FROM NICHANG, THE place where the road ended, we faced the welcome prospect, after all these sedentary days, of a fourteen-mile walk over the hills; this would bring us to a little village across the Kwantung frontier, whence we should get a sampan down the Pei River for the last stage but one of our journey to Canton. It was still only the middle of the day, so we set about hiring carriers for our luggage, from which, for fear that it would be searched at the provincial frontier, we extracted and concealed about our persons a remarkable collection of Communist propaganda, given us, together with some Red seals and banners, by the authorities in Kiangsi. We did not want our political sympathies to be misinterpreted.
Carriers were harder to hire than usual. On the day before a party of three merchants had been stripped, robbed, and beaten by bandits on the path which we were to follow, and the coolies put a higher commercial value on their qualms than Li considered reasonable. I don’t know what it is about me, but there seems to exist – I have remarked on this before – between me and the criminal classes in the Far East some queer and constant time-lag. Jam to-morrow, jam yesterday, but never jam to-day. Just up the road, a little way down the line, the day after or the day before I pass that way, the worst happens. The day I am there is a dies non.
And so it was on this occasion. We came at last to terms with carriers, and paid them half their wages in advance to leave with their wives, to soften the blow of a potential bereavement. Two young Chinese students, bound for Canton, joined our party on the theory that there is safety in numbers, and we set out from the village at a good round pace. The path we travelled was an ancient one, being flagged and for part of its length lined with an avenue of firs. All through, the afternoon we walked, following the path over the curious and savage hills and down into gullies from whose solid walls of rock the heat of the sun leapt out at us. The country was extraordinarily beautiful. All the hills in China – at least all the hills that I have seen – have an oddly artificial look. They rise suddenly and take quaint shapes; they never sprawl. They are exactly as they are portrayed in Chinese art; they seem to have been enlarged from a delicate and fanciful miniature, with complete success. It is a mannered landscape, and it has great charm.
Occasionally we halted to drink tea and rest the carriers. With their tottering yet indefatigable gait, they set a rapid pace. Our two Chinese fellow-travellers, so slight, so reedy in appearance, padded happily along, fanning themselves with their straw hats and seeming not to feel at all the effects of a march of which, from one glance at their physique, you would have judged them wholly incapable. When the path went up or down a hill, the flags became steps; of this form of highway the only criticism possible is that you must watch your feet too much, thereby missing things which are beautiful or strange in the countryside around you.
There were no bandits; there was not even a frontier post. Only one incident enlivened our journey. We reached a point where the path crossed the last, half-constructed lap of the motor road down which we had been whirled that morning. Here it ran in a cutting made in the flank of a steep hill. Coolies were working in the cutting, and there were more coolies far up the hill-side above it. The bed of the cutting was full of huge boulders which were to form the foundations of the road.
Over these boulders we picked our way with some difficulty, jumping from one to the other like the most maladroit of goats. In the middle of them I stopped, poised on a pinnacle, to take a photograph. The others went on ahead.
Suddenly I heard shouts, followed by the dull sound of an explosion from the hill-side above me. Looking up, I found that I was now alone in the cutting. The smoke of a blasting charge floated out against the blue sky, and a large, a really enormous rock was bounding savagely down the hill.
I had no doubts as to where it was going to land. It was going to land on me. This opinion was shared by the men who had released it, a wildly gesticulating fresco of manikins two hundred yards above me. I made a prodigious leap from my rock to the next. The galloping boulder, which now looked to me about the size of the Isle of Wight, scored one of its increasingly rare contacts with the hill-side, kicked up a cloud of dust, and slightly changed its direction. It was still coming straight for me.
The prospect of a game, however short, of catch-as-catch-can between me and a large segment of South China clearly appealed to the spectators but left me cold. I decided that, if one had to be squashed, it was better to make, figuratively speaking, no bones about it. I descended, with all possible dignity, into a cranny between two boulders and shut my eyes.
With a sound to which the Fall of the House of Ussher was as the dropping of a pin, the mass of rock landed among the boulders ten feet away and lay, miraculously, dead. It hardly splintered at all, and none of the splinters came my way. We continued our journey.
The only other thing worth relating about that walk was a coincidence, trivial but striking. I had been telling Gerald, as we went along, about a journey which I had undertaken the year before, as one of an expedition which had pursued a ludicrous course across the Central Plateau of Brazil in search of the legendary Colonel Fawcett. We were discussing the strange immortality of the lost explorer – how after eight years one was still continually coming across references to him. Suddenly Gerald stooped and picked up a scrap of newspaper. It was printed in English. The only complete paragraph on it announced the return, empty-handed, of yet another American expedition from the jungles of Matto Grosso; although defeated, they were still convinced, the newspaper said, that Fawcett was alive.
