Chapter I: Equatorward

One of my jaunts up-country in Kwangtung Province dragged, and I missed the French liner at Hong Kong. Luckily the _Panama Maru_, bound on one of the trips around the world that bring her back to her home berth in Kobe every seven months, also made Saïgon her next stop. We sailed early in the afternoon of one of those brilliant days that double the blue intensity of Hong Kong harbor. The Japanese freighter served no free wine with her meals and had none of that interior ornateness that suggests the Paris Opéra gone to sea. But perhaps for that very reason she was more successfully mopped and dusted; and the Nipponese atmosphere aboard was more interesting than the cosmopolitan scent of the fortnightly Messageries steamer to Marseilles. True, she made barely ten knots an hour. But the French could hardly have served better food; the two “boys” were unspoiled, and Captain Ichikawa was a friendly little soul, even inviting me to make free of the chart-room. The quiet, all but noiseless, efficiency of his crew was a startling contrast to the incessantly shrieking chaos of Chinese craft. The three or four first-class cabins opened abruptly upon the dining-room rather than upon the deck; yet even the baby in one of them was Japanese, like everything and everybody on board except myself, and seemed never to cry. A lone Japanese would certainly not have been more courteously treated on an American boat than was the sole non-Nipponese being on this.

It is often said that the Japanese are not individualistic in personality. There were certainly as many types as passengers, however, gathered about our table. The energetic son of Tokyo, now in business in Saïgon, who shared my cabin, was tall and handsome, as agreeable a companion in cramped quarters as any American man of commerce, and he spoke both French and English perfectly. On the other hand the peanut-headed undersized youth across the table looked and acted like the “nut” his cranium suggested. Then there was a medical graduate going out, with the assistance of the mikado’s government, to practise upon the Japanese laborers on the coffee plantations of São Paulo—who one evening managed to tell me in near-English that he had read, both in my tongue and his own, all the published plays of Eugene O’Neill. He would give much to see them played, he added, but had never seen a Western drama on the stage. The two women who sometimes graced our board were as different as were the quiet brown and gorgeous-figured red kimonos they respectively wore on such occasions. Even the half-dozen officers rounding out the tri-daily gathering were divided by as distinct lines of demarcation as are their colleagues of any nationality.

Gently we rolled southward, with a drift to the west, over a densely blue tropical sea. It grew too warm, first in our open-on-the-dining-room cabins, then on the deck itself. Summer curtains and awnings appeared; electric fans took up their duties once more, and in one cabin at least spun all the night through. The third morning brought one of those lazy perfect days when loafing in a deck-chair seems the nearest tangible approach to heaven. We sighted the coast of Annam that afternoon, hazy, almost mountainous, apparently as treeless as China itself, and had it always in sight thereafter, a lighthouse winking at us all through the evening. If possible the weather was even more peerless on the fourth day; the sea, flat as a floor, blue as if saturated with indigo, was covered with light ripples that made it look like a vast piece of watered silk.

Unfortunately it had not turned tropical quickly enough to save one of our fellow-passengers. A youngster who had taken pneumonia during the crossing from Japan to the coast of China died during the third night. Another child had gone the same way, two days out of Nagasaki, and many in the general quarters below the main-deck still had heavy colds. This boy of three had been the only son of one of the score of families going out third-class to Brazil. The funeral, at which the captain personally requested my presence, took place on the fourth evening. Most of the passengers and such of the crew as could be spared stood about a kind of altar improvised on the poop. First the captain, then others stepped up and bowed low before this, repeating some sort of litany that ended with the sprinkling of incense. Last of all came the parents, to go impersonally through the same ceremony. They did not weep, though their drawn faces showed that they had given way in private to grief to which it would be bad Japanese form to yield in public. The Buddhist service was as simple as it was quiet, wholly un-Chinese, without a sob or a loud voice, even as the little box wrapped in the flag of the rising sun floated away astern in the moonlight. It was as much that atmosphere of the uselessness of giving way to the inevitable, I think, as the fact that I had left behind in Canton a three-year-old son of my own, which made me so depressed that I was still pacing the deck at midnight.

