Harry Alverson Franck

We were off at six, with the night still black about us. But that did not mean that we actually got started so early, for it would be a strange Chinese journey that began without a hitch. This time it was one of the mules which we had been unable to examine in the darkness. He turned out to be small, gaunt, and ratty, and long before we had passed through straggling Kwanyintang he became so lame and wabbly that there seemed no possibility of his even lasting out the day. Fortunately we were in a position to have our desires heeded. By order of his chief, our aide from Kaifeng had instructed the local commander to furnish us an escort of ten soldiers. We were quite familiar with the ancient jest that having a guard of Chinese soldiers is worse than falling into the hands of bandits; but at least, if they did not succeed in outsprinting the brigands in case of an attack, they could assure them that we were not worth the robbing or holding for ransom. Besides, were we not out mainly if not exclusively for experience? Now the escort proved its worth at the very outset; for even though it may have little influence over large bands of outlaws, such a Chinese guard is useful in prodding simple citizens into prompt action when those they are escorting express a wish. Ours was barely mentioned to the lieutenant in charge of the detail when he slipped off into the darkness as if he meant to make it so “snappy” that even Americans would applaud. That did not prevent the sun from peering with a red and swollen face up over the uneven pile of tile roofs to the southeast of us before he gave any sign of continued existence. But when he did come back there came with him a larger, sturdier mule than any of those already in our service, with its old-fashioned owner—who still wore a cue, which was turning iron-gray—ambling a bit sullenly, we thought, beside him. The transfer was made, and we were soon off in earnest, in a cavalcade that left the throngs of passers-by invariably staring after us.

The lieutenant, it gradually transpired, having found the innkeeper who had contracted to furnish us transportation unable to replace the ailing animal at once, had calmly commandeered the first likely one he came upon. This being the chief worldly asset of the helpless owner, he had been forced to come along, to set off on a week’s journey on extremely short notice. Being mere Americans, we could not see why one of the other drivers, of whom there was one to each litter, could not have been intrusted with this extra mule, particularly as they all lived in the same town and were under bond, so to speak, through the innkeeper. But one soon learns that it is far the best plan to let the Chinese get their results in their own time-honored way, and not to peep too much behind the scenes, nor conclude that what is absurd, or unjust, or even cruel to the Western mind is necessarily so to the people of the Middle Kingdom. Each litter and pair of mules, we found in time, without openly showing curiosity, belonged to one man, either the driver who plodded all day long in the dust beside it, constantly quickening the pace of his two animals with an explosive “Ta! Ta!” and a few choice Chinese “cuss-words” which there is no call to add to our Western stock, or to a man who stayed at home and hired some one to muleteer for him. Naturally our declining the lame mule and the substitution of another divided the sum that was paid for that litter, and there was bad blood evident between the two men who trotted beside it as long as the journey lasted.

A summery autumn spread over the land, and the ten soldiers who deployed on either side of us soon asked permission to toss their cotton-padded overcoats into the litters. Their low cloth shoes and wrapped trouser-legs, Chinese fashion, were well suited to tramping, especially in the flour-like loess. Besides his fairly modern Mauser rifle and at most a dozen cartridges, each seemed to have a few small personal possessions tucked away about his person, and one middle-aged fellow with a face worthy a “hard-boiled” American “top sergeant” of the old school carried a hooded falcon seated on his crooked arm for the whole thirty sometimes hot and often laborious miles. Merely another example, we supposed, of the Chinese fear of trusting one’s belongings out of sight. Except for one long and somewhat stony ridge, the loess formation was unbroken, and dust swirled to the ears at every step. Beggars, often in a horrible state, rolled in it at the roadside, not only in the towns but at most unlikely spots in the open country. Surely their gleanings could not have totaled even a modest meal a day, and it was this working of such unlikely territory which impressed one particularly with the depths of Chinese poverty.

