Chapter XXI

Several trains run day and night the whole length of Formosa, covering the 257 miles between the northern and the southern port in ten or twelve hours. Besides, there are branch-lines, and growing extensions above Keelung and below Takao in the south, while over on the precipitous east side of the island work is progressing on the system that before many years will encircle it entirely. But the railway confines itself everywhere to the edges of the island, like Japanese control and orderliness, and nowhere penetrates very far into the magnificent mountainous interior that makes up three fourths of the area and nearly all the beauty of Formosa.

Against the almost anarchistic background of travel, even by rail, in the China of to-day, these real Japanese trains were like a return to the modern world again. One could overlook the meter-gauge, as of Japan proper, and the screechy, ear-torturing whistles of the locomotives copied from Europe; for the trains take the time-table seriously; ticket-collectors uncover and bow at the door even of third class—the patronage of which is quite possible to the traveler without “face” to lose and the habit of stretching his money over the greatest possible distances; the constant watering and sweeping of the car-floors is an enormous gain over China, where none but a few special first-class coaches can vie in cleanliness with the cheapest class here, though the mass of Formosans has not yet by any means reached the Japanese stage of pulchritude. On the other hand it is not they who strip to scanty underwear in the first- and second-class coaches.

Whether it is due to fear of the savages beyond or that more desirable land is plentiful, the hills do not seem to be cultivated even near Keelung and Taihoku. They are densely green, but with low shrubbery rather than crops, while rice spreads everywhere across the bottom-lands where they are not already covered with graves—acres of graves that are merely green mounds, recalling Korea; graves of stone, horseshoe-shaped, recalling southern China. Wide roads rather cheaply paved, with unsubstantial-looking bridges, parallel and cross the track, bearing bicycles, once in a long while an automobile, above all bullock- and coolie-carts, which take the place of pole-burdened carriers jogging along the narrow, winding, stone-flagged trails across the channel.

Here even the fields are orderly, the rows of beans or sugar-cane, of sweet potatoes and indigo, stretching away in unwavering military lines, sometimes clear to the distant foot-hills. Discipline is so omnipresent that even the traveler direct from China soon ceases to be surprised that there are no riots at stations between those getting on and off the train, no bullying soldiers and other ticketless persons of influence or special privileges crowding out honest passengers. Instead the stations are so exactly alike, so standardized, that one feels sure the resplendent station-master’s honorable chop-sticks inside are pointed in such a direction—perhaps northeastward toward Tokyo. The very station trees are disciplined, in military alignment and trimmed as precisely alike as the hair of boys in an orphanage. Men stand at petrified military attention at crossings and switches, a green flag in the hand toward the approaching train, a red one on the side toward which, by their gracious permission, it is permitted to proceed.

But out in the country there is some of the picturesqueness of China. Rags on the ends of fish-poles, manipulated by old women, by broken grandfathers, by children too young to wield a hoe, or merely by the wind, do their best to scare away the crop-destroying birds. The locomotive fronts of water-buffaloes now and then challenge the screeching trespasser upon their domain, always to think better of it in time and flounder away through the muddy rice-fields, perfect pictures of the better part of valor. But at the larger stations men in red caps wait discreetly, as in Japan, beneath the eaves to carry off the baggage of travelers who summon them to life, and venders in green caps parade the platform offering the ubiquitous “O-bento!” and crying other wares which any one knowing English can, listening carefully, recognize by ear,—“Matchi! Tabako! See-dare! See-tron! Bee-ru! Aisucureemu!”

Toward the center of the island the main line divides, to come together again a hundred miles farther on, and that section close along the barren seacoast is a dreary trip, the dirty low water only rarely showing a patch of blue far out, a long region covered as far as the eye can see, or to dismal mountain foot-hills, with cobblestones of all sizes, only now and then a tiny oasis of thin cultivation among them. Splendid dikes, made of these same cobblestones held together with wire netting, protect the right of way against rivers undoubtedly turbulent in the rainy season. The numerous streams of Formosa are short, but they all lead merry lives while they last. Tunnels, of which the Japanese seem inordinately fond, abound; and where else are telegraph-wires so numerous as in the islands of the Nipponese? It is as if they were suggestive of a spying disposition.

The south-bound traveler in Formosa comes at length frankly into the tropics. Banana-groves become numerous; rice and sugar-cane stretch to the very base of sometimes distant mountains; bamboos wave their plumes languidly in the tepid air and dispute with palm-trees for foothold on jungled hillsides that are gashed with precipitous stony watercourses down which rage torrents in the season of the rains. Geographically, too, the temperate zone has been left behind; for a sign-board just below Kagi marks the Tropic of Cancer, which distributes the island almost equally between the cool and the equatorial divisions of the earth.

By this time the fair highways with poor bridges have degenerated into dirt roads that grow rather pathy farther south, though four-wheeled wagons, with tiny wheels in front and huge ones behind, drawn by water-buffaloes at their own chosen speed, continue to the end of the island. Chinese roofs cover the compact villages modestly, as if they dared not toss their corners so picturesquely aloft as in the land whence they came. Throughout the island there is but little color—or odor—compared with China, but there is a certain gaiety in feminine costumes, varying more or less by districts. These mingle together on the railway, so that Cantonese women with flowers in their hair, Foochow field-women with their historic three-dagger head-dress, women from Amoy and Swatow with their own peculiar notions of propriety in personal adornment jostle Formosan country women with still other ideas on this important subject. For a considerable distance through the center of the island the native women dress their coarse jet-black hair into what looks like a clumsy imitation of the exaggerated style of Japan, so that they suggest modest countrified geishas; but the custom is said to be autonomous, and no daughter of Taiwan so low as to copy from the women of their unloved rulers.

Below the imaginary line dividing the tropics from the less ardent zone nearly every one except the Japanese takes to chewing the betel-nut, as we miscall it. It is really the betel-leaf, from a climbing vine which, for convenience sake, is often planted beside the areca-palm, the most slender member of the palm family. The nut of this, together with lime and sometimes other ingredients, added to the betel-leaves which are the base and most important part of it, makes up the substance of this repulsive habit. The gaping mouths of the Chinese are ugly enough under normal circumstances; when they drivel with betel-juice they are a sight to go far to avoid. Perhaps it is because the areca-palm and its affectionate climbing companion will only grow in the tropics that the people of a small island are geographically divided as to the habit, though that is not a particularly satisfying explanation.

Persimmons, which the Japanese call _khaki_, papayas and pumalos, those giant members of the citron family of which strangers do not always grow so fond as the _geta_-wearing race, abound in southern Formosa. Up and down the island country women, in the trousers, jacket, and mushroom hats which make them all but indistinguishable from their husbands, shovel cobble ballast along the railway. How our “straw bosses” would shriek with laughter at that, or turn the circumambient air a dense blue, according to their individual temperaments!