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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78626 ***
+
+[Illustration: Endpaper]
+
+[Illustration: Century VAGABOND BOOKS of TRAVEL]
+
+
+
+
+                              EAST OF SIAM
+
+
+[Illustration: There was a young lady of Laos]
+
+
+
+
+                              EAST OF SIAM
+         _Ramblings in the five divisions of French Indo-China_
+
+                                   BY
+                             HARRY A. FRANCK
+
+    Author of “A Vagabond Journey Around the World,” “Roving through
+  Southern China,” “Vagabonding Down the Andes,” “Four Months Afoot in
+                              Spain,” etc.
+
+                        ILLUSTRATED WITH NUMEROUS
+                       OUT-OF-THE-WAY PHOTOGRAPHS
+                              BY THE AUTHOR
+
+                            GROSSET & DUNLAP
+                  _Publishers_    ::  ::    _New York_
+
+           By arrangement with the D. Appleton-Century Company
+
+
+                          Copyright, 1926, by
+                            THE CENTURY CO.
+
+
+                          Printed in U. S. A.
+
+
+                                   TO
+                    THE HOSPITABLE FRENCH COLONIALS
+
+
+
+
+                                PROLOGUE
+
+
+Those of us who had the good fortune to take part in that great
+adventure known as the World War can scarcely have failed to notice,
+among the many kinds of French colonial troops, some little men in khaki
+and brass-topped mushroom hats, most of them with black teeth. It was
+not until five years after the Comedy of Versailles that my perpetual
+wandering over the face of the globe brought me to the land from which
+they came—Annam, “Kingdom of the Eminent South.” There was not only the
+motive of satisfying, by seeing them at home, the curiosity raised by
+these little brown men in the French army; as far back as I can remember
+I had felt inquisitive toward that strangely shaped spot on the map,
+that slender country which drips like a stalactite of candle-grease down
+from the southeast corner of China.
+
+Besides, during all my two years of roving about the once Celestial
+Empire I heard frequently of the wonders of the ruins of Angkor in
+Cambodia. So one day in early January, a propitious season, I dropped
+down to Saïgon, visited those astounding remnants of the past, and
+returned overland all the way to Canton. Later, toward the end of April,
+I brought my family to Hanoï for a month of Parisian change on the way
+to Yünnanfu, and took advantage of the opportunity to journey through
+Laos, largest, most interesting, and least known of the five divisions
+of France’s Indo-Chinese empire. So in the end I traveled not merely the
+length and breadth of Annam but saw all five parts of that
+dumb-bell-shaped land east of Siam which the French consider their most
+important colony in the Far East.
+
+So unusual was my luck during those travels that only my overwhelming
+modesty has kept me from entitling this unpretentious tale of them
+“Hobnobbing with Kings”; and so very interesting a trip was it to me
+personally that in the face of my hard-earned knowledge that our ever
+more herd-minded general public is as fearful of the unknown and the
+unfamiliar as the most superstitious of wild tribes, and would much
+rather read of the deeply tourist-trodden streets of Rome and Paris, I
+have insisted on performing this unassuming task.
+
+Those two well separated months were more than a mere vacation from
+Chinese travel. To jaunt through French Indo-China is to see a sample of
+what China itself would probably be under European control, white-man
+rule—were any nation powerful enough to accomplish that many times
+larger task—as Formosa suggests what it might be under the Japanese. I
+hope I have at least made it clear that Indo-China is not in any sense
+China, but the living line of division between two ancient and very
+different masses of Oriental civilization, even as its name signifies.
+
+                                                        HARRY A. FRANCK.
+
+
+
+
+                                CONTENTS
+
+
+ CHAPTER                                                            PAGE
+       I EQUATORWARD                                                   3
+      II ON INTO CAMBODIA                                             28
+     III THE JUNGLE-GUARDED RUINS OF ANGKOR                           46
+      IV THE CAMBODIANS AT HOME                                       74
+       V NORTHWARD FROM SAÏGON                                        86
+      VI THROUGH ANNAM TO ITS CAPITAL                                103
+     VII MAROONED IN HUÉ                                             124
+    VIII AN IMPERIAL HAPPY NEW YEAR                                  147
+      IX THE PEOPLE OF THE EMINENT SOUTH                             166
+       X HURRYING ON TO THE NORTHERN CAPITAL                         185
+      XI HANOÏ AND THE TONKIN                                        201
+     XII THE FRENCH IN INDO-CHINA                                    219
+    XIII OVER THE MOUNTAINS TO LAOS                                  244
+     XIV EN PANNE!                                                   260
+      XV DOWN-STREAM TO LUANG PRABANG                                278
+     XVI KNIGHTED IN THE KINGDOM OF THE DIVINE BUDDHA                296
+    XVII SPEEDING SOUTHWARD                                          323
+   XVIII VIENTIANE AND BACK TO HANOÏ                                 347
+
+
+
+
+                             ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+ There was a young lady of Laos                           _Frontispiece_
+                                                             FACING PAGE
+ Cholon architecture is neither exactly French nor
+   Chinese                                                            18
+ A funeral procession in Cholon, Chinese suburb of Saïgon             18
+ A decreasing form of conveyance in Cochinchina                       19
+ Unlike China proper, great sections of Indo-China are
+   covered with magnificent virgin jungle-forests                     19
+ One may still crawl about Angkor by elephant, though
+   Fords are much more à la mode                                      82
+ Buddhist priests took their saffron-clad ease in the
+   shade along the great moat of Angkor-Vat, beyond the
+   tourist bungalows in the background                                82
+ A rural Cambodian family at home                                     83
+ Motor-buses link together the railways of Indo-China,
+   crossing broad sandy river-banks on strips of woven
+   bamboo splints                                                     98
+ In Annam prisoners working in the streets wear a light
+   remnant of the old neck-torturing Chinese _canque_                 98
+ In the “Marble Mountains” are many grottoes, some of
+   them elaborately fitted up as temples                              99
+ An Annamese summoning a ferry from across one of the
+   many rivers which still offer no bridges to
+   automobiles                                                        99
+ An Annamese girl, chaperoned by her small brother, sells
+   her wares in the market-place of Hué                              114
+ When it rains in Annam, as it does on every provocation,
+   a simple straw raincoat covers either sex among the
+   masses                                                            114
+ Like the southern Chinese the Annamese are expert
+   boatmen because they learn their calling long before
+   they reach the dignity of clothing                                115
+ Swinging in the village squares is a favorite diversion
+   of the Annamese populace during the lunar New Year’s
+   season                                                            115
+ Overlooking, from his flagpole, the palaces of the
+   emperor of Annam                                                  130
+ China itself cannot outdo the old bronze urns before the
+   main palace of the Annamese emperor                               130
+ The throne-room of the emperor of Annam, on the
+   afternoon before the New Year’s ceremony                          131
+ The waterfront of Hué, capital of Annam, offers a
+   contrast between its native craft and the French
+   bridge                                                            146
+ Once a visitor surreptitiously snapped this glimpse of
+   the mandarins of Annam kowtowing before their emperor
+   on New Year’s Day                                                 146
+ The scores of homes of mandarins within the “citadel” of
+   Hué were all richly decorated for the lunar New Year              147
+ Inside the “citadel” and near the sumptuous palaces of
+   the emperor of Annam are the perhaps more comfortable
+   homes of his humble subjects                                      147
+ An Annamese mandarin all dressed up for his New Year’s
+   honors to his emperor; his servant behind                         162
+ Servants of the mandarins carry home after the ceremony
+   the ancient Ming accoutrements of their masters                   162
+ Emperor Khai-dinh of Annam on his French-supported
+   throne                                                            163
+ Some of the most effective of Annamese tombs are covered
+   with pictures and designs made of broken porcelain
+   dishes set in cement                                              163
+ With each new year the Annamese clear of vegetation the
+   graves of their ancestors, back to remote generations             194
+ I asked a living caretaker to fill the place of one of
+   these of stone which guard the entrance to a royal
+   tomb of Annam                                                     194
+ In the heart of Hanoï, northern capital of French
+   Indo-China, stands a delightfully picturesque lake of
+   goodly dimensions                                                 195
+ Annamese girls hold Sunday morning flower-market at this
+   corner of the city-girdled lake of Hanoï                          195
+ The ladies of Annam lose any claim they have to beauty
+   when they open their mouths on black-enameled teeth               210
+ Thi-ba, who did her best as guardian of our children,
+   was equally set against bobbed hair and skirts                    210
+ For days one may steam in and out among the fantastic
+   rock islands of the Bay of Along                                  211
+ Tropical vegetation sometimes commandeers sustenance on
+   the rock peaks                                                    211
+ The women of Tonkin combine hat, sunshade, and umbrella
+   in one unwieldy contraption                                      258
+ The Muong women wear little above the waist, except the
+   loads they carry                                                  258
+ The guard turned out to greet my companion, the
+   _résident_ of Vinh, at the first village on the way to
+   Laos                                                              259
+ The Muong chief of our noonday village came in state,
+   bringing eggs and native fire-water                               259
+ The chief sport of the mountain-dwelling Miao of Laos is
+   the making of assorted neck-rings of silver dollars
+   that might better be spent for shirting                           274
+ The Miao woman of Laos take no back seat for their men              275
+ A Kha woman of the semi-wild tribe that is said to be
+   the aboriginal race of mountainous Laos                           275
+ Wind-sieved rice is the principal food of the rural
+   inhabitants of Luang Prabang                                      306
+ With a silk scarf worn loosely over a shoulder the women
+   of Luang Prabang capital are more coquettish than
+   their waistless sisters of the country districts                  306
+ The palace of the king of Luang Prabang sits placidly on
+   the bank of the upper Mekong                                      307
+ The king turned out his chief dancing-girls and masked
+   male entertainers for my approval                                 307
+ Knighted in the Kingdom of the Divine Buddha                        322
+ Two royal elephants saw me off from the palace, the
+   youngster showing a desire to make me depart on the
+   run                                                               323
+ A Miao woman on her travels carries bed and food                    323
+ A Kha home in the mountains of Luang Prabang                        338
+ Grandfather and grandmother of the primitive Khas tend
+   the children while the intermediate generation seeks
+   the family livelihood in the hills                                338
+ Wherever his habitat, the water-buffalo is happiest when
+   immersed to the nostrils in a mud-hole                            339
+ One group of the many Laosian carriers who bore my few
+   belongings across Luang Prabang                                   339
+ This ancient monument in Vientiane, French capital of
+   Laos, is the most curious remnant of its regal days               354
+ A door of a ruined palace or temple of Vientiane                    354
+ Within the ruined temple the Buddhas sit, in the
+   infinitely patient attitude of the East, crumbling
+   away under the rains and disappearing beneath the
+   encroaching jungle                                                355
+ Though the French have brought automobiles to Vientiane,
+   this ancient form of conveyance still predominates                355
+
+
+
+
+                              EAST OF SIAM
+
+
+
+
+                               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_.