Of the pitilessness of it we had had an impressive example before leaving Kwanyintang. In a dust-deep gutter beside its most densely thronged thoroughfare lay, the afternoon before, a boy of perhaps sixteen, a single filthy rag covering him merely from shoulders to navel, several immense surfaces of his exposed body eaten away by some loathsome disease. Evidently he was writhing in real pain instead of more or less pretending it for sympathy’s sake, as did so many of his rivals along the way, for several men had paused to talk with him, and that is an extraordinary mark of solicitude in China toward roadside mendicants. But evidently no one did anything else for him; for as we rode by the spot before daylight next morning, while the night was still bitter cold, there he still lay in the same all but naked state, powdered over with dust, and evidently dead—at least we sincerely hoped so. The poverty of China is so general, and native charity and compassion so slight—for even the minority who are above suffering cannot but be more or less constantly obsessed with the dread of themselves falling into beggary—that even what we would call “very deserving cases” must put forth great efforts to attract attention to their needs. Some of these are so ingenious as to be humorous, as well as pathetic, which may be intentional, for no one on earth enjoys humor more or responds to it more quickly than a Chinese. In one of the deep loess caÑons through which we passed, a man whose feet seemed to have rotted away knelt close up against the precipitous earth wall in a spot which gave him just room enough to keep from under the hoofs of animals and the feet of pedestrians passing in such constant droves that he seemed to be bathing in dust. Through this rose his raucous voice in the monotonous sameness of some phrase of distress, accompanied by the ringing of a hand-bell. At regular intervals of at most thirty seconds he ended these sounds by fetching his head down with a terrific wallop on a big stone that lay in the road before him. Pausing to wonder why he did not crack his skull, I gradually became aware of the fact that he always struck the bell in his right hand into the dust in exact synchronization with the blow of his head, thereby of course cleverly increasing the apparent thud and at the same time inconspicuously breaking the blow. But, for all that, his forehead was almost raw with the constant pounding, and the exercise alone must have proved a real day’s work before the day was done. Yet the passing throng, being itself by no means affluent, seldom gave him more than a casual glance. The wicker farm scoop that lay beside him had barely half a dozen “cash” scattered about it, and this was typical of all the roadside beggars we passed for days to come. Whenever one of us tossed a copper into such a receptacle amazement overcame even the bystanders; for a copper is worth ten whole “cash,” though it is about the equivalent of one fourth of an American cent!

For the first few miles there was an endless string of coolies carrying bags of cement and of flour, and less evident supplies for the railway construction-camps farther on. A tunnel a mile long was nearing completion, and grading and cutting continued for some distance. Within a year, optimistic officials hoped, trains would be running to the Shensi border, and in two or three would reach at last the famous old western capital, Sian-fu. Then there were quantities of cotton coming in from the west, and every other imaginable thing bobbing at the ends of those springy poles across coolie shoulders which are so often miscalled bamboos, since they are more nearly hickory, polished and varnished to a mahogany brown. Itinerant craftsmen of every sort, peddlers of anything there is a chance of selling, portable restaurants for the feeding of all this multitude, hundreds of jogging coolies carrying their beds and their few belongings on their quest for work, all use this pole for bearing their burdens, so that the vista as far as the eye can reach was like a river of undulating men and things. Much of the way lay high, and gave us splendid views off across mountainous country fantastically broken as only loess can break, terraced on a hundred different levels, ever falling away at the edges, a world, as it were, that was wearing out. Or again the road, which never for an instant was worthy of any such name, would plunge into one of the chasms it had worn for itself during centuries of plodding through this friable soil, chasms a hundred, two hundred, in places surely three hundred feet deep, which might continue for many miles before there came another glimpse of the surrounding country. To walk in these is like shuffling through a cement-factory; let the least breath of wind blow, and one heartily longed again for a gas-mask. The walls being absolutely sheer and the sunken roads very rarely wider than a single cart, let one of these get ahead of us and we must inhale and swallow its dust for many weary li; while the tasks of passing those constantly appearing from the opposite direction required the patience and the profanity of a Chinese muleteer. Of the joys of fetching up in one of these endless channels at the rear of a camel caravan, probably at least a hundred strong, and many times more famous for raising dust than speed, no mention shall be permitted to sully the pages of what aims to be the veracious story of a perfectly respectable journey.

