Chapter X: Hurrying on to the Northern Capital

I was up at four the morning after the imperial ceremony, in sufficiently good mood to refrain from kicking the “boy” who had called me according to orders, and off in a heavy rain by a rickshaw assured the evening before by a combination of heavy subsidy and threatened penalty. The train from Hué to Dongha, completing the central stretch of the railways of Indo-China that begins at Tourane, ran close outside the moat of Hué citadel, the walled imperial city stretching from river to river. Beyond, a rich plain was almost completely covered with rice, a wet green plain backed by the mountain ranges, bulking against the western sky, that were never far distant on the left. The scantiness of the country, the paucity of its arable land, seemed to be emphasized here; for Annam gets very narrow indeed north of Hué, so narrow that it all but breaks in two. Yet it was surprising how many people were crowded into this slender strip of earth, how many things of interest to the hurried traveler too, for that matter.

At length, hardly an hour beyond Hué, we rode out from under the clouds as from under a roof. For the climate runs in streaks up and down this narrow country. The weather again became, and, what was more to the point, remained, splendid, so that almost the only time I did not have brilliant sunshine during my two months in Indo-China was during that enforced delay at Hué. Another hour and we ran out of track, and were set off at 7:30 at a mere station, where I stepped into an autobus in which I rode until 8:30 that night.

There were plenty of Annamese in the back four fifths of the vehicle, though it was not packed as the autobuses of Annam often are. For at this New Year’s season most people were either already at their ancestral homes or had no intention of coming. Just how the driver and his unfailing assistant were induced to work at such a time was a mystery, but that perhaps is one of the advantages of French rule. These autobuses run as regularly as the trains with which they connect, whether there are passengers or not, for at least there are the mails. In fact on the whole they run a little faster than the trains, which is perhaps one reason their fares are higher. My Scotch blood evidently having surged to the surface during my delay, I had taken before leaving Hué a second-class ticket, partly too, I fancy, in order to prove that the company would have to sell me one, in spite of my complexion. There had been no argument, though white men cannot ride among the natives in fourth class on the trains. But the Annamese agent at Dongha, as if he could not bear to see the race that ruled over his land mingling with his fellow-countrymen, insisted that I ride first class, that is, in the front seat, behind the driver this time. Or there may have been another reason; for when my recovered baggage was placed in the closed box at the rear of the car—also a first-class privilege, since freight and express, the parcel-post and the baggage of native passengers, was all piled up on the railed roof of the vehicle or tied along the running-boards—he mentioned casually that of course it weighed considerably more than the fifteen kilograms even a first-class passenger was allowed as free luggage; and as the rate for anything above that amount is nearly as high as for human flesh, I felt it only fair to slip a couple of paper piastres into his limp palm, at which he not only did not protest but even thanked me in imperfect French.

This time I had a fellow-passenger of my own color. A Frenchman of sturdy frame and studious face, a khaki patch held in place over one eye by a cord that had left a thin white line free from sunburn diagonally across his intelligent features, had also stepped off the train. As the custom in England and its newer American counterpart of strict incommunicativeness between strangers unexpectedly meeting on the road does not apply among the hospitable French colonials of Indo-China, I soon discovered that my companion, though ostensibly in the customs service, was a novelist whose latest romance against an Annamese background I had finished reading the evening before. I might have been embarrassed at being discovered by so important a personage, an official to boot, occupying “European accommodations” at the price of a native ticket, had I not quickly learned that the novelist had not even paid second-class fare for his first-class seat, but was traveling on a government _réquisition_, which cost him nothing more than the asking.

He had been in the customs service of Indo-China since early manhood, but chancing to be on furlough in his native land when the World War broke out, he had joined his regiment at once, fighting unscathed all through the war, until, three days before the Armistice, he had lost an eye. But the government had been kind. It had kept him on the pay-roll as a customs officer, but let him run about the country at government expense, to such things as the ceremony we had just seen at the court of Hué, in order that he might gather material for more writing. For your Frenchman realizes that even an honest novel, true as to local color, is useful propaganda; and Indo-China has a longing to be known, in France as well as in the world at large. Hawthorne and Whitman, I recalled, had not been paid their government salaries in order that they might go on producing what was perhaps even better literature than that of my new traveling companion. Nor could I remember having heard of any of our crippled war veterans receiving government aid in the production of art or letters.

