Across China on Foot Part 3

CHAPTER IV.

_Scene at the Rapid_. _Dangers of the Yeh T'an_. _Gear taken ash.o.r.e_.

_Intense cold_. _Further preparation_. _Engaging the trackers_. _Fever of excitement_. _Her nose is put to it_. _Struggles for mastery_.

_Author saves boatman_. _Fifteen-knot current_. _Terrific labor on sh.o.r.e_. _Man nearly falls overboard_. _Straining hawsers carry us over safely_. _The merriment among the men_. _The thundering cataract_.

_Trackers' chanting_. _Their life_. _"Pioneer" at the Yeh T'an_. _The Buffalo Mouth Reach_. _Story of the "Woodlark."_ _How she was saved_.

_Arrival at Kweifu_. _Difficulty in landing_. _Laying in provisions_.

_Author laid up with malaria_. _Survey of trade in Shanghai and Hong-Kong_. _Where and why the Britisher fails_. _Comparison with Germans_. _Three western provinces and pack-horse traffic_. _Advantages of new railway_. _Yangtze likely to be abandoned_. _East India Company.

French and British interests_. _Hint to Hong-Kong Chamber of Commerce._

Wild shrieking, frantic yelling, exhausted groaning, confusion and clamor,--one long, deafening din. A bewildering, maddening mob of reckless, terrified human beings rush hither and thither, unseeingly and distractedly. Will she go? Yes! No! Yes! Then comes the screeching, the scrunching, the straining, and then--a final snap! Back we go, sheering helplessly, swayed to and fro most dangerously by the foaming waters, and almost, but not quite, turn turtle. The red boat follows us anxiously, and watches our timid little craft b.u.mp against the rock-strewn coast. But we are safe, and raise unconsciously a cry of grat.i.tude to the deity of the river.

We were at the Yeh T'an, or the Wild Rapid, some distance on from the Ichang Gorge, were almost over the growling monster, when the tow-line, straining to its utmost limit, snapped suddenly with little warning, and we drifted in a moment or two away down to last night's anchorage, far below, where we were obliged to bring up the last of the long tier of boats of which we were this morning the first.

And now we are ready again to take our turn.

Our gear is all taken ash.o.r.e. Seated on a stone on sh.o.r.e, watching operations, is The Other Man. The sun vainly tries to get through, and the intense cold is almost unendurable. No hitch is to occur this time.

The toughest and stoutest bamboo hawsers are dexterously brought out, their inboard ends bound in a flash firmly round the mast close down to the deck, washed by the great waves of the rapid, just in front of the 'mids.h.i.+ps pole through which I breathlessly watch proceedings. I want to feel again the sensation. The captain, in essentially the Chinese way, is engaging a crew of demon-faced trackers to haul her over. Pouring towards the boat, in a fever of excitement that rises higher every moment, the natural elements of hunger and constant struggle against the great river swell their fury; they bellow like wild beasts, _they are like beasts_, for they have known nothing but struggle all their lives; they have always, since they were tiny children, been fighting this roaring water monster--they know none else. And now, as I say, they bellow like beasts, each man ravenously eager to be among the number chosen to earn a few cash.[D] The arrangement at last is made, and the discordant hubbub, instead of lessening, grows more and more deafening.

It is a miserable, desperate, wholly panic-stricken crowd that then harnesses up with their great hooks joined to a rough waist-belt, with which they connect themselves to the straining tow-lines.

And now her nose is put into the teeth of this trough of treachery--a veritable boiling cauldron, stirring up all past mysteries. Waves rush furiously towards us, with the growl of a thousand demons, whose anger is only swelled by the thousands of miles of her course from far-away Tibet. It seems as if they must instantly devour her, and that we must now go under to swell the number of their victims. But they only beat her back, for she rides gracefully, faltering timidly with frightened creaks and groans, whilst the waters s.h.i.+ver her frail bulwarks with their cruel message of destruction, which might mean her very death-rattle. I get landed in the stomach with the end of a gigantic bamboo boat-hook, used by one of the men standing in the bows whose duty is to fend her off the rocks. He falls towards the river. I grab his single garment, give one swift pull, and he comes up again with a jerky little laugh and asks if he has hurt me--yelling through his hands in my ears, for the noise is terrible. To look out over the side makes me giddy, for the fifteen-knot current, bl.u.s.tering and bubbling and foaming and leaping, gives one the feeling that he is in an express train tearing through the sea. On sh.o.r.e, far ahead, I can see the trackers--struggling forms of men and women, touching each other, grasping each other, wrestling furiously and mightily, straining on all fours, now gripping a boulder to aid them forward, now to the right, now to the left, always fighting for one more inch, and engaged in a task which to one seeing it for the first time looks as if it were quite beyond human effort. f.a.gged and famished beings are these trackers, whose life day after day, week in week out, is harder than that of the average costermonger's donkey. They throw up their hands in a dumb frenzy of protest and futile appeal to the presiding deity; and here on the river, depending entirely upon those men on the sh.o.r.e, slowly, inch by inch, the little craft, feeling her own weakness, forges ahead against the leaping current in the gapway in the reef.