+
+[Illustration: Cholon architecture is neither exactly French nor
+Chinese]
+
+[Illustration: A funeral procession in Cholon, Chinese suburb of Saïgon]
+
+[Illustration: A decreasing form of conveyance in Cochinchina]
+
+[Illustration: Unlike China proper, great sections of Indo-China are
+covered with magnificent virgin jungle-forests]
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER II
+                            ON INTO CAMBODIA
+
+
+The French move freely in and out of Indo-China without passports, but
+all “foreigners” are tightly bound with red tape. Germans and Russians
+are not yet admitted at all, and even harmless tourists are treated as
+suspicious characters. In these days of rapid transmission of
+information, and its more exciting sister, misinformation, it was
+something of a surprise to find, five full years after the signing of
+the Treaty of Versailles, that news had not yet reached the colonial
+bureaucrats even of this far-flung dependency that the World War was
+over. Having been officially robbed of my passport upon landing, as
+happens to all _étrangers_, I could recover it only by appearing next
+morning at a police office and filling in on both sides a large form
+designed to bring out in elaborate detail all the past, present, and
+future history of the signer. One question in particular was puzzling:
+“Have you ever been in the enemy country?” Since I had been laboring
+under the impression that France was just then at peace with all the
+world, I asked the official in charge of my case to elucidate. He seemed
+to betray a hint of annoyance beneath his perfectly Gallic exterior, and
+finally explained that the forms were still those used in war days. “The
+high cost of printing, you know....”
+
+One question naturally leads to another: were a few months of helping
+his countrymen to hold the bridge-heads on the Rhine to be counted
+against me? But he seemed to be growing suspicious of my straight face;
+besides, since he was the one functionary in the passport division who
+flattered himself on speaking some English, his attention was largely
+taken up with seeing that I did not address him in French, or that I at
+least should not sully the carefully Anglicized form by answering some
+of its questions in that tongue. How could that one of his colleagues
+whose laborious monthly duty it is to translate a dozen or more of these
+forms for foreigners back into French, as the beginning of a lengthy
+_dossier_ on each such individual admitted to the colony, meet any
+suspicion that his berth should be abolished, if foreigners were allowed
+to do their own translating? The expense of putting those forms into
+English, back in war days, would moreover hardly be justified if they
+were not used for foreigners as intended; hence nothing more natural
+than that even those foreigners whose French is far more fluent than
+their English should be compelled to give their history on these
+translated forms, even though the official beside me had to help them to
+turn their French into English.
+
+I had been too long familiar with French bureaucracy to suppose that my
+passport would be returned at once, merely for a bare hour of filling in
+a questionnaire. Naturally this had to be taken to men higher up, “for
+study,” before so final an action could be taken. But I could prepare to
+take the evening steamer to Cambodia “in all tranquillity,” the
+philologist of the passport bureau assured me—in his own tongue now, no
+doubt because the information was unofficial. My passport would be
+handed me on the steamer before she sailed, he confided. His manner was
+such that it was hard to keep from flattering myself that my notoriously
+honest face had led him to make an admission to me which he would never
+have dreamed of making to an ordinary traveler.
+
+He had spoken truly too; the passport was returned, even as he had
+foretold, and the manner of its returning showed how valuable are the
+services rendered by the swarms of officials who look after such
+matters. I had strolled across from my hotel to the steamer _Mekong_
+long enough before to be already deep in deck-chair conversation with
+the charming young American lady and her merely more elderly chaperon,
+whom our tropic-emaciated consul had told me to expect among my
+traveling-companions, when a young man in what looked like a disguised
+uniform began pacing the deck shouting for “Monsieur Ügh,” as nearly as
+his cross between a grunt and a word can be rendered in English. The
+fourth or fifth time he disturbed the absorbing pleasure of meeting
+one’s own people, of the preferable sex at that, unexpectedly in a far
+distant land, I noticed that he waved in one hand an American passport.
+About the same moment my returning wits confided to me that the noise he
+was making so incessantly was the Frenchman’s most sincere attempt to
+pronounce the name “Hughes.” In a whole-hearted desire to help him out
+of what was evidently on the verge of becoming a troublesome duty, I
+rose and asked the shouter’s permission to look at the document. It was
+my own passport. I thanked him cordially for the two forms of relief
+this discovery brought, and returned to my conversation.
+
+Before long my attention was distracted once more by another stentorian
+voice, this time calling for “Mademoiselle Ügh!” I offered my services
+again—and retrieved the passport of the young lady beside me, whose name
+was no more Hughes than is my own. Barely had she stowed it away in that
+intricate way ladies have of risking their valuable possessions when a
+third voice, paging “Madame Ügh!” began to punctuate the summer night. I
+recognized the man who had despoiled me of my passport before allowing
+me to land from the _Panama Maru_. It was natural that the same official
+could not be expected to hand out more than one of the documents that
+evening, with so few to go round. Besides, this man had hardly had three
+days in which to recover from the task of receiving me into the country.
+It caused me no great surprise to find that the paper he now flourished
+about his head belonged to the elder of the two ladies beside me, though
+her deceased husband had borne a name not even remotely suggestive of
+the prolific family Hughes.
+
+Priceless sources of information must the voluminous _dossiers_ of
+visitors to Indo-China be, so carefully compiled by the division of
+police inspection charged with drawing up and “studying” them. It was
+not until I had time later to do some studying of my own that I examined
+my passport, with its square yard or less of stamping and annotation by
+the French authorities, in an effort to solve the mystery of the name
+under which we had evidently all three been registered in the annals of
+Indo-China. Only then did I notice that even more prominent, on the face
+of the official permissions so generously granted by our Department of
+State for American citizens to proceed abroad, than the name of the
+holder, was that of one Charles E. Hughes.
+
+Ah, well, what are colonies and “protectorates” and mandated territory
+and spheres of influence for if not to provide posts for more officials?
+The episode might soon have been forgotten in the glories of a tropical
+night, had not so much surprise been shown by the passport officials and
+the ship’s company that Monsieur and Madame Hughes had booked separate
+cabins. Our passports were again taken away from us in Pnom Penh,
+restamped and returned to us there, stamped and registered once more
+upon our return to Saïgon, and my own was manhandled I know not how many
+more times in sundry places before my travels in Indo-China were over;
+but I neglected to obtain exact figures on the increase of the Hughes
+family before finally leaving France’s rich Far-Eastern possession
+behind. In contrast to all this, I was asked to show my passport once
+during two years of roving in China, and the asker was quite contented
+with a visiting card instead.
+
+It was a noisy night about our frail little cabins on the _Mekong_, and
+dawn found us anchored at Mytho, to which we could easily have taken a
+train from Saïgon that morning in time to board the craft before she
+pushed off again. Because the Messageries Fluviales have a monopoly on
+the rivers of Indo-China against which even the French, of unofficial
+standing, protest loudly but in vain, travelers pay high for the
+thirty-six-hour journey from the capital of Cochinchina to that of
+Cambodia on these rather uncomfortable little river steamers. But again,
+why trouble with colonies and protectorates if they give no monopolies?
+For that matter the French steamers between Marseilles and Shanghai
+charge more for the passage from Hong Kong or Singapore to Saïgon than
+between those two British ports, where competition reigns.
+
+All day we plowed our way, with frequent stops, up a wide river through
+a dead-flat palm-tree and banana country. Between halts there was little
+of interest except our fellow-passengers, and even they were not
+particularly unique. Eight travelers lolled in the breeze under the
+tarpaulin above the first-class deck, to which our complexions confined
+those of us of so-called European race. Besides the young American lady
+and her chaperoning compatriot, there was an English couple to whom
+tropical travel was an ordeal to be endured only because Angkor is
+something one must see. Made miserable by every deviation from the
+accustomed ways of their foggy native land, Mr. and Mrs.—shall we say
+Piffton-Smith? no matter what, so long as we do not forget the hyphen
+and disgrace them by the mere name of Smith—suffered acutely from
+everything: the French food, the French meal-hours, the French language,
+the delightful climate, even the friendly little ants in the cabins.
+What a pity one cannot find everything just as it is at home when off on
+one’s travels in quest of the strange and the different! Only by
+constant mention of their youthful daughter, Lady So-and-so, recently
+married to the far from youthful governor of—er—a British crown colony,
+could Mrs. Piffton-Smith endure the martyrdom at all. One must not
+forget that daughter any more than the hyphen, though for that matter
+there was little danger of doing either; trust Mrs. Piffton-Smith for
+that. It was evident that no one in the family had ever been a Lady
+before.
+
+But let us be charitable; perhaps it is not merely the women of
+foot-bound China who have more cause for complaint than the favored sex.
+While we mere men had to use our oven-like little cabin only as
+dressing-rooms between a day of loafing and a night of sleeping on the
+cot-provided deck, the ladies were cruelly confined during their
+nightgowned hours. Three lively young French officers on a furlough from
+their regiments, one of whom spoke excellent English, completed the
+cabin passenger list. French soon came to seem the natural tongue, so
+that the Piffton-Smiths had new cause for complaint in being left out of
+the conversation. Under the back awning behind the orange-box
+“staterooms” was a much larger collection of passengers, untroubled with
+cabins, cots, or the fear of creasing their garments. As the day wore
+on, the human type there gradually changed. The throng grew less Chinese
+as Annamese travelers wandered ashore at the frequent stopping-places,
+became more Hindu, more Aryan, the eyes large and straight, with well
+defined eyebrows, mustaches shading the lips of the men, some with
+almost Russian beards. Those rare inhabitants of the banks, half seen
+through the trees and reeds, also took on Aryan features, for all their
+chocolate color.