We made the constant good speed of a limited express, along a road raised a foot or two above the rice-fields, here dry but green, still flooded back toward the foot-hills. I could in fact have ridden a little less swiftly with more pleasure. For there being rarely any turn in the road, and no other vehicles, gasoline-driven or otherwise—luckily, since the roads of Indo-China are for one car at a time—we went over the many short bridges just wide enough for so ponderous a conveyance as ours with the roller-coaster feeling of a day at Coney Island. It was a gravel road in which grew grass that seemed to have sprung up during the last few days of rain; and there was never a fence or other protection from it even at the villages through which we roared so madly. Striking peaks stood out among those rows of ranges perpetually following us on the west; at the mouths of the several short rivers that looked like seas in the raging wind we were ferried across in the usual decrepit old _bacs_.

At Donghoï or Quang-binh we were the first guests in a brand-new hotel, subsidized by the government in order that the few French travelers who go up and down the _Route Mandarine_ may have all the advantages of home during the _déjeuner_ and siesta that break the journey there. During that Parisian ceremony we picked up a French colonial burned a reddish bronze by half a lifetime at a country post beneath the equatorial sun. He went on with us for a few hours to his bungalow at the place where another _bac_ came across the sea to us at the call of a water-buffalo horn in the hands of a ferryman. Before it had fought its way to the southern shore there was ample time to enjoy the coolness of an interior in marked contrast to the facial and temperamental heat of its chief occupant, who, apologizing for the absence of his _congaïe_ to do the honors, had his “boys” serve us drinks cooled with the ice that was thrown off to him each forenoon from the south-bound bus. Without this daily necessity he could of course no more have endured life in his isolated station than without his respectful servants and his female companion. Most of the conversation ran on the selfishness of a few of his younger colleagues in expecting their own countrywomen to accompany them to such posts of “exile in the wilderness.”

Every house or hovel of the natives had standing before it the tufted bamboo of the New-Year season, that signal to the spirits of the air that the people who live beneath it are pious and not to be molested—something akin to the hobo signs of our own land. In many of the villages the populace was childishly enjoying itself in swings made, supports and all, not too securely of bamboos crudely lashed together. Toward the middle of the afternoon we found ourselves making toward a great wall of mountains at right angles to the main ranges. It looked as if this ponderous autobus could not possibly pass such a barrier, at least without the united assistance of the passengers, and I recalled with some misgiving the ancient story of second-class travelers being obliged to get off and push, while those in first class had merely to walk. For the day was still uninviting to physical exertion, and my special front-seat privileges might not be honored in such an emergency without the two-piastre agent at Dongha to protect me. But the road found a way up and around and over the steep spur, twisting itself into hair-pin curves to climb a slope up which an old-style Chinese road went straight and unswerving, with the hardiness of the pioneer, to the remnants of a gate at the lowest point, not far from where our less virile modern route surmounted it.

To all intents and purposes we had come to the end of Annam. What the Chinese named the Eminent South Country was usually reckoned as beginning on the north at the Gate of Annam, as this pass has been called for centuries. This was the old Annam-Tonkin boundary; there is still the vestige of an ancient wall built along the summit by the Annamese to protect themselves from invasion, and many great battles have been waged there. To-day the official boundary is much farther north, and does not signify anyway, for there is a fiction that Tonkin, the northern knob of the Indo-China dumb-bell, is now a part of Annam, ruled over by Koang-de, the Son of Heaven at Hué.

The climb had opened out a great amphitheater of a valley, checkerboarded with rice-fields, a stretch of the sea with a curving beach that flashed in the afternoon sunshine, several other spurs that almost hindered our progress, and more rows of ranges, with densely green forests in the hollows high up on some of the ridges. On the southern side of the Gate there had been no forest, only a light brush; but it looked as if the northern slopes, blue-black now in the slanting sunshine, were all thickly wooded. Long pasturelands, rolling and bushy, dotted with red herds, almost completely crowded out cultivation for some distance. There were few inhabitants, but many tiger temples, all set in clusters of bamboos or trees, as if the wilderness that had driven out the rice-fields brought the dreaded beast that much nearer. The mountains had pushed us so close to the sea that for some time beaches and even islands seemed but a stone’s throw away.

