morning when, in riding into a town of some size, I caught sight of a woman with natural feet, such as I had not seen perhaps for a week; and the first flash to cross my mind might have been expressed in some such exclamation as, “My, but isn’t she ugly!” The abnormal type is always ugly, and if, in a mere week, a foreigner can become so accustomed to the normal Chinese woman, who tapers down like a sharpened stake, that an uncrippled one strikes him, even momentarily, as a kind of monstrosity, it is easy to understand why the Chinese have come in many centuries to consider this alteration of the human form both an improvement and a necessity. Nor is the custom so universally injurious to the health as the rest of the world naturally supposes. Women with cheeks bright red without the aid of rouge, yet with the tiniest of feet, were no more unusual in Kansu than the filthy, old, and totally unattractive ones who scuttled away into their holes as if they were in imminent danger when two harmless foreigners rode by on travel-weary pack-mules.

Beyond “Dry Straw Hotel”—most Chinese place names are quaint and simple if you translate them—where we made the noonday halt on the next to the last day of the journey, the hills were no longer terraced, perhaps because they were too steep, but lay piled up in a thousand folds and wrinkles that made them even more beautiful. Wheat was flowing the other way now, toward Lanchow, mainly on donkeys. There was much stone in the soil of the great plain across which we jogged with a growing sensation of eagerness that afternoon, and to the left, hazy under the low sun, the beginning of the high ranges bordering Tibet. Large towns were frequent, though there was no decrease in dirt and poverty.

Toward sunset we were accosted at the beginning of a defile by two Chinese on sleigh-bell-jingling horses, one of whom handed us a letter. It was from the chief Protestant missionary of Lanchow, a friend of the major’s, to whom he had written from Sian-fu announcing our coming. Rapidly as we had traveled, the coolie-borne fast mail had so far outstripped us that here was the reply, welcoming us to the city and regretting that, since we were to arrive on a Sunday, services made it impossible for the writer to come out and meet us in person. To be met thirty miles out by a host, even by proxy, struck us as real hospitality; and the fact that the messengers had no difficulty in identifying us is all that need be said as to the scarcity of Caucasian travelers in Kansu. Even had they missed us among the labyrinthian paths and gullies, they would not have gone far before some one would have told them that the two foreigners had already passed. In all the sixteen days we saw on the road two pairs of Russian Jews and two Dutch Catholic priests, and had spent the night with two sets of missionaries and dined with a third. One of the messengers was to return to Lanchow post-haste with news of our arrival, and the other was to serve us as guide. They do some things in a regal fashion in the far interior of China.

The last town in which we were forced to pass a night was a miserable collection of filth and half-baked mud, though rich in grain, stacks covering the flat roofs and surrounding the hard-earth floors on which it was still being threshed; though two brand-new temples gleamed forth from the general ugliness. All next morning a half-witted road, evidently bent on outdoing itself as a fitting climax of the journey, wandered along a wide river valley cut up everywhere not only by the meandering stream itself but by hundreds of irrigation ditches. All these were frozen over more or less solidly, with the result that progress was a constant struggle with our mules, already jaded with fatigue and fright and covered with icicles when we climbed at last to the bank and made our way through almost continuous villages by a narrow road. Even here irrigation ditches still made trouble, and strings of carts and camels reduced progress materially, though this did not greatly matter, since there was no difficulty in keeping up with our carts that had been obliged to continue along the river bottom. Pure loess had disappeared some days before, but the soil was merely a bit more solid along the road that had been deliberately cut through a hill beyond which I came out sooner than I had expected upon the Yellow River, here racing swiftly through a deep rocky gorge and rather gray than yellow in color. Extraordinary activity had broken out in the large town forty _li_ from the end of our journey, for hundreds of men were building a real embankment, hauling stone from far up the river-bed, and preparing to throw a bridge across the tributary down which we had come. But the enterprise, it turned out, was not the complete nullification of the opinion we had formed of the Chinese inability to accomplish public works, for it was being done with American relief funds under the supervision of the host who was awaiting us.

Tobacco grew all along the last fertile miles of the journey, and the increasing population busied itself in stripping leaves instead of winnowing grain. These were carried home in two-man litters made of matting, while the stripped stalks evidently served as fuel. For some reason, which no one could explain to us, many of the fields were still covered with the grown plants, shriveled and brown from the early winter frosts, and in many cases covered with a kind of straw cap. Then the road thought better of the short respite it had given us and plunged uphill through another genuine loess cañon, where cliffs seemed ready to fall in clouds of dust and camel-trains crowded. Out of this we broke an hour or more later upon a far-reaching view of the wide, open plain walled by mountains, across which, still twenty _li_ distant, lay the capital of China’s westernmost province.