+
+
+Daylight found us at Pnom Penh, capital of the French protectorate of
+Cambodia. It was a calm, well kept little city, with hardly any of the
+hubbub of China and none of its filth—at least within sight. The air was
+less deadening than at Saïgon, less charged with electricity and
+water-vapor, though still so hot that there was no joy in doing anything
+equal to the joy of doing nothing. Half a dozen wide streets, much
+shaded by trees, invited the stroller about a town in many ways quite
+up-to-date, pleasant as it was with tropical languor. Pnom Penh has been
+called the Little Bangkok, as Saïgon is the Little Paris. I was at last
+completely beyond Chinese civilization, though there were some Chinese
+residents, mainly merchants; most of the commerce of Cambodia is in
+Celestial hands. White people were not numerous, but there were plenty
+of other foreigners—black and brown French soldiers from other colonies,
+representatives of nearly all the lands of the Far East. Yet all other
+races stood out merely as individuals among the Cambodians, so closely
+related to the Siamese in clothing, language, the uneven pompadour
+hair-cuts of the women. With rather stupid faces from the mouths of
+which dripped betel-nut juice, above perhaps the ugliest female costumes
+in the world, ending in the inevitable _sampot_, a kind of pants-skirt
+drawn up between the legs and tucked in behind, they were far from
+attractive. Gentle effeminate-looking men with long bobbed hair or black
+tresses wound together in a knot at the back of the neck meandered about
+between the shafts of rickshaws or toiled slowly about the
+steamer-landing.
+
+The first men in the flowing saffron robes of Gautama whom I had seen in
+the two decades since my Siamese journey—though I had seen Buddhist
+priests and to spare—stood out against the less gaudily garbed laymen.
+The bonzes are the bosses of the country—always of course after the
+French. There had been sixty thousand of them in Cambodia the year
+before, for the Cambodians are very religious. But they pay no taxes,
+and under the French they are gradually being _supprimés_, so that now
+they were reduced to 42,250, according to official statistics. Still,
+these languid beings in bright yellow robes, often set off by red, rose,
+purple, and other draperies, with shaven heads and Hindu skins, were by
+no means scarce. Groups of them with their begging-bowls stood before
+many a shop and house while the sun was still low, sauntering on to make
+their silent plea to others after a handful of rice or a saucer of
+cooked fish had been poured into their bowls by the pious inmates.
+
+There was something very French about Pnom Penh, for all its very
+Oriental aspect. French bread was on sale everywhere; the “Grand Hôtel,
+N. Manolis, Propriétaire,” might, like all the others in Indo-China,
+have been in Paris—except for the heat—tourist prices and all. Here
+again were the same marble-topped tables, the same zinc _comptoir_
+presided over by a sharp-eyed and caustic-minded matron, the same flimsy
+newspapers in awkward holders, the same letter-paper headed by an
+advertisement of the Maison Dubonnet. Fortunately we were sailing again
+that evening and needed its monopolistic accommodations only in the way
+of food and drink. Midday, with its lassitude, its invincible
+somnolence, followed so closely upon the déjeuner, however, that its
+shelter, and at least the repose offered by its chairs, with the
+marble-topped tables serving as props, were essential. The most ardent
+sight-seer could hardly have found pleasure in roaming about Pnom Penh
+with the unclouded equatorial sun directly overhead. Dinner in the
+evening was to the strains of a native orchestra that might have done
+worse, and a veritable stage-lighting effect was produced by the
+swirling wings of the big electric fans suspended from the ceiling amid
+clouds of insects.
+
+Pressed by his more belligerent neighbors, Norodom, king of Cambodia,
+placed his country under the protection of the French in 1863, and since
+then the nominal ruler is merely a play king. The real boss is the
+_résident supérieur_ sent out from France. It goes without saying that
+the royal figurehead is surrounded by all the riches and sumptuous state
+which the French and his own doting subjects can supply him, while the
+“protector” does all the work. The arrangement seems to be much like
+that between the couple who agreed that one should decide all the small
+questions and the other all the large, and so far there have been no
+small questions in Cambodian affairs. Old pagodas of the Burmese rather
+than the Chinese style stand forth here and there in the older part of
+the capital as a reminder of independent days when a head fell at the
+motion of the kingly finger. But most of Pnom Penh dates from the years
+of the protectorate. Little more than half a century has passed since
+Norodom confided his country to France, and already much that the French
+built in the capital has taken on an air of age, under the perpetually
+burning sun and the seasonal rains that drive vegetation to
+super-vegetable performance. The beautifully straight streets traced by
+the French, so out of proportion with the population that passes along
+them, are green with grass outside the busiest section. In the far
+outskirts hover the thatched huts, often on stilts, of the mass of the
+population.
+
+The gilded steeples of the throne-room, however, within the great royal
+inclosure, infallibly draw the eye that catches them. This and several
+others of the palaces are so new that they were not finished when the
+World War broke out, and two of them still had scaffolds about their
+needle-pointed spires and along their swift golden roofs. Inside the
+outer wall of the inclosure runs a long series of life-sized paintings
+from the sacred texts, before which groups of pilgrims bow down in
+worship, and squat in contented repose during the hours of siesta. One
+of the palaces has a silver floor thirty-six by a hundred and twenty
+feet, the solid silver _dalles_ half an inch thick. A gold Buddha,
+studded with diamonds, that is said to be worth sixty million piastres
+is among the many precious things, as well as much tinsel, inside the
+plain bright-yellow walls of the palaces, to which there are no real
+barricades. Cases containing jewels of great price in the Silver Temple
+are not locked, but are protected merely by pasted strips of paper, with
+the name of the guardian written on them. The Cambodians still consider
+their king so sacred that they never steal his possessions, and alien
+thieves seem never to get this far afield. Of the far-famed Footprint of
+Buddha within its own special pagoda there is nothing to say except that
+it is about six feet long, in solid rock, studded with jewels, with the
+toes all exactly of the same length.
+
+Our day in Pnom Penh was well chosen, for in the afternoon the king had
+a dance performed in the wall-less pavilion of the palace grounds for
+the pleasure of visiting French and British officers. It was a far
+different dance from those which kings of Europe give in honor of
+visitors. While the white strangers in town sat as at a tennis
+tournament beneath the shade of the pavilion roof in seats provided for
+those who do not naturally squat, two girls, the youngest hardly in her
+teens, appeared in the center of the floor. Among his other playthings
+the octogenarian king chooses annually two hundred and forty girls from
+the prettiest of the upper class, to be trained to dance before him. But
+either his eyesight is poor, the choice extremely limited, or he had
+deliberately set out to insult these guests foisted upon him by the
+French rulers, for even a popular novelist could not have called this
+chosen pair beautiful. Flour, or some white powder closely resembling
+it, covered their faces in ghastly thoroughness, faces in which not the
+suggestion of an expression seemed to be permitted by the rules of
+Cambodian dancing, and flour in which streams of sweat cut strange
+arabesques during the ceremony. On their heads were replicas of the very
+pointed steeples of the throne-room; costumes gaudy with gold and many
+colors, quite unlike the every-day dress of Cambodian women, somewhat
+resembling in fact the garb of a Spanish toreador, covered them from
+neck to knees. Two big silver anklets clinked above each of their bare
+feet. It was a costume by no means scanty enough for the climate, and if
+the truth must be told at all costs there was a conspicuous call for
+soap and water just where their floured faces joined the gaudily garbed
+bodies.
+
+Dancing? Yes, perhaps, for want of a word more exactly descriptive. It
+really was posturing, more or less to the rhythm of an orchestra of
+native players on strange instruments squatted on the floor at one end
+of the open pavilion. There was never a quick movement, not a hint of
+animation in the white faces, though there was considerable expression
+in the lithe arms and posturing bodies; more, no doubt, than we ignorant
+Western spectators suspected. But it was impossible to picture the
+youths in an American dance-hall even suspecting, to say nothing of
+admitting, that this was dancing. Through it all an old woman tossed
+from the side-lines, like a football coach, hints to the perspiring and
+apparently stiffly embarrassed performers. Little by little all the
+rabble in town sneaked up, noiseless on bare feet, and squatted just
+within the shade along one side of the pavilion. Cambodia’s king, one
+gathered, was democratic in his attitude. The only element of the
+population lacking before the ceremony ended were the priests in their
+yellow robes; like their colleagues of Spain on the day of the
+bull-fight, they may not morally mingle with the laymen during such
+ceremonies.
+
+Old King Sisowath himself was not there, except perhaps in spirit. His
+eighty-four years made him chary of excitement. But before we went off
+to the later afternoon band concert in a park at the other side of town
+we had seen his crown, his seven parasols in as many different colors
+for each day of the week, his two even more gaudy ones for fête days,
+his two palanquins for state and ordinary occasions, and all those other
+baubles which the tourist so often mistakes for the rewards of travel.
+The Cambodian sovereign mounts his throne only once in his life, even so
+long a life as Sisowath’s—at his coronation. On other days he holds
+audience sitting on a cushion at the foot of it. Yet barefooted servants
+wandered about dusting and fingering everything, reminding one that even
+emperors must have charwomen. Crude, violent colors were much in
+evidence. When the king goes forth in state both he and his chair are so
+covered with gold and precious stones that the eye quails before him in
+this equatorial sunlight. Poor old figurehead! Little did Norodom dream
+to what depths his demand for French protection would so soon sink his
+successors. Nothing is more symbolical of the real position of old
+Sisowath than the well known story of how his favorite concubine yielded
+to the urgings of a young French official on the steamer bringing his
+Majesty back from Paris a few years ago, and of the king’s impotence to
+punish either of them.
+
+
+The _Barsac_ was somewhat more comfortable than the _Mekong_, though the
+mother of Lady So-and-so would not admit it. No doubt this was because
+it confined itself almost entirely to carrying visitors to Angkor rather
+than making its passengers adjuncts of its freight. A pilot in the
+head-dress of a Chinese nurse-maid, a sailor adorned with a West Indian
+bandana, short-haired women and all but naked men paddling about in
+dugout canoes of very fat belly and narrow upturned ends, sometimes with
+a supercilious drone in a yellow robe among them, mildly enlivened the
+early hours next morning. The larger boats were pushed along by one oar
+in the hands of a standing boatman, or boat-woman, as in China, and
+Venice. Flocks of white birds almost like seagulls skimmed across the
+yellowish water; all was pleasant as long as we kept moving; only the
+breezeless halts were painful.
+
+It was in fact a beautiful day’s sail up across the Tonlé Sap, the Great
+Lake formed by the Mekong in high-water time, now nearing its close.
+This mid-January excursion was indeed probably the last to Angkor for
+the season, unless later travelers succeeded in making the journey by
+automobile along the new road soon to be completed. In place of houses
+on pole legs, twelve or fifteen feet above the ground, there came
+floating villages, scores of houses tightly bound together. Enormous
+quantities of fish are taken in the receding waters, and as the lake at
+its height covers vast areas the population is reduced to this form of
+earning a livelihood. The fish heads are boiled for oil, the highly
+offensive scent of which now and then reached our nostrils, and the
+fish, gutted and salted, are sent to China and Singapore. Once the sea
+covered this region, with only an island where there is now a part of
+the mainland, so that salt-water fish are still caught in the lake, and
+in the flood season freshwater fish are taken far out in the ocean.
