We might as well have indulged in an extra nap next morning instead of being as exacting as usual on the hour of departure, for the city gate was still closed when we reached it. The rooster that all Chinese inns maintain for the benefit of their watchless clients had already “sung”; but on those moonlight mornings such a timepiece could easily be regarded as out of order, which is no doubt the reason we not only had to waken the soldiers in the little guard-house but that there was a further delay of nearly half an hour while one of them wandered away into the city to get the key, evidently ensconced under the pillow of some other guardian of Ningsia’s safety. All we lacked to make the third act of “La BohÈme” complete was a light fall of snow and a more Parisian atmosphere, for not only was there a brazier over which the soldiers warmed their hands, and a collection of countrymen with produce waiting to enter as soon as the gate was opened, but we had, though we did not then suspect it, our Mimi with us.

Our new cartman, it seemed, had come from Paotou accompanied by another cart, and its driver had already found a fare for the return trip when this expedition and ours were thrown together in the back yard of the Moslem inn. In fact, the other might have started a week before had his client not been afraid to travel alone through a region with a bad reputation for bandits and thieves. Wholly unknown to us, therefore, we were to constitute the escort of this timid person, of whose existence we were still completely ignorant. We did notice that a third cart left the inn close behind us, and that it trailed us all the way to the gate, but there was nothing suspicious in some other traveler’s happening to pick the same ill chosen hour of departure as we, nor in his setting out in the same direction. Our first hint that something might be suspected was the sight of the third cart still following on our heels through the gate, as if it belonged to our party and was therefore free from paying the twenty coppers required of every native conveyance.

All that morning it stuck to us across a great plain with much ice, here and there covered with tall reeds. There was no doubt that it had invited itself to join us; the only questions remaining were its destination and who it was that lay ensconced behind its heavy blue cloth front door. These mysteries were solved at the noonday halt. A well dressed boy had already appeared on the front platform beside the driver, and the instant the cart drew up in the yard of the inn we had chosen out stepped a Chinese lady still well short of the age when scandal ceases to wag its tongues about members of the attractive sex. She was the wife of a silk merchant of Paotou, we gathered in a roundabout way; the youth was her nephew or something of the sort; and she had evidently joined us for the whole fortnight that remained of our journey.

We both admit that we are not utterly devoid of sympathy or chivalry, but somehow it did strike us that the lady might have gone to the formality of letting us know, at least indirectly, that she was going to grace our expedition. But they do things differently in China; and perhaps this was a less scandalous way than frankly to make the acquaintance of unrelated male traveling companions.

The three carts never once broke ranks that afternoon as we plodded on across the plain, with another great lighthouse pagoda and more ox-cart caravans with seven-foot wheels. The whole Yellow River valley seemed to have been flooded a bare week ahead of us, and while this no doubt would be repaid many fold in the spring, it would have made traveling a sad experience if everything had not been frozen over. As it was, our cartmen did much wandering in the rather vain hope of avoiding icy roads, for, old as she is, China apparently has never learned to put calks on her horseshoes. We had a hundred li to make that day, which did not seem difficult in the light of the fact that we had once covered a hundred and forty on this leg of the journey, but the li were stretching perceptibly, and what with the zigzagging and the delay at the city gate we were still well short of our goal when night fell. The moon was rising later now, so that we had to feel our way across the plain in utter darkness, for even by day the “road” was often only faintly marked. The stillness of this great valley at night was impressive—and fortunate, for the only thing to guide us was the sound of our carts ahead, silent underfoot but with a constant thumping of the heavy wheels on the loosely fitting axles.

