Across China on Foot - Edwin John Dingle (i love reading books txt) 📗

down to Shanghai, and Mr. H.E. Sly, whom we had met in Shanghai, was due to relieve him. Mr. J.L. Smith, of the Consular Service, was here also, just reaching a state of convalescence after an attack of measles, and was to go to Chen-tu to take up duty as soon as he was fit. But despite the topsy-turvydom, we were made welcome, and both Phillips and Smith did their best to entertain. Chung-king Consulate is probably the finest—certainly one of the finest—in China, built on a commanding site overlooking the river and the city, with the bungalow part over in the hills. It possesses remarkably fine grounds, has every modern convenience, not the least attractive features being the cement tennis-court and a small polo ground adjoining. I had hoped to see polo on those little rats of ponies, but it could not be arranged. I should have liked to take a stick as a farewell.

People were shocked indeed that I was going to walk across China.

Let me say here that travel in the Middle Kingdom is quite possible anywhere provided that you are fit. You have merely to learn and to maintain untold patience, and you are able to get where you like, if you have got the money to pay your way;[E] but walking is a very different thing. It is probable that never previously has a traveler actually walked across China, if we except the Rev. J. McCarthy, of the China Inland Mission, who some thirty years or so ago did walk across to Burma, although he went through Kwei-chow province over a considerably easier country. Not because it is by any means physically impossible, but because the custom of the country—and a cursed custom too—is that one has to keep what is called his "face." And to walk tends to make a man lose "face."

A quiet jaunt through China on foot was, I was told, quite out of the question; the uneclipsed audacity of a man mentioning it, and especially a man such as I was, was marvelled at. Did I not know that the foreigner must have a chair? (This was corroborated by my boy, on his oath, because he would have to pay the men.) Did I not know that no traveler in Western China, who at any rate had any sense of self-respect, would travel without a chair, not necessarily as a conveyance, but for the honor and glory of the thing? And did I not know that, unfurnished with this undeniable token of respect, I should be liable to be thrust aside on the highway, to be kept waiting at ferries, to be relegated to the worst inn's worst room, and to be generally treated with indignity? This idea of mine of crossing China on foot was preposterous!

Even Mr. Hudson Broomhall, of the China Inland Mission, who with Mrs. Broomhall was extremely kind, and did all he could to fit me up for the journey (it is such remembrances that make the trip one which I would not mind doing again), was surprised to know that I was walking, and tried to persuade me to take a chair. But I flew in the face of it all. These good people certainly impressed me, but I decided to run the gauntlet and take the risk.

The question of "face" is always merely one of theory, never of fact, and the principles that govern "face" and its attainment were wholly beyond my apprehension. "I shall probably be more concerned in saving my life than in saving my face," I thought.

Therefore it was that when I reached a place called Fu-to-gwan I discarded all superfluities of dress, and strode forward, just at that time in the early morning when the sun was gilding the dewdrops on the hedgerows with a grandeur which breathed encouragement to the traveler, in a flannel shirt and flannel pants—a terrible breach of foreign etiquette, no doubt, but very comfortable to one who was facing the first eighty li he had ever walked on China's soil. My three coolies—the typical Chinese coolie of Szech'wan, but very good fellows with all their faults—were to land me at Sui-fu, 230 miles distant (some 650 li), in seven days' time. They were to receive four hundred cash per man per day, were to find themselves, and if I reached Sui-fu within the specified time I agreed to kumshaw them to the extent of an extra thousand.[F] They carried, according to the arrangement, ninety catties apiece, and their rate of pay I did not consider excessive until I found that each man sublet his contract for a fourth of his pay, and trotted along light-heartedly and merry at my side; then I regretted that I had not thought twice before closing with them.

It is probable that the solidity of the great paved highways of China have been exaggerated. I have not been on the North China highways, but have had considerable experience of them in Western China, Szech'wan and Yün-nan particularly, and have very little praise to lavish upon them. Certain it is that the road to Sui-fu does not deserve the nice things said about it by various travelers. The whole route from Chung-king to Sui-fu, paved with flagstones varying in width from three to six or seven feet—the only main road, of course—is creditably regular in some places, whilst other portions, especially over the mountains, are extremely bad and uneven. In some places, I could hardly get along at all, and my boy would call out as he came along in his chair behind me—

"Master, I thinkee you makee catch two piecee men makee carry. This b'long no proper road. P'raps you makee bad feet come."

And truly my feet were shamefully blistered.

One had to step from stone to stone with considerable agility. In places bridges had fallen in, nobody had attempted to put them into a decent state of repair—though this is never done in China—and one of the features of every day was the wonderful fashion in which the mountain ponies picked their way over the broken route; they are as sure-footed as goats.