A slightly different human type appeared beyond the Gate of Annam, stockier, the women perhaps a bit better looking, or more nearly good looking—so long as they kept their repulsive mouths shut. In fact purists among the French anthropologists of Indo-China insist that the real Annamese are not in the handle of the dumb-bell at all, but in Tonkin, because south of the Gate so many tribes have been Annamited, so to speak, mingled in blood and culture with the conquerors from the north. Unlike their relatives south of the Gate, the Tonkinese were dressed in a cinnamon or tobacco-juice color that suddenly became as universal as black had been farther south, as denim blue is among the masses of China. The countrywomen, then their men, and finally all the hand-laboring class, took to wearing long cotton cloaks of this reddish brown hue. I found later that this is colored with _cunao_, the vegetable dye in which the masses north of the old boundary dip their clothing, so that all Tonkin wears the same conspicuous livery. More exactly it is inconspicuous, in much of Tonkin; one might fancy it had been adopted as a protective coloring, not only so that betel saliva would not show on it, but because so much of the soil of the Tonkinese plains is reddish that everything, earth, water, people, their clothing and their cattle, anything that comes in contact with the earth, took on this _cunao_ color. Centuries of toiling in flooded rice-fields reflecting a tropical sun had indeed given even their faces a similar tint.

There were fewer male Psyche knots here than farther south, hair-cuts for men being now popular. The women had suddenly taken to skirts, in place of the voluminous thin-cotton trousers of Annam proper, and dressed their hair differently, wrapping the braid once about the head and letting the rest hang down like the tail of a Hindu turban. But the most conspicuous change was that the palm-leaf hat of toadstool shape, which I had grown to associate forever with the country people of Annam, had given way, among the women only, to a most astonishing head-shade. Of grindstone shape and size, being easily two and a half if not three feet in diameter and perfectly flat on top, with a brim six or more inches wide forming a perpendicular circle about them, these astounding hats made also of leaves, perhaps of the banana, looked like a tub set upside down on the head. More exactly they sat on a little round support tied to the top of the head, and were so unwieldy on this slight fulcrum that whenever the wind was blowing or the wearer under motion the struggle to retain her head-gear seemed to be much more difficult than the carrying of her shoulder-pole burden. The men continued to wear the smaller cone-shaped mushroom hats that had roofed the rural population all the way from Cochinchina, as if they realized how foolish they would have looked in these immense grindstones, or knew the futility of trying to compete with their women in ornamental matters.

The graves were now well weeded knobs on top of large raised circles of earth; the towns, almost as compact as those of China, were surrounded by high walls of growing bamboos. The more straggling towns south of the Gate of Annam had been encircled, if at all, by hedges of cactus or wild pineapple, concealing nothing; here every village was completely hidden, with an opening here and there through its bamboo wall like that to the lair of a jungle beast, so that with Tonkinese villagers going home consists in crawling away into the jungle like the tiger they so dread and honor. This lofty bamboo hedge is a vestige of pirate days, and of battles between towns and clans. Near the coast cocoanut-trees did their part toward the concealing, and of course the soldierly arec-palm with its clinging betel-vine was everywhere. Once or twice we passed fields of mulberry-trees, for Tonkin also produces silk. Women in the grindstone hat stood on little platforms and screened rice by pouring it out in the wind, rice to be hulled later by these same women stepping with their bare feet incessantly on the end of a heavy beam that drops its hammer-head into a stone or wooden mortar.

It was well after dark when we came to a last _bac_, across an arm of the sea that seemed in the black night as wide as the British Channel, and were gradually poled and pulled and sculled by sleepy coolies toward the lights of Ben-thuy, where the railway picks up again. Another three years and trains will be running between Dongha and Ben-thuy; we had seen the half finished embankment now and then along the way. Within twice that time the traveler should be able to go entirely by rail the whole length of Indo-China, clear on to the Yang-tze perhaps, possibly even to Angkor, connecting with the lines of Siam, which already run to Singapore.

There were no accommodations for foreigners at Ben-thuy, merely the river-mouth port of the city of Vinh, where we were soon housed in the almost French hotel of a Spanish—er—lady of fortune. Vinh is a large town, for Indo-China. Three hundred and ten houses, a whole section not far from the hotel, had been burned that day as an unintentional addition to the New Year’s celebration, and the night air was still strongly scented with the conflagration; but this catastrophe had left only an unimportant vacancy in the civic area. The French showed little sign of interest in these popular misfortunes, so long as their own spacious part of the town, with its uncrowded dwellings on broad half forested lawns, remained undisturbed. Is it because they no longer hold in honor their own labyrinthine old cities that the French have given such an atmosphere of bourgeois order to the towns of their Far-Eastern empire by making them checker-boards of straight, right-angled streets, just as the Japanese have done in Formosa and Korea?