By that time we had anchored at the mouth of the Mekong, near a lighthouse. Off again at dawn, I sat, after a last salt bath, wearing the few garments that Japanese custom permits, in a delicious tropical morning breeze as the steamer made its way up a tide-water river with dead-flat banks of low, apparently uninhabited jungle stretching as far away as could be seen in any direction. The stream was as wide as the misnamed Pearl River at Canton, but clean and blue, flecked here and there with a tiny boat top-heavy with its clean-white pointed sail; and it wound so constantly all the fifty miles from the mouth to Saïgon that we headed again and again to every point of the compass. The low jungled banks gave way to brown plains with patches of palms, low thatch houses, and what looked like haystacks scattered far and wide. The inevitable Socony plant appeared, and some distance beyond we ran down at last the flat evasive town, the steeples of which had betrayed its location, now to port, now to starboard, again over our stern, like the ears of some startled jack-rabbit trying in vain to dodge its pursuers.

There was a reminder of Martinique about the already sweltering city half seen beyond a wharf dotted with white helmets. I had rather expected to be called upon as interpreter, but the fat, bored-with-the-tropics French doctor who sweated up the steep gang-plank knew some English, though he spoke it more laboriously than did our captain and several of my fellow-passengers. There was something amusing in seeing these people of two nations which have no overwhelming love for us of the English-speaking races forced to use our tongue in their intercourse. In his perpetually bored way the port doctor was very insistent that every Japanese on board show proof of a recent vaccination, though only my cabin-mate was landing; but when I began to do likewise he waved me politely aside and took my word for it in a way that implied that as a Caucasian I was in a class by myself. An equally courteous, if less bored, official pocketed my passport and gave me the freedom of the half-way station between Hong Kong and Singapore.

Before the dock lay behind me I regretted the habitual lack of foresight that had led me to bring only an extra winter suit instead of half a dozen white ones, and was praising the superior wisdom of the thoughtful wife in Canton who had insisted on my taking along a tropical helmet in January. Luckily other travelers seem to be in the habit of misjudging the winter climate of Saïgon, and Chinese tailors at the foot of the principal street are used to correcting such oversights in a hurry. Though it was Sunday they promised me a _complet_ or two of duck within two days, at twelve _piastres_ each—and while I am on the subject let me mention that the piastre of Indo-China is equal to the “Mex” dollar of Hong Kong and China, averaging a little more than half our own, and not given to fluctuating with the franc.

The Rue Catinat, grilling now beneath the late morning sun, drew me inland. Mingled with its all too plain evidence of propinquity to the equator was that of a considerable relationship to Paris. Between window-displays that might have come almost intact from the Rue de la Paix, black and brown fellows in red fezzes, locally known as Malabars, squatted in booths raised well above the narrow sidewalks—money-changers, sellers of tobacco, and the like. Here and there a Hindu merchant stared out into the white light of the gently yet perspiringly mounting street. Here Sunday was no British Sabbath. Annamese waiters bustled about the marble tables of hotel cafés well peopled with white men and women instantly recognizable as French. Business as usual seemed to be the motto of all but the most important establishments. Yet even the diaphanously clad Oriental strollers of various origins shuffled along in the narrow streak of shade before one row of shop-fronts.

Saïgon’s main street flowed out before long into a sun-stewed square with a cathedral trebly hot in its red brick garb. The view from its tower across the well streeted city, almost forested above the section of wharves and commerce, would have been worth a less perspiring climb. Farther on, the American to whom I had a letter lived in simple bachelor splendor in a low house of thick walls and disproportionately large rooms. Languid with long tropical residence, this former captain in the Philippine constabulary who now represented our great oil corporation seemed to recognize no pastime except the lolling in a reclining-chair with a cold drink within easy reach. I am no suitable companion in the consumption of British whisky—that could be had in this stronghold of its French rivals only by something closely resembling smuggling—and I drifted down toward the port again.

All Saïgon sizzled now in noonday repose. Not merely on Sunday, I later learned, are all offices, all shops except those of the heat-impervious Orientals, closed from eleven until two for the daily siesta. One of the shocks due the rare hurried business man or tourist from the West who drifts into Saïgon is to find it virtually dead daily from the early French lunch-hour until the sun nears the western tree-tops. Here and there an enervated rickshaw-man dragged his empty vehicle slowly behind him. A few dozing Hindus, a fez-wearer or two asleep with open eyes on his haunches among his wares, were visible in the unbroken rows of shops. Heaps of coolies reposed under the trees of other streets, under raised porches, their thin legs tangled together, open-mouthed like dead fish. Otherwise the streets were empty; not a European was outdoors. All the governing race were asleep in the breeze of electric fans, such garments as they still wore pasted to their bodies. Had one of them spied me wandering the streets at this hour I should no doubt have been taken for mad.

