Chapter XXIX

There can be no dispute as to the justice of having named the chief stepping-stone between Japan and the Philippines “Ilha Formosa.” Even from the sea it is a beautiful island; no visitors, except those foolish enough to content themselves with a journey along its tame, railway-linked western flatlands, will be likely to forget in one brief lifetime its magnificent interior. Once it has decided, not far inland, to take to the clouds, Formosa rises very abruptly from the western foot-hills, range after range of blue mountains, their tops most often covered with clouds, the highest of them topped with snow in midwinter, vying with one another in their excited upward climb until they culminate in Niitakayama, known to the outside world as Mount Morrison. This giant of the Japanese Empire rears its head, though rarely showing it to the world below, more than thirteen thousand feet above the sea, on which it can look down in almost any direction. Many of its neighbors have an elevation of more than ten thousand feet. Then, as if their ambition for climbing had suddenly subsided, the ranges drop precipitously down to where the blue waters of the Pacific lap the solitary crags beneath. The cliffs on the east coast of Formosa are reputed to be the most headlong in the world, towering in places a sheer six thousand feet from the water’s edge.

One extremely narrow valley, between this great central mass of mountains and the smaller eastern coast range, stretches half the length of the island, in its central portion, and along this the Japanese are already completing a section of the government railways. This passes a few plantations and links together some unimportant towns, but runs mainly through semi-savage territory. The wild region to the north of it presents a serious problem to the engineers charged with completely surrounding Taiwan by rail. There are two trails by which the island can be crossed, one at the southern end, and another, unsafe without a large escort, nearly through the middle of it. Several hundred miles of push-car tracks thrust their way inland in perhaps half a dozen places, but none of them penetrate very deeply into the precipitous and savage interior, doubly romantic because it is forbidden territory.

One journey well worth the making is that up Arisan, where great forests of evergreen trees, some of which are believed to be fifteen centuries old, are being exploited by means of an exceedingly steep little railway that brings down mammoth logs for local building and for export. But wherever the traveler strikes inland he cannot fail to be rewarded by unusual scenic beauties, and sooner rather than later to run into the true Formosans. If these wild men have a sense of humor, they surely laugh at the world below, for they monopolize the invigorating climate of the mountains, while the despised little people who claim to rule over them, and, as far as the savages know, all the rest of the effeminate human race which considers head-hunting too hardy a pastime for its feeble nerves, must content themselves with the sea-level plains, even in enervating midsummer. The Japanese forbid travelers to visit these children of nature on the more or less sincere pretext that they may lose their heads; the fame of the head-hunters themselves proves a much more effective ban. It is conceivable that an experienced and resourceful explorer might escape the net of Japanese police so solicitous of his welfare, but nothing but good luck, and perhaps a disarming temperament or a taking way with savages, could save him from whatever the mountain-dwellers, who would be sure to pick him up soon after he crossed the guard-line, might choose to do with him.

The hand-cars, by which are moved freight and those few passengers whose thighs or lack of time will not permit them to furnish their own transportation, consist of a platform five feet square set on a four-wheeled truck. For ordinary travelers a box or a bag thrown on this as a seat completes the arrangements for a journey into the interior. When a foreigner is captured, however, he has little choice but to travel “first class,” which means that he rides on one of these same hand-cars, surmounted by a superstructure of wicker or woven bamboo-withes, like a sentry-box with a seat, at least trebling the price of the trip. This has its advantages, though they are scarcely worth the money. Unless there is another first-class passenger, which seems rarely to happen, the distinguished victim has the conveyance to himself. It calls for him as near his inn as the little railway track will bring it, and at the hour he chooses to be ready; his pushers are a bit above the average, thanks to the double incentive of a hope of tips and the preference for the lighter work of passenger over freight service. When he meets another car he may sit stolidly in his place, while its lower-class passengers alight and their pushers lift it off the track, providing it is not laden with a heavy cargo from the hills that is even more immovable than a first-class passenger.

A single pusher trots one across the first dozen miles of plain, where the scenes are approximately the same as along the steam railway,—rice-fields, flooded or waving with ripening grain, according to the season, water-buffaloes, some of them slowly and ponderously performing their allotted labors, others leisurely grazing the scanty grass of grave-mounds and paddy-dikes, probably with a solitary black bird on their backs, or with a faded and somewhat tattered young Formosan stretched out at full length, his head equally comfortable on the neck or the rump of his phlegmatic beast. A village or a cluster of shops appears now and then, some of them division-points at which the traveler changes cars and crews—by having his superstructure set over upon another hand-car propelled by a new pair of legs.