Another “boy” risked his life by calling me at four again, though the train on which I wandered northward all that day long did not leave until two hours later, from a station a few blocks away. That journey from Vinh to Hanoï began as rather a stupid ride, but it turned out better than the morning promised. The little train, with its single three-class coach at the end of a string of modified cattle-cars for the populace, sat lower to the ground and was in some ways less comfortable than the autobus. A stone embankment from two to six feet above the rice-fields formed the basis for railroad and highway, which flowed together every little while into the same narrow bridges, with a coolie at either end to sound a warning. The plain, of more or less width according to how curious the mountains were to come down and look at the sea, was one vast paddy-field. Birds were numerous for a tropical land. Herons lay in wait for careless frogs at the edges of the rice-fields; the _crabier_, a brown bird showing a patch of white, like a flag of truce, when flying, plied its customary quest for edible crabs; a little reddish bird that seemed to have copied the garb of its human neighbors flitted here and there across the leisurely moving foreground. Water-buffaloes, almost one in three of them of the albino type, were plowing belly-deep in the slime of the paddy-fields or loafing along the dikes; whole Oriental families of them lay immersed in mud-holes, completely covered except for the ends of their snouts and their sagacious little eyes, recalling those tales of Annamese pirates hiding themselves indefinitely under water by breathing through two reeds thrust in their nostrils. Now and then one of these ponderous pachyderms presented his massive head threateningly toward our train, as if about to attack this new type of animal, but always decided at the last moment not to risk it and loped off into the flooded paddy-field on either side with a splash of wet mud.

In places the land was so flooded from the recent rains that only graves, dikes, and the tops of the half-grown rice appeared above the broad expanse of water—except of course the villages and temples in their clusters of trees, standing wherever possible on a knoll too rocky to be cultivated to advantage. Villages close to the road were frequent, graves still more so, the dead and the living inhabitants both too numerous. The plain, flat as a billiard-table, the water and the exact rows of flooded rice shimmering like silk, was dotted with red cattle, some also plowing, and with redder people of all ages and both sexes, in various forms of undress, all toiling for their rice in the inundated fields. More exactly it was all one vast field, divided into all manner of queer shapes by narrow green ridges six inches above the general level. Brown men in faded tobacco-brown clothing—still more often women, who seem to do most of the work—groped about up to their thighs and biceps in the slime. Some were immersed to the waist; some paddled about in sampans; others stood in pairs on the dikes and tossed water from one field to another in a basket of woven bamboo splints hung in the middle of a long rope, or toiled alone shoveling water from one level to another with a huge wooden spoon mounted on a framework.

The reddish-brown garments that had begun at the Gate of Annam were universal in the rural parts of this region. Some of the men in the fields were naked except for a shirt tied up about the armpits, but the women were more or less covered, though they are more careless than those of China about exposing the person. Trousers for women had for the time being entirely disappeared, though they were to appear again about Hanoï; a sign, I suppose, of the fast life of cities. Along the road close beside us women under shoulder-pole loads of anything, everything, trotting in constant files, like trains of leaf-bearing ants in the jungle, often left their long, sun-faded, red-brown cloaks swinging open, and not concealing all that the once white diamond-shaped breast-cover beneath leaves visible. Some frankly wore only that and the knee-high skirt, as if this season of hard labor was no time to be prudish in small matters. Almost all wore those great basket-like hats, some faded and frayed, some fresh from the markets to and from which endless streams of them forever jogged. A picturesque figure is the Tonkinese woman of the people, with her flat umbrella-hat, her loose, cinnamon-colored, knee-length jacket, her short skirt or very loose thin black trousers, her clacking wooden sandals in town or her noiseless straw ones in the country, her black-lacquered teeth bloody with the betel-juice driveling from the corners of her hideous mouth. Invariably she has a well built back, a pretty brown in tint, and suggesting to our society leaders how they too might have perfect forms—merely by carrying a hundred pounds or so across their shoulders to market several times a week.

There were stretches where the land was almost bare, the fields yellow-green, with brownish graves, the foot-hills terraced, some of them cut up by bush fences but apparently uncultivated now. The forerunners of the mountain range were without vegetation, except for clumps of trees, among which the palm was the most common. In other places, where the demands of husbandry had not killed them, were whole forests of trees white with blossoms, bamboos that were like smoke spirals of blond gold, great kapok-trees, without a leaf on their whitened branches, but bearing immense bunches of flowers that turned orange by translucence against the blue of the sky. Finally the mountains came down so close to the sea that there were heaped-up hills cultivated in patches, though here, unlike China, the ratio between soil and inhabitants has never been such that anything more than the level land must necessarily be cultivated.