None come to offer a.s.sistance to our crowd, who are now turned facing us, and strain almost flat on their backs, giving the strength of every drop of blood and fibre of their being; and the scene, now lit up by a momentary glimmer of feeble sunlight, a.s.sumes a wonderful and terrible picturesqueness. I am chained to the spot by a horrible fascination, and I find myself unconsciously saying, "I fear she will not go. I fear--"

But a man has fallen exhausted, he almost fell overboard, and now leans against the mast in utter weariness and fatigue, brought on by the morning's exertions. He is instantly relieved by a bull-dog fellow of enormous strength. Now comes the culminating point, a truly terrifying moment, the very anguish of which frightened me, as I looked around for the lifeboat, and I saw that even the commodore's cold and self-satisfied dignity was disturbed. The hawsers strain again. Creak, crack! creak, crack! The lifeboat watches and comes nearer to us. There is a mighty yell. We cannot go! Yes, we can! There is a mighty pull, and you feel the boat almost torn asunder. Another mighty pull, a tremendous quiver of the timbers, and you turn to see the angry water, which sounds as if a hundred hounds are beating under us for entry at the barred door. There is another deafening yell, the men tear away like frightened horses. Another mighty pull, and another, and another, and we slide over into smooth water.

Then I breathe freely, and yell myself.

The little boat seems to gasp for breath as a drowning man, saved in the nick of time, shudders in every limb with pain and fear.

As we tied up in smooth water, all the men, from the _laoban_ to the meanest tracker, laughed and yelled and told each other how it was done.

We baled the water out of the boat, and one was glad to pull away from the deafening hum of the thundering cataract. A faulty tow-line, a slippery hitch, one false step, one false maneuver, and the sh.o.r.e might have been by that time strewn with our corpses. As it was, we were safe and happy.

But the trackers are strange creatures. At times they are a quarter of a mile ahead. Soft echoes of their coa.r.s.e chanting came down the confines of the gully, after the rapid had been pa.s.sed, and in rounding a rocky promontory mid-stream, one would catch sight of them bending their bodies in pulling steadily against the current of the river.

Occasionally one of these poor fellows slips; there is a shriek, his body is dashed unmercifully against the jagged cliffs in its last journey to the river, which carries the multilated corpse away. And yet these men, engaged in this terrific toil, with utmost danger to their lives, live almost exclusively on boiled rice and dirty cabbage, and receive the merest pittance in money at the journey's end.

Some idea of the force of this enormous volume of water may be given by mentioning the exploits of the steamer _Pioneer_, which on three consecutive occasions attacked the Yeh T'an when at its worst, and, though steaming a good fourteen knots, failed to ascend. She was obliged to lay out a long steel-wire hawser, and heave herself over by means of her windla.s.s, the engines working at full speed at the same time. Hard and heavy was the heave, gaining foot by foot, with a tension on the hawser almost to breaking strain in a veritable battle against the dragon of the river. Yet so complete are the changes which are wrought by the great variation in the level of the river, that this formidable mid-level rapid completely disappears at high level.

After we had left this rapid--and right glad were we to get away--we came, after a couple of hours' run, to the Niu K'eo, or Buffalo Mouth Reach, quiet enough during the low-water season, but a wild stretch during high river, where many a junk is caught by the violently gyrating swirls, rendered unmanageable, and dashed to atoms on some rocky promontory or boulder pile in as short a s.p.a.ce of time as it takes to write it. It was here that the _Woodlark_, one of the magnificent gunboats which patrol the river to safeguard the interests of the Union Jack in this region, came to grief on her maiden trip to Chung-king. One of these strong swirls caught the s.h.i.+p's stern, rendering her rudders useless for the moment, and causing her to sheer broadside into the foaming rapid. The engines were immediately reversed to full speed astern; but the swift current, combined with the momentum of the s.h.i.+p, carried her w.i.l.l.y-nilly to the rock-bound sh.o.r.e, on which she crumpled her bows as if they were made of tin. Fortunately she was built in water-tight sections; her engineers removed the forward section, straightened out the crumpled plates, riveted them together, and bolted the section back into its place again so well, that on arrival at Chung-king not a trace of the accident was visible.