+
+All day we steamed through a veritable Gatun Lake, now with jungle and
+an occasional floating village on one side, now with a hazy range of
+hills far off on the left, sometimes with nothing but the yellowish
+waters as far as the eye could see. Occasionally there was not even a
+junk in sight, no more trace of man than before his appearance among the
+terrestrial fauna; at other times the great expanse, broad as a sea, was
+flecked with sail-boats with almost diamond-shaped sails. But the
+flooded forest was not dead or dying as at Gatun, for the waters recede
+in time each year to save it from extinction.
+
+We were to have reached Angkor toward the noon following our evening
+departure from Pnom Penh; but I for one was glad we spent all the day
+sailing across the Great Lake, if only for the sunset. The lake was flat
+as glass, one side lost on an ocean-like horizon, the other a low
+distant endless line of trees. A delicate lilac spread along all the rim
+of the sky; then on the western side the limpid air became pink, and
+almost suddenly everything was tinged with this color: the surface of
+the lake itself, the entire circle of horizon, every tiniest fleck of
+cloud in the sky above. Ahead, a line of beautiful green showed the
+endlessness of the drowned forest; on the west, in contrast, there came
+a quick heaping up of masses of dark, chaotic, terrifying, gigantic
+things which stood upright and seemed to weigh upon the waters, like
+fantastic blocks of mountains, standing out as clearly as if their
+summits were painted along the clear sky, yet looking as if they were
+preparing for a formidable crumbling away, such as one might fancy the
+end of the world to be. Gradually, like some mammoth holocaust, the
+blood-red sun burned its way down into the clouds massed along the
+western horizon, clouds which outdid themselves in strange shapes, from
+impossible crags, on which trees seemed to be falling in rapid
+succession, to snow-clads farther off; and then, after it had been gone
+entirely for a while and one thought it had disappeared below the edge
+of the earth, the sun reappeared, a demon face red with rage peering
+forth as from a cave, from which it advanced down to the very water’s
+edge, spilling blood far out across the lake. Then red chaos, and
+purple, and lilac, and finally soft mauve night.
+
+Not long afterward we got off into sampans with happy laughing rowers
+and went away through the inundated forest, among great trees bathing
+clear to their upper branches, the water under their armpits, or only
+their heads emerging, like modest women. Higher rose the ever thicker
+forest close about us; we found ourselves ascending a narrowing stream;
+and at length, soon after the moon appeared, we bumped against something
+more or less resembling a pier. It was the end of an excellent road,
+raised high on an embankment for some distance, and we climbed into—ah,
+well, it is a small commonplace world at best, this twentieth-century
+globe, even in its most distant recesses—into what our English friends
+called motor-cars, though they were those more than familiar things
+built by an inventive and once eccentric but now widely known
+ex-Sunday-school teacher of Detroit, and were off for a moonlight ride
+behind a careful chauffeur who wore no shoes. It was a tepid night,
+dotted with fireflies, the musical silence forming an undertone to the
+droning of the cars broken now and again by the soughing of big
+water-wheels raising water from the small river that turned them. In the
+palm-tree jungle on either side we made out many little houses on
+slender legs, the inhabitants of both sexes lolling or strolling in a
+single piece each of Scotchy plaid wrapped about them like a short
+skirt.
+
+It was nearly eleven at night when we reached the _sala_, a comfortable
+spreading bungalow erected by the French for the accommodation of the
+fussy modern visitors to Angkor. Two decades ago Pierre Loti took all
+day along that road in a jolting two-wheeled ox-cart, and put up in the
+stilt-legged shack of Buddhist monks. But we had arrived at a lucky
+moment, as was evident from the sounds of revelry by night that came to
+us from beyond the moat just across the road from the _sala_. It was a
+supernaturally broad moat, looking at least a hundred yards wide in the
+light of the full moon that drifted lazily across a great building
+rising to pointed towers that bulked forth out of the night far beyond.
+An ancient stone causeway across it led to this gigantic structure of
+Angkor-Vat, before the partly ruined front doorway of which a
+torch-lighted throng was gathered. Visitors who had come before us,
+headed by a French novelist and the queenly wife of the governor of
+Cochinchina, had sent to Siem Réap at the edge of the Great Lake for
+Cambodian dancers, and with them had come fifty boys bearing torches and
+most of the native population of the district.
+
+There were a score of girls in the gaudy garments and the steeple-shaped
+head-dress of the calling, chewing betel-nut, and giggling like a bevy
+of New York typists as they danced, though the rules call for silence
+and wholly expressionless faces. Banked behind a dozen seated Europeans
+in white, and forming a compact circle around them and the dancers, two
+or three hundred natives of both sexes squatted or stood, many with
+naked youngsters between their knees. Small boys with blazing torches
+outlined the inner arc of the circle; the little torch-bearers squatted
+on the flagstones formed an enchanted circle of flames tapering upward
+to smoke about the dancers. Some of the spectators had taken places on
+the steps and the balustrade of the bridge; other half-naked Cambodians,
+and Annamese with their effeminate knots of hair, gave the gathering a
+ragged fringe. The ancient temple seemed to have returned to life, the
+days of very long ago to live again; it was easy to imagine these living
+dancers the descendants of those carved in stone on the pillars in the
+background, for all their black teeth and what looked like
+blood-dripping mouths.
+
+The Annamese spectators were solemn, like men so impressed with their
+own importance that they dare not break their dignity; the Cambodians
+were simple happy children, taking the joys of life as they come and
+giving no more thought to to-morrow than to stone-dead yesterday. The
+croaking of frogs in the broad shallow moat mingled with that of some
+loud-voiced species of cricket; birds of the night passed overhead with
+a startled cry—or was it applause?—at the strange scene below, profaning
+the great doorway of the dead temple. Beneath the brilliant tropical
+moon that all but blotted out the Southern Cross well above the horizon,
+the floured faces of the dancers took on, now a ghastly, now a clownish
+aspect, as they posed and postured, moving noiselessly in their bare
+feet slowly to and fro on the century-worn stone pavement. Dressed like
+the Hindu gods they seemed to be impersonating, they undulated back and
+forth on the glass-smooth stones, their supple arms waving as if they
+were mere antennæ without rigidity anywhere, in contrast to their
+stiffly immovable bodies.
+
+There was a story to be read, evidently, in their deliberate
+pantomiming, a solemn if not a tragic tale, for all the occasional
+bursts of embarrassed or prankish giggling, like plantation darkies at a
+cotton-field celebration. One gathered that a demon with several faces
+wished to carry off Siva, beautiful lady-love of Rama, and when the two
+rivals of the ancient legend faced each other with threatening gestures
+all the childish part of the audience began to shriek, as at the meeting
+of hero and villain in a Punch-and-Judy show or at the movies. Indeed
+the spectacle was insured against flagging interest by the behavior of
+the rapt happy throng in the flickering light before the ancient temple
+more than by the dancers it encircled. Young and old seemed to follow
+the story easily; to us Westerners without their background of ancient
+legends and Oriental symbolism it was merely a picturesque scene, made
+doubly fantastic by the circle of torches and weird with the thump of
+tom-toms that lasted deep into the night.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER III
+                   THE JUNGLE-GUARDED RUINS OF ANGKOR
+
+
+Soon after sunrise next morning Fords carried us off to some of the more
+distant ruins of the ancient city buried in tropical forest. With the
+heart of the day unbearable in the sunshine, it is wise as well as
+customary to get under way early at Angkor, and French breakfasts are
+brief, if not quite to the point. An excellent road, considering the
+place and the climate, set off close along the sides of the moat, then
+shot off at a tangent at the second corner. An abnormally broad moat it
+still seemed, wide as the Panama Canal even by sunlight; and it was all
+but covered with water-cress and beautiful white and pink lilies, or
+their tropical counterparts.
+
+To visit Angkor is no longer a proof of prowess, except of the
+Ford-endurance needed to make the circuit of ruins covering forty
+kilometers of throttling forest-jungle. Even as recently as the
+beginning of the present century visitors had to scramble through the
+wilderness about Angkor as best they could. To-day there is a network of
+good roads, French even to their sign-boards, to all the important
+ruins, with so few ox-carts or other native traffic on them now that
+they are almost as commonplace as our national highways—until suddenly
+they burst out again upon some other mammoth ruin.
+
+Described by a Chinese traveler two hundred years before America was
+officially discovered, and many times since, Angkor is still little
+known to the world at large, though it is perhaps the greatest
+collection of ruins on earth. Neither Java nor India can show so
+extensive and so perfectly preserved an architectural ensemble; Machu
+Picchu, similarly lost in dense tropical forest, though high up among
+the great ranges of the Andes instead of down at the dead-flat sea-level
+of Angkor, is a mere village by comparison. Once this Khmer city, buried
+for centuries and long left to desolation, was one of the splendors of
+the world. Its monuments still tell the story of the luxury of its royal
+and military life; its carvings give an inventory of its riches, from
+jewels to dancing-girls. The least observing must soon realize that this
+was once the heart of a magnificent kingdom; and what an immense city it
+was—and is. Angkor-Thom was larger than the Rome of Augustus; the great
+temple of Angkor-Vat alone has a space four times as large as the Place
+de la Concorde, which is larger than Columbus Circle.
+
+It seems that about the time of Alexander the Macedonian a people
+apparently detached many centuries before from the great Aryan race
+migrated from the direction of India and came to plant itself on the
+shores of this great river, the lower Mekong. Others say that when India
+and Burma were being conquered by barbarians at about the time of Christ
+these Khmer came down from northeast Burma, hillmen with a virility that
+has since died out, so that they in their turn have now long since been
+conquered, as they subjugated and mixed with the unspoiled aborigines of
+this region, “men with little eyes who worshiped serpents.” On what
+queer bases are civilizations built! Just as the old Nile, with its silt
+alone, caused a marvelous civilization to grow up in its narrow valley,
+here the Mekong, spreading out its waters year after year, deposited the
+richness that prepared the wealthy empire of the Khmer. The city of
+Angkor-Thom (Angkor the Great), capital of this empire, reached the
+nadir of its glory between the ninth and twelfth centuries of our era.