Here and there on the muddy mat of the fields stood slender triangular rafts anchored or mired in the slime, raising in the air, with strange immobile gestures, disjointed arms, like gigantic field-spiders. Most of them bore on this base a rudimentary house, a roof of woven palm-leaves closed at the back with an old paddy-winnowing basket, a bundle of straw inside taking the place of a sleeping-mat. They were the shelters of the fishermen who come here whenever there is water enough to make it worth while to plunge into it the big square dip-net at the end of the balanced pole suspended at the front of the raft. Some were without the nets now, the bare bamboos on which these are fastened seeming to claw the air in their eagerness to be of use again. In places there were scores of these fishing devices, each with its little hut, its net balanced with stones and raised and lowered by a rope inside the hut, so that the fisherman does not need to expose his already bronzed hide to either rain or shine.

Some time in mid-morning, masses of jagged rock, similar to the “Marble Mountains” of Tourane, began to rise from the plain, growing ever more numerous. They were identical, I was to find later, with those fantastic rock isles that dot by thousands the northwestern corner of the Gulf of Tonkin. This region has indeed been called the terrestrial Bay of Along, which is no misnomer, for these rocks also once stood out of the sea, before the earth came to fill in between them the flat plain that flows as level as the ocean all about them. Some of these gigantic formations, which were to follow me far down the West River into the Chinese province of Kwangsi, had patches of hardy vegetation on them; some were as bare as the forbidding mounds of stacked bayonets they suggested. They were of most curious shapes, forms as tormented as if the mountains had been tortured in their youth, some like rocks torn jagged by uncounted centuries of dashing waves. Now they grew up among the rice-fields, and continued for hours, fantastic, of every possible formation, attitude, posture, striking peaks and ridges with perpendicular, horizontal, diagonal strata, covered with thorny scrub vegetation wherever it could get a foothold. Some of those queer rock hills, half covered with plant life, looked like velour fedora hats carelessly tossed out on the plain; others resembled the slack heaps of a region of pulsating industry.

All the rest of the day we rode among those mountainous heaps of rock, those phantoms of stone. Sometimes that afternoon the whole western horizon was cut off by a capriciously peaked range so hazy as to seem a gauze curtain, at other times so close that it appeared to hang threateningly over us. But always there was this vanguard of isolated rock heaps standing sentinel along the plain. I made the journey between Vinh and Hanoï three times before I finally left Indo-China, and I never tired of those eccentric nonchalant piles of stone, on land and sea, of which the “Marble Mountains” of Tourane are the southernmost outcroppings and the bandit-riddled cliffs along the Si-kiang near Nanning the most northern.

The arable land was still more intensively cultivated and inhabited north of Thanh-hoa, a hot “citadel” of well built structures along orderly streets, which there is time to go and see if you will miss the midday meal at the station presided over by an Annamese woman with unlacquered teeth whose French is suspiciously fluent. Thanh-hoa station well outside the town is the luncheon-place of all foreign travelers between Vinh and Hanoï, whether by train or by automobile, and track and road run so close together much of the distance that acquaintances made there can be renewed from time to time during the journey. Those in the motor-cars now and then sped past us within handshaking reach, tossing over their shoulders gibes at our slowness, though we were not so slow at that. The towns grew larger, with some more or less European houses, an old church sometimes bulking above the trees. The mountains gradually retired to infinity; French appeared in the platform crowds, the Chinese merchants in our car increased as Jews do in trains nearing our own metropolis. Crowds were returning from holiday jaunts on this last day of the official _Têt_ season. French boys, and girls too for that matter, with nascent mustaches and bare knees, who had never been in France, were on their way back to school; French and half-caste hunters filled our car with dogs and guns, with dead rabbits, wild chickens and ducks, bagfuls and bunches of still less commonplace game. Though we took on more cars as they were needed, our coach was so overrun with standees that the mind was unwillingly carried back to the subways of another continent, while the fourth-class cars were almost as packed and jammed and chaotic as the soldier-abused trains of China.

Passengers were piled three deep from engine to back platform by the time we reached Hanoï at six, and I found the city so busy that I had my first and only ride in a _pousse-choléra_, as the French quite fittingly call the iron-tired buggy-wheeled rickshaws usually patronized only by the natives. Certainly I should have had something akin to cholera if the journey to the post-office for my first mail in a long time and back to the Hôtel de la Gare had lasted much longer.