At that the carts got out of our hearing, and for a long time we rode on at random, keeping as straightforward a course as possible, until finally we were lucky enough to see rising close before us out of the night an imposing gateway of the walled town of Ping-lo. Our chief impression of this is that if it had as much paving as it has ornamental street arches there would be fewer streets to wade and stumble through, hence less temptation to curse the stupidity of such inhabitants as were faintly visible for not being able to put us on the track of our carts. We found our way at last, however, to the inn-yard where they were already unhitched—to discover that the trousered lady had followed us even there. It had not mattered so much at the midday halt, but with several inns to choose from we were tempted to protest when she clung to us even by night, taking indeed the very next room to us, with a thin mud wall between. We did protest, in fact, though for other reasons than any real fear of being “compromised,” of hearing Peking whisper over its bridge-tables and its cocktails at the club, “What’s this about the major and that fellow bringing a Chinese girl along with them, eh?” While we never got a monosyllable out of her ourselves, the lady had in a high degree that fault more or less unjustly charged against all her sex; and as she slept most of the day, after the fashion of Chinese travelers, to whom the horrors of a “Peking cart” seem to be like the rocking of a cradle, it was natural that she needed to relieve herself by chattering all night, with the youth or innkeepers’ wives as the not unwilling listeners. Now, the Chinese language is anything but musical, and the voices of Chinese women are evidently trained to sound as much as possible like the tightening brakes of a freight-train on a swift down grade, so that even in our most charitable moods we could scarcely have lain silently bewailing the departure of our hitherto splendid slumber for more than the two or three hours we did without attempting to do something about it. The vigorous application of a boot-heel to the mud partition, and a few terse remarks that were probably none the less clear for being only partly couched in Chinese, had a desirable effect, which was made more or less permanent by having Chang explain next day to the third driver, who passed the information on through the youth to the feminine part of our aggregation, certain rules of conduct that were essential to a continued membership in it.

In the middle of the next afternoon irrigation suddenly ended, and a stony, barren plain, rising into foot-hills on the left, grew up ahead. Some time during the following day we crossed the unmarked boundary between Kansu and Inner Mongolia and left the Mohammedan province behind. From the town where we spent one of those nights there is a short cut through the Ordos that takes but half the time required to follow clear around the right-angled bend of the Yellow River, but even if one is sure of being able to cross the river at both ends of that trail there is nothing but an uninhabited desert wilderness between, where a single well is worthy a name on the map, and which is practicable only to camel-caravans. Thus there was nothing to do but let the Hoang Ho force us farther and farther westward, though our goal lay to the east, now by stony roads, now through half-days of the drifted sand of genuine deserts, or by river bars spreading out in great masses of ice which it was not always possible to pass without making a great detour. There was a very good reason why we could not float down the Yellow River, or skate or ice-boat either, for not only was it often frozen over completely for long distances but the ice lay in broken chunks a foot or two thick and so packed together that they sometimes were piled high up on the shore. There were days during which we never sighted the river, though we were always following it; at other times we spent midday or night right on its banks, with it the only water available.

Such a place was the one we reached unusually early one afternoon. In spite of its three-barrel name of Hou-gway-tze it consisted of a single cluster of mud buildings, which took all prizes for their filthy condition. Moreover, every room was packed with more coolies than could crowd together on the k’angs, and several of them were suffering from what might easily have been malignant diseases or dangerous illnesses. It looked as if we would have to commandeer one room by driving the coolies out of it—and then take our lady in with us. But General Ma, the uncle, Mohammedan ruler of all this western district, had very recently built a new inn, with high crenelated walls of bright yellow mud and a generally inviting appearance, a furlong or two beyond the unspeakable hovels that had evidently for centuries been the only housing for travelers at this point. Our cartmen seemed to take it for granted that we would not be admitted to the new compound, for it was not only strictly Mohammedan but had really been built to house soldiers. It took Chang less than five minutes, however, to assure the man in charge that we would not cook or eat pork on the premises, and to talk a soldier out of the only one of the rooms that did not have its k’ang crowded. Evidently the hope of being given a few coppers in the morning, in which he was, of course, not disappointed, or the privilege, unless he was Mohammedan, of disposing of some of the scraps left over from our meals and perhaps of getting an empty tin can or two was reward enough for him. Where our feminine companion spent the night is still a mystery, for though she promptly followed us to the new inn we saw nothing of her after her descent from the cart until she crawled out of it again the next noon fifty li farther on.

