Chapter VI: Through Annam to Its Capital

We were off again by the same conveyance at four next morning. Long before daylight the road was alive with files of coolies, two loads bouncing at the ends of each shoulder-pole, the same familiar lines of jogging carriers as in China, with the difference that here there were as many women as men, for the bound foot is one advantage of Chinese civilization that was never adopted in Annam. All up and down the long slender kingdom of the Eminent South endless miles of coolies of both sexes come trotting to market to sell to one another. Always they jog in Indian files, even on the wide modern roads, unable to cast off centuries of training along the narrow trails of old Annam. All wore palm-leaf hats; some carried parasols also, even before daylight, perhaps as a protection against the setting moon. With the first rays of sun, flung horizontally across the already tepid world, double lines of pole-bearers stretched ahead and behind, on both sides of the road, as far as the eye could see, the women carrying with a floating motion, many of the men not carrying at all. New lines, cut out in fresco against the brightening horizon, came jogging in along the dikes of the paddy-fields. As both sexes dressed and carried alike, and the men wore their long hair in Psyche knots, it was not easy to distinguish man from woman until we were close upon them, sometimes not even then. Evidently the Chinese found this annoying, for when they conquered Annam, centuries ago, they ordered the women to wear short garments with wide sleeves. China’s power over the kingdom of the south virtually ended during the Ming dynasty, however, and the Manchus did not succeed in introducing the queue.

The country was now perhaps a bit less mountainous than the day before, the strip of plain wider, certainly more densely populated, and all its products were bound market-ward. Here and there in the files a mother carried a child at one end of her pole and a small pig at the other. The hasty glimpse as we dashed past was not enough to decide whether the youngster or the pig had been brought along as a counterweight. Like their near relatives in China, the pigs of Annam refuse to walk to market. Coolies carry them in baskets—“like foreigners in chairs”—or merely with a band from their jouncing poles about their bellies, which would seem to the disinterested observer to be more painful than walking. Who would be so bold, however, as to claim to grasp the point of view of a pig?

Often that morning the road ahead looked like a flowing river of coolies, parasol-hats and jogging poles forming a kind of scum on the surface. We dashed through this endless stream like a steamer through a narrow waterway, our incessant horn always clearing a passage just soon enough to escape doing the ceaseless multitude of dodging pedestrians bodily injury, the chauffeur’s assistant striking a resounding thwack, with a whip that he seemed to carry for no other purpose, on every palm-leaf hat he could by any stretching reach. We dashed as peremptorily through markets squatting along and, so rare is wheeled traffic, even in the road at the frequent villages, markets noisy with bartering, gatherings that recalled Haiti in other ways than the pell-mell with which they scattered as we rode down upon them without so much as slackening speed. Annamese markets are always a broad vista of whitish palm-leaf hats, so that they look like an individually roofed congregation. There were hat factories beside the road where more of this ubiquitous head-gear was being fashioned, of other materials as well as palm-leaves, it seemed, for the brass top of one soldier’s hat came off in my presence and disclosed the filling to be the apartments-to-let columns of a New York newspaper, yellow with several years of tropical service. In certain movements and when the wind is blowing the Annamese must keep his mouth open to hold his hat on, by tautening the ribbon under his chin. Wanderlust in Annam takes the form of going to market, especially among the women and girls. They like the sense of freedom it gives them, the company, the gossip, above all the bargaining, at which the women of Annam are past mistresses. In the afternoon we met these same files of women, or at least their exact counterparts, jogging homeward as heavily laden as they came, for they often buy as much as they sell.

In this section, all through southern Annam in fact, every one not in mourning wore black. Compared with those of Cambodia and of some other parts of Indo-China, the women were almost prudish in their dress. Like the men they wore thin cotton pantaloons as voluminous as those of the modern college youth, and a jacket barely disclosing the neck, and more often than not all this was covered with a flowing cotton coat reaching almost to the ankles. Rarely was a breast revealed even during the frequent nursing of children that in many cases should long since have outgrown that form of nourishment. True, in the hottest hours of the sea-level day many of the women, especially the older and less attractive ones, wore in their own villages nothing between hat and pantaloons except a diamond-shaped breast-protector, tied on with cross-strings across the back, outdoing from the rear the most extreme of Western evening-gowns. But on the road and in the market even the flowing coats seemed almost _de rigueur_.

