Chapter X: The Upper Yangtze

I was very impatient to be off on my western journey, but after the boat was engaged, the tracking ropes examined by experts at the customs, and my few stores—tea, curry powder, and rice—had been bought, I had four days of “hanging on.” The boatmen made various excuses for delay. One day it was that the _lao-pan_, or master, had not advanced them money wherewith to buy stores; another was a feast day; a third must be spent in paying debts or they would be detained; and on the fourth they said they must visit certain temples and make offerings for the success of the voyage! The weather was raw, grim, and sunless. I had had a fire day and night in my room at the customs, and a fireless, draughty boat was a shivery prospect, but things usually turn out far better than either prophecies or expectations, and this voyage was no exception.

I was fortunate in being able to take as far as Wan Hsien Mr. Owen Stevenson, of the China Inland Mission, who had had ten years’ experience in Yunnan, accompanied by Mr. Hicks, a new arrival; and they engaged the boat for the next stage to Chung-king, which gave Mr. S. some little hold on the _lao-pan_, who was a mean and shifty person, coerced into evil ways by a terrible wife, a virago, whose loud tongue was rarely silent, who had beaten her eldest boy to death a few months before, and of whom the remaining boy—a child of eight—lived in piteous terror, lest he should share the same fate. This family of five lived in the high stern cabin, but were apt to run over into parts of the boat which should have been _tabu_. The crew consisted of a pilot who is responsible for the navigation, a steersman, a cook, and sixteen trackers and rowers.

The boat itself was a small house-boat of about twenty tons, flat-bottomed, with one tall mast and big sail, a projecting rudder, and a steering sweep on the bow. Her “passenger accommodation” consisted of a cabin the width of the boat, with a removable front, opening on the bow deck, where the sixteen boatmen rowed, smoked, ate, and slept round a central well in which a preternaturally industrious cook washed bowls, prepared food, cooked it, and apportioned it all day long, using a briquette fire. At night uprights and a mat roof were put up, and the toilers, after enjoying their supper, and their opium pipes at the stern, rolled themselves in wadded quilts and slept till daybreak. Passengers usually furnish this cabin, and put up curtains and photographs, and eat and sit there; but I had no superfluities, and my “furniture” consisted only of a carrying-chair, in which it was very delightful to sit and watch the grandeurs and surprises of the river. But gradually the trackers and the skipper’s family came to over run this cabin, and I constantly found the virago with her unwelcome baby girl, or a dirty, half-naked tracker in my chair, and the eight-year-old boy spent much of his time crouching in a corner out of reach of his mother’s tongue and fist.

Abaft this were three small cabins, with windows “glazed” with paper, and a passage down the port side from the stern to the bow, on which I cannot say they “opened,” for they were open (!), and a partial privacy was only obtained by making a partition with a curtain. Abaft these was the steersman’s place, which was also a kitchen and opium den, where my servant cooked, and where the pilot and most of the crew were to be seen every night lying on the floor beside their opium lamps, passing into felicity. Abaft again, at a greater height, the skipper and his family lived. On the roof there were hen coops and great coils of bamboo rope for towing.

It was an old boat, and the owner was not a man of substance. The paper on the windows was torn away; the window-frame of the cabin in which I slept, ate, and carried on my various occupations, had fallen out, the cracks in the partitions were half an inch wide; and as for many days the sun seldom shone and the mercury hung between 38° and 43°, and hugging a charcoal brazier was the only method of getting warm, and that a dubious one, the earliest weeks were a chilly period.

On the afternoon of January 30th I embarked from the customs pontoon much exhilarated by the prospect before me, but we only crossed the river and lay all night in a tremendous noise among a number of big junks, the yells of the skipper’s baby being heard above the din. This man excused this last delay in starting by sending word from the shore that he was waiting for the mandarin’s permit, and would be ready to leave on the following daybreak.

I was up at daybreak not to lose anything, but hour after hour passed, and no _lao-pan_ appeared, and at ten we started without him to meet him on the bank a few miles higher, when there was a tremendous row between him and the men. We were then in what looked like a mountain lake. No outlet was visible; mountains rose clear and grim against a dull grey sky. Snowflakes fell sparsely and gently in a perfectly still atmosphere. We cast off from the shore; the oars were plied to a wild chorus; what looked like a cleft in the rock appeared, and making an abrupt turn round a high rocky point in all the thrill of novelty and expectation, we were in the Ichang Gorge, the first and one of the grandest of those gigantic clefts through which the Great River, at times a mile in breadth, there compressed into a limit of from 400 to 150 yards, has carved a passage through the mountains.

The change from a lake-like stretch, with its light and movement, to a dark and narrow gorge black with the shadows of nearly perpendicular limestone cliffs broken up into buttresses and fantastic towers of curiously splintered and weathered rock, culminating in the “Pillar of Heaven,” a limestone pinnacle rising sheer from the water to a height of 1800 feet, is so rapid as to bewilder the senses. The expression “_lost_ in admiration” is a literally correct one. At once I saw the reason why the best descriptions, which are those of Captain Blakiston and Mr. A. Little, have a certain amount of “fuzziness,” and fail to convey a definite picture.

