Читать книгу Intimate China: The Chinese as I Have Seen Them - Archibald Mrs. Little - Страница 12

TRACKERS.

By Mrs. Archibald Little.

It is always pleasant to sail before a wind, and boat-travel taken thus is the delight of travel in essence divested of all its ennuis, of tiresome fellow-travellers, dust, steam, rush! Yet there is rushing enough in the Yangtse Rapids; but rushing of such another sort! We ran upon a rock our first day, and were not able to find a leak that night by the flickering light of a Chinese candle. But next day a bag of damaged rice showed clearly where it was, and a little tangle of cotton-yarn with some tallow made it all right. After that our mast cracked so alarmingly that we shortened sail; but that also was soon made right, the sole of an old shoe being nailed over the crack. Old shoes seem to have lasting power. And we sailed on again before the favourable wind that had carried us from Ichang, all through the Yangtse Gorges, in less than a week. Was some of our good fortune owing to the three joss-sticks burning at the stern? They also were stuck in an old shoe, or rather straw sandal this time. Perhaps old shoes have a meaning, like so many other things in China, not understood by people not imbued from their cradles with the profound truths of Fung shui.

Our voyage was like a dream of childhood realised, a dream inspired by many readings of Sinbad's marvellous travels. At Ichang they were making merry over a disappointed globe-trotter, who had been to see the Gorges, and come back complaining they were not perpendicular! Whether he insisted on their descending perpendicularly to their winter water-line, or their summer water-line, not seldom sixty feet apart, report said not. But if he had come on to the Bellows Gorge, surely even he must have been satisfied. The great Szechuan Road, the one new road I have seen in China, is simply hewn out of the face of the apparently perpendicular rock, so that the cliff arches over it. There on the southern side are the square holes in the rock, memorial of Chinese daring, which the celebrated General Meng Liang caused to be made, so that in the night he could take his soldiers, on pieces of wood stuck into these square holes, a rude but strong ladder, up the face of the cliff, naturally supposed to be inaccessible, and surprise the enemy, thereby conquering the kingdom of Shu. There also are the caves, where men gather saltpetre at dizzy heights, climbing up to them by paths that make one hot to look at. Farther on are the iron pillars on one side, and opposite the holes in the rock, between which chains were fastened so as to prevent those of the kingdom to the west of the Gorges from coming down in their vessels to attack the men of Hupeh, then the kingdom of Wei. And here, as we left the gorge, we saw the temple to the memory of Liu Pei, who was there encamped, and slain when Meng Liang made his marvellous night attack. This borderland teems with memories, and the Chinese do not quickly forget. In Kweichow there is still a tablet to the wife of Liu Pei, over the well at the back of what is now the Prefect's official residence, where she drowned herself when her husband was slain, nearly two thousand years ago.

But the day we were there was New Year's Eve, and even our man-servant said it was impossible for me to go into the city to see it that day; and on the next day's festival it would be cruel to trouble our good soldiers to escort us. For we were travelling with that great luxury, a gunboat, that is also a lifeboat; and the soldiers, as in all this admirably organised lifeboat service, were excellent fellows, whether for handling an oar or for keeping back the crowd. They seemed positively to delight in carrying the camera, or in posing for a foreground, evidently admiring their own clothes very much, and being very wishful to know if we could read the characters upon their jackets. But for this gunboat, which sailed faster than our passenger-boat, and could put us ashore anywhere, we should have been deprived of nearly all our interesting walks; for our boat sailed on and on even into the night. Sailing through the never-ending Witches' Gorge, ever following White Wings before, a beautifully appointed junk, that had kept just ahead of us all day, and seeing our first sunset since we started, soft saffron in the west, had a very magical effect. It seemed impossible ever to go back again to one's friends. Why not sail on for ever, since one had for once discovered the Ideal Life?

POLING A BOAT UP A RAPID.

By Mrs. Archibald Little.

"We knew the merry world was round,

And we might sail for evermore."

But there were other moments, and moments oft repeated, when all was excitement and action. Wild shouts and waving of arms encouraged the steaming trackers. The water boiled round the bows. The drum sounded. A man sprang on to an almost impossible rock—it is climbed at least twenty times nearly every day—and disengaged the tow-line, on which our lives were depending. The camera was at full cock! And then a sailor reached in front of it, and that moment was lost! But the boat hung fire, and we tried again. At one rapid there were women tracking—women with their hoof-like feet and loathly trousers, giving delicate little pulls, that surely could not advance the boat much. Then our soldiers were poling and hooking, with crimson faces and straining arms! Now we are through that race, and flying along in the eddy preparatory to the tug-of-war at the next rapid! The trackers are running ahead like a pack of beagles. A side-ravine becomes visible, with a grand gateway, irresistibly recalling Coleridge's "like cliffs that have been rent asunder." Then we gaze at caves, squared, and with fresh-looking ladders hanging from them, and understand they are places of refuge for the husbandmen in the houses opposite to retire into should danger threaten, and that it is not so very long since they were used. Certainly, they would appear able to stand every siege but that of hunger.