Upon arrival at Kweifu one bids farewell to the Gorges. This town, formerly a considerable coaling center, overlooks most beautiful hillocks, with cottage gardens cultivated in every accessible corner, and a wide sweep of the river.

We landed with difficulty. "Chor, chor!" yelled the trackers, who marked time to their cry, swinging their arms to and fro at each short step; but they almost gave up the ghost. However, we did land, and so did our boy, who bought excellent provisions and meat, which, alas! too soon disappeared. The mutton and beef gradually grew less and daily blackened, wrapped up in opposite corners of the cabin, under the protection from the wet of a couple of sheets of the "Pink 'Un."

From Kweifu to Wan Hsien there was the same kind of scenery--the clear river winding among sand-flats and gravel-banks, with occasional stiff rapids. But after having been in a _wu-pan_ for several days, suffering that which has been detailed, and much besides, the journey got a bit dreary. These, however, are ordinary circ.u.mstances; but when one has been laid up on a bench of a bed for three days with a high temperature, a legacy of several years in the humid tropics, the physical discomfort baffles description. Malaria, as all sufferers know, has a tendency to cause trouble as soon as one gets into cold weather, and in my case, as will be seen in subsequent parts of this book, it held faithfully to its best traditions. Fever on the Yangtze in a _wu-pan_ would require a chapter to itself, not to mention the kindly eccentricities of a companion whose knowledge of malaria was most elementary and whose knowledge of nursing absolutely _nil_. But I refrain. As also do I of further talk about the Yangtze gorges and the rapids.

From Kweifu to Wan Hsien is a tedious journey. The country opens out, and is more or less monotonously flat. The majority of the dangers and difficulties, however, are over, and one is able to settle down in comparative peace. Fortunately for the author, nothing untoward happened, but travelers are warned not to be too sanguine. Wrecks have happened within a few miles of the destination, generally to be accounted for by the unhappy knack the Chinese boatman has of taking all precautions where the dangerous rapids exist, and leaving all to chance elsewhere. Some two years later, as I was coming down the river from Chung-king in December, I counted no less than nine wrecks, one boat having on board a cargo for the China Inland Mission authorities of no less than 480 boxes. The contents were spread out on the banks to dry, while the boat was turned upside down and repaired on the spot.

A hopeless cry is continually ascending in Hong-Kong and Shanghai that trade is bad, that the palmy days are gone, and that one might as well leave business to take care of itself.

And it is not to be denied that increased trade in the Far East does not of necessity mean increased profits. Compet.i.tion has rendered buying and selling, if they are to show increased dividends, a much harder task than some of the older merchants had when they built up their businesses twenty or thirty years ago. There is no comparison. But Hong-Kong, by virtue of her remarkably favorable position geographically, should always be able to hold her own; and now that the railway has pierced the great province of Yun-nan, and brought the provinces beyond the navigable Yangtze nearer to the outside world, she should be able to reap a big harvest in Western China, if merchants will move at the right time. More often than not the Britisher loses his trade, not on account of the alleged reason that business is not to be done, but because, content with his club life, and with playing games when he should be doing business, he allows the German to rush past him, and this man, an alien in the colony, by persistent plodding and other more or less commendable traits of business which I should like to detail, but for which I have no s.p.a.ce, takes away the trade while the Britisher looks on.

The whole of the trade of the three western provinces--Yun-nan, Kwei-chow and Szech'wan--has for all time been handled by Shanghai, going into the interior by the extremely hazardous route of these Yangtze rapids, and then over the mountains by coolie or pack-horse.

This has gone on for centuries. But now the time has come for the Hong-Kong trader to step in and carry away the lion share of the greatly increasing foreign trade for those three provinces by means of the advantage the new Tonkin-Yun-nan Railway has given him.