With a strong, fair wind our sail was set; the creak and swish of the oars was exchanged for the low music of the river as it parted under our prow; and the deep water (from fifty to a hundred feet), of a striking bottle-green colour, was unbroken by a swirl or ripple, and slid past in a grand, full volume. The stillness was profound, enlivened only as some big junk with lowered mast glided past us at great speed, the fifty or sixty men at the sweeps raising a wild chant in keeping with the scene. Scuds of snow, wild, white clouds whirling round pinnacles, and desolate snow-clothed mountains, apparently blocking further progress, added to the enchantment. Crevices in the rocks were full of maidenhair fern, and on many a narrow ledge clustered in profusion a delicate mauve primula, unabashed by the grandeur and the gloom. Streams tumbled over ledges at heights of 1000 feet. There are cliffs of extraordinary honeycombed rock, possibly the remains of the “potholes” of ages since, rock carved by the action of water and weather into shrines with pillared fronts, grottoes with quaint embellishments—gigantic old women gossiping together in big hats—colossal abutments, huge rock needles after the manner of Quiraing, while groups of stalactites constantly occur as straight and thick as small pines, supporting rock canopies festooned with maidenhair. Higher yet, surmounting rock ramparts 2000 feet high, are irregular battlemented walls of rock, perhaps twenty feet thick, and everywhere above and around are lofty summits sprinkled with pines, on which the snow lay in powder only, and “the snow clouds rolling dun” added to the sublimity of the scenery.

It was always changing, too. If it were possible to be surfeited with turrets, battlements, and cathedral spires, and to weary of rock phantasies, the work of water, of solitudes and silences, and of the majestic dark green flow of the Great River, there were besides lateral clefts, each with its wall-sided torrent, with an occasional platform green with wheat, on which a brown-roofed village nestled among fruit trees, or a mountain, bisected by a chasm, looking ready to fall into the river, as some have already done, breaking up into piles of huge angular boulders, over which even the goat-footed trackers cannot climb. Then, wherever the cliffs are less absolutely perpendicular, there are minute platforms partially sustaining houses with their backs burrowing into the rock, and their fronts extended on beams fixed in the cliff, accessible only by bolts driven into the rock, where the small children are tied to posts to prevent them from falling over, and above, below, and around these dwellings are patches of careful culture, some of them _not larger than a bath towel_, to which the cultivators lower themselves with ropes, and there are small openings occasionally, where deep-eaved houses cluster on the flat tops of rocky spurs among the exquisite plumage of groves of the golden and green bamboo, among oranges and pommeloes with their shining greenery, and straight-stemmed palms with their great fan-like leaves. Already in these sheltered places mauve primulas were blooming amidst a profusion of maidenhair, and withered clusters and tresses showed what the glory of the spring had been and was yet to be when the skirts of these spurs would be aflame with azaleas, and clematis, and great white and yellow roses, and all the wealth of flowers and trailers of which these were only the vestiges.

Another feature was boats large and small, and junks, some laboriously tracked or rowed like my own, when the wind failed, against the powerful stream, or descending, keeping the necessary steerage headway by crowds of standing men on the low deck, facing forwards, vigorously working great sweeps or _yulows_, five or ten at each, the gorge echoing all along its length to the rise and fall of the wild chants to which the rowers keep time and which are only endurable when softened by distance. After some hours of this region of magic and mystery, near sunset we emerged into open water, with broken picturesque shores, and at dusk tied up in a pebbly bay with glorious views of mountain and woodland, not far from the beautiful village of Nan-to, and the “needle” or “pillar” of heaven, well known to the dwellers in Ichang. The Ichang gorge is about twelve miles long; the Niu-kan, grander yet, about three; the Mitan about three and a half; the Wushan about twenty; and the Feng-hsiang, or “Wind-Box,” the last of the great gorges, about four. These are the great gorges.

I halted for Sunday in this lovely bay, an arrangement much approved of by the trackers, who employed the holiday in washing their clothes, smoking a double quantity of opium, and making a distracting noise, aggravated by the ceaseless yells of the boat baby, yells of an objectionable heredity and undisciplined naughtiness, which at first imposed on my ignorant sympathies. Nevertheless I luxuriated in the quiet which one can obtain when a babel is unintelligible.

In the afternoon the air was keen and bracing, the sky very blue, and the sunshine, after three weeks of gloom, had the charm of novelty. By the narrowest of paths I climbed a cleft down which a crystal rivulet fell in leaps, pausing to rest now and then in deep pools fringed with a profuse growth of maidenhair. Minute plots for rice rose in steps along it; its banks were masses of ferns, roses, and clematis, the beautiful “Connecticut running fern” being as common as is the _Filix mas_ with us. Higher rose the steep path; more glorious were the mountain views, more marvellous the forest of spires and pinnacles, more graceful the slender-stemmed palms, finer the contorted _Pinus sinensis_, more lush the dense foliage, bluer the sky above—not the China we picture to ourselves, of water, quaint bridges, curled roofs, and flat, formal gardens, but a Chinese Switzerland, sub-tropical, an intoxication, a dream!

In such scenery it was appropriate to come upon a deep-eaved _châlet_ of brown wood, with surroundings, models of cleanliness, shady with magnificent bamboo and orange groves, through which were seen far below deep ravines and picturesque brown villages, and the broken sparkle of the Great River, with snowy mountains on the other side, and from the junks on its broad breast the rowers’ chant floated up harmoniously, and from the farmhouse, where the people seemed to be leading a rural, domestic life with guests about them, a man came out speaking politely, and hauled off a fierce dog, decidedly hostile to foreigners.