We passed rocks fluted like organ-pipes, with the stones that had done the fluting still held captive in them; rocks fretted almost into lacework by the action of the water; rocks weathered red, and rocks weathered grey; and one day we saw a black mass, which we were told was harder than steel, yet it was gnarled and gnawn in rings. After passing that black mass, the strata sloped from east to west, just as on the other side of the Gorges they sloped from west to east; thus, coming up-stream, the rocks no longer seemed so menacing as before.

"But here are the far-famed singing girls of Kweichow, with reedlike voices, and a man, very pale, with a face like Dante, for accompanist on a pretty little viol; and the sound of merry-making increases. Our soldiers have been cooking their pig's head nearly all day. A mandarin's boat moored next to us has a regular witches' cauldron, full of the cock that every one has been carrying about these last few days, comb, legs, and all, a pig's head, and several more uncanny-looking bits of meat. Evidently our trackers also are enjoying a good feed outside. We have twenty lusty rogues, besides our boat's crew. And we are all moored in a tangled mass; so that there does not seem to be room for even one boat more to spend its New Year at Kweichow Fu. There are joss-sticks burning at our cabin door. Joss-sticks were burnt solemnly over our pig's head in the gorge in the morning of that day, a cannon solemnly fired three times, and the cook prostrated himself as he offered the burnt-offering. Now crackers are going off all round; and every man who has a chance has asked me if I do not think Szechuan the most beautiful country in the world. Even the captain tried to hurry me in the morning into photographing the entrance into the first Szechuan gorge. 'Szechuan is beautiful,' he said. So say all the men with white handkerchiefs bound round their brows, thus showing their Western origin."

But it was all beautiful, all wild, all grand, after we entered the Land of Promise through the gate of the Ichang Gorge. For those who do not love Nature in her wilder moods this was not the time of year to travel through the Gorges. They should wait till spring has garlanded them with flowers like a Mayfair ballroom, and perfumed the breezes with their fragrance. There is a certain sameness about the grandeur of the scenery when seen always under a leaden sky with a north-easter driving us on. But for those who admire precipice piled upon precipice, and rocks rent asunder, every season is the season for the Gorges, where the Niukan is perhaps the loveliest; but the Ping Shu Gorge and that of the Fearsome Pool are certainly the most solemn and impressive; while the Witches' Gorge offers the most variety, and the Ichang Gorge, though perhaps only because it is best known, ever seems the friendliest, and is certainly the most fantastic.

IN THE NIUKAN GORGE.

By Mrs. Archibald Little.

All China New Year's Day we wandered through the ruins of Liu Pei's city. Bits of the wall remain, and the gateway under the old drum tower; but it is a little hard to believe these date from A.D. 200, although all the people declare they do, and our man-servant begged that they might be photographed. We picnicked under a beautiful clump of trees, looking down upon the grand rock mass, whose being covered by the river is the signal for the Kweichow authorities to forbid the passage of junks down-river as too dangerous. The days of this grand rock mass standing in mid Yangtse must be numbered, supported as it is on three pillars; thus there are two arches to be seen beneath it, when the water is low enough. We wandered through a lovely temple on the hill, commanding the most picturesque view we had yet seen down the last Fearsome Gorge. Unlike most Chinese temples, this, the first Szechuan temple I had seen, was really exquisitely kept, clean, and well swept, with clean, bright windows of many-coloured paper panes. The priests were polite, the images freshly painted. We came down through a village, again all clean and fresh as paint. Every one was in good clothes, of course, as it was New Year's Day; but it was surprising to find that even the smartest women were ready to be photographed, and not at all too frightened to look into the camera themselves.

WHITE EMPEROR'S TEMPLE, LOOKING DOWN THE GORGE OF THE FEARSOME POOL, OR BELLOWS GORGE.

By Mrs. Archibald Little.

We longed to walk along the great Szechuan Road, completed as far as the Hupeh frontier, sixty miles, at a reputed cost of £52,000, and really a road, though, as is usual in Szechuan, it is often long flights of steps, and several of its crossings over streams looked doubtful. The Chinese do not make roads sufficiently often to be good road-makers. Hupeh was to have continued this road through its gorges to Ichang; and the great Lo, the Marquis of Carabas of these parts, had just been up to inspect and chalk O where the road was to go. If it were ever finished and could last, it would rival the Corniche Road for magnificence of scenery.