Among the coolie class these overcoats of both sexes were of thin cotton. The better-to-do men in the towns and in the autobus wore jet-black ones, thin as gauze, transparent as mosquito-netting, with flowered designs of the same hue woven in them, like the pattern in lace, and fastened together down the side with little gold buttons. Beneath this the well dressed man wore a white jacket-shirt and very loose cotton trousers, and thrust bare feet into black slippers or wooden clogs. A black cloth carelessly wound about the head distinguished most coolies, but all men above that class wore that most unique item of the Annamese costume, a black band-turban permanently arranged in many little folds, rising in stairway fashion up the forehead and descending in the same manner at the back. This mere head-band, without top, is worn indoors and out, even, one suspects, during sleep. In place of the male turban the women wrap black cloth about the long single thick braid of their generally luxuriant hair, and wind this about the head. Out in the sun the palm-leaf hat sits on top of turban or its feminine counterpart. At least along this main route of French railway and autobus highway both men and women of the well-to-do class wore gold and other valuable ornaments openly. Long necklaces of grains of gold of the size of peas are the favorite adornment of the women who can afford them; there were bracelets, sometimes several on one arm, earrings usually of gold, and miscellaneous jewelry to suit the individual taste or purse.

Rice lands stretch for many miles north of Quinhon, some so broad that they looked like great inundated wheat-fields. In other places the hills closed in like interested spectators, but still left room for a broad strip of cultivation. Sunk to the knees in this slime, pantaloons rolled to the tops of their thighs, men and women clawed about the roots of the young rice. Here a laborer up to his—or her—middle in mud and water toiled feverishly to stanch an overflowing pond by slapping hasty handfuls of oozy black mud on a broken dike. On another such division between the paddy-fields two Annamese of indeterminate sex were alternately pulling and letting loose in rhythmic cadence the two ends of a cord bearing in its middle a pail made of straw, the simplest Oriental form of lifting water from an overflooded field into a thirsty one above. Farther on, a coolie condemned to hard labor to earn his rice, turned with his bare feet a primitive wheel that set in motion an endless chain of simple buckets. To protect himself from the sun he held in one hand an open umbrella, and no doubt dreamed himself a mandarin. Right, left, sometimes everywhere as far as the eye could see, were rice-fields, mirroring the sun so brightly that the eye quailed before them. Yet there was little color to make gay this landscape of the plains; it is green or nothing, except for the bluish tinge of masses of the Japanese lotus or hyacinth. The Annamese planted this in a few selected spots to celebrate the victory of the yellow race over the white at Tsushima; and now, as if to punish them for their seditious thoughts, it has spread far and wide, invading their ponds and rice-fields, obstructing their watercourses. To-day the peasants of Annam spend much of their time laboriously digging out and carrying away this prolific and troublesome plant, good for nothing, not even as fertilizer. In so narrow and intensively cultivated a land it is a great problem even to find space on which to throw the stuff, yet their food is just so much decreased until they can rid themselves of this disastrous invasion of flowers.

A few red humped cattle lolled under wayside trees, or grazed on dikes where they were mirrored in the flooded fields, as were the mountains in the background and the huts in cocoanut-groves against the more or less distant foot-hills. Clusters of water-buffaloes on vacation lay immersed to their nostrils in mud-holes or swung their mammoth horns with an inhospitable air along the mud ridges between the paddy-fields, or fed on the edges of the uncultivated hillocks in which the great mountain range always bulking clearly or hazily to the west gave up its contest with the sea. A pair of birds stood blithely on the backs of some of the amphibians; on others a boy, at times even a girl, lay at full length, head pillowed on rump or withers. Among the trees especially these ponderous beasts resembled, exactly as to color, that other survivor of the dinosaurian age, the elephant. Some of them were of that dull creamy hue of the sacred “white” elephants of Siam and vicinity. For a semi-albino buffalo is common in Indo-China, its eyes red, a rough red skin showing through scarce whitish hairs, as if it were half roasted in the Annamese sun—perhaps it is only because it is not rare enough that this abnormal beast is not also regarded as sacred.