I take my turn at leading our procession of mule litters and let my companions swallow its dust for a while

However, we were by no means confined to the bottoms of the caÑons. A mule-litter, we quickly discovered, resembles many another contrivance in this imperfect world, in that it has both its advantages and its drawbacks. Shaped like a bath-tub, it might perhaps be quite cozy could one merely make it up as a bed and crawl into it. But when it is already half filled with such odds and ends as steamer-trunks and bedding-rolls, there is only a limited space left for the mere passenger. Moreover, the straw mattings are neither sun- nor dust-proof, and while one may in time and with patience learn either to sleep or to read in a litter, in spite of the camel-like motion varied by a sudden disconcerting lurch every quarter-hour or so, when the plodding driver outside concludes that the poles need leveling on one or the other mule, the average traveler is more apt to pass his time drowsily gazing at the plethora of red pompons and trappings on his lead-mule and listening to the monotonous tinkling of his bell. Litter-riding is an art that must be learned. As the rolling motion is prone quickly to unbalance the contrivance, proper bestowal of the body is closely akin to tight-rope walking. If one be of a restless disposition and accustomed to change the lower leg for the upper at certain intervals, one must not let the attention grow drowsy; if one persists in the reprehensible habit of smoking, then in laying down the pipe in the right hand great care must be exercised that the can of tobacco be at the same instant deposited with the left, lest the excess of weight prove fatal. In all our journey my own litter turned over upon me but once, and that was in an inn-yard where assistance was at hand to drag me out from under the trunks, cots, suit-cases, and what not under which the mishap buried me; but if there were ten consecutive minutes when I did not expect it to do so, they were probably during the many times that I was not inside it. We met in the west foreigners of long Chinese experience who did all their traveling in litters, some indeed who lined and carpeted theirs with felt, put a stove inside, and journeyed for weeks at a time, even in the depths of winter, reading many volumes during the journey. But while we are quite ready to admit without controversy the comfort of a mule-litter as compared with a “Peking cart,” I for one found the finest thing about it the fact that one could get out and walk.

This we did early and often, and thereby frequently kept out of the dust-swirling caÑons entirely for long stretches. For the constant procession of coolies plodding up and down this route had worn at least one, and often as many as half a dozen, hard smooth paths along the brink of the chasm, paths undulating and meandering just enough to be delightful. From them we could look far down the sheer cliffs, seldom fifteen feet apart, upon the endless mule-trains, broken here and there by cumbersome two-wheeled carts, ox or horse drawn, or by a disdainfully leisurely string of camels, all so tiny with the depth sometimes that they seemed a procession of children’s toys. At the same time we enjoyed a brilliant sunshine—often too brilliant, in fact, though October was all but gone—now and then a delicious breeze, and views of the life of the region and landscapes frequently approaching the magnificent, all of which were unknown to the man who was drowsing or attempting to read in his litter far below. The average speed of our conveyances, though they were the swiftest things in the defiles, was scarcely equal to a reasonable walking pace, so that we could here and there wander a bit from the straight and narrow paths for a glimpse of something that seemed worth the deviation.

There were places, for instance, where rows of old earthenware jars were set up in ridges of earth and filled with water, often carried from long distances, for the watering of passing animals—trust the people of cruelly crowded China not to overlook any chance to pick up a few stray “cash.” The latter, by the way, were now almost the only money seen, and passing coolies carried a string of them looped over a shoulder or some other convenient projection. Sometimes a row of enormous bowls formed a wall, shutting off a compound, instead of the commonplace structure of yellowish dried mud so generally serving that purpose. Naked children swarming everywhere and men with bronzed torsos bared to the waist working in the fields seemed to give the calendar the lie. Blindfolded animals plodding an endless round, a pair of men, or a man and his crippled wife, manipulating a big, crude windlass, brought up water from the field-wells scattered hither and yon, and unsuspected, if the superstructures were lacking, until one had all but stumbled into them. The vagaries of the loess soil were often fantastic, sometimes incredible. Extremely friable, wholly unstratified, yet surprisingly solid, too, its contrasts were a constant astonishment. There were villages in which it had split and gashed and fallen away into some adjoining rivulet caÑon to such an extent that the mud houses seemed to be strewn helter-skelter among a forest of cathedral-spires and Gothic roofs, perched at every possible height and dozing serenely on perpendicular chips of earth which it seemed impossible that the first slight breath of mind should not precipitate in a mere cloud of yellow dust into the terrifying chasm below. Its persistence in standing long after it must surely have fallen was one of the wonders of the sunken roads. Here a great slice of it, split wholly free from the main precipice and seeming to hang like a curling wave a hundred feet or more directly above our passing litters, gave every appearance of being on the very point of breaking and burying a score of travelers beneath it, yet somehow it never did, at least in our presence. Innumerable such catastrophes must have come to pass during the long centuries in which this “national road” had become a caÑon; but the Chinese way, no doubt, had been for the survivors to plod calmly on over the collapsing earth before the dust had settled, secure in the knowledge that if their own particular godlets held them in favor they were free from similar danger, while, if they were not, precautions were mere wasted breath.