There was time for a stroll before the sun withdrew its genial companionship. Great masses of crumpled mountains, treeless and velvet-brown, lay just across the river, which here was partly open, with a current of perhaps five miles an hour. No wonder it had to turn out for so mighty a barrier, and double the journey that was left us. On our side of the stream stretches of tall, light-yellow bunchgrass and a kind of sage, of slightly purplish tinge under the sinking sun, were broken by long rows of sand-dunes. In the morning the north sides of these were white with hoar-frost and helped a bit to light the way for us before daylight. Files of coolies who might easily have been bandits—we wondered if many of them were not brigands who had turned in their weapons and disbanded for the winter—were constantly appearing out of the brush and hillocks of this and the other uninhabited deserts beyond. Many of them wore a kind of makeshift turban of pure unspun wool, and all were dressed for cold weather, often in combinations of skin coats and cotton-padded garments that made them picturesque figures. How many hundreds of these we passed on our journey northward there is no way of computing, nor of knowing whether they were followers of some bandit chieftain who would take to the road again in the region ahead, which had been so harassed of late, as soon as the weather made banditry pleasant and travelers plentiful once more. Perhaps they were all what the few we spoke with claimed to be,—men who had taken rafts down the river, or coolies who had worked in Mongolia or Manchuria during the summer and were now walking a thousand miles or more back to their homes, as men do by the millions in overcrowded China.

We were constantly meeting these hardy fellows far from any other evidences of human existence. Long lines of them, bundled up in all they possessed, emerged from the darkness of early morning, one or two perhaps singing in a mixture of minors and falsettos that recalled the songs of the country people of Venezuela. Occasionally a straggler limped past far out on the dreary plain; but with few exceptions they kept the pace, and the cheerful countenances of perfect contentment. We always came upon a group of them at the single lonely huts that were often the only possible stopping-places during the whole day, sitting in a sunny corner sheltered from the wind at noon, perhaps stripped to the waist and diligently searching the seams of their thick padded garments, or already stretched out on the crowded k’angs where we halted for the night; for they seemed to prefer to travel in the darkness of morning rather than of evening. Probably, too, they had in mind the sharp competition for k’ang space, if not also for food and fuel, and the necessity of arriving early if they would be sure of accommodations at these only shelters for forty or fifty li in either direction.

The fixed price of lodging for a coolie in these inns seemed to be five coppers; then there was five “cash” or a copper for hot water for their tea, and not more, probably, for each of their two meals than for lodging; so that the innkeeper got about the equivalent of one to three American cents from each guest, depending on whether he stopped at noon or overnight, and the total expenditure of each coolie perhaps averaged four cents a day, besides the bit of food some carried with them. Now and again they no doubt cut down this extravagant figure by skipping a meal or, like the several score we saw streaming away from a temple early one morning, finding shelter at a lower price. Many of these coolies hardly looked Chinese at all, though it might be difficult to decide what other blood had modified their features. In fact, the northern Chinese, especially outside the larger cities, with their strong bodies and sturdy faces, bear little resemblance to the common Western conception of the sly, slender, pigtailed Celestial; I doubt very much whether the American boy whose only acquaintance with the race has been through the “movies” or a rare laundryman from Kwangtung in the far south would have recognized as Chinese our chief driver, with his strong, almost Roman nose, his leather-dark complexion, and his attributes of a real man even in the Occidental sense.

Though one seldom finds the doubtful joys of chewing tobacco appreciated outside the confines of the Western hemisphere north of the Rio Grande, it was something of a surprise to discover how many Chinese do not even smoke it. Probably the chief reason is that they cannot afford it, though ten cigarettes in gaily decorated packages can be bought for the equivalent of two cents. This would have accounted for the fact that so many of these coolie groups were abstainers. Those who did smoke used the little pipes with long stems, of about the capacity of half a hazelnut shell, familiar to Korea and Japan as well as to China; and their pale tobacco of the texture of fine hay was so mild as hardly to seem to Western taste derived from the dreadful weed at all. Whenever I distributed a few pinches of a brand widely known in the United States the result was a series of sudden coughing spells and the laughing admission that Mei-guo yen is painfully strong. Our cartmen, however, who alternately smoked a larger pipe with a porcelain stem of the size of a policeman’s club, either came to prefer the taste of American tobacco or found it more economical to ask for an occasional pinch from my can than to untie their own strings of “cash.” Several large corporations, all, I believe, British or American, are expending great efforts and vast sums to teach the Chinese the highest possible consumption of cigarettes; and their wares and their “advertising vandalism,” as a more serious-minded traveler has justly called it, are to be found even in the villages and along the main roads of the far interior. But they are hampered by the problem of how to produce a cigarette that can be sold at prices the consumer can afford to pay, even though the wages in their Chinese factories are in keeping with those elsewhere in the country. The fact that the revenue-stamp, which represents so large a proportion of the American’s smoking expenditures, is missing still does not solve the difficulty. Like opium, tobacco was brought to—not to say imposed upon—the Chinese from outside, and not many centuries ago. The weed has not been known in China as long as it has in Europe, to say nothing of America. Long after Sir Walter Raleigh frightened his admirers by causing smoke to issue from his nostrils tobacco was brought to Japan by the Portuguese or the Dutch; from there it crossed to Korea, drifting naturally into Manchuria, and the Manchus introduced it into China along with the cue in 1644.