A whole population was toiling in the rice-fields, or trotting elastically along the dikes, two pole-balanced loads bouncing from every shoulder. The rural Annamese are not lazy; on the contrary they are very hard workers, though they have some of the natural indolence of the tropics. Agriculture is laborious under the best of conditions, to say nothing of those of the Orient; with his seldom lacking flock of voracious children the _nha-qué_, the peasant of Annam, can rarely rest. Small, but of great endurance, the countrymen of the Eminent South are forever on the run, like ants in haste to provide themselves against a drouth or a famine. Both sexes can trot indefinitely under great loads; even a six-year-old boy can propel a sampan, though he may not yet have reached the dignity of clothing.

Rice is by far the principal product of Annam, fish or fruit being a slow second. Thanks to its rice, Annam is rich; all Indo-China is rich, else why this Western form of “protection”? Low as they seem to us from the land of exorbitance, prices are high compared to China. There were a few beggars, now and then one obviously leprous, yet few indeed measured by the rows of them along any important Chinese route. A visiting French novelist, angry at the exchange between its real currency and his poor paper francs, entitled one of his chapters on Annam, “Under the Sign of the Piastre.” There are so many piastres in Indo-China that the Chinese and the Chettys, the “usuricultors” who lend to the unforesighted peasant at highwayman rates of interest, and even French officialdom and monopolists, cannot take them all; there remain some for the _nha-qué_, the toiling peasant who earns them all by the sweat of his brown back—and those of his women-folk.

Since almost all the Annamese are agriculturists, there is no aristocracy between the emperor and his mandarins and the _nha-qué_, little exploiting of any other than the agricultural resources of the country. Whatever wealth it has comes from the soil, almost entirely from these flooded rice-fields mirroring the ever near-by chain of mountains that shuts off this laborious people close on the west. For the real Annam is only this very narrow strip of fertile lowlands on the eastern slope of the Siamese peninsula. Like the Nile in Egypt, this main highway, close as it is to the sea, takes in all the narrow country. The Annamese chain crowds the toiling peasant so close to the sea in many places that he is often driven into it as a fisherman to escape starvation. He cultivates only the valleys, both because he knows little else than rice and because the Moï, the barbarians of various tribes, make it uncomfortable for him back in the hills. Yet narrow as their country is, of the eighteen or twenty million people in French Indo-China two thirds are Annamese. For as if to make up for its slenderness, that strip of flatland between the mountains and the sea is incredibly fertile, so fertile that its overcrowded toilers trouble themselves far less with fertilizing than do the Chinese.

Bamboo of all sizes, palms ranging from mere fans to great masses of leaves, magnificent trees, some of them bearing the jackfruit on their trunks, cocoanut-palms hugging the coast-line, banana-plants all but hiding thatched huts, above all the straight and slender arec-palm up which climbs the clinging betel-vine, broke the monotony of the rice-fields. There were miles of hedges gay with what looked like a small pink rose, and large flowers made up of many tiny ones, care-free, unconstrained bushes, not the domesticated hedge-rows of England. In places a shock of colors like an explosion emphasized the landscape. Then, after so long a stretch of rice-fields that they grew wearisome, we went high up over a spur from which spread out another great vista, more than half of it the dense, very green tops of cocoanut-palms. Beyond came miles of waste-lands, with sand white as snow piled up over sterile hillocks.

There were hundreds of graves among these barren sands, strewn as closely together as are the green unmarked grave-mounds that emerge everywhere from the rice-fields, where agriculture gnaws at them year after year, century after century, yet never destroys them. Though January was not yet done, and the lunar New Year was still a week off, preparations had almost everywhere been completed for that important date. Here and there a man was still touching up his family graves, giving them a new top of sand or earth, weeding and clearing them of all vegetation, before the Annamese New Year should overtake him and bring reproach from the spirits of his ancestors. But most of this work had already been done, so that the rounded knolls, such as stretch in hundreds of millions from northern Korea to southern Annam, were bare and smooth now, all showing some sign of recent care. Here in the waste-lands the graves looked like sand-mounds left by playing children; farther on came queer coffin-shaped ones of cement or baked mud, just as if a coffin above the ground had merely been plastered over.

