Part 14
At the head are two big red parasols, surrounded with a fall of silk like the canopies in a procession; than a fantastic black butterfly, as large as an owl with extended wings, which is carried at the end of a stick by a child; then two rows of banners; then shields of red lacquered wood inscribed with letters of gold. As soon as we begin to march gongs commence to sound lugubriously at regular intervals as for a military salute, whilst heralds with prolonged cries announce my arrival to the inhabitants of the village.
Here we are at the gate, which seems like the entrance to a cavern; on each side are hung five or six little wooden cages, each one containing a kind of black beast, motionless in the midst of a swarm of flies; their tails may be seen hanging outside the bars like dead things. What can it be that keeps itself rolled up like a ball, and has such a long tail? Monkeys? Ah, horrors, they are heads that have been severed from their bodies! Each one of these pretty cages contains a human head, beginning to grow black in the sunshine, with long, braided hair which has been intentionally uncoiled.
We are swallowed up by the big gate, and are received by the inevitable grinning old granite monsters which at right and at left raise their great heads with the squinting eyes. Motionless, against the inner wall of the tunnel, the people press to see me pass, huddled together, climbing one upon the other,--yellow nakedness, blue cotton rags, ugly faces. The dust fills and obscures this vaulted passage where men and horses press, enveloped in the same gloom.
We have entered old provincial China, belonging to another era entirely unknown to us.
[Illustration: _Copyright, 1901, by J. C. Hemment_ NON-COMMISSIONED OFFICERS AND MEN OF FRENCH ARTILLERY AND MARINES]
II
Ruin and dilapidation within the walls, as I expected, not from any fault of the Boxers or of the Allies, for the war did not come near here, but as a result of decay, of the falling into dust of this old China, our elder by more than thirty centuries.
The gong in front of me continues to sound lugubriously at fixed intervals, and the heralds continue to announce me to the people by prolonged cries, resounding through the little powdery streets under the still burning evening sun. One sees unused land and cultivated fields. Here and there granite monsters, defaced, shapeless, half buried, worn by years, indicate what was formerly the entrance to a palace.
Before a door which surmounts a tricolored pavilion the procession stops, and I dismount. For seven or eight months our fifty soldiers of the marine infantry have been quartered here, spending a whole long winter at Laï-Chou-Chien, separated from the rest of the world by snow and icy steppes, and leading a Crusoe-like existence in the midst of the most perplexing surroundings.
It is a surprise and a joy to come among them, to see again their honest home faces, after all the yellow ones we have met along the road, darting sharp enigmatical glances at us. This French quarter is like a bit of life, gaiety, and youth in the midst of mummified old China.
It is plain that the winter has been good for our soldiers, for the look of health is on their cheeks. They have organized themselves with a comical and somewhat marvellous ingenuity, creating lavatories, douche rooms, a schoolroom where they teach French to the little Chinese, and even a theatre. Living in intimate comradeship with the people of the town, who will before long be unwilling to see them go, they cultivate vegetable gardens, raise chickens and sheep, and bring up little ravens by hand like orphan babies.
It is arranged that I should sleep at the house of the mandarin after having supped at the French post. So at nine o'clock they come for me to conduct me to the "Yamen" with lanterns of state, decorated in a very Chinese fashion and as big as barrels.
The Chinese Yamen is always of tremendous extent. In the cool night air, picking my way by the light of lanterns, amongst huge stones and between rows of servants, I pass through a series of courts two hundred metres long, with I don't know how many ruined porticoes and peristyles with shaky steps, before reaching the crumbling and dusty lodging which the mandarin intends for me,--a separate building in the midst of a sort of yard, and surrounded by old trees with shapeless trunks. There, under the smoky rafters, I have a great room, with whitewashed walls, containing in the centre a platform with seats like a throne, also some heavy ebony arm-chairs; and as wall decorations some rolls of silk spread out, on which poetry, in Manchou characters, is written. In the wing on the left is a small bedroom for my two servants, and on the right one for me with window-panes of rice paper. On a platform is a very hard bed with covers of red silk, and, lastly, an incense burner, in which little sticks of incense are burning. All this is rural, naïve, and superannuated, antiquated even for China.
My timid host, in ceremonial costume, awaits me at the entrance, and makes me take a seat with him on the central throne, where he offers me the obligatory tea in porcelain a hundred years old. Then he had the discretion to bring the audience to a close and to bid me good-night. As he withdrew he told me not to be disturbed if I heard a good deal of coming and going over my head, as the space above was frequented by rats. Neither was I to be disturbed if I heard on the other side of my paper window-panes people walking up and down in the yard playing castanets; they would be the night watchmen, thus informing me that they were not asleep, and were doing their duty.