Scrub trees rose above the tall light-yellow clumps of tough grass during most of the day beyond the general’s inn. Pheasants flew up here and there in large flocks. Once we passed a Mongol rounding up a herd of shaggy, half-wild ponies. We should have known him by his bent-knee yet cowboy-perfect riding in spite of his Chinese sheepskin dress, by his full-blooded, red face, “like a brewer’s drayman in—England,” as some one has put it, even if he had not been unable to understand Chang when we found the road suddenly missing where the river had licked away the side of a hill to which it formerly clung. Now and then we met a Mongol riding a camel at a trot across the bushy country, and a large scattered group or two of these animals were browsing on the tough yellow grass as if it were delicious. Our horses invariably showed fright at a close view of a camel, perhaps because they could not bear the sight of such ungainly ugliness, for certainly the two-humped beasts never gave the least indication either of the desire or of the ability to harm their more graceful rivals in the business of transportation.

Tungkou on the further side of a large bay formed by the Hoang Ho was a town of some importance, evidently a principal port during the season of river traffic, for huge boats built of hand-hewn planks and divided into several partitioned compartments were drawn up in considerable number on the shore. There were half a dozen new fortresses, some of two stories, or with a kind of cupola from which the coming of enemies, such as a force of bandits, could be seen some distance off; and many of the large compounds of the town were also freshly built of the same straw and yellow mud, though there was nothing new or clean about the old familiar, staring, easily laughing inhabitants. In certain moods, such as come at the ends of many long days of hard travel, there is a feeling of loneliness, of indescribable depression, in being long gazed at by multitudes, as if one were a wild beast, or a circus clown. The telegraph line of two wires which serves this region jumped the river at Tungkou in one mighty leap between double and reinforced poles on the two banks and plunged on into a Sahara of high drifted sand-ridges, over which we found our way with difficulty during the first hours of the next morning.

Then for several days irrigation took the place of desert again, and we passed towns that claimed to be entirely Catholic. After the Mohammedan rebellion a certain order of that faith began work in the almost unpeopled region along this northwesternmost elbow of the Yellow River, copying the irrigation systems of their Jesuit forerunners of centuries before a bit farther south and building up town after town in which none but Catholic converts are really welcomed. As the broad river valley was barely used at all before the priests came, except for grazing, and was but lightly populated, there can scarcely be any criticism of them on that score. San-shun-gung and Poronor were perhaps the most important of the dozen or more of these towns through which we passed, and which appeared with great regularity every forty li, sometimes every twenty. The first named was walled, rather recently and with mud bricks, perhaps because it was the seat of the bishop, whose residence close to the large church, with a belfry building distinct from it, might have looked less imposing in other surroundings than the usual low, mud-built Chinese village. Services were in full swing, with most of the inhabitants audibly in attendance and the streets deserted, when we passed through this place early one morning; but Poronor of the Mongol name was a noonday halt and we had opportunity there for a chat with the local ruler. He was a Belgian priest, as in the other larger towns, and bourgmestre, too, as he called it; for the priest is always the town mayor and chief authority, though there may also be a Chinese or Mongol “mandarin.” While we were being entertained with wine and cigars in his laboratory-office—for he took account of the bodily as well as the political and spiritual ailments of his converts—a large group of Mohammedan soldiers left a procession of them that was straggling down from the northeast and gathered in the yard, to peer in at us through the glass windows. They were pestering him to death, the priest said, new groups coming every day to ask him to furnish them carts and animals, and naturally drivers, in which to continue their journey. He had done so several times, but was now refusing the request; and nothing could be better proof of the real authority of the foreign priests of that distant Yellow River valley than the fact that the soldiers did not take transportation facilities by force when he declined to furnish them.