The Annamese live and keep shop on a wooden platform a couple of feet above the earth floor; and generally mere boards laid on two sawhorses, covered with a thin reed mat, serve them as beds. Rarely has a native house more comfort than that. As all houses should be redecorated at New Year’s, there is a great market then for new reed, grass, or fiber mats, and whole processions of them were coming in from the country districts on the shoulder-poles of men and wives. Some were plain, some had simple designs, some had streaks of color running through them, and I saw many rich with red and purple and lush-green hues that no doubt would grace the hard couch of the wealthy. To the Annamese the mat is the symbol of the bed, of the couple, the household; and believing as firmly as the French that it is not well for man to sleep alone, they always sell these mats in pairs. If a family buys only one mat at New Year’s renewing-time, say the wiseacres, some member of it is sure to die within the year. From the moment that two persons are gathered together they should buy two mats, and as there is very little single blessedness in Annam, merchants do not wish at any price to divide a pair and run the risk of never selling the odd one. Bachelors and old maids, one gathers, are as badly off at New Year’s time as a one-legged man in a shoe-store—and it serves them right, any native of early-marrying Annam would no doubt answer, were his attention called to one of those rare and unnatural beings.

Every little while during that all-day journey from Quinhon to Tourane gusts of rain sprang up, between stretches of blazing sunshine, and then men, women, and children, every one of the outdoor class, slipped on palm-leaf rain-coats that were shaped like opera-capes, or like barrels with one stave removed so that the wearers could get into them, and which they turned in any direction against the slant of the rain. Scores of boys in these leaf rain-coats sat their water-buffaloes or their red humped cattle and let it drizzle. A real shower brought out so many rain-coats that the whole landscape—people and houses, buffaloes and hillsides—were covered with palm-leaves.

In the slimy pond at the entrance to every village the inhabitants were washing their rice, their clothing, their water-buffaloes, their night-buckets, themselves, everything that is dirty, and dipping from the same spot water for their kettles. They live with their cattle, their sway-back pigs, their chickens, ducks, and orphaned curs; at noon-time everybody in the villages, even the yellow mongrels, the black pigs, the wilt-tailed fowls, slip into the cai-nha, or thatched hut, for the siesta; and by night there is a similar congregating. Yet they are not so filthy as the Chinese; all things are relative. It behooves a more southern people, eager to live out its allotted span, to show less innocence of the meaning of cleanliness than do the incredible Celestials.

Once that day we met an elephant. He was being slowly driven along by a nonchalant coolie dozing astride his neck, grazing as he went. Somehow an elephant strolling down a modern highway, marked with kilometer-posts and traveled by autobuses, daintily picking a bit of weed or a tuft of grass here and there, and attracting no more attention than a cow or a water-buffalo, was more impressive than one all dolled up in a circus-parade.

When it was not clambering over a spur of the ever jostling mountain chain to the west, this road through Annam was always the same—a dike between two rice-fields, dusty or muddy in the country, filled with people, pigs, and dogs in the towns and villages. Then suddenly, frequently, inevitably, another _bac_, an ancient floating contrivance that leaks and creaks with age, which Annamese push across some river or inlet of the sea with poles that seem too heavy for their meager arms. Sometimes the commander of the _bac_ is a woman, strongest of all the crew, not only in will-power but in muscle. Once in a while we crossed a woven-bamboo bridge that gave with a groan under our cruel weight and regained its shape as an invalid knocked down regains his feet. But the short rivers of narrow Annam are often so wide and so erratic that they discourage the building of bridges. For the stream rises or falls, according to the season, disappears, comes back in a towering rage; and red with anger some morning it carries away not only bridges, where any exist, but dikes, roads, villages, the very railways, anything that dares to loiter in its imperious path. Then, too, Indo-China has terrific typhoons, which tear down her forests, to say nothing of destroying roads and bridges and the other puny works of the French usurpers.

The French do their best to keep the highways of Indo-China up to their own far-famed standard, especially this ancient route through Annam that is still sometimes known, in memory of the days when Chinese officials went over it in chairs, as the Mandarin Road—though now it is Route Coloniale No. 1. A French _ingénieur de routes_ lives in every stretch of a hundred kilometers or so; there was much road-mending all along that two-day autobus journey. An army of _congaïes_, the supple young women of Annam, trotting like black ants along the dikes, carried stones, mud, and other materials in little baskets at the ends of their shoulder-poles; at frequent intervals we dashed past long heaps of broken stone; men and women, boys and girls, the two sexes working and looking incredibly alike, and showing no sign that they recognized any difference in sex, toiled to keep the road passable.