"There are many brigands in this country," he added; "the city with its high walls closes its gates at sunset, but the workmen going to the fields before daybreak have made a hole in the ramparts,--this the brigands have discovered, and do not hesitate to enter by it."
When this deep-bowing mandarin was gone, and I was alone in the darkness of my dwelling, in the heart of an isolated city whose gates were guarded by human heads in cages, I felt myself at an infinite distance away, separated from my own world by immense space as well as by time, by ages; it seemed to me that I was going to sleep amongst a people at least a thousand years behind our era.
SATURDAY, April 27.
The crowing of cocks, the singing of little birds on my roof, awoke me in my strange old room; and by the light that came in through my paper panes I guessed that the warm sun was shining out of doors.
Osman and Renaud, who were up before me, came to tell me that they were hurriedly making great preparations in the courtyard of the Yamen in order to give me a fête, a morning fête, because we had to continue our route to the imperial tombs soon after the mid-day meal.
It began about nine o'clock. I was given a seat in an arm-chair beside the mandarin, who seemed weighed down beneath his silken gowns. In front of me, in the dazzling sunshine, was the series of courts with porticoes of irregular outline and old monsters on pedestals. A crowd of Chinese--always the men alone, it is understood--have assembled in their eternal blue rags. The yellow wind which had died down at night, as usual, begins to blow again, and to whiten the heavens with dust. The acacias and the monotonous willows, which are almost the only trees scattered over this northern China, show here and there on their slender old branches little pale-green leaves just barely out.
First comes the slow, the very slow, passing of a band with many gongs, cymbals, and bells all muffled; the melody seems to be carried by a sweet, melancholy, and persistent unison of flutes,--large flutes, with a deep tone, some of which have several tubes, and resemble sheaves of wheat. It is sweet and lulling, exquisite to hear.
Now the musicians seat themselves near us, in a circle, to open the fête. All at once the rhythm changes, grows more rapid, and becomes a dance. Then from afar, from the retirement of the courts and the old porticoes, one sees above the heads of the crowd, through the dust that grows thicker and thicker, a troop of dancing creatures two or three times taller than men, swinging along, swinging in regular time and playing citherns, fanning themselves, and comporting themselves generally in an exaggerated, nervous epileptic manner.--Giants? Jumping Jacks? What can they be? They are approaching rapidly with long, leaping steps, and here they are in front of us. Ah, they are on stilts, enormously high stilts. They are taller on their wooden legs than the shepherds of the Landes, and they hop like big grasshoppers. They are in costume and made up,--painted, rouged. They have wigs, false beards; they represent gods, genii such as one sees on old pagodas; they represent princesses also, with beautiful robes of embroidered silk, with cheeks too pink and white, and with artificial flowers in their chignons,--princesses all very tall, fanning themselves in an exaggerated way, and swinging along like the rest of the company, with the same regular, continuous movement, as persistent as the pendulum of a clock.
All these stilt-walkers, it seems, are merely young men of a neighboring village, who have formed themselves into a gymnastic society, and who do this for amusement. In the smallest villages in the interior of China, centuries, yes, thousands of years, before the custom reached us, the men--fathers and sons--began to devote themselves passionately to feats of strength and skill, founding rival societies, some becoming acrobats, others balancers, or jugglers, and organizing contests. It is especially during the long winters that they exercise, when all is frozen, and when each little human group must live alone in the midst of a desert of snow.
In fact, in spite of their white wigs and their centenarian beards, it is obvious that all these people are young, very young, with childlike smiles. They smile naïvely, these droll, pleasant princesses with the over-long legs, whose fan motions are so excited and who dance more and more disjointedly, bending, reversing, and shaking their heads and their bodies in a frenzy. They smile naïvely, these old men with children's faces; they play the cithern or the tambourine as though they were possessed. The persistent unison of the flutes seems to bewitch them, to put them into a special condition of madness, expressed by more and more convulsive movements.
At a given signal each one stands on a single stilt, the other leg raised, the second stilt thrown back over the shoulder; and by prodigies of balancing they dance harder than ever, like marionettes whose springs are out of order, whose mechanism is about to break down. Then bars two metres high are brought in, and they jump over them, every one taking part, including the princesses, the old men, and the genii, all keeping up an incessant play of fans and a beating of tambourines.