+The Khmer brought with them the gods of Brahmanism, the beautiful
+legends of the Ramayana, which seem to have come to them through the
+Hindus at about the time of Christ, and as their opulence grew in this
+fertile delta of the Mekong each king vied with his predecessors in
+clearing away the forest and in building everywhere magnificently
+decorated palaces, and gigantic temples chiseled with thousands of
+figures.
+
+Some centuries later—no one knows exactly when, for the existence of
+this once important people is largely effaced from the memory of man—the
+powerful sovereigns of Angkor saw arrive from the West missionaries in
+bright yellow robes, bearers of a new light at which the Asiatic world
+was just then marveling. The savage temples of Brahma became Buddhist
+temples; the statues of their altars changed their attitudes, lowering
+their eyes and softening their faces with gentle smiles. The Khmer
+empire of the Mekong delta appears to have started on the downward path
+during our thirteenth century. The history of its rapid and mysterious
+decline has never been fully written, and the invading forest guards the
+secret of most of it. There are evidences of a connection between it and
+the history of China; for it was not long after the Tai or Laos race
+that we commonly call the Siamese, masters even of Canton until 1053
+A.D., were driven out of what is now southwestern China by a series of
+battles along the West River, that the Khmers were in their turn
+dispossessed by this hardier though fleeing people. Time had moved
+swiftly with them. At least in the art of their monuments the Khmer were
+at their height during the twelfth century, and by the fourteenth they
+were so weak, perhaps because of the softening influence of tropical
+living, that they fled before the Siamese and founded a new capital to
+the southward. The little Cambodia of to-day, conserver of complicated
+rites the sense of which is almost completely lost, is the last remnant
+of this once powerful empire of the Khmer, which for more than five
+hundred years has ebbed away, until it has been all but extinguished
+under the silence of trees and mosses.
+
+From the end of the fourteenth century Angkor belonged to Siam, which
+changed its name and set over it a king of its own. Since then the great
+palaces and temples had been left to time and tropical vegetation, until
+little more than half a century ago the first European discovered, ruin
+by ruin, this marvelous city lost in inextricable jungle. This
+rediscovery is credited to Henri Mouhot, in 1861; but it was not until
+1910 that the uncovering of the ruins began. Annamese armies had long
+invaded Cochinchina, then a part of Cambodia, and to save herself from
+complete destruction the weakened nation became a protectorate of
+France, barely a year after Mouhot’s explorations. Angkor still belonged
+to Siam; but some wise Frenchman seems to have discovered that it was
+formerly a part of Cambodia and insisted on a return to the ancient
+_status quo_; or on applying that doctrine of “self-determination” on
+which unimperialistic France is so strongly set. At any rate Siam was
+“induced,” by the treaty of 1907, to “give back” to Cambodia all
+Battambang Province, including the Angkor region. Then communication was
+opened to the ruins, which had been at the mercy of the elements for
+nearly a thousand years.
+
+Yet they were not so badly ruined as they might have been. When the
+Khmer fled before the Siamese of the fourteenth century they could
+hardly have expected that their architectural marvels would merely be
+swallowed up by the voracious forest, but rather that they would be
+destroyed root and branch; and probably for generations they thought
+this had happened. But even the destroying of such massive works of
+stone is hard labor in an equatorial land, and the Siamese confined
+themselves to the destruction of the buildings of a political nature and
+left untouched the temples and other religious monuments. Buddhism was
+less respectful, for all its gentleness, and caused many of the Brahman
+glories to disappear, or replaced them with Buddhist statues and tawdry
+trappings.
+
+
+There are monuments vying in size and artistry with the best the ancient
+world has to offer, scattered through all the forest-jungle over nearly
+twenty square miles. The French have done a splendid job in uncovering
+and restoring these marvels of the past. We of the land of boasted
+efficiency would probably have cleared away and restored too much, for
+comfort and convenience’ sake, and spoiled the effect. In places even
+the French archæologists have in their professional zeal driven off the
+forest too ruthlessly, and left some ruins in the sad state of nudity of
+a stone quarry. But in most cases they have been thoughtful as well as
+careful. Great green plumes waved high over our heads as we sped along
+by road or strolled by side-trail to mammoth ruin after ruin. Trees that
+would be giants beside any of those of northern climes except our
+redwoods carried without apparent effort mighty loads of vines and
+parasites that would have stifled the sturdiest elm or oak. All this
+vegetation gave one the feeling of being so completely surrounded that
+he might never get out of it again; yet it was not such a forest-riotous
+wilderness as I had expected, and it was hard to believe that herds of
+wild elephants were trampling it down only a few miles away. Here and
+there were expanses of natural half-clearing; white birds in flocks
+escorted water-buffaloes through swamps that might almost have been
+passable by Ford.
+
+Yet there was a greater rage for destruction among the plants than had
+ever been shown by the Siamese. The Prince of Death, Siva of the
+Brahmans, has given to each beast the special enemy which eats it, to
+each creature its destroying microbes; and he seems to have foreseen
+that puny man would try to prolong himself a little by constructing
+durable things, and imagined a thousand destructive agents to annihilate
+his efforts. Huge trees which the French call _fromagers_—though I saw
+no cheese upon them, and our own name of “silk-cotton tree” seems more
+justified—their trunks as if whitewashed, or spotted with leprosy, or,
+more exactly still, as if they had been painted in lilac and cream by
+some fantastic-minded artist, roam the ruins with their buttress roots.
+Queerly grown in and over the great stone piles like inquisitive
+serpents, these roots have in some cases wandered thirty yards away in
+search of sustenance. Laocoön roots lifted great stones in their
+embrace; one had disdainfully shoved aside a huge pillar and taken on
+the job of supporting the mass of masonry itself. The banyan, with its
+aerial roots, does not overthrow the ruins; it gathers them, strains
+them to its bosom, as it were, so that enormous heaps of rocks that
+would otherwise long since have fallen apart still maintain the form the
+Khmer gave them. Trickery rather than force characterizes even the
+vegetation here in the tropics, though the trees too have learned to
+fight when necessary. The more brutal _fromager_ bursts walls asunder by
+the slow force of its growing trunk, squeezes ancient buildings to death
+like the boa-constrictor, swallows them in its great maw. Especially
+what the French call the “fig-tree of ruins” is irresistible; it reigns
+as master to-day at Angkor. In the beginning it was only a little seed,
+sowed by the wind on a frieze or the top of a tower. But from there its
+roots, like steel cables, have insinuated themselves between the stones,
+descending by a sure instinct toward the earth; and having at last
+reached it, they have grown quickly from its nourishing soil and become
+enormous, disrupting, unbalancing everything, opening thick walls from
+top to bottom, sometimes completely destroying the edifice. Among the
+palaces, above the temples it has so patiently disintegrated, it spreads
+its pale smooth branches with their serpent spottings, and shades the
+débris with its superb broad domes of foliage as with great green
+parasols.
+
+Here and there along the roads and trails magnificent trees have been
+mutilated by man, rare and furtive as he is in these parts. Deep holes
+are burned in many a trunk in order to collect in earthenware pots resin
+for the making of candles, as the Landais of France gather pitch from
+their pine-trees. Now and then the road is straddled by stone gateways
+above which smile huge human faces with long tresses of lianas. But for
+all the centuries they have had free play, neither the slow encroachment
+of the forest and jungle nor the heavy dissolving rains have been able
+to wipe out the impression of Angkor-Thom as a city of splendid
+architecture, or the ironic bonhomie, as Pierre Loti calls it, of these
+mammoth stone faces, much more disquieting than the grimaces of the
+monsters of China.
+
+Though they were remarkable architects, the Khmer were rather poor
+masons. They knew no more of how to build a vault than by piling up huge
+stone after stone in horizontal layers, each reaching a little farther
+out toward the center. Their arches are crude, made of immense stones
+laid one on top of another, and instead of a keystone they simply placed
+a larger stone on top. Their total work is all the more surprising, and
+its duration that much more marvelous, their roofs, though they must
+always have leaked, as they do now, all the more wonderful because the
+Khmer so little knew how to build them. Some have been shored up by the
+French; some of them were evidently repillared by the builders
+themselves. Yet scores still stand, after nearly a thousand years,
+without any such assistance.
+
+Most of the stones themselves are not so well fitted as at Machu Picchu
+in the Andes; but the decorations on them outdo anything the ancient
+civilizations of the Western Hemisphere have to offer. The greatest art
+of the Khmer was their taste in sculpture, the finish of their
+execution, their treating of colossal things with the care and delicacy
+of jewels. Everywhere are figures, bas-reliefs, carvings without end, so
+delicately chiseled that one might think them lace pasted upon the
+stone, façades as carefully worked as the most patient embroideries. The
+stones all have round holes in them, suggesting how they may have been
+carried to the places they were needed. The reddish, comparatively soft,
+sandstone or composite of which much of Angkor-Thom was built is common
+in this part of the world. A French geologist asserts that it is old
+lava. Yet the task of building such a city even with that was a task
+indeed in such a climate.
+
+All that first morning, and the next, we kept coming upon new masses of
+striking architecture in the forest. Now and again the modern road ran
+beneath towers bearing on each of their four sides mammoth human faces,
+always alike and said to represent Brahma. Many single faces were carved
+on eight, ten, a dozen huge stones awkwardly put together. These
+Cambodian _préasats_, as archæologists call them, whether or not they
+are adorned with the quadruple face of Brahma, are as characteristic of
+Khmer art as the palm-tree is of the Cambodian landscape. In one place
+the road was flanked by a great stone balustrade, a hundred yards long,
+and by the remnants of what was once another, each in the form of a
+gigantic cobra with raised head, upheld in the arms of a score of
+mammoth stone men. The cobra-head motif everywhere suggested a former
+ardent worship of snakes; human figures with a beak in place of a nose
+were almost as common. One great wall was covered with a procession of
+life-size elephants; beyond were walls formed inside and out of
+thousands of closely set Hindu figures. Here and there were suggestions
+of the Maya ruins of Central America, but this probably proves merely
+that minds which have reached a similar development run in similar
+channels, rather than that tropical people of a millennium ago crossed
+the great ocean.
+
+
+The tourist-minded Fords rushed us about all the Saturday and Sunday
+mornings following our arrival, but left us to our own devices the rest
+of the four days. The _sala_ where they duly deposited us again after
+each flight outdid the best hotels of Indo-China, except that the
+roosters housed just behind it might have been spared. But guests of
+course must have their eggs and their roast chicken, and no Frenchman
+would be so cruel as to deprive even a hen of its mate. Every living
+being, European or native, retired immediately after the eleven o’clock
+_déjeuner_ and did not rise again until two or three in the afternoon.