The new-comer soon finds that he too is better for his siesta, and that there is nothing to be gained in going without it, for there is little that he can do and no one whom he can see. No wonder the white residents all seemed tropicalized, if I may coin a word greatly needed in any attempt to describe life in Saïgon. Two or three hours of broken nap, and they must get up again, wearier than ever, spirits and body alike languid and stiff; for work or its substitute begins anew. One by one each leaves his house, jumps into a rickshaw with burning cushions, and goes to shut himself up once more in office or shop. There only the tropically experienced and the well-to-do can manage a comfortable coolness in which those not used to the equator as a close neighbor can either think or work. The streets begin again to swarm with _pousse-pousses_—for in spite of the all too evident fact that it is pulled the French insist on calling the rickshaw a “push-push,” perhaps in memory of the converted baby-carriage from which this now widespread vehicle was fashioned. Thinner, more washed-out in appearance than more northerly men of their laborious calling, the pullers nevertheless charge madly down upon every possible client, just as in China. But here they are more orderly, a trifle cleaner perhaps, with an air of being kept closely within bounds by foreign rules as well as by the climate. Less cheery than their Chinese prototypes, they seem more optimistic. The rickshaw-man of Indo-China holds out both hands at the end of his run, as if expecting such a fortune for his services to one of the dominant race that one hand would not hold it. But his optimism rarely materializes, and no dispute with one of the race that rules over his land seems to be worth the effort in such a climate.

Meanwhile, unable to adapt myself so quickly to the do-nothing of tropical midday, I had wandered to the end of the town. It was the same old France, even this far afield—outwardly imposing buildings generously adorned with plump naked females in stone, and within, dusty bureaucracy where the buying of a postage-stamp is a transaction, with much bookkeeping involved. Saïgon is in theory the capital of all Indo-China, though in practice the governors-general have all preferred somewhat more northerly Hanoï. Their palace here, like the cathedral, the Postes et Télégraphes, the Municipal Theater, and all the other examples of elaborate French architecture misplaced in the tropics, is set off in its grass-covered square at the end of some broad avenue. Palatial European residences with an atmosphere of lavishness emphasize the conspicuous scarcity of native buildings, whether towers, temples, ancient gates or palaces, or high-class dwellings. For that matter the native residents seem few, at least until one reaches the outskirts, though Saïgon was an important center before the French came.

Farther out are big brick barracks, where young French soldiers conscious of no color-line mingle freely with colonial troops ranging from black Malgaches to pale-yellow Annamese. Wide tree-lined roads lead on to the Botanical Gardens, in which men and women Parisian in dress and manners drive or stroll in the semi-coolness of evening; and just across the arroyo bounding it on the farther side is the bush—jungle and thatched huts and primitive living, where one glimpses hammocks in hovels of faded thatch on bare ground among banana-plants that carry the mind back to rural tropical South America.

European health used to be so bad in Saïgon that French residents often had the experience of playing baccarat with a friend one evening and accompanying him next morning to Bangkok—not the capital of Siam but the Saïgon cemetery for foreigners, popularly so-called among them from the street that leads to it. The story is still told of a misinformed French journalist in France who was moved to protest at the extravagance of sending all the dead to Siam, “in order not to alarm the population.” To-day conditions are better, as healthful as could be expected for wine-drinkers in an equatorial country. But the French seem less at home here than the Annamese in their black two-piece garments, shiny as oil-cloth, their wooden clogs scraping noisily on the cement sidewalks, on the stone-faced roadways beyond, splotched with the red saliva of this race of betel-nut chewers. Their hair, usually in topknots that peer from beneath black band-turbans, the black-enameled teeth they consider so becoming, and the betel-nut that drips blood-red over their lips they have in common with their more wealthy compatriots in coats of transparent black gauze over light-colored gowns.