The roads of Indo-China, even this principal highway of Annam, are constructed for one vehicle at a time, as are the _bacs_ and the narrow cement bridges across the slighter streams that were constantly breaking through from the mountains on this journey up the eastern coast of the China Sea. There was little reason for them to be wider, for few automobiles take advantage of the Frenchman’s expensive road-building, though there were then more than four thousand motor-cars in Indo-China, and any one who has recently traveled in continental eastern Asia knows that means a great many. We passed a private car or two during the day, the south-bound autobus of our own line, and the rival mail-carrying government buses, the one bound in our direction constantly racing past us or being in turn left to swallow our dust or wallow in our mud. A few big clumsy carts drawn by water-buffaloes brought rice to market; further than that there were almost no other vehicles, except rickshaws. No wonder road-filling markets and startled villagers, to say nothing of pigs, curs, urchins, and chickens, were not prepared for us when we roared down upon them out of the south and on like an avalanche into the north. Nearly all the carts of Indo-China are drawn by man-power; even massive machinery is hauled by human muscle, though there are a few stout little horses. A hammock slung on two poles, with a woven-reed or split-bamboo cover over it, were the only survivals of the sedan-chairs once so numerous along the Mandarin Road. To-day you can scour all Indo-China, from Bac-Lieu to Laokay, and never meet, at least on a main road, a single palanquin, nowhere find a chair porter, once so numerous, but only a thin line of autobuses and automobiles, and many rickshaws.

We met rickshaws everywhere, plying even between towns far apart in the well inhabited sections of this Shoestring Country. Red rickshaws rattling with the iron-tired wheels of our buggy of a generation ago, nearly all carried two passengers, and freight or baggage enough to sink an ox-cart. Yet the little runner, seldom as large as either passenger, trotted mile after mile across the country, rarely falling into a walk. Even in hard-working China two adults are hardly ever seen riding in the same rickshaw, but in Annam it is so common as to be almost the rule. It is of course nice and cozy, romantic and unoriental, to see a man riding along with his wife half in his lap—granting that it always is his wife; certainly it is some one’s wife, for nothing is so rare in Annam as old maids. Sometimes there is a half-grown child also, for good measure, giving the skinny puller the task of dragging three persons and all their movable belongings along mile after mile of highway, until you wonder whether even the dull-witted human horses themselves do not realize that it might have been better for them if the French had never come to build roads capable of two-wheeled vehicles.

Tourane, where the autobus ended its northward task some time before sunset on the second day out of Nhatrang, is a “foreign concession.” One suspects that the “protected” emperor of Annam lost little time in conceding this much to the French when they expressed a desire for a _pied à terre_ in Annam, with a status similar to those they hold in Shanghai and Tientsin. As a matter of fact Tourane, the best harbor in Annam, was given to the French, along with the islands of Poulo Condore and Touron off the coast of Cochinchina, in return for their help to Gia-long in consolidating the claims of the present dynasty at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Tourane bulks larger on the map than on the spot. It suggests a real-estate boom in some aristocratic old hamlet that died out long before the “plotting” by its optimistic sponsors reached its justification. In area it vindicates its conspicuousness on paper; on the spot it is even more roomy than the average town of Annam under the French, straining itself to cover as great a space as possible, like some of our largest American cities, like a squatter who fears that anything he may not claim will be taken away from him. Grass-bordered roads rather than streets, broad rural highways among widely scattered French tropical residences in spacious yards, each with the atmosphere of a private park, the necessary official buildings of a French headquarters, shops and market-place enough to supply the wants of the residents, and the Hôtel Morin, half grocery and half _pension_, for the accommodation of transient foreigners, just about complete the inventory. Scattered at the end of a short wide river where it empties into an excellent blue harbor in which ocean steamers can anchor close to the town, it is no city at all compared even with obscure Faifo a few miles south; but as a residence of foreigners it takes on a false importance.