At last, when they can hold out no longer and go and lean against the porticoes among the old acacias and willows, another company just like the first comes forward and begins again, to the same tune, a similar dance. They represent the same persons, the same genii, the same long-bearded gods, the same beautiful mincing dames. In their accoutrements, so unknown to us, and with their curiously wrinkled faces, these dancers are the incarnation of ancient mythological dreams dreamed long ago in the dark ages by human beings at an infinite distance from us; and these customs are handed down from generation to generation, and from one end of the country to the other in that unchanging way in which rites, forms, and property in China are invariably transmitted.
This fête, this dance, extremely novel as it is, retains its village, its rustic character, and is as simple as any truly rural entertainment.
They finally cease jumping the bars, and now two terrible beasts come forth, one red and one green. They are big, heraldic dragons at least twenty metres long, with the raised heads, the yawning mouths, the horns, and claws, and horrible squinting eyes that everybody knows. They advance rapidly, throwing themselves onto the shoulders of the crowd with the undulations of a reptile; they are light, however, made of pasteboard, covered with some sort of stuff, and each beast is supported in the air by means of sticks, by a dozen skilful young men who have a subtle knack of giving to their movements a serpentine effect. A sort of master of the ballet precedes them, holding in his hand a ball which they never lose sight of, and which he uses as the leader of an orchestra uses his baton, to guide the writhings of the monsters.
The two great creatures content themselves with dancing before me, to the sound of flutes and gongs, in the centre of the circle of Chinese, which is extended in order to make room for them. At length the struggle becomes quite terrible, while the gongs and cymbals rage. They become entangled, they roll on top of one another, they drag their long rings in the dust, and then, all at once, with a bound they get up, as though in a passion, and stand shaking their enormous heads at one another, trembling with rage. The ballet master, nervously moving his director's ball, throws himself about and rolls his ferocious eyes.
The dust on the crowd grows thicker and thicker, and on the invisible dragon-bearers; it rises in clouds, rendering this battle between the red beast and the green beast almost fantastic. The sun burns as in a tropical country, and yet the sad Chinese April, anæmic from such a drought following the frozen winter, is barely heralded by the tender color of the few tiny leaves on the old willows and acacias of the court.
After breakfast some of the mandarins of the plain from the neighboring villages arrive, preceded by music and bringing me pastoral offerings,--baskets of preserved grapes, baskets of pears, live chickens in cages, and a jar of rice-wine. They wear the official winter head-dress, with a raven's quill, and have on gowns of dark silk with squares of gold embroidery, in the centre of which is depicted, surrounded by clouds, the invariable stork flying toward the moon. They are nearly all dried-up old men with gray beards and drooping gray moustaches. We have great _tchinchins_ with them, profound bows, extravagant compliments, handshakings in which one feels the scratch of over-long nails, the touch of thin old fingers.
At two o'clock I remount with my men and start off through the dilapidated streets, preceded by the same procession as upon my arrival. The gongs are muffled, the heralds sound their cries. Behind me my host, the mandarin, follows in his palanquin, accompanied by the troop on stilts and by the enormous dragons.
As we leave the village, and enter the deep tunnelled gateway where the crowd is already assembled to see us, the whole procession is engulfed with us,--the long, striding princesses, the gods who play the cithern or the tambourine, the red beast, and the green beast. In the semi-obscurity of the arched way, to the noise of all the citherns and of all the gongs, in the clouds of black dust which blind us, there is a compact _mêlée_, where our horses prance and jump, troubled by the noise and terrified by the two frightful monsters undulating above our heads.
After conducting us a quarter of a league beyond the walls, the procession leaves us at last, and we find silence again on the burning plain, where we have about twenty kilometres to go through the dust and the "yellow wind" before reaching Y-Tchou, another old walled city which is to be our halting-place for the night.
Not until to-morrow do we arrive at the tombs.
III
The plain resembles that of yesterday, yet it is a little more green and wooded. The wheat, sown in rows, as with us, grows miraculously in this soil, made up of dust and cinders though it apparently is. Everything seems less desolate as one gets farther away from the region of Pekin, and ascends almost imperceptibly towards those great mountains of the west, which are appearing with greater and greater distinctness in front of us. The "yellow wind," too, blows with less severity, and when it dies down for a few moments, when the blinding dust decreases, it is like the country in the north of France, with its ploughed fields and clumps of elms and willows. One forgets that this is the heart of China, on the other side of the globe, and one expects to see peasants from home pass along the paths. But the few toilers who are bending over the earth have long braids, coiled about their heads like crowns, and their bare backs are saffron-colored.