+To think of doing anything else was all but impossible, to say nothing
+of actually doing it. Not even the Cambodians, used to this climate at
+least for centuries, seemed able to endure those burning hours out of
+doors. For all my tropical experience I soon found that the only way to
+bear life during that atrocious period was to revert to the reputed
+costume of Adam before the unfortunate apple episode, turn the electric
+fan squarely upon my recumbent form inside the mosquito-net, and succumb
+to the fond hope of perhaps getting a nap.
+
+Those of us who knew nothing of real hardships also fancied we suffered
+one other terrible infliction in that otherwise comfortable bungalow.
+The French food naturally was good, with neither wine nor ice lacking,
+but the principal meal was made so miserable by swarms of mosquitoes
+under the tables that poor Mrs. Piffton-Smith—though of course she would
+violently resent the adjective—had to wear even at dinner the oven-like
+riding-boots she endured among the ruins out of an abject fear of
+“reptiles,” though, except for the stone cobras, the less imaginative of
+us never saw so much as a fleeing serpent’s tail. If there were duly
+presented newcomers at table she mitigated her martyrdom somewhat by
+frequent references to her daughter Lady So-and-so, wife of Lord
+So-and-so, governor of—and so on. But few travelers came after us; Mrs.
+P.-S. naturally knew no French, and obviously she could not speak to
+strangers without the formal introduction that was often lacking; and
+those of us who had long since learned that extraordinary daughter by
+heart were not, I fear, very sympathetic listeners even to new anecdotes
+concerning the Lady of the family. Those of the women who had no such
+antidote for those mosquito-tortured hours wrapped napkins, newspapers,
+anything at all, about their legs, and burned under the table
+joss-sticks enough to supply a Chinese temple, being unjustly denied the
+male privilege of relieving their nerves by such remarks as now and then
+rose from a man who, driven beyond endurance, tried a slap or two—and
+left a splotch of blood on his white trousers.
+
+After my first drenched nap I set out to roam through Angkor-Vat, most
+striking of all the ruins scattered over that twenty square miles of
+tropical forest. Vat, by the way, is the Cambodian and Siamese word for
+temple. Just across the lake-like moat, with its shimmering watery
+carpet of lilies and water-cress, on the outer shore of which the _sala_
+sits, the mighty building was heaped into the sky in the center of the
+only real clearing in the region. From the big stone doorway of long ago
+through which one emerges upon the great stone bridge and causeway
+leading to it, the central mass ahead bore a certain resemblance to the
+Kremlin; yet that is small beside it. The enormous stone slabs of the
+causeway were worn smooth as polished marble, in places even hollowed
+out, by the feet of men and women and elephants already dead a thousand
+years. For the few shod tourists who have followed it during the past
+decade can scarcely have made more impression on those cyclopean blocks
+than do the bare feet of pilgrims and of the bonzes in their yellow
+robes who still patter along it. Strange processions indeed must have
+trodden this aged causeway, flanked by a massive railing of gigantic
+stone cobras standing sentinel with raised heads—seven heads each,
+spread out like fans, the necks swollen as when the deadly snake is
+ready to strike.
+
+Life had become endurable again, yet the afternoon heat from the stones
+blazed upon all day by an unclouded equatorial sun was a succession of
+physical blows as distinct as my heavy Western footsteps along the
+causeway toward the basilic phantom ahead. Once inside the inner
+inclosure, this gigantic edifice dominated everything, a more impressive
+sight, in its way, than the Taj Mahal itself, as beautiful, almost as
+symmetrical, losing mainly by over-elaboration. Nowhere in the world
+perhaps has man piled up so many stones as in this mountain-temple.
+Crushing masses of sculptured rocks, terraces, stone-carved bas-reliefs,
+stairways leading swiftly upward into towers that seem to scrape the
+cloudless heavens, gave me a feeling akin to depression. At first sight
+all one’s impressions were jumbled together; disorder and confusion
+seemed to emanate from this hill of chiseled blocks. It is not simple in
+its lines, like Thebes and Baalbek, like Machu Picchu and the Taj Mahal,
+but has the exuberance, the dismaying complications of Hindu art, so
+that it is not merely by its enormity that it staggers the beholder. He
+who tries to see it all at once suffers the fatigue so common in
+museums; one must come back often, each time studying a little of it in
+detail, and then gradually a perfect symmetry asserts itself.
+
+Two monsters, darkened by centuries and bearded with lichen, though
+under the French they are now shaved from time to time, guard the front
+entrance to the temple itself, like dragons stationed before legendary
+grottoes. The base of this mighty pyramid of a structure is more than a
+kilometer square, and completely about it runs a great gallery that
+stretches far to right and to left from the four entrances on as many
+sides of the building. Beneath the tropical sky without a fleck of cloud
+that never for an instant left us during those four Angkor days the
+mountain-temple glowed with a golden-brown radiance, so that the
+greenish demi-day that suddenly replaced the glaring sunshine outside
+gave one the impression of entering a subterranean passage, though on
+the outside there are merely massive pillars. Those galleries
+surrounding the main structure are nearly three quarters of a mile in
+length, and for the entire circuit every inch of the wall is carved with
+an endless bas-relief giving the whole history of the Khmer up to the
+building of Angkor-Vat, the whole story of the greatest Hindu legend.
+For the incredible chiseled painting along the four outer walls of the
+temple has for its inspiration one of the noblest and most ancient epics
+conceived by the men of Asia, those Aryan ancestors of ours—the
+Ramayana. The uninterrupted bas-relief unrolls as long as the legs will
+carry one, an inextricable series of battles, warriors gesticulating
+with fury, combatants by the thousand, caparisoned elephants, ancient
+engines of war, war chariots with wheels strangely up-to-date,
+interminable scenes fleeing forever ahead in straight perspective, until
+they seem still more infinitely long than they really are.
+
+This wall of endless carvings looks like a single piece for hundreds of
+yards. One must look closely to discover the joints between the enormous
+stones put together without cement, yet adjusted with a precision as
+rigorous as in the monuments of Egyptian antiquity. I found myself often
+comparing with Machu Picchu this gigantic heap of sculptured stones, and
+at least in this encircling wall of Angkor-Vat the stone-fitting was
+equal to that at which the few visitors to the long lost city of the
+Andes have marveled.
+
+There are indeed two miles of galleries in the Vat, twenty-six thousand
+feet of bas-reliefs chiseled in stone, archæologists tell us. All these
+pictures were formerly painted or gilded, but they have been at the
+mercy of the elements for nearly a thousand years, and have lost all the
+brilliancy of the original colors. Sweating with the eternal humidity of
+the tropics, the panoramas have taken on a sad blackish tint, with, in
+places, the gleam of wet things. Then, too, up as high as the puny
+mankind of to-day can reach, the bas-reliefs—five meters high on those
+outer walls—are worn glass-smooth by the rubbing of secular fingers. In
+times of pilgrimage the whole multitude makes it a duty to touch every
+figure it can possibly reach. Here and there, in the parts lighted by
+the beautiful little windows with thick carved-stone bars that are among
+the chief glories of Angkor-Vat one may still see tracings of the
+original coloring, on garments or faces; and sometimes, in the tiaras of
+queens or goddesses, a little gold spared by the weather continues to
+gleam after all these centuries.
+
+
+In the middle of the face of each quadrilateral a portico opens in this
+great gallery and gives access to a central court in which the temple
+itself, properly speaking, rises, a prodigious heap of sculptured
+sandstone climbing into the blue sky. The grandiose spreading out of the
+courts of the second story and the formidable upward surge of the
+central mass all but take the breath away. Such a complication of lines,
+what a beauty for all the heaviness in the silent ensemble! The infinity
+of decorations is incredible; the Khmer certainly did not pay their
+workmen the union wages of to-day; for one thing there would not have
+been so much care and artistry in the work. The building seems to have
+been done by Cham and Tai prisoners of war and by regular levies of the
+Khmer populace itself—much as black Christophe built his citadel in
+Haiti. Evidently we must have some species of slavery to produce
+monuments of this kind; “free” workmen cannot furnish the constant
+enthusiasm and infinite care in details that they require. But in a way
+those tropical toilers so long since returned to dust had things better
+than our trade-union bricklayers of to-day, impossible as that may seem.
+For the story goes that there was one architect for every five hundred
+builders, and each of the builders had a hundred coolies to keep him
+supplied with stone! Then artists came to cover every available surface,
+with the care of painters working on canvas. For the Khmer were of the
+Hindu point of view, abhorring simplicity and uncovered surfaces.
+
+There are no obscenities among the myriad carvings of Angkor-Vat, even
+from our Puritan point of view, though somehow one expects them. But the
+Khmer kings evidently liked their musical comedies, or at least their
+ballets, even as does the tired business man of to-day. For there are
+Apsarases carved everywhere, in infinitely repeated groups, chiseled on
+every side of every stone pillar, not merely here at Angkor-Vat but
+throughout most of the ruins of Angkor-Thom, forever dancing before
+their long departed masters. These perpetually virgin though constantly
+violated nymphs of the Hindu paradise, everywhere sculptured in stone,
+under the porticos, in the verandas, in the clear-obscure of the
+galleries, beneath the hard sunshine that falls through crumbling
+vaults, make the dead walls live. Everywhere they dance, among the
+falling lianas, on the bases of temple altars, their arms supple, their
+busts stiff and upright, as millenniums ago on the shores of the Ganges
+for the amusement of Indra, as at Pnom Penh their living descendants
+dance before the octogenarian king on the silver pavement of his
+palace-temple. The artists of ancient times chiseled and polished as
+lovingly as any modern sensuous denizen of the Latin Quarter these
+dancing virgins—who can say what has become of the beautiful women from
+whom these perfect torsos were copied?—and all these figures in
+bracelets and rich adornments rather than clothing have been so often
+caressed in the course of the bygone centuries that their beautiful bare
+throats shine like polished marble. It is the women especially who,
+during their pilgrimages, touch them passionately, begging from them the
+gift of becoming mothers. Unfortunately, like those on the bas-reliefs
+of Egypt, the feet of these lovely creatures are badly done, being
+always drawn in profile even when the dancer is facing forward, so that
+what might seem art to the followers of the reputedly funniest of our
+“movie artists” merely testifies that the myriad beautiful stone
+goddesses of Angkor were the work of a primitive humanity, still
+struggling with the difficulties of design.