The railway runs from Haiphong in Indo-China to Yun-nan-fu, the capital of Yun-nan province. And it appears certain to the writer that, with such an important town three or four days from the coast, s.h.i.+ppers will not be content to continue to s.h.i.+p via the Yangtze, with all its risk.

British and American merchants, who carry the greater part of the imports to Western China, will send their goods direct to Hong-Kong, where trans.h.i.+pment will be made to Haiphong, and thence s.h.i.+pped by rail to Yun-nan-fu, the distributing center for inland trade. To my mind, Hong-Kong merchants might control the whole of the British trade of Western China if they will only push, for although the tariff of Tonkin may be heavy, it would be compensated by the fact that transit would be so much quicker and safer. But it needs push.

The history of our intercourse with China, from the days of the East India Company till now, is nothing but a record of a continuous struggle to open up and develop trade. Opening up trade, too, with a people who have something pathetic in the honest persistency with which their officials have vainly struggled to keep themselves uncontaminated from the outside world. Trade in China cannot be left to take care of itself, as is done in Western countries. However invidious it may seem, we must admit the fact that past progress has been due to pressure. Therefore, if the opportunities were placed near at hand to the Hong-Kong s.h.i.+pper, he would be an unenterprising person indeed were he not to avail himself of the opportunity. Shanghai has held the trump card formerly. This cannot be denied. But I think the railway is destined to turn the trade route to the other side of the empire. It is merely a question as to who is to get the trade--the French or the British. The French are on the alert. They cannot get territory; now they are after the trade.

It is my opinion that it would be to the advantage of the colony of Hong-Kong were the Chamber of Commerce there to investigate the matter thoroughly. Now is the time.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote D: _Cash_, a small bra.s.s coin with a hole through the middle.

Nominally 1,000 cash to the dollar.]

THIRD JOURNEY

CHUNG-KING TO SUI-FU (VIA LUCHOW)

CHAPTER V.

_Beginning of the overland journey_. _The official halo around the caravan_. _The people's goodbyes_. _Stages to Sui-fu_. _A persistent coolie_. _My boy's indignation, and the sequel_. _Kindness of the people of Chung-king_. _The Chung-king Consulate_. _Need of keeping fit in travelling in China_. _Walking tabooed_. _The question of "face" and what it means_. _Author runs the gauntlet_. _Carrying coolie's rate of pay_. _The so-called great paved highways of China, and a few remarks thereon_. _The garden of China_. _Magnificence of the scenery of Western China_. _The tea-shops_. _The Chinese coolie's thirst and how the author drank_. _Population of Szech-wan_. _Minerals found_. _Salt and other things_. _The Chinese inn: how it holds the palm for unmitigated filth_.

_Description of the rooms_. _Szech-wan and Yun-nan caravanserais_. _Need of a camp bed_. _Toileting in unsecluded publicity_. _How the author was met at market towns_. _How the days do not get dull_.

In a manner admirably befitting my rank as an English traveler, apart from the fact that I was the man who was endeavoring to cross China on foot, I was led out of Chung-king _en route_ for Bhamo alone, my companion having had to leave me here.

It was Easter Sunday, a crisp spring morning.

First came a public sedan-chair, bravely borne by three of the finest fellows in all China, at the head of which on either side were two uniformed persons called soldiers--incomprehensible to one who has no knowledge of the interior, for they bore no marks whatever of the military--whilst uniformed men also solemnly guarded the back. Then came the grinning coolies, carrying that meager portion of my worldly goods which I had antic.i.p.ated would have been engulfed in the Yangtze.

And at the head of all, leading them on as captains do the Salvation Army, was I myself, walking along triumphantly, undoubtedly looking a person of weight, but somehow peculiarly unable to get out of my head that little adage apropos the fact that when the blind shall lead the blind both shall fall into a ditch! But Chinese decorum forbade my falling behind. I had determined to walk across China, every inch of the way or not at all; and the chair coolies, unaware of my intentions presumably, thought it a great joke when at the western gate, through which I departed, I gave instructions that one hundred cash be doled out to each man for his graciousness in escorting me through the town.

All the people were in the middle of the streets--those slippery streets of interminable steps--to give me at parting their blessings or their curses, and only with difficulty and considerable shouting and pus.h.i.+ng could I sufficiently take their attention from the array of official and civil servants who made up my caravan as to effect an exit.

The following were to be stages:--

1st day--Ts'eo-ma-k'ang 80 li.

2nd day--uin-ch'uan hsien 120 "