[Illustration: CHINESE PEASANT CULTIVATING RICE FIELDS WITH NATIVE PLOW]
All is peace in these sunshine-flooded fields, in these villages built in the scanty shade of the willows. The people seem to live happily, cultivating the friendly soil in primitive fashion, guided by the customs of five thousand years ago. Aside from the possible exactions of a few mandarins,--and there are many who are kind,--these Chinese peasants still live in the Golden Age, and I can hardly conceive of their accepting the joys of the "New China" dreamed of by Occidental reformers. Up to this time, it is true, the invasion has scarcely reached them; in this part of the country, occupied solely by the French, our troops have never played any other rôle than that of defender of the villagers against pillaging Boxers. Ploughing, sowing, all the work of the fields, has been quietly done in season, and it is impossible not to be struck with the very different look of other parts of the country which I will not designate, where there has been a reign of terror, and where the fields have been destroyed and have become desert steppes.
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At about half-past four, against a background of mountains which are beginning to look tall to us, a village appears, the first sight of which, like that of yesterday, is rather formidable with its high crenellated ramparts.
A horseman comes out to meet me once more, like yesterday, and again it is the captain in command of the post of marine infantry stationed there since last autumn.
Watchers stationed on the walls have perceived us from afar by the cloud of dust our horses raise on the plain. As soon as we approach we see emerging from the old gates the official procession coming to meet us, with the same emblems as at Laï-Chou-Chien,--the same big butterfly, the same red parasols, the same shields and banners. Each Chinese ceremonial has been for centuries regulated by unvarying usages.
However, the people who receive me to-day are much more elegant and undoubtedly richer than those of yesterday. The mandarin, who comes down from his sedan chair to await me at the side of the road, having sent his red paper visiting-card on before him a hundred feet or so, stands surrounded by a group of important-looking persons in sumptuous silk robes. He himself is a distinguished-looking old man, who wears in his hat the peacock feather and the sapphire button. There is an enormous crowd waiting to see me make my entrance to the funereal sound of the gongs and the prolonged cries of the heralds. On the top of the ramparts figures may be seen peering through the battlements with their small oblique eyes, and even in the dim gateways double rows of yellow men crowd against the walls. My interpreter confesses, however, that there is a general disappointment. "If he is a man of letters," they ask, "why is he dressed like a colonel?" (The scorn of the Chinese for the military profession is well known.) My horse, however, somewhat restores my prestige. Tired as the poor Algerian animal is, he still has a certain carriage of the head and tail when he feels that he is observed, and especially if he hears the sound of the gong.
Y-Tchou, the city wherein we find ourselves, shut in by walls thirty feet high, still contains fifteen thousand inhabitants in spite of its deserted districts and its ruins. There is a great crowd along our route, in all the little streets and in front of the little old shops where antediluvian occupations are carried on. It was from this very place that the terrible movement of hatred against foreigners was launched last year. In a convent of Bonze nuns in the neighboring mountain the war of extermination was first preached, and these people who receive me so kindly were the first Boxers. Ardent converts for the moment to the French cause, they cheerfully decapitate those of their own people who refuse to come to terms, and put their heads in the little cages which adorn the gates of their city; but if the wind should change to-morrow, I should see myself cut up by them to the tune of the same old gongs and with the same enthusiasm which they put into my reception. When I have taken possession of the house set apart for me, back of the residence of the mandarin at the end of an interminable avenue of old porticoes, and monsters who show me their teeth in tiger-like smiles, a half-hour of daylight still remains, and I go to pay a visit to a young prince of the imperial family, stationed at Y-Tchou in the interests of the venerable tombs.
First comes his garden, melancholy in the April twilight. It lies between walls of gray brick, and is very much shut in for a town already so walled. Gray also is the rockwork outlining the small squares or lozenges, where big red, lavender, and pink peonies flourish. These, unlike our own, are very fragrant, and to-night fill the air of this gloomy enclosure with an excessive odor. There are also rows of little porcelain jars inhabited by tiny fish--regular monstrosities--red fish or black fish with cumbersome fins and extravagant tails, giving the effect of a flounced petticoat; fish with enormous terrifying eyes, which protrude like those of the heraldic dragons and which are the result of I do not know what mysterious form of breeding. The Chinese, who torture the feet of their women, also deform their trees, so that they remain dwarfed and crooked. They train their fruits to resemble animals, and their animals to look like the chimæras of a dream.
It is already dark in the prince's apartment, which looks out on this prison-like garden, and one sees little, on first entering, but draperies of red silk, long canopies falling from numerous "parasols of honor," which are open and standing upright on wooden supports. The air is heavy, saturated with opium and musk. There are deep red divans with silver pipes lying about for smoking the poison of which China is in a fair way to perish. The prince, who is twenty or twenty-two years old, is of a sickly ugliness, with divergent eyes; he is perfumed to excess, and dressed in pale silk in tones of mauve or lilac.
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