+
+
+I raised my eyes to the mass above me, and almost without volition my
+neck craned to its utmost that I might gaze upon the four giant towers,
+topped by a central one still larger, in which the temple rises. Nothing
+lives up there—except flocks of bats—and the stairways of startling
+height fall under the ardent sun like a cascade of sandstone. The Khmer
+were no more expert at making stairways than with roofs and arches and
+the feet of their dancing-girls, and Angkor-Vat has the steepest stairs
+in the world—even we who so love superlatives will not deny them this.
+Stairs that are all but sheer walls lead to the lofty heights of this
+mountain of a temple, stairs so steep that the knee-caps strike on the
+step above, and so narrow that the foot can only be set down sidewise;
+and even then there is many a slip, especially in descending. The bygone
+architects should have been more thoughtful toward dizzy tourists; the
+Piffton-Smiths never got above the ground floor at all—which was like
+coming to Rome and going home again without seeing the Colosseum. Even
+the surest-headed of us clung to the hand-polished old walls in
+descending, losing our footing often on the worn and sometimes wet
+steps.
+
+One must climb these cascades of stone, too, between recumbent lions,
+beasts suggesting Assyrian sacred bulls in stone, cobras spreading out
+their seven heads like a fan above their angrily swollen necks, as well
+as between smiling Apsarases, perpetually dancing for their long dead
+masters. A hard climb, even for me, whose strength lies mainly in legs,
+and I found myself on the first of three platforms, with a second story,
+of a height double that of the first, defying me with still more abrupt
+stairs, still more closely guarded by smiles and grimaces in stone. Then
+when I certainly had the right to think that at last I had arrived,
+there suddenly sprang up before me the third story, of a height double
+that of the second! It was like climbing the Andes, like fronting life
+and discovering to one’s astonishment that what at first looked like a
+struggle, perhaps an insurmountable obstacle, is only the easy
+preliminary to ever harder and higher tasks beyond. This progressive
+doubling of the heights, from one story to another, was a clever
+architectural discovery, enlarging the temple by an illusion from which
+one cannot escape. The Khmer were clever architects, as I have said
+before; and the memorable stairway that leads to the topmost platform,
+with its narrow worn steps on which grass grows even while the French
+are striving to keep this most magnificent of the monuments of Angkor
+clear of it, while pilgrims and tourists are constantly going up and
+down them, for their respective motives, is steep enough to give any one
+vertigo; even the sailor we know as Pierre Loti found it so. “One would
+say that the temple grows larger, prolongs itself indefinitely,
+straining itself toward the heavens, so that climbing Angkor-Vat is like
+those fatiguing nightmares in which one strives toward a goal that
+forever flees on ahead. The gods no doubt wish to make themselves more
+inaccessible the more one tries to approach them.”
+
+There are four of these stairways, watched over by the enigmatically
+smiling Apsarases, one on each side of the temple. As I mounted, the
+forest seemed to mount with me, spreading out on all sides to the
+horizon, unbroken as the sea clear to the circle of that horizon. The
+topmost platform must be at least a hundred feet above the plain, yet
+the great monument seems submerged, drowned in the midst of its verdure.
+It is the greatest extent of forest I have ever seen, except perhaps
+from the eastern slope of the Andes, where South America falls away into
+the enormous Amazon basin that stretches to the Atlantic. Formerly, in
+place of this silent sea of vegetation below, stretched the city of
+Angkor-Thom, perhaps no more forested then than Peking or a New England
+city to-day. If one could only push aside the roof of interlacing
+branches one could still see beneath them the walls, terraces, temples,
+the long paved avenues flanked by divinities in stone, balustrades,
+gigantic serpents with raised heads, Brahma-faced towers, all now
+swallowed up in the jungle. But the forest has become again what it was
+for incalculable centuries before the beginning of man, so that nothing
+visible remains of the work of those Hindu-like adventurers who many
+hundred years ago came here to tempt fate and clear the space of a city
+of nearly a million inhabitants. It endured only a millennium and a
+half, that episode of the empire of the Khmer; in other words a very
+negligible period compared with the longevity of the vegetable kingdom.
+The scars are reclosed, nothing now appears for all their labors, and
+the “fig-tree of ruins” spreads everywhere its parasol of green leaves.
+It is true that in our day other adventurers, from far off to the West,
+have founded near here the semblance of another empire; but it is small
+and puny compared to that of the Khmer, not likely to rival it in
+duration any more than it has in lasting monuments. When these
+pale-faced conquerers shall have gone their way also, they will merely
+have cleaned up a little the works of a greater race, and will be
+remembered only as the charwomen may be in the ruins of our sky-scrapers
+of to-day, by a charred broom or a broken dust-pan left here and there
+among the débris.
+
+All afternoon I climbed and loafed about that mighty pile of masonry. In
+the immense clearing within which the giant temple sits enthroned,
+defended by moats and walls, one had the impression of perfect security,
+quite unlike the feeling among the other ruins, for all the nearness and
+immensity of the great forest that hangs its black curtain all about it.
+Tigers do not cross the great stone bridge, even though the doors are
+never closed. The Vat was never finished. When, at the end of our
+thirteenth century, the Khmer empire fell, for no good reason that has
+ever been discovered, it was still in process of construction. As this
+great work of theirs surpasses any of our own, at least when we consider
+the tools they had, it is little short of presumptuous to suppose that
+we will endure longer than did that doughty empire of the tropical
+forests.
+
+
+The Chinese scholar who visited this mysterious empire on the eve of its
+decline and left the only known documents on its splendor tells us that
+the fifth tower of Angkor-Vat, rising above all the rest and most
+imposing and complicated of all, seeming to give the temple a mountain
+summit when seen from afar off, but dwarfed by the very size of the
+edifice when one is close beneath it, was crowned with a golden lotus so
+large that one could see its sacred flowers gleam in the air from all
+parts of the city that is to-day buried in the jungle. Leaning over from
+the upper platform at the base of this tower one looks down upon an
+entrancing scene below, most of it a hundred feet below. From up there
+one sees that what with the tropical sun and rain and long abandonment
+each of the superimposed layers of the temple has become a sort of
+suspended garden in which the immense leaves of the banana mingle with
+white tufts of the fragrant jasmine. The comfortable French bungalow
+across the moat is no larger than a dove-cote. Scattered about the
+temple clearing are slender palm-trees up which men climb by single
+bamboo poles tied with vines to the trunk, carrying over their shoulders
+bamboo buckets that they exchange for others hanging from cut fronds
+until they are filled with a sap from which is made a brown sugar. Even
+the almost naked men among the giant leaves of these trees that looked
+so high from below were far beneath me here. In the forest that
+surrounds the temple hundreds of parrakeets shrieked; one might think
+they had come from the four corners of the forest to enliven the
+solitude of the little stone dancers, who in their turn give the ruins
+life, and they never leave off chattering until night settles down upon
+them, as no doubt the dancers themselves chattered when the forest was a
+park and the ruins a palace.
+
+Under the trees at the edges of the clearing are the shacks of monks
+where Admiral Viaud, alias Pierre Loti, slept, almost twenty-five years
+ago now, when he came to Angkor in his two-wheeled cart and went away on
+an elephant. The frail little houses, to which tiny stairs that are
+barely ladders lead, are made of wood and mats; some have little
+festooned windows from which shaven skulls peer now and then, and they
+stand on poles, well above the ground. All the inhabitants are dressed
+alike, in bright yellow robes set off by a drapery of orange and other
+colors that stand out against the old walls, gray with age, sometimes
+reddish, especially near sunset, as it was now, startling flashes of
+color against the dense curtain of greenery beneath the clear sky. Too
+accustomed to Europeans to be curious toward them, they seem to take us
+as unavoidable nuisances, and when they sing in a low voice and
+monotonous rhythm they gaze at us without interrupting their tranquil
+litany. Now some of them are walking abroad, languidly and without
+haste, their hairless heads shining beneath the low sun. Theirs are
+curious villages, where there are no women, no animals except mongrel
+curs, no tillers of the soil, nothing but these monotonous singers,
+yellow of face and dressed in two brighter tones of the same color. For
+furniture their simple dwellings have nothing but an old Buddhist altar,
+with gods in faded gold, before which little heaps of ashes testify to
+the constant burning of joss-sticks to their tawdry divinities. About
+two hundred of these bonzes of Cambodia and Siam guard the sacred ruins,
+and nearly that number live here perpetually, psalming day and night
+about this pile of titanic blocks of stone heaped up by their more hardy
+ancestors, or by those whom their more hardy ancestors defeated and
+drove away.
+
+Sunset, quickly followed by a bright full moon, came, and the lighting
+of the immense stage-setting about me diminished until the forest,
+already full of shadows under an ashen sky, in which a yellow
+phosphorescence mingled with an ever darker green, died down to a great
+spread of vacancy without details or distinctness. In the last light of
+the day, leaning over the edge of the uppermost platform, I had seen a
+procession of multicolored women drawing away along the great causeway
+across the moat, a saffron-clad priest with a rolled parasol across his
+back leading them. Cruder Buddhas have here and there replaced broken or
+fallen Brahman figures in the great temple, especially within the base
+of the central tower in the lofty third story. They are ugly things of
+mud and wood compared with the ancient Khmer deities, and to look upon
+them gives one the feeling one sometimes has toward the crude
+missionaries from our own land who are trying to replace the more
+fitting as well as older beliefs of the East with their own. A quantity
+of Buddhist idols of all sizes sit on thrones in this upper story,
+smiling at nothing, and pilgrims go about, bowing down before statue
+after statue, indifferent, and no doubt unaware, whether they are
+praying to Vishnu or to Buddha. Sometimes pilgrims from far-off Burma
+come in the silence of the night to lay a flower or burn a joss-stick
+before each of these figures, with a musty smell now, that are crumbling
+away into the dust from which they, like the rest of us, came. A word
+from the leader, which one can guess to be some such warning as, “Let us
+hurry or the hour of the tiger will overtake us,” and they make their
+devotions more hastily, cut even shorter their reverences, and soon
+their barefoot tread is lost in the drone of a Buddhist service below as
+they descend the steep stone stairways.