With sunset comes the great French rite, _l’apéritif_. Men in fresh white and women in their best summer frocks gather on the terrace—in other words most of the public sidewalk, with slight respect for pedestrians—of the Hôtel Continental, a scene suggesting the Café de la Paix of Paris in a tropical setting. The awnings are trussed up, and the night life, the chief life of Saïgon, at least of the visible variety, grows with the evening. The very common-sense custom of the European men in going bareheaded after sunset is a delightful relief from the heavy sweat-begetting cork helmet. All the Frenchman’s comforts of home, from creamy curaçao of oil-like texture to rich green _absinthe frappée_, are trotted forth by Annamese “boys” in white gowns, topped by their inevitable band-turban, jet-black as the coarse hair most of them wear in a Psyche knot. All manner of French colonial types join the appetite-seeking throng—the anemic rounder, the sturdy colonist in his black shovel-beard, the humped bureaucrat in his pince-nez. Rare indeed is the man who is not accompanied by at least one member of the fair sex who could have come from nowhere but France, garb, manner, and all, in spite of her pallor and reduced vivacity born of tropical residence.

As a hostelry the Continental was full. But one of the most agreeable surprises about Indo-China, at least to the man who comes there from wandering in China itself, is the number of its hotels with all the comforts of Paris. They are very French hotels indeed, from the menu to the thrifty eagle-eyed madame behind the bottle-flanked zinc counter, even though the midday _déjeuner_ cannot of course be served out on the sidewalk. Rooms may be spacious or small, but they are always furnished with a big double bed, symbol of the Frenchman’s horror of sleeping alone. This is unfailingly flanked by the _bidet_, in enameled tin on loose wooden legs or of the latest bath-tub style. Bath-tubs themselves are rare, but in a land where perspiration drips at every crook of a finger the shower-baths, often in a cement-paved corner of the room itself, are alone worth the price of admission. All this and more I found at exceedingly reasonable rates at the Hôtel de la Rotonde, just across the street from the starting-place of the biweekly steamer to Pnom Penh.

Autobuses leave Saïgon in various directions; toy-like French automobiles may be had for the hiring. Where the former, and sometimes the latter, leave off, one may descend to thatch-topped carts behind humped cattle, or climb into queer little vehicles something like the jaunting-cars of Ireland. The well-to-do natives of Cochinchina seem still to prefer the _malabar_, a horse-drawn box on four wheels, so named from the Indian immigrants who appear to have brought it with them. The bus ride to Thudam disclosed an industrial school where the old Annamese arts that show signs of dying out, such as inlaying furniture and bric-a-brac with mother-of-pearl, are being retaught under French principals. Annamese boys of the working class are recommended to it by the village elders and are paid a bit while learning. In such matters as these, and the good roads leading to them, French rule is visibly an advantage. The rather dusty ride out to the Falls of Trian is also one of those worth while among the radiating routes covering little Cochinchina. On almost any of them mangosteen trees stand forth to make one’s mouth water, though it has never been my luck, thanks to persistent off seasons, to taste this untransportable vegetable ice-cream, reputed the finest fruit in captivity.

Smallest and oldest of the five divisions of French Indo-China, Cochinchina is the only colony among them. The others are “protectorates,” though the difference is hardly visible to the naked eye. But at least its strictly colonial status simplifies the task of its governor. He came from Mauritius and was part negro, according to the official propagandist for more tourists who insisted on taking me to call on him. I should hardly have suspected it in his cool and deeply shaded offices, and certainly not from a later glimpse in more social circles of his beautiful French wife of queenly dignity. A colonial governor ranks high in the matrimonial market of France, whatever his complexion. But if I fancied there was no color prejudice in this motley dependency I was disabused by the secret scorn my companion expressed, as we left the palace, for the African strain in the superior to whom he had been so deferential in official intercourse, though he himself seemed to go out of his way to mention his own Annamese wife and half-caste children. To each nationality its peculiar point of view.

Trains, trolleys, autobuses, automobiles, rickshaws, _malabars_, and boats, not to mention pedestrians, ply constantly between Saïgon and Cholon, its rich Chinese suburb. Tiresomely Chinese in many of its details, this wealthy city testifies to French tutelage. Instead of shoulder-wide streets garnished with roaming pigs and untended garbage, there are good pavements, and a modern water-supply in place of the bucket-brigades from river or mud-hole. Still no Elysium, it is immaculate compared to China proper. Here live Chinese who own costly automobiles; here diamonds and other valuable jewelry are widely worn in public; here where it is safe to indulge such inclination under foreign rule, is altered the impression one carries away from the bandit- and soldier-ridden old empire to the north, that the Celestials are the antithesis of the Hindus in this matter of personal adornment. In every shop, whether of a grocer or a seller of porcelains, of medicines or of silks, there is a mighty heaping up of wares, and six clerks where we would have one. Among them an old man fat and cheery of aspect as the Laughing Buddha at the entrance to Chinese temples, naked except for thin cotton trousers and slippers, sits manipulating the balls of his calculating-board. Flat, dry, lacquered ducks, transparent at the edges, hang along cords like bats taking their day’s repose. Pigs blown up like their toy counterparts of rubber, lie at their ease, polished and hairless, with outstretched legs, grinning their deathly grin at the passing throng. Now and again a funeral goes by, gaudy and noisy as if the chief actor were among the graves of his ancestors, but more richly ornate and lacking the usual tawdriness, like the town itself compared to old China. But those who have been there then say that the time to see Cholon is during the week of Têt, as the lunar New Year is called in Indo-China, when the canvas and cardboard dragon is promenaded through the streets, opening his enormous maw and twisting his long disgusting body, in which a score of sweating coolies are hidden.