By the same token it has some of the comforts of home, or at least their tropical counterparts. The expenditure of two piastres a month brings daily to those householders capable of appreciating such luxuries two large bottles of sterilized water from the French government hospital. Ice, without which the French refuse to live for a day in their Far-Eastern empire, is brought every morning from Hué, sixty-five miles away. I was reminded by contrast of the endless individual tasks of boiling all water that passes the lips of any but the most foolish foreigners in China, and that four fifths of the foreign residents there know ice only from homeland memories, while thousands of them never enjoy the luxury of a really cold drink from the time they leave their transpacific steamer until they embark for home again. Wherever half a dozen Frenchmen are gathered together in Indo-China there is an ice-making machine, or at least some means of getting a daily supply from some more fortunate group. The most constant cry in any French hotel dining-room in the colony is “_Nuoc-da!_” Natives who have become sophisticated in such matters have much sport in startling the Moï and other wild tribes back of the sea-level strip with the “water-stone” produced by their French masters. A piece of it passed from palm to palm until it disappears like a few drops of perspiration produces more astonishment among the hills than does an automobile or airplane. It is pure magic to the naïve wearers of the loin-cloth, and by such things have the people of the West won their prestige among them.

Until I reached Tourane I had not seen a Christian missionary in Indo-China—that is, not a Protestant missionary; the French do not admit that their own priests are missionaries in a land over which their own flag waves. Glad as the traveler always is to meet his own people in very foreign parts, I had been half conscious of a feeling of relief at the scarcity of avowed soul-savers, compared to the swarms of them in China itself. This paucity of workers in the spiritual vineyard of a race in some ways more Christ-like than we is not an indication that Protestant missions have wilfully overlooked Indo-China but that the French do not fervently welcome them there. In all the colony-protectorate there are only a few proselyters from the English-speaking world, and they are confined to three or four stations. In activity as well as in territory they are forced to be very circumspect, and thereby hangs the sad tale they have to tell the traveler who will listen.

They came first in 1911, a bit of pollen wafted southward from the great mission-field of China. At first they were allowed comparative freedom, or at least were graciously ignored. Then came the World War, and in due time the discovery that the United States might not after all join the Allies. Neutrals were rated little better than enemies in this far-flung slice of the French empire. All American missionaries in the possession were ordered to leave. The Canadians might remain, since they were allies; but as they were merely individual workers in what was virtually an American mission-field, they had little choice but to leave also. When the war was long enough over for its bitternesses to have become somewhat diluted, the missionaries were allowed to return, but only to find their goings and doings more hampered than ever. They were almost freely admitted to Cochinchina, because it is rated a colony, in which the laws and customs of France apply in most matters. They were allowed in Tourane, because it is a “foreign concession.” But the rest of Indo-China being merely under the “protection” of France, missionary work there is a different matter. The authorities had discovered that the treaty of 1877 between the emperor of Annam and the Western world, by which Christian missionaries were granted the right freely to propagate their doctrines in the emperor’s realm, applied only to the Catholics, “because they are the only Christians within the meaning of the text.” Moreover the startling fact was unearthed that “the emperor and his ministers are against the teaching of the Protestant doctrines to their people”—as if the poor little puppet on the throne of Annam would dare to be against anything unless his French guardians suggested it. Similar difficulties developed against admitting missionaries to Tonkin, Cambodia, and Laos, and to-day the saving of souls in the Protestant fashion is not a flourishing enterprise in that part of the peninsula east of Siam.

On the other hand the Annamese are converted to Catholicism by whole villages, particularly after some priestly assistance in the courts, a communal loan, or some other legitimate Catholic form of propaganda. One great inducement is that the converts are allowed to retain their ancestor worship, under a slightly different guise. But then, the Protestant missionaries permit their rare converts to keep all the wives of whom they are possessed at conversion, so long as they do not add to them afterward. “What,” the missionaries quite properly ask, “could be done with cast-off wives if their converted husbands found Christianity a means of getting rid of their support?”

