Читать книгу Hills of Han: A Romantic Incident - Samuel Merwin - Страница 18

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AT the point where the ancient highway, linking Northern China with Thibet, the Kukunor region and Mongolia, emerges from the treeless, red-brown tumbling hills of Hansi Province there stands across the road—or stood, before the revolution of 1911—a scenic arch of masonry crowned with a curving elaborately ornamented roof of tiles. Some forgotten philanthropist erected it, doubtless for a memorial to forgotten dead. Through this arch the west-bound traveler caught his first view of the wide yellow valley of the Han, with its yellow river, its square-walled, gray-green capital city, and, far beyond, of the sharp purple mountains that might have been cut out of cardboard.

The gray of old T'ainan lay in the massive battle-mented walls and in the more than six square miles of closely packed tile roofs; the green in its thousands of trees. For here, as in Peking and Sian-fu they had preserved the trees; not, of course, in the innumerable tortuous streets, where petty merchants, money-changers, porters, coolies, beggars, soldiers and other riffraff passed freely through mud or dust, but within the thousands of hidden private courtyards, in the yamens of governor, treasurer, and provincial judge, in temple grounds outside the walls, and in the compound of the American Mission. At this latter spot, by the way, could be seen, with the aid of field-glasses, the only two-story residence in T'ainan; quite a European house, built after the French manner of red brick trimmed with white stone, and rising distinctly above the typically gray roofs that clustered about its lower windows.

There were bold gate towers on the city wall; eight of them, great timbered structures with pagoda roofs rising perhaps fifteen yards above the wall and thirty above the lowly roadway. The timber-work under the shadowing eaves had sometime been painted in reds, blues and greens; and the once vivid colors, though dulled now by weather and years, were still richly visible to the near-observer.

Many smaller settlements, little gray clusters of houses, lay about the plain on radiating highways; for T'ainan boasted its suburbs. The hill slopes were dotted with the homes and walled gardens of bankers, merchants and other gentry. On a plateau just north of the Great Highway stood, side by side, two thirteen-roof pagodas, the pride of all central Hansi.

About the city, on any day of the seven, twisting through the hundreds of little streets and in and out at the eight gates, moved tens of thousands of tirelessly busy folk, all clad in the faded blue cotton that spells China to the eye, and among these a slow-moving, never-ceasing tangle of wheeled and fourfooted local traffic.

And along the Great Highway—down the hill slopes, through suburbs and city, over the river and on toward the teeming West; over the river, through city and suburbs and up the hills, toward the teeming East—flowed all day long the larger commerce that linked province with province and, ultimately, yellow man with white, at the treaty ports, hundreds of miles away. There were strings of laden camels with evil-looking Mongol drivers; hundreds and thousands of camels, disdainfully going and coming. There were hundreds and thousands of asses, patient little humorists, bearing panniers of coal lumps and iron ore from the crudely operated mines in the hills. There were hundreds and thousands of mule-drawn carts, springless, many with arched roofs of matting.

Along the roadside, sheltered by little sagging canopies of grimy matting, or squatting in the dirt, were vendors of flat cakes and vinegary sumshoo and bits of this and that to wear. Naked children swarmed like flies in the sun.

The day-by-day life of the oldest and least selfconscious civilization in the world was moving quietly, resistlessly along, as it had moved for six thousand years.