As I gazed admiringly along the miles and miles of ripening wheat and golden rape, pink-flowering beans, interspersed everywhere with the inevitable poppy, swaying gently as in a sea of all the dainty colors of the rainbow, I did not wonder that Szech'wan had been called the Garden of China. Greater or denser cultivation I had never seen. The amphitheater-like hills smiled joyously in the first gentle touches of spring and enriching green, each terrace being irrigated from the one below by a small stream of water regulated in the most primitive manner (the windlass driven by man power), and not a square inch lost. Even the mud banks dividing these fertile areas are made to yield on the sides cabbages and lettuces and on the tops wheat and poppy. There are no fences. You see before you a forest of mountains, made a dark leaden color by thick mists, from out of which gradually come the never-ending pictures of green and purple and brown and yellow and gold, which roll hither and thither under a cloudy sky in indescribable confusion. The chain may commence in the south or the north in two or three soft, slow-rising undulations, which trend away from you and form a vapory background to the landscape. From these (I see such a picture even as I write, seated on the stone steps in the middle of a mountain path), at once united and peculiarly distinct, rise five masses with rugged crests, rough, and cut into shady hollows on the sides, a faint pale aureola from the sun on the mists rising over the summits and sharp outlines. Looking to the north, an immense curved line shows itself, growing ever greater, opening like the arch of a gigantic bridge, and binding this first group to a second, more complicated, each peak of which has a form of its own, and does in some sort as it pleases without troubling itself about its neighbor. The most remarkable point about these mountains is the life they seem to possess. It is an incredible confusion. Angles are thrown fantastically by some mad geometer, it would seem. Splendid banyan trees shelter one after toiling up the unending steps, and dotted over the landscape, indiscriminately in magnificent picturesqueness, are pretty farmhouses nestling almost out of sight in groves of sacred trees. Oftentimes perpendicular mountains stand sheer up for three thousand feet or more, their sides to the very summits ablaze with color coming from the smiling face of sunny Nature, in spots at times where only a twelve-inch cultivation is possible.

A dome raises its head curiously over the leaning shoulder of a round hill, and a pyramid reverses itself, as if to the music of some wild orchestra, whose symphonies are heard in the mountain winds. Seen nearer and in detail, these mountains are all in delicious keeping with all of what the imagination in love with the fantastic, attracted by their more distant forms, could dream. Valleys, gorges, somber gaps, walls cut perpendicularly, rough or polished by water, cavities festooned with hanging stalactites and notched like Gothic sculptures—all make up a strange sight which cannot but excite admiration.

Every mile or so there are tea-houses, and for a couple of cash a coolie can get a cup of tea, with leaves sufficient to make a dozen cups, and as much boiling water as he wants. Szech'wan, the country, its people, their ways and methods, and much information thereto appertaining, is already in print. It were useless to give more of it here—and, reader, you will thank me! But the thirst of Szech'wan—that thirst which is unique in the whole of the Empire, and eclipsed nowhere on the face of the earth, except perhaps on the Sahara—one does not hear about.

Many an Englishman would give much for the Chinese coolie's thirst—so very, very much.

I wonder whether you, reader, were ever thirsty? Probably not. You get a thirst which is not insatiable. Yours is born of nothing extraordinary; yours can be satisfied by a gulp or two of water, or perhaps by a drink—or perhaps two, or perhaps three—of something stronger. The Chinese coolie's thirst arises from the grilling sun, from a dancing glare, from hard hauling, struggling with 120 pounds slung over his shoulders, dangling at the end of a bamboo pole. I have had this thirst of the Chinese coolie—I know it well. It is born of sheer heat and sheer perspiration. Every drop of liquid has been wrung out of my body; I have seemed to have swum in my clothes, and inside my muscles have seemed to shrink to dry sponge and my bones to dry pith. My substance, my strength, my self has drained out of me. I have been conscious of perpetual evaporation and liquefaction. And I have felt that I must stop and wet myself again. I really must wet myself and swell to life again. And here we sit at the tea-shop. People come and stare at me, and wonder what it is. They, too, are thirsty, for they are all coolies and have the coolie thirst.

I wet myself. I pour in cup after cup, and my body, my self sucks it in, draws it in as if it were the water of life. Instantly it gushes out again at every pore. I swill in more, and out it rushes again, madly rushes out as quickly as it can. I swill in more and more, and out it comes defiantly. I can keep none inside me. Useless—I cannot quench my thirst. At last the thirst thinks its conquest assured, taking the hot tea for a signal of surrender; but I pour in more, and gradually feel the tea settling within me. I am a degree less torrid, a shade more substantial.

And then here comes my boy.

"Master, you