Many a time the paths we followed along the crests seemed to have reached the day when they must spill down the face of the precipice, yet they always carried us safely past. Of cave-dwellings cut far back into these cliffs there was no end, by far a majority of the population having only such homes. But what perhaps was most startling of all the astounding caprices of this strange soil was to come, in a stroll across what gave every appearance of being a flat unbroken field, suddenly upon a great square hole in the ground, fifty or more feet in length and breadth, and as many deep, which was nothing more nor less than a family courtyard. Farm-implements and domestic animals littered its floor; into its side walls, sheer and exact as those of a box, were cut a dozen caves, high arched but with the usual small doors in each mud-bricked front—the dwelling-places of the numerous family, probably of three generations. There was nothing about such a farm-yard different from the ordinary ones all over China, except that the high mud wall surrounding it is the solid earth, with an inconspicuous tunnel often of considerable length connecting it with the outside world. Let this fall in, and there is not a ladder in rural China long enough to bring the hole-dwellers to the surface, on which lie their hard earth threshing-floor and their fields.

The threshing-floors were everywhere busy at this season, beating out the last of the grain with flails or rolling it out with huge stone rollers drawn by languidly ambling animals. Whole families took part in the operation, the more than half-naked children teasing the leisurely beasts to keep on the move; the women, who generally knelt to spare their crippled feet, pawing about through the straw and now and then even helping the men to toss the grain up into the chaff-clearing wind. About the edges of every floor were stacks of hay and straw, all plastered over with a kind of clay roof, as seems to be the fashion in Honan.

But the prize sight of all was the terraced fields. I had seen some in the Inca lands of South America that seemed remarkable examples of human persistence, but they are mere children’s pastimes compared with these of western China. Those in the Andes are faced with stout stone walls and run only part-way up an occasional hillside, or bring a too steep valley under cultivation. Here a most remarkable series of terraces, of thirty, forty, even fifty levels, rose to the very summit of every mountain we saw not only for days but for weeks, covering it completely with low steps of endless giant stairways. Yet here stone is unknown; the facing of each field is merely the loess itself, constantly crumbling away upon the field next below. Geologists are more or less agreed, I believe, that the loess regions of North China, covering a quarter of a million square miles, are due to the destruction of the forests centuries ago, a destruction so complete that even the roots were grubbed out for fuel, so that a soil which with its natural share of rainfall and vegetation was all that man could wish has become a powder-like earth ready to break down and fly away at the first breath of wind. If they are right, what a splendid justice it would be to send those who are doing their best to deforest our own fair land to struggle for existence with the hordes of China, where the pressure of population has driven the farmer not only to the very crest of arid mountains but into every tiniest depression in the soil! Absolutely treeless, with never a suggestion even of brush or grass, these loess regions were everywhere for day after day the same bare yellow brown, beautiful enough in the changing phases from sunrise to sunset, but of a monotony that wearies the eye for all the extraordinary forms in which the ages have cast it. In spring and summer perhaps, when the terraces are waving with crops, there may be green enough. But it was hard to believe it in this autumn season, when even the rare remnants of a cotton or a corn field have the same shriveled, moistureless, yellow-brown hue as all the far-spreading and tumbled landscape.