The pushers are all Formosans, quite like any other Chinese coolies in outward appearance, except that they are better fed and less likely to be raggedly clothed. But before long the traveler recently from China will be struck by their taciturnity, their lack of Chinese cheerfulness, as if they had led a lifetime of repression, or had underneath their outer obedience a deadly hatred of all alien races, and not merely of the one ruling over them, which makes them unwilling to enter into conversation with foreigners beyond the few remarks necessitated by their calling. In short, they differ from their Chinese fellows across the channel just as alien-ruled peoples the world over differ from men who consider themselves independent.

At length the dead level gives way to slopes growing gradually steeper, with lesser descents between them, down which pusher and all coast at pleasant speed. The hitherto straightforward track begins to twist and wind in an effort to find the easiest ascents; there may come a long bridge of piles and bamboo, with so swift a climb into some town across the river that even a first-class passenger is expected to descend, and will have time to explore the place before his baggage has been pushed around the great circle by which the track mounts to it. Here two pushers man the car to which his private cabin is transferred, for the ascents will grow ever steeper, first over increasing foot-hills, then into actual mountains, while for half-hours at a time only the utterly dispassionate will fail to get out and walk.

Men and women working in couples push many of the freight-cars and nearly all the work-trains one passes on the way. Until one is close upon them it is all but impossible to distinguish one sex from the other among these country people of lower Formosa, dressed almost exactly alike, in a loose jacket-shirt, and cotton trousers reaching to the calves, topped by a mushroom hat of leaves and bamboo splints. With experience the eye learns that the slightly plumper, the bit less angular workers, those who swing their hips as they walk and take a trifle shorter steps, are the female of the species. Somehow one comes in time to know them by instinct, whether knee-deep in the fields or trotting in a row of coolies of mixed gender under undulating pole-borne burdens. Yet one is never ready to wager any great odds on the question until they are so close at hand that their often comely features and their distinctly feminine forms leave no ground on which an opponent would be willing to lay a stake. There is no downtrodden air about these women, any more than among the country women of Japan. With their sturdy bodies and uncrippled feet they are on physical equality with their men, and why should they take a back seat for them? At times they do, but only where feminine modesty requires it. Here is real domestic companionship, each car-pusher with his wife as a team-mate, perhaps with the rest of the family on her back to complete the picture.

Higher still begin the tea-fields, dense low bushes stretching in rather closely planted rows over hills and ridges, which here and there show evidences of recent reduction, probably by burning off the former jungle, from wilderness to cultivation. Somewhere about here, too, or just over the next high ridge yonder, one will begin to see scattered members of the mountain tribes. This far down they look anything but dangerous, rather too tame and over-friendly, in fact. The first one I came upon was a tattooed old woman who greeted me from beside the track like a long-absent brother, and had almost to be shaken off by force.

At the first camphor camp where I stopped for the night, in this case quite a town, with a Japanese sergeant of police and several shops, there were numbers of head-hunters who had more or less submitted to civilization. Some of them wore Japanese garb, especially a few women, who seemed to be keeping house for lonely men from Japan. From such camphor stations jungle paths strike inland in hardly accessible places, up slopes where civilized man would never expect to find a trail. These are difficult for effete shod humanity to follow under the most favorable conditions; when it rains, as it does often and generously in the mountains of Formosa, they are almost impossible. But they lead those who have the persistence and the prehensile capacity to climb them through magnificent forests, adorned with splendid ferns as big as many of our northern trees, to isolated clusters of huts that one recognizes at a glance as the dwellings of “wild” men. In some place these low shacks are built of rude slabs of wood; more often they are made of slate, with a smaller hut on stilts near-by in which food is stored. Probably the men cannot be trusted with food in the house itself while their women are away working to grow more of it for them. Even as near civilization as this one begins to run across youths dressed in a single blanket-like garment, carrying bow and arrows, a huge knife in the half of a section of bamboo as scabbard hanging at their thighs, who look easily capable of taking the head of any unwary traveler who ventures too far outside the protecting sphere of the Japanese.