Gerald and I pointed out to each other what a small place the world was. It is always better to observe the rites.
Presently we climbed the last pass. Below us lay the village of Pingshek, squeezed in between the foothills and the river, and pricked by three little white forts which stood on knolls among the huddled houses. The river wound away southward through a valley embossed with shaggy and fantastic rocks, hundreds of feet high; beyond it was a great climbing wall of mountains, remote and insubstantial in the evening light. The sun was setting behind us; as we went down towards the village the shadows on the eastern slopes were cool.
The village inn was not a very good one. Li, for whom the linguistic problem now loomed larger with every step we took, was at sea with the local dialect; the feeling that he was losing face with us, and perhaps being swindled by the inhabitants, made him very unhappy. ‘South man not good’, he muttered, and shook his head in a disconsolate way. His disgust was increased when the local soldiery came to examine our passports. Having seen few if any foreigners before, they took us for Japanese and made an outcry. They were soothed only after an impassioned speech by the student from Canton, whose ethnology was providentially more advanced than theirs.
We got a room opening on to the stone roof of the inn, on which I slept under an enormous moon; the small white forts stood up out of a nacreous haze which hung low above the river and shone as if they had been made of silver. Although the local wine was good, the dinner was the worst of the journey – so bad, indeed, that it took me half a minute’s mastication to discover that a morsel, selected with chopsticks in an uncertain light, was in fact the left claw of a chicken. At this we lodged a complaint and the proprietress, a woman of spirit, beat her cook over the head with a stool. The dish was sent down again to the kitchen. On its return it was found to contain, among other things, the chicken’s beak. After that we gave it up.
At dawn the next morning we went down to the river, where the sampan which we had chartered the night before was beached with many others on the mud. High above us (the river was low) men and women were cleaning their teeth and performing other tasks associated with reveille from the jutting windows of wooden houses on the waterfront. Our crew brought eggs and vegetables and little shreds of pork to the sampan, where in the tunnel-shaped cabin of matting rice was already cooking in a big black pot.
Only the distant peaks were warmed by sunlight as we pushed off from the foreshore, on which scavenging curs with hostile eyes moved slowly, stiff from sleep. A man lying on the bows of the boat next to ours awoke and lay staring at us, too amazed to blink. His face was full of apprehension and perplexity, for he had come from oblivion straight to a world in which two giants of an unorthodox colour monopolized his field of vision. He was still staring as we dropped downstream.
The water came from the mountains and was swift and green, not the drab yellow of the rivers of the plains. In the bows our three rowers, standing, plied their long thin-bladed oars. The master of the boat managed the ponderous twenty-foot steering oar which trailed behind us limply. He had a crafty but uninteresting face. We made a little deck of loose planks in the stern, and the student from Canton, treading first on one, then on the other of the projecting ends, fell twice, with fearful force, into the bilge.
A little mist still drifted on the surface of the water: the bluer smoke of the village we had left behind us hung above it in a series of half-formulated tiers. The beauty of the river increased as we descended. Great pinnacles of rock, as high as a hill and oddly tufted with vegetation, rose about the river bed; the summit of one of them, by a freak, had the exact outline of a monstrous camel, kneeling.
We were the first boat away from Pingshek, but others were following us, a leisurely, equidistant procession which the straight stretches of the current’s course revealed. Soon we began to pass boats coming up stream. The men poling them put the crutch of the pole in the hollow between neck and shoulder, then, bending almost double, ran down the broad gunwales of the boat with a great shouting song. In passages where the current was swift, the boat was hauled by trackers who, straining at a long rope, cried in shrill chorus as they stumbled along the shore. Every boat, however full of cargo, was also the home of a family; only the poultry, the animals, and the smallest babies played no part in the day’s work of poling, steering, cooking, and washing clothes. Each sampan reflected, in cross-section, the peasant’s unremitting struggle for existence.