But walking always became a perspiring form of locomotion long before noon, and some convenient caÑon-mouth or a stretch where the road came to the surface for a breathing-spell found us climbing into our litters. From then on until toward evening our view of the world about us was likely to be confined to the triangular bit of it visible between the red pompons on the lead-mule’s back and the straw roof of the litter, often still further reduced by the walls of the narrow ditch which so frequently was the road nearly all day long. Through this we saw more, however, than might be expected. A camel-train, or one of many mule-drawn soldiers’ wagons, loomed up out of a dust-fog so thick that collisions were narrowly averted in spite of our slow speed. Loess soil would not be so bad, at least so far as the traveler is concerned, if only it would lie still, instead of insisting on exploring the innermost recesses of any one or anything with which it comes in contact. Let a breath of air sweep down the road—which was certainly no unusual experience—and we could barely see the next litter before us. Then there was nothing to do but cover the face with a handkerchief and lie listening to the endless dingle-dingle of the little mule-bells and the slight creak of the swaying litter, broken frequently by the “mule-train coughing in the dust”—cough the weary animals did, indeed—and now and again by the vociferous “Ta! Ta!” of the drivers whose footsteps made no sound in the powdered earth, or a long-drawn “Trrrrrrrrrrr!” when they wished to bring the animals to a halt. An old and very experienced traveler is authority for the assertion that the road from Honan to Sian-fu is perhaps the most trying bit of cart-road in China, and, strong as such language is, we were inclined to agree with him. Yet it is a journey I would not have missed for several times its many minor discomforts.

Sometimes the road escaped from the caÑon for several miles, and then there was sure to be plenty to catch the eye. Perhaps it was a little house, temple, or dove-cote at the top of a high slender pillar of earth, for rain and wind may have washed the world away from about it and left an unbelievably frail support. Soldiers we were constantly meeting in great numbers; occasionally we passed large groups of recruits not yet furnished with weapons, simple-faced boys who might much better have been left in their native cave-villages to till the terraced mountains than to add still more to China’s most serious problem. But this draining of the country districts of able-bodied young men goes merrily on all over the republic—and the training of eventual bandits seems to have no end. Our own escort and long files of their armed fellows bound in the opposite direction now and then showed themselves on the sheer edge of the cliffs high above us, they and their guns silhouetted against the cloudless sky. We constantly met veritable crowds of travelers, mainly pedestrians. Endless strings of coolies came and went, their beds and tools and all their earthly belongings in blue denim rolls on their backs, or balancing from the swaying pole over their shoulders. I often caught myself wondering why they could not all stay where they were and save themselves all this laborious shuttling back and forth, so exactly alike were the long files of them plodding eastward and going west. There were very few women travelers; compared with the great throngs of men there were almost none, and they were always riding, naturally, since the most they could do otherwise would be to hobble a few hundred yards an hour on their dwarfed feet. Sometimes one of them loomed up out of the dust astride a donkey, always with a man prodding the animal on from behind, his easy stride seeming to emphasize the helplessness of the crippled legs tapering down to all but useless little feet on either side of the biblical animal. Children, swarming everywhere, were rarely on the move along the road, though occasionally we passed the cart or litter of a better-to-do Chinese carrying his family with him. But even if the heavy cloth front door of his conveyance was not closed, we rarely caught more than a glimpse of the peering faces of women and children tucked away behind the man and the driver in what must have been extremely tight quarters.

Several times widows in white or sackcloth passed, usually seated alone Turkish fashion on an uncovered cart, as if to make their grief as conspicuous as possible. Some of them were surprisingly young; generally their faces were completely covered; and invariably they rocked back and forth on their haunches and wailed at the tops of their voices, whether in passing through a town or out in the open country, at least whenever there was any one except their plodding driver to hear them. This public display of grief seemed to be a custom of Honan; at least, we seldom if ever saw it farther west. One morning while we were still walking we heard a choral wailing from afar off, and at length came upon the mother, wife, son of six, and baby of a man who had just died, all squatting together on the outdoor threshing-floor at the edge of their village, and all of them, including even the infant, pouring forth their sorrow to the four winds. A pathetic, almost touching scene it was to me—until I chanced to glance back just in time to see the old woman pinch the boy in a very sensitive spot, and thereby redouble the wailing which the sight of a passing foreigner had almost silenced.