On the other hand, any criminal whom the bourgmestre wished to be rid of was turned over to the Mohammedan commanders. The converts were almost exclusively Chinese; for there were naturally no converted Moslems, and only a few Mongol Catholics, who lived in two small villages back toward the hills. In one town where we spent the night the priest was for the moment absent, but this did not hinder us from getting a fairly clear view of his establishment. The large windows of glass—so unusual in western China—along the inner side of the church and the priest’s study disclosed rather bare rooms, the former with a few lithographed saints and benches or kneeling-boards some six inches high and wide, the latter with a rough Chinese-made easy-chair and table and the indispensable paraphernalia of the priestly calling, including a score of rather dog-eared books. Barely had we entered the compound than a flock of boys swooped noisily down upon us. They were “orphans” of the little mud school in a corner of the enclosure, or sons of the townspeople; and they were rather poor witnesses to the advantages of Catholic training, at least in deportment. For not only were they undisciplined but very decidedly “fresh,” and certainly there had been no improvement over “heathen” Chinese children in the matter of wiping their noses and using soap and water. While they were crowded about us the priest’s native assistant appeared and put us through the usual autobiographical catechism required of any lone foreigner surrounded by Chinese, then reciprocated with shreds of information expressed in scattered words of Chinese, French, and Latin. Finally he led the way toward, but not into, the schoolroom, for the flock of unwiped noses surged pell-mell ahead of us and when we entered they were all kneeling in their places on tiny benches similar to those in the church, with their forearms on their home-made desks, chanting at the tops of their voices and at express speed some Latin invocation which probably had about as little meaning to them as it had to us. The assistant proudly announced himself the teacher and displayed his few treasures of learning, among which a religious book printed in Latin and Chinese on opposite pages was plainly the most revered. When at length he was moved to silence the chanted uproar, and we pronounced a few of the Latin words at his request, he gave extravagant signs of delight, much as a great scientist might if a colleague unexpectedly confirmed some fine point on which his own experiments had focused themselves.

Bound and unbound feet were about equally in evidence in these Catholic towns, as if in such minor matters as this and the use of handkerchiefs converts might do as they saw fit. Nor could we see any appreciable advance in living conditions, though the school-girls of Poronor, in their bright red trousers and jackets, were a picturesque touch which made up somewhat for the annoyance of eating in the presence of as mighty a mob audience as in regions never blessed with Christianity. Chang reported, too, that people along the way told him that the Catholic Chinese were heartily disliked, because they were not only unusually dishonest and rather haughty, but because they might do any mean trick that suggested itself, and the priests invariably upheld them, even to using their influence in resultant lawsuits.

The broad valley between hazy and even invisible mountain ranges on one side and, on the other, a river which we hardly saw during the last week of the journey was sometimes a sea of yellow grass high as a horseman’s head and sometimes a big bare plain deliberately cut up by irrigation ditches so wide that there was often no crossing them without many miles of detour. There were times when a compass seemed necessary, so uncertain was the course of the meandering “road,” which even the experienced carters now and again lost completely. Travel was slight, and every few miles a herdsmen’s hut all but hidden in the tall grass was the only sign of population. Thousands of acres of these uncultivated plains had been dug up and burned over, probably by men who make their living by gathering marmot skins, though there were no visible evidences of these gopher-like animals, which retire to their holes for the winter. Snow fell during the night that we spent in Hoang-yang-muto—“Antelope Woods,” so named, no doubt, because there is not a tree and certainly not a “yellow sheep” to be seen for many miles roundabout, and all the next morning our horses were hampered by great balls of snow and earth that formed beneath their hoofs, and which we were forced to remove ourselves, for our brave mafu avoided any unnecessary familiarity with his charges. But by the middle of the afternoon the landscape had resumed its brown-yellow coloring and never lost it again during the journey.