In Indo-China one seldom speaks of going to the grocery; it is rather, “I am going to the Chinaman’s.” The Annamese, and still more so the other races that make up the native population, are lazy, or at least languid as merchants, and the Chinese get the business and the riches. To speak of retail commerce is to mean the Chinese, and in larger matters they are by no means outsiders. For a hundred and fifty years they have been installed at Cholon, and from there they have spread over all Cochinchina, all Indo-China for that matter. They arrive thin and in rags, and leave, if at all, fat and placid; and as fast as they get rich other gaunt wretches take their places at the foot of the ladder. It is as if they were being perpetually passed through a fattening-machine; and if some of them have no luck, lack sufficient cuteness, there is the recompense of opium to make a plank as comfortable as a rich man’s bed.

More or less respected by the people they feed upon, they are discreetly or insolently superior to them, depending on their individual status of the moment. Formerly they made great fortunes quickly in rice. That way is hampered now, because the government sends out rice quotations that reach even the peasants. But still they get rich. So greatly are they the gainers that Indo-China has been called a “Chinese colony administered by Frenchmen.” Economically the Celestial is master of the country; his activity, his intelligence in business affairs, his commercial cleverness, his very temperament would make him so, even without the great advantages of a population given to gambling and gifted with a lack of forethought that make for usury at high rates. Thirty-six per cent is legal interest even in the French courts of Indo-China, and the wily Chinese often gets everything merely for lending ten piastres—land, house, furniture, sometimes the whole family as slaves.

A gambling game known as “the thirty-six animals” sweeps through all the villages, especially of Cambodia, like _o bicho_ in Brazil. In Cambodia, as in Siam, as in China, slavery has been legally abolished, but it continues to flourish. In the old days the work of the slave for debt covered only the interest; it never paid the principal and set him free. To-day the peasant who borrows in a lean year or after a bad wager may hope that at least his children will get out of the meshes of the spider-faced Chinese lender.

Even from the political point of view the Chinese are a privileged class in Indo-China. Though they have no diplomatic representatives of their own, they virtually have the rights of extraterritoriality under the protection of the French. Every Chinese in the colony must belong to a _congrégation_, a kind of association that is responsible to the state for all its members, civilly and pecuniarily. Each man between the ages of eighteen and sixty pays a tax of from 6.60 to 200 piastres, depending on the category to which he belongs. There are six of these categories, with bankers and merchants in the highest class and coolies in the lowest. Though they pay this to the “congregation,” it really goes to the government. This is no bright French idea, but was the lot of all Chinese living in Annam long before the French came. Besides this varying head-tax there is a “prestation tax”—whatever that may be—of from two to fifty piastres a year; and any Chinese who wishes to travel beyond the town in which he is registered must pay for a _laisser-passer_, good for two weeks and twice renewable, so that those who are always traveling contribute considerably to the government during the year. Women, children, the sick, and men over sixty pay only a yearly tax of one piastre, and may travel when and where they wish; but even the son of a Chinese by an Annamese woman, and born in the colony, remains a Chinese and must belong to some “congregation.”

The Chinese of Cholon and of Indo-China in general rarely speak a word of Annamese or of French and of course no English; nor for that matter do they speak Chinese, for they all come from the southern coastal country where dialects reign. Canton, Amoy, Swatow, and Hainan furnish the chief “congregations.” Such intriguing names as Hai Chin and Hung Long Tom are to be seen on their shop signs. Except for the Cantonese, who usually bring wives with them, nearly all these happily expatriated Celestials take temporary native wives, usually Annamese. But they _never_—the italics are those of a French writer—leave temporary wife and children behind without assuring their livelihood. The same cannot be said of the French in Indo-China—nor, the French might retort, of Americans in the Philippines.