In the middle of the morning we came to a place where the river had to pass through a high range of mountains. Here was the head of the Gorges, and from now on there would be an element of danger in the journey, though only a small one. Within sound of the rapids a little temple was perched on a cliff, looking downstream over the white and leaping waters. We landed and climbed to it up a flight of steps. In obscurity, before a rank of gods full of that pantomimic fury which seems so often to be the hall-mark of divinity in China, our crew offered prayers for a safe run, lit joss-sticks, and let off crackers. The dark temple was pungent with smoke and incense. Outside, in the sunlight, a long diagonal of bent, half-naked trackers stamped a formal design across the wide steps which led downwards to the river. Slowly, with cries, their straw sandals slipping on the stone, they hauled a sampan up the rapids by a rope tied to her mast-head. As she reached clear water at the top they broke into a trot and disappeared round a bend in the rocky tow-path, chanting a triumphant sing-song. We went back to our boat.
In the Gorges there were nearly fifty separate rapids. They did not look very bad, and they were not as bad as they looked. With memories of another river in another country, where twelve months ago these things had been encountered on a grander scale and under less expert guidance, I watched the local technique with interest. The steering was as much from the bows as from the stern, and with the long beam which was the forward tiller a certain amount of rather inartistic prodding and fending off was done. The river, though low, ran fast, and we felt as if we were travelling like the wind as we plunged down the steep, broken chutes between the rocks. We struck several times, but always with impunity; the flat and rather flexible bottom of the sampan slid easily over obstacles which seemed to have been worn smooth by the passage of her unnumbered sister ships. The worst that happened to us was to lose our lunch, which was upset by a collision that felt as if it must have split the boat; as the meal consisted only of a thin soup made of rice and some imponderable kind of cucumber, this was no great misfortune.
All through the afternoon we were carried swiftly down the Gorges. The hills, tall and Tyrolean, now rose more closely on either side of our winding course. We were in a narrow corridor, roofed by the blue sky. In between the rapids we hoisted a patched rectangular sail; the crew whistled fervently, and with an air of concentration, for a breeze, so that I wondered on which side of the world that superstition was born. The eastern bank, far above us, was scarred with cuttings, and hordes of men, clinging to the steep face like flies, were at work on the railway which will one day (perhaps in five years, if all goes very well) link Canton with Hankow and thus with Peking. We did our best to rejoice at these symptoms of progress towards the great and desirable goal of mechanization; but it was not without a certain reactionary glee that we learnt of the existence of a spirit to whom they were anathema. This spirit – a kind of unicorn, according to the boatmen, who pointed out to us the crag in which he lived – was doing his best to hold the pass against the forces of civilization, and had on one occasion gone so far as to overwhelm a hundred labourers with an avalanche. The final issue of the struggle, they seemed to think, was still in doubt; but it was clear that they did not regard the unicorn as being engaged in a forlorn hope.
At last we left the rapids and came out into a plain. We passed a fisherman; in his little boat sat twenty fishing cormorants, and at every lurch of it they hunched their wings in protest with a comical unanimity. (Is there perhaps always something comical about unanimity?) The hills behind us were black against a yellow sky, and, where the river wound, tall grey sails stalked through the silent fields like ghosts. Through a land from which the colour was being drained we moved slowly and in silence towards the lights of a village.
That was almost the last stage of the journey, and the best.
The sampan was beached on a foreshore above which electric light shone fiercely in many of the windows; we were getting back to what the parvenu West understands by civilization. Men with flashlights and a peremptory manner came on board and searched the boat for opium. We dined on shore, but slept in the open air on the unaccommodating boards of the sampan.
The village, which was called Lokchong, was railhead. There were, however, no trains, and the next morning, after a long, hot wait, we bumped over an inferior road in a bus to Shuichow. This, our last bus-ride, was enlivened by the Chinese lady next to me, who was inordinately sick.
At Shuichow there were trains, but only in the early morning. We had to wait a day. In Kwangtung the rights of women seem to be regarded as inconsiderable. The carriers at the bus terminus were all female, and our luggage was carried a mile under a blazing sun by two ladies, one not a day under seventy, the other much younger but pregnant. Neither of them turned a hair.
Shuichow was brisk and up to date; the local garrison were the best disciplined troops we had seen since Nanking. In the afternoon we were surprised, while bathing naked in the river, by a mixed party of foreign missionaries. Apart from this shameful incident, our stay was uneventful.
Next day, after a five-hour train journey which seemed luxury to us but might not have appealed to anyone lacking our fund of odious comparisons, we reached Canton. We were thinner, swarthier, much dirtier, but only about twenty pounds poorer than when we had started out, nearly a month ago. The route which we followed has not, I believe, been previously covered in its entirety by a foreigner, nor is there any earthly reason why it should have been.
Still, it is a good journey.