In Tourane there was a Protestant church—though the French deny such false places of worship any other name than _temple_—and a school. But those great educational and medical institutions so common in China with its thousands of missionaries of who knows how many sects are not a feature of the Indo-China landscape. The French have many hospitals, but they are government- rather than priest-operated. They have found it uphill work to encourage the Annamese to go to them, and only of very late years have they attracted any great percentage of the population, though clinical service is free and even in-patients pay very little—lying-in cases, for instance, are charged about a piastre a fortnight, just enough to pay for native food. But when the French doctors go to call on patients outside the hospitals they ask fees of five piastres a visit of French and Annamese alike. Naturally an Annamese earning ten piastres a month cannot call in the doctor often, so they fall back upon their own medicine-men. “_Mais quoi donc!_” cry the French; “A doctor must have his pay like any one else, _n’est-ce pas?_” True enough no doubt, though after two years of associating with the foreign missionary doctors of China, whose fees amount almost to nothing—unless the patients are non-missionary foreign residents—one begins to dream of some more ideal method in matters of health than the competition of the market-place.

I coaxed one of the few Americans engaged in saving souls in Tourane to take a needed holiday and visit the “Marble Mountains” with me. These farthest-south outrunners of the great rock hills that become so numerous and so fantastically individual in form farther north, dotting by thousands the Bay of Along and stretching far on down the West River in the Chinese province of Kwangsi, seem wholly out of place here protruding from the flat sandy coast-land. It is as if the gods, carrying these absurd heaps of molten rock from their equatorial melting-place to their allotted destination, had dropped a few of them unnoticed on the way. Across the river, by native boat, we walked for hours along the beach toward them, close as they look to the town. The sea, stretching away to the eastward like a sheet of molten steel, rolled great breakers in at our feet. Had they swept over us we should probably have been less drenched than we were with perspiration from that endless plodding through the sand.

The incandescent sun stood sheer overhead by the time we reached that misplaced cluster of savage heaps of rock. Jagged mountain peaks jutting out of the sand like islands from the sea, the “Marble Mountains” of Tourane, taking their name from the marble-like rock of which they are formed, rise in thousands of pinnacles, nearly all of them sharp as needles, the peaks themselves pointed as the head of a Roman spear. Nature evidently did not intend man to explore these isolated crags standing out so sharply against the white sand all about them. For not only are the myriad rocks themselves needle-pointed, but all the vegetation that steals its scanty nourishment among them bristles with thorns. No four-footed animal has ever been known to venture up them; and only hardy climbers of the two-legged species, with the price of a new pair of shoes available, are wise to attempt the ascent, slight as is the elevation. From the summit of the highest, once the climber can find standing-space for both feet, spreads a brilliant scene of beach and sea, of rice-green plain backed by the endless Annamese range not far inland, and, dim in the offing, the hogback island which the government rents to a syndicate of Cantonese who gather there the ingredients of bird’s-nest soup.

We fell upon our wilted lunch at a temple cut into the lower slope of one of the “mountains,” a temple quite like those of China, even to the languid attitude of the priests. Then we explored grotto after grotto, deliciously cool after our infernal climb. In the largest of them the Annamese have set up other Chinese-style temples, for the attracting of pilgrims. Half-naked families peered forth from little huts nearly buried in the sand as we skirted the bristling waterless heaps on our way to the river, down which native boatmen sculled us back to the town.

The mission stands so convenient to the railway station in the outskirts of the widely scattered concession as to suggest that the workers in this difficult bit of the Lord’s vineyard wish to be prepared at any moment to abandon their task at the behest of their powerful rivals. The train that picks up there the broken end of what in a few years will be a continuous railroad the whole length of Indo-China strains its way for more than two hours toward Hué, the Annamese capital. First there is a desert of brush and sand from mountains to the sea, its blue bays dotted by so many sails that one’s sympathy is rather with the hunted fish than with the crowded people who must have them or starve. Huge fish-nets on poles, pulled from the shore, leave the denizens of the deep little chance for safety except by taking to the far high seas. Then for twenty miles the railway crawls along the face of a cliff, not a hundred feet above chaotic heaps of rocks boiling in the surf of a vast stretch of blue ocean, burrowing its way through many tunnels. At length both rocks and sea disappear, some densely jungled hillsides succumb in time to a plain, now planted with rice, now covered with low brush, single weather-faded thatched huts or clusters of them scattered across it, and with the sudden tropical twilight passengers blend into the chaos of rickshaw-men of the capital of Annam.