If I had come too early to see Cholon in the throes of the Chinese New Year, at least I was just in time to attend the most important annual celebration of another alien group that fattens on the native population. Every January the Chettys, a Hindu caste of bankers and usurers to be found in all the ports of the Far East, give a great fête in honor of their protectress, the Goddess Souppramanya. It was the most barbaric spectacle I have ever seen in many years of globe-trotting. In the evening all Indians of this class in Saïgon, from mere street-booth money-changers to big bankers, enveloped themselves in their curtain-like muslin costume, with a spongy towel about the neck, and formed a procession to their temple in the Rue Ohier. This Pagode des Chettys—one must get used to the French way of saying _pagode_ for temple and _tour_ for pagoda—is rich and elaborate for its setting, though only mildly so compared to such structures in India. The contrast between its ornamental tower and the _défense d’afficher_ signs lavished upon its bright pink walls is not likely to escape even the languid passer-by lolling in his _pousse-pousse_.

Unlike what would have happened in India, here there seemed to be no objection to my presence; the worshipers in fact gave me subtle hints that they were rather pleased at my attention, though the stern watchman at the door waved away natives of the colony. There may have been great inner meaning, plethoras of mysticism quite beyond my simple ken, in the ensuing ceremony, but to me it was rather a shock to know that what are popularly accepted as our fellow-Aryans could be so crassly superstitious. Yet such things no doubt are all a matter of degree and inherited point of view; the unfamiliar always has a hint of the grotesque, even of the hideous.

Great Hindu bankers naturally wear many diamonds; otherwise these overfed worshipers were only in white flowing loin-cloths, some with a fold of cheese-cloth over one shoulder. With three fingers each further prepared himself by smearing on his forehead, his flabby arms, and the hairy chest that attested his Aryan blood, whitish stuff mixed by low-caste members of his race from cow-dung and other ingredients. Hindu musicians supplied an absolutely unbroken caterwauling splendidly in keeping with the rest of the insane ceremony. One of them in particular should easily have won the world record for long-windedness. For a full hour, if not indeed much longer, he kept his cheeks blown out to their capacity without an instant of interlude, thereby keeping a barbaric kind of fife miauling without cessation and at the same time beating a drum incessantly with his fingers.

One by one the fat, bediamonded, all but naked bankers stood before the opened shrine, itself a vision of untold riches, sometimes singly, sometimes in small groups, and with their hands high above their heads shook and twisted and contorted themselves like madmen suffering the extremes of torture. The object of these revolting attempts of all too solid flesh to resemble a snake in the throes of pain or anger were, as nearly as I could gather, to deceive the goddess into the belief that the worshipers were acutely suffering at sight of her divine splendor, or that they were ready to suffer any agony in her honor. One by one they threw themselves on the cement pavement laid in small brightly colored squares and writhed and squirmed, twisting their heads fiercely from side to side, rolling over and over, in a way to make mere groveling a pastime, the sweat of torture and of an equatorial climate pouring from their brown bodies until the floor was wet beneath them. The paunchiest creature of them all, his fingers covered with diamonds large enough, in the vernacular of the day, to choke a horse, his dough-like face riddled with the marks of smallpox, doubly repulsive with his great hairy naked paunch, went through contortions nauseating to the hardiest stomach. His voluntary convulsions suggested that he was the chief of the caste, as his diamonds implied that he was the leader in successful usury. If only our bankers and money-lenders had to do some such penance annually instead of merely going to church weekly in a silk hat and a limousine!