But years have past since we first travelled on the Upper Yangtse, and no steps have yet been taken to carry the road down-river; the funds intended for this purpose are said all to have been absorbed in paying compensation for damage done to foreigners' property in the riots of one summer. Some day, perhaps, a railway will be cut out along the river-channel. In the meantime, my husband has proved the long-doubted practicability of steaming through the rapids, by himself taking a little steamer up without any foreign assistance to help him, only Ningpo engineers, who knew neither the Szechuan speech nor ways, and a Szechuan pilot, who had never been on a steamer before. That voyage will for ever rank among the most exciting experiences of my life; for all the population along the river turned out to see the steamer, so that the cities presented the appearance of having all their outlines heavily underscored with a blue pencil; whilst sometimes as many as five Chinese lifeboats and gunboats, with large pennants and burgees flying, and occasionally firing their cannon, all wanted her to tow them at once, since their mission was to protect her. And as the little steamboat could at the outside go nine knots an hour, it was, indeed, a business to get her up the rapids. In one case—the worst—she steamed all she could, and three hundred men, harnessed to tracking-lines, pulled all they could, till one great bamboo line snapped. But she got up safely after seven minutes, in which one felt as if one's hair turned white; for if she had once got her head round, she must have been lost, and every man aboard her. A more powerful steamer would make nothing of many of the rapids, and even that worst one at some seasons of the year is barely noticeable.

NEW AND GLORIOUS RAPID.

By Mr. Cecil Hanbury.

The chief points of interest, after passing through the Gorges, are Changfei's beautiful temple, a great place to spend a happy day at; the singularly beautifully situated city of Wanhsien; Changchow, with its graceful bamboo groves; and Fengtu, the Chinese Hades.

TREE MOVED 100 YARDS BY LANDSLIP THAT FORMED NEW RAPID.

By Mr. Cecil Hanbury.

To a Chinaman this last is the most interesting place along the river: for the Emperor of the dead is supposed to live on the little hill there, as the Emperor of the living does at Peking; and whenever a Chinaman dies, all the world over, a letter ought to be written to Fengtu announcing his death, and not dropped casually into the post, but solemnly burnt by a Taoist priest. It is the one place Chinese boatmen regard with awe, and they object to moving about at night near Fengtu. Pilgrims come in great numbers to see the well that is reputed bottomless; and every one burns a little paper and throws it in. So that when I saw it the well appeared quite full up to the top. There was an iron cover over it I longed to photograph; and as it was quite dark by the well, I asked whether the soldiers accompanying me might carry it outside into the daylight and to my surprise no objection was made to their doing so; and when I set up the camera, a priest said he would stand beside it with an incense-stick, as that would look better. There is a great sword at Fengtu; but we did not learn the legend about this. The whole hillside was covered with temples, all crowded with pilgrims; and my husband said if I would go photographing in Chinese places of pilgrimage, I really must not expect him to accompany me. But I was new to China then, and enthusiastic; so four soldiers linked their arms round me, and in that manner I photographed.

IRON COVER OF BOTTOMLESS WELL.

By Mrs. Archibald Little.

On another voyage we stopped at Fengtu for the night as we were proceeding up-river. It was when the chapels and houses throughout Szechuan were being burnt down, and missionaries flying for their lives, though no one was killed, happily. All the people on the foreshore rushed down to look at our boat, brandishing bamboos; and our servants said they had to shout very loud and very energetically that we were not missionaries in order to save our lives. The principal official sent down additional soldiers to guard us through the night. But it was impossible to be frightened. For that, I think, was really the very hottest night I have lived through; even lying on the roof of the boat it was impossible to do anything but gasp.

AT FENGTU.

By Mrs. Archibald Little.

Beyond Fengtu are the colossal statues of the philanthropic beancurd-seller and his wife, hewn out of the living rock, and sitting in caves made in the rock out of which they are hewn. Beyond them, again, comes a very pleasant country of farmsteads, and great shade-trees, and caves in the rock-face, once inhabited, it is believed, by the aborigines, who were there before the Chinese came. But if so, how well and neatly they are shaped! And why did people who could square doorways so neatly live in such uncomfortable, dark places as caves? People all say to one another that these caves would be very interesting subjects for study; but so far no one has studied them.

Thus, by many windings, and past great bridges, and up more rapids, at last we arrive at terrible, long reaches of rocks; and then at Chungking, the commercial capital of Szechuan, China's westernmost, and one of its largest and richest provinces. But Chungking deserves a chapter to itself, especially as it is the only Chinese city within whose walls I have lived for years. Some people call thus living "doing a term of fortress." A Chinese city is certainly very like a prison.