Once in a while a bride passed, conspicuous in all her finery, and looking as if she, too, could easily weep the length of her tedious journey, did custom permit it. Then there was the wheelbarrow-brigade, in some ways the most interesting part of all the endless procession. The thought of a man wheelbarrowing a heavy load clear across a province or even farther had a mixture of the pitiable and the ludicrous about it—something reminiscent of a nonsensical election-bet. Yet it is doubtful whether any man in all our broad land, with the possible exception of champion athletes at the climax of their exertions, perform such grueling labors as do these Chinese wheelbarrow-men, who passed us in veritable regiments, sometimes in close unbroken file for a mile at a time. Given the weight of the big clumsy, creaking contrivances themselves, an incredibly heavy and often awkward load, a “road” which no untraveled Westerner would recognize as such, with steep hills, caÑons ankle-deep in dust, and the constant struggle for right of way on the crowded caricature of a thoroughfare, and it was no wonder that the man straining at the handles, with the stout strap from them passing over his shoulders, all but invariably resembled a marathon runner at the end of his greatest contest. In northwest China the tui-chu is not a passenger vehicle, as in some parts of the country; but this ceaseless one-wheeled cavalcade carried almost everything except human beings. The luckiest seemed to be those whose bulky load was merely cotton; the heaviest burdens, with rare exceptions, were evidently the two to four black-brown bags of wheat, a bit smaller in circumference than our two-bushel sack, but nearly twice as long.

All possible manner of aids had been enlisted by the sweating men at the handles, though the great majority toiled onward without assistance. Sometimes another man, perhaps a donkey, once in a while a mule, an aged horse, a small ox, pulled in front of the wheelbarrow. More than one man had pressed his son and heir into service, and boys of all ages added their by no means insignificant bit to the drudgery. The detailed picture still stays with me of one child who could not have been more than six, his little bronzed body completely naked except for the red or blue diamond-shaped stomacher which most Chinese consider indispensable to health, steadily tugging away for all he was worth at the rope over his bare shoulder. He and his brawny father behind were plainly many toilsome days away both from home and their destination, yet on the child’s face there was not a suggestion of protest, but more than a hint of joy at this splendid opportunity to see the world. Indeed, the generally contented, not to say joyful, attitude toward their arduous fragment of life of these slaves of the wheelbarrow, of the coolies, of the toiling masses of China in general, is one of the astonishments, and delights, of Chinese travel. Possibly these men were paid the equivalent of fifteen American cents a day for their cart-horse exertions, furnishing their own food and lodging on the way; yet a surly face was as rare as a lazy body, and laughter always burst forth upon the slightest provocation. Those who pulled in front, I noticed, no matter how young or how weak, were never reproved or admonished to greater exertions from behind; it seemed to be as natural for them to do their unflagging best as for water to run downhill, and the thought of their slacking or of being capable of more never appeared even to suggest itself to the man at the handles.

Twice, possibly three times, I saw a woman tugging at a wheelbarrow rope, but in each case the load was light and the distance evidently short; it must have been, in fact, for she could not have struggled far on the little goat-like feet and muscleless legs which time-honored custom had left her. I suppose the several brilliant Western “authorities” that are at the moment engaged in “interpreting” China to us would cite as another proof of the ascendancy of esthetic over material things in the Chinese mind the fact that, though her unhampered labor is very necessary to him, the Chinese peasant and coolie still insists on having his wife beautified at the sacrifice of her physical usefulness. On the threshing-floor or in the cotton-fields the women could be worked to somewhat better advantage than on the road, and there one saw more of them. For they could do most of this work kneeling, and nearly all of them, even girls of eleven or twelve, wore thick knee-pads, not unlike the shin-guards of a football-player, to soften a bit the hard lot that had befallen them. In the towns one often saw wives or servants crawling about the dirty earth floors on their knees in the performance of their household duties.

The cotton-fields, by the way, were almost endless, though not much else could be said in their favor. The plants, from six inches to a foot high, were of a dead-dry brown, of the same color as all the landscape to the summit of the terraced mountains, and the miserable little bolls that remained did not seem worth even the trouble of such poverty-stricken pickers as here and there still wandered about in search of them. There had been no rain all summer in this region, they told us, and unless some fell within the next two months and saved the winter wheat, there would be another famine as serious as that of 1920.

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