At length their divinity, Souppramanya, which like any American worthy of attention looked easily worth the million repute and her incredibly bejeweled appearance credit her with, was taken down from her niche. A dozen men in loin-cloths carried the idol to her silver chariot; two great cream-colored sacred bulls, or, more exactly, steers, wearing fancily embroidered robes over their single humps, were led forth from their sumptuous stables within the temple, and the second phase of the ceremony began. Between two rows of torches, surrounded by oriflammes, sacred parasols in gay colors, and inexhaustible musicians, the extravagant equipage of the goddess set out around the walled inclosure of the altar. Huger than water-buffaloes of the fields, their sleek fawn-colored hides shining, their expression that of their human prototypes haughty with generations of adulation, the sacred cattle trod slowly at the head of the worshipers, their spoiled-aristocrat dignity unruffled by the frequent slipping of their silver shoes on the smooth hard pavement, or at the sometimes painful pulling at the cords attached to their perforated nostrils. Sacred as they were, such coercion by their idolizers was evidently necessary to keep them in order, and this they endured as if even sacred beings were not wholly free from the pull of circumstances. Behind, surrounded by a milling throng of naked smeared Hindu men and boys writhing with religious fervor, came the martyr without whom the ceremony would be in vain. He had prayed and fasted for a week in order to be able to endure his suffering. Lances pricking his feet, an enormous pin thrust through his tongue, he drew a little chariot fastened to him by traces ending in silver hooks that dug deeply into his flesh. His eyes twisted in their orbits, foam driveled from his lips, a figure horrible to behold, urged on by the clamors of the frenzied money-lenders, who now and then still threw themselves in abject contortions on the pavement. The crowd jostled and pitilessly crowded upon a second martyr, who had transformed himself into a pincushion, with needles and pins sticking out of his flesh in every direction. It was an astonishing as well as a revolting spectacle, a vision of fanatical India such as I had never seen in India itself, doubly surprising because of the freedom with which we two white men and a Frenchwoman were allowed to mingle with the worshipers.

Two, three, four times the barbaric procession made the circuit of the temple. A curious noise that seemed to come from within the chariot puzzled me, until I managed to crowd closely enough to discover that the ambulating altar contained a little motor which lighted it with electricity! The gaunt Hindu in charge of this howled and writhed with the others; but in a fold of his loin-cloth bulged two or three electric-light bulbs to replace those that might burn out.

Then quickly the whole performance subsided. The regal-mannered steers were led back to their stalls; the swollen cheeks of the musicians deflated in a final piercing yowl; the goddess was carried back to her permanent throne. In a twinkling the frenzied bankers returned to the placid every-day behavior of their calling, and went to squat on the floor in a raised place too sacred for ordinary beings, where low-caste Indians began to pass trays of food among them. This consisted mainly of cocoanuts cut in two and filled with bananas, red fruits, and several unrecognizable forms of Hindu delicacies. The hairy-paunched favorites of fortune helped themselves more than generously; the small fry, and the children scattered among them, got only handsful of sticky rice, carelessly tossed to them by the servers.

This spectacle was repeated every evening for ten days. It was very easy to guess what might have befallen those who had dared to wear such diamonds or publicly parade such idols in China, or for that matter in our own expensively policed land. Here no fear of robbery seemed to trouble the pious Chettys, most opulent of the thousands of castes of India. All the evening there had hovered near me a man from Pondicherry, that tiny patch of India still ruled by the French. Dressed in the tailored garb of Europeans in the tropics, his decidedly Aryan features merely a glossy brown instead of white, speaking perfect French, he seemed far removed from the men of his race who writhed on the floor in their diamonds and loin-cloths. The ceremony was evidently commonplace to him, for he showed no surprise even at the height of it. His fervor seemed to be political rather than religious, and like many a man of color in the French colonies he was almost boisterously Francophil. A dozen times during the evening his voice rose high enough above the fanatical tumult to assure me in as many ways of expressing it that India would be the happiest land on earth if only France rather than England held it.

The ease with which I got permission to visit the Saïgon establishment where opium is prepared for sale implied that the French made no secret, whether or not they saw anything wrong in it, of their official sponsoring of this traffic. Opium is a government monopoly in Indo-China, with a similar establishment in Tonkin to the north. In a big airy room of armory-like ceiling, a hundred or more feet long and half as wide, a score of Annamese were at work. What with the heat of caldrons and of the climate, and the sickeningly sweetish smell of the drug, their labor with heavy ladles was no sinecure. In fact the whole personnel works only three hours out of the twenty-four, eighteen hours a week. The poppy-juice comes from India—at the northern establishment especially southwestern China now supplies great quantities, but this is of course not officially admitted—in balls of the size of a cocoanut, or resembling still more closely the Brazil-nut in its native state, for the shell is nearly an inch thick—but made of leaves. These leaves are eventually sold to the natives, who chew them with their betel-nut, no doubt getting some opium-like effect from the soaking of poppy-juice.