Not long after the Catholics disappeared, big Mongol lamaseries began to rise every few hours above the horizon. These were much more pretentious than anything else between Ningsia and Paotou, the big main building always two and sometimes three stories high and constructed of good modern brick. From a distance they looked like ugly summer hotels that had been foisted upon the simple country, but a nearer view always showed the dozen or more big windows in each wall to be mere bricked-up pretenses of the openings they resembled. Evidently the “Living Buddhas” who graced these establishments had attempted to copy what they considered to be the glories of Shanghai or Tientsin, but could not rid themselves of the notion that a proper dwelling must be as stuffy as a Mongol felt tent. Even the clusters of white houses about these poor imitations of modern Italian villas bore false windows, and only the turnip-shaped dagobas had anything suggestive of the picturesque about them. Swarms of dirty lamas in yellow, red, and purple robes, big stout fellows of every age from boy novices to those whose already almost visible skulls would soon be the playthings of dogs, poured forth from these places if we rode in among the buildings, from which sometimes came ritual noises that were a mixture of the terrifying and the childishly ridiculous. Nor was there any lack of women about these monasteries, in quantities of gaudy jewelry and with real feet.

The plain had been unbroken for days as far as the eye could see, giving the impression that the country was tilted and that we were for ever riding uphill, when a low mountain rose above the horizon at dawn on Friday which we barely reached by sunset on Saturday. All Sunday we plodded close along the foot of this, here and there passing a cluster of huts within a compound more often than not in ruins, but with the assertion in big characters whitewashed on their mud walls that they were “hotels.” Once or twice we stopped at Mongol or Chinese inns, but most of them were still “Hwei-Hwei,” which did not matter so much after the cook hit upon the happy expedient of telling the proprietors that the bacon he served us for breakfast was “American salt beef.”

Though we had expected it almost any day on this journey northward, it was not until this last Sunday night of the trip that we could not get a room to ourselves. The isolated inn at which darkness overtook us consisted of one huge room surely a hundred feet long, with an alleyway from door to “kitchen” and a narrow lateral passage to the end walls, otherwise completely taken up by the four k’angs thus divided. These were already crowded with scores of coolies, ox-cart drivers, and similar travelers much more interesting to look upon than as bedfellows. Luckily there was one paper window in a far corner, and there we gave orders to have the last ten feet of the k’ang swept, the walls dusted, and a blanket and the reed mat we did not need hung up as curtains. If there were drawbacks to this improvised chamber, such as listening to the eating, sleeping, and drinking noises of our fellow-guests, the place at least was warm, thanks not only to the bodily heat of the several scores of men but to as roaring a fire as poor fuel could produce in the mud cook-stove that passed its surplus warmth into the flues beneath the general beds. For the last few days inn “kitchens” had been fitted with an immense shallow iron kettle set permanently into the adobe stove, and from this any one who wanted boiled water dipped it. About such inconveniences our cook competed with the flocking coolies who prepared their own humble fare, but it rarely needed even the commanding word of Chang to impress them with the fact that such great personages as ourselves naturally should have precedence over the mere garden variety of mankind.

Possibly the anxious reader is wondering how our lady companion met the trying situation of the total lack of privacy on that Sunday night. But there was no such problem. For when we had stepped forth into the darkness at the usual hour on the eighth morning out of Ningsia, the “tai-tai’s” cart was still sitting on its tail, thills in air, with a care-free something about it that should have made our own battered and road-weary wains envious. To our inquiry came the response, with more than a hint at our having been so unjust, that our pace was too swift for the lady, that rather than continue to get up every day long before daylight and ride often until after dark, with never a chance of getting out of her cart except at the noonday halt, she preferred to run the risk of being robbed or ill treated, even killed, by bandits, for she could endure it no longer. We refrained from making the obvious reply that, as far as our moderately tenacious memories informed us, we had never even suggested that she try to keep a foreigner’s pace; and thus we had parted, without an embrace, or even a kind word. Indeed, she had never spoken to us during all that intimate week, though I had caught her once or twice exchanging smiles with the major.

A typical farm hamlet of the Yellow River valley in the far west where some of the
farm-yards are surrounded by mud walls so mighty that they look like great armories