The brown jelly-like substance inside is dumped into huge brass pans over fires and ladled constantly as it boils, sweat running literally in streams from the workers. When it has cooled and been well kneaded the resultant dough is placed in other such pans and rubbed down into a concave cake two or three inches thick. This in turn is placed upside down over a very hot charcoal brazier, and every minute or two a workman peels off a skin of the thickness of leather and throws it into still another pan. When all the cake has been skinned away, the leather-like layers in the new pan are treated with water, for they would otherwise be brittle as glass, and are worked again into a very brown dough which gradually swells to fill the pan. Handfuls of specially prepared interior of bamboos, soft and resembling vermicelli, are then thrust into the mass, and brown water runs slowly from these through cloth filters into buckets. Only this liquid is of any value, the residue being thrown away, useless even as fertilizer.

Reduced to a semiliquid form once more, this final product is placed in iron barrels, a single one of which is worth twenty thousand piastres. The stuff may now be sold at any time, though if possible it is allowed to settle six months or more, for like wine and marriage the longer it is kept the better it becomes. Then in the form of a paste closely resembling russet shoe-blacking it is put up in tins of five, ten, twenty-five, fifty, and one hundred grams each. The first retails at barely two piastres, so that every rickshaw-man and errand-boy may afford it; the largest, at twenty-five. The de luxe opium is put up in purple boxes, a special mark on the very best of them indicating that they are reserved for the king of Cambodia. Great quantities of this best purple variety are sent to the old Cambodian sovereign each December, as the Christmas present of the government. His royal colleague, the emperor of Annam, is supplied from the Hanoï establishment. The ordinary tins, with no marks upon them except a cryptic number, are placed in heavy wooden boxes simply marked “Benares”—other code names distinguishing the better grades—and go out in great loads to all parts of the colony. The stuff is sold in these tins to any one who can pay for it, in every little _débit_ distinguished by an “O.R.,” for “Opium Régie” on signs similar to those indicating authority to retail for the French tobacco monopoly. What with government preparation, license fees, and the like, the drug brings an enormous profit to the government; that is, to France.

The official who took it upon himself to get me started right in my sight-seeing called the opium monopoly “the shame of Indo-China”; and some other French residents felt, or professed to feel, the same way about it. But even he insisted that if it were not thus openly sold and regulated the people would smuggle it in; and if it were prohibited entirely there would be a revolution! So there would be, though perhaps not in just the sense the speaker meant to imply.

We all know that France takes a somewhat different view of “vices” than do we of the English-speaking races. The French attitude seems to be, let vice flourish and abound, that each may learn to save himself from temptation, or decide for himself how much indulgence he can allow without serious personal harm. There are hints that this may perhaps be as effective in the end as our own growing custom of forcible suppression. Even in novels based on life in Indo-China the French attitude toward opium seems to be about what ours as a nation is toward tobacco. Many, some say three fourths, of the eighteen thousand French in the colony smoke opium, as do most of the various indigenous races, many Chinese, and some Hindu residents. There are not a few French residents of the better class who contend that it does no great harm. Among the natives, men with the opium habit are treated with indulgence, but the women “never” smoke it; any who did so would be considered the lowest of human creatures. On the whole the Japanese seem to have handled the problem better in Formosa, for they at least strive to keep their own people free from the habit, and are systematically reducing consumption within their own territory, rather than trying to increase it. The smoking of opium, a Chinese importation, was not a common vice in Indo-China, unless perhaps among the Annamese, before the French came. In Cambodia and among some of the other gentler races that make up the protected federation, market-days and big gatherings are needed to overcome the inertia toward the habit even to-day. But the government forces it upon the people for the benefit of the treasury; and the development of obligatory military service has spread it everywhere. Lists of villages are sent out by diligent functionaries with the information that they are not consuming their pro rata of opium, just as great business houses in other lands protest to their agents that such and such territory should take more of their goods, and local officials are told to urge shopkeepers with the “O.R.” license to add to their stocks and push them over the counter.

The opium monopoly in Indo-China is by no means airtight. In Laos there are many Miao who grow the poppy up in their hills far inland, and as they can get little more than half as much for their product from the French monopoly officials as from the Chinese constantly engaged in illicit opium traffic, only a fraction of that grown and really sold by the Miao is ever reckoned in government reports. The Chinese smugglers have their own _pirogues_, slender swift boats for the inland rivers, and with these they are constantly getting opium out of the country, mainly by way of Siam. Luang Prabang reports only eight hundred thousand piastres’ worth of opium a year, yet every one knows that far more is smuggled out of that kingdom than is sold to the government monopoly, and so easily that customs officers are kept on the Laos-Siam and Laos-China frontiers chiefly for appearance’s sake.