+
+Whatever else one may see at Angkor, one always comes back to the great
+temple, and that not merely because it is so near the _sala_. I found
+myself almost unconsciously wandering there in the moonlight every
+evening after dinner. For one thing it gave a respite from the prattle
+of tourists, very few of whom ventured into the structure after dark. On
+the first day I had met two childlike monks in their yellow robes going
+along the gallery with a broom and a scoop of woven bamboo strips. They
+were picking up the wherewithal to fertilize some little monastic
+garden, no doubt for the growing of flowers, since the pious laymen
+furnish them their food, and the tilling of the soil for useful purposes
+is not one of the duties of their calling. There is no lack of
+fertilizer to be had in Angkor-Vat. The pavements that are not open to
+the sun are everywhere carpeted with the droppings of bats, so thick in
+many places that one seems to be walking on felt. An almost intolerable
+odor permeates all the interior, and the squeaking of what the French so
+fittingly call “bald mice” up under the sharp vaults of the crude
+massive roofs is always in the ears even of the visitor by day. Then, if
+one’s eyes are sharp, they may make out myriads of the repulsive
+creatures hanging head down by their claws to the rough stone ceiling,
+looking during these their sleeping hours like sacks of dark velvet.
+
+By night, clouds, avalanches of these flying rats, aggressive and
+tireless, greet the intruder. As my steps resounded in the obscure
+corridors, along which I advanced feeling my way foot by foot, for all
+the brilliant moonlight outside, sharp little cries multiplied to a
+concert, as of thousands of angry rats above my head. The horrible odor
+seemed to increase as one after another of the sleeping creatures
+unfolded its hairless membranes and joined in the general movement. It
+is always half-night up there under the vaults and roofs, and perhaps
+they do not sleep too soundly, or know the hour exactly, even by day;
+with the night the least intrusion turns chamber after chamber into
+swirls of the squeaking creatures. They descended to touch my hair; the
+wind of their wings was like the breeze of electric fans running riot in
+the darkness, cold in the tepid night as the breath of death. They
+swirled about me in swarms on their silent wings, uttering their angry
+little cries, as if banding together to repel an invader. One might have
+fancied them the unappeased spirits of the Khmer gods of long ago, or
+the unsaved souls of those who built the mountain-temple, resenting the
+profaning of the sacred edifice in the solemn hours of the night by the
+crude, heavily shod being of the modern world. If I stood perfectly
+still for some time, the chorus decreased, died down, disappeared, as if
+they had all gone back to sleep again. But with the first step forward
+they detached themselves once more, one after another, and soon the same
+noisome gyrations of unseen squeaking things was all about me again. My
+flesh crept at the damp contact of their wings, at the very thought of
+their touching me, and for once I was almost afraid of the dark, a
+feeling I had not known since early childhood. I kept myself with
+difficulty from fleeing headlong out into the moonlight.
+
+No longer paled by the excess of sun, the bas-relief of the gallery, the
+figures on the terraces, the dancing Apsarases everywhere took on a
+nebulous clarity that in a way made them all the more beautiful. The
+moon shone in silver streams through the carved stone bars of the narrow
+windows; out in the courtyards the massive block of Angkor-Vat with its
+five towers seemed more gigantic than ever, too enormous to be merely
+the work of pygmy mankind. The more than steep stairways had about them
+something so uncanny that it took more exertion of the will than of the
+thighs to climb them; I had the feeling of entering a mammoth
+burial-vault from which there would never again be any escape. As if
+fearful of having to accuse myself of cowardice I climbed the first
+story, doubly high to the second, forced myself up to the third. A light
+like a fallen star twinkled at the top of the highest stairway, at the
+door of the sanctuary beneath the central tower. It was the votive-lamp
+of the Chettys, the Hindu money-lenders of Cholon and Saïgon, who offer
+this eternal flame to the abandoned gods. Then suddenly the squeak of
+swirling bats became more than my nerves could bear, and I retreated,
+slowly only because of the indignity of frankly running away, and the
+likelihood of tobogganing down those long cascades of narrow slippery
+steps at a false movement made in haste.
+
+
+On Monday I set off on foot to Bayon at the crack of dawn, knowing how
+painful walking becomes soon after the sun rises above the tree-tops.
+The Elephant Terrace and Bayon, with some of the striking old ruins in
+their vicinity, about which I spent the morning, I had already hastily
+seen as we were Fording bungalow-ward on the first morning in order not
+to delay Mrs. Piffton-Smith’s luncheon and nap. Now, alone and at
+leisure, I found them second only to Angkor-Vat. Bayon, impressive as a
+cathedral, is the oldest sanctuary of Angkor-Thom, two centuries older
+than the great temple in which the genius of the Khmer terminated. In
+its day it had half a hundred towers, each and every one of them bearing
+on all its four sides the face of Brahma, the highest rising nearly
+fifty meters above the plain. Now many have fallen, been destroyed, or
+been removed by the French to save the others; and still there are so
+many of them that one feels the futility of trying to get out of sight
+of their myriad-faced god. Those enigmatical faces of Brahma, or Siva,
+some of them two men in height, crowned by diadems in stone, gaze so
+multitudinously down from even what remains of the pyramidal mass that
+one has a feeling of self-consciousness as when one is the focus of the
+eyes of a living multitude. Those visages with the enigmatical smile,
+the half-closed eyelids, the great flat noses, all with the selfsame
+expression of ironic pity, are not merely on every face of every tower;
+they gaze even from worn stones, no larger than a fist, picked up in the
+underbrush.
+
+Toward the end of the ninth century, four hundred years before the
+decline of the Khmer, Bayon, ruder and even more enormous than
+Angkor-Vat, was in its glory. The fifty towers of different sizes formed
+several stories, and the topmost could be seen from any part of the now
+abandoned city. To-day most of it has to be reconstructed by the
+imagination, including the vast cleared space that made it possible to
+see the crushing stature of the ensemble. In fancy one can rebuild the
+successive terraces, the great stairways, the sumptuous avenues which
+led to it, bordered by so many columns, balustrades, divinities,
+rampant-headed cobras, and monsters, now crumbled away in the grass. But
+even the faces of Brahma that remain gazing to the four cardinal points
+of the compass seem to affirm, to force upon the beholder, the
+omnipresence of the god of Angkor.
+
+A shower-bath, lunch, and a nap, and I was off again, for a three-hour
+elephant ride. There are two of these great beasts attached to the
+_sala_, but like the goat-cart at the zoo they are now rather
+curiosities than useful means of transportation. Akin to all holders of
+sinecures, they stood before the door lazily swinging their trunks and
+watching with cunning little eyes the Fords that have taken nearly all
+their work away from them. The American ladies mounted one of them, Mr.
+Piffton-Smith and I the other. The mother of Lady So-and-so would not
+risk her precious life in such an adventure, and how her husband
+persuaded her to let him undergo this terrifying experience is a
+domestic secret to which I have no key.
+
+I shall forevermore think of the elephant as a synonym for caution, for
+slowness and docility too, for that matter. The _cornacs_, as the French
+call what we know as mahouts, drove these pacific monsters more easily
+than we do a horse, nay, as easily as one can drive an automobile,
+except that nothing would induce them to move faster than two miles an
+hour. Like domesticated man, there was nothing whatever wild about them,
+and with every step up the only hillock in all the region the prudent
+beasts felt every stone before trusting their weight to it, until they
+seemed to personify the precautious mother of a Lady whom we had left
+behind. Little by little we dominated the immense sea of absolutely flat
+forest. Here where once there were innumerable palaces gleaming in the
+sunshine, little more was visible above the endless spread of vegetation
+than the block of Bayon and the five towers of Angkor-Vat. The view
+across the vast forest-jungle left even that great temple like a needle
+lost in a haystack, so tiny was it in its immense setting in the midst
+of what looked like an endless and a trackless wilderness.
+
+So terrifying was this experience of rising a hundred feet or two above
+sea-level on these cautious monsters that poor Mr. P.-S. had to be
+helped down at the summit like an infant, and only the impossibility of
+covering on foot the mile or two back to the _sala_ induced him to mount
+again. Cambodian workmen, under orders of the French, still toil in
+several of the ruins, and here they laughed and shouted as they threw
+blocks of stone down the slope with insulting words. Then we went
+slowly, more than slowly, back, and across the mammoth bridge over the
+moat for a circuit of Angkor-Vat. It was as if, knowing they could not
+compete in speed with the Fords that have replaced their fellows, the
+beasts had no intention of trying; or it may be that there is an
+elephant union. That would even better account for their skill in
+wasting time at every movement, at every moment, making their journey
+the shortest possible within the three hours allotted us. The foundation
+of Angkor-Vat and the bridge leading to it are raised two or three
+meters above the ground, to facilitate mounting and dismounting from the
+elephants that were once the only beasts of burden in this region. But
+there was no time to dismount and mount now; the hour of the tiger would
+indeed have come before the lethargic animals took up their funereal
+march again. As we crept slowly round the temple, the elephants tore
+large branches from some of the tropical trees high above our heads, and
+munched them as languidly as a plumber eating his lunch on some one
+else’s time. Men in breech-clouts were still walking up the frail
+palm-trees with bamboo buckets in which to gather their sugary sap; the
+bonzes were chanting their monotonous litanies from their stilt-legged
+huts; and then the sun disappeared swiftly in the sea of jungle and gave
+us that brief fleeting twilight of the tropics.
+
+On Tuesday morning I mounted a tiny horse and rode away alone through
+the woods, the delightful freshness of an early tropical morning all
+about me. A light two-wheeled cart was also to be had, but I preferred
+the miniature sample of the equine world—until the blazing of the sun
+began in earnest. Though there are on the whole few feathered creatures
+in the forest that has swallowed up Angkor-Thom, as if even they were
+afraid of the denseness of the jungle, the singing of birds and insects
+made a mild ceaseless music. Sometimes it sounded as if a bird was
+whispering a cordial invitation to me from the bush—or was it merely
+whistling to keep up its courage? There was such a wall of verdure on
+either side that, like will-o’-the-wisps, they were never really
+visible. Monkeys dashed from branch to branch, scores of monkeys, though
+not one had we seen during the official trips by Ford. Evidently they
+keep out of the way of tourists, perhaps because they cannot endure
+their inane chatter. But now they played by the dozen about the ruins,
+as freely as if they recognized in me a close relative, and indulged in
+a pantomime, worthy of any stage, that was plainly an imitation of the
+workmen among the remains of Angkor-Thom. A Cambodian legend assures us
+that monkeys formerly talked like men, until the men made slaves of them
+and forced them to work. The monkeys did not like this, and as they are
+timid but intelligent they simply ceased to talk like us and pretended
+not to understand, so that from that time forth they have lived in
+peace, gathering nothing except for their dinners, and gamboling among
+the trees to their hearts’ content. The thin Cambodian coolies who toil
+for the French about the ruins have not been so clever.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER IV
+                         THE CAMBODIANS AT HOME
+
+
+The efficient French manager of the _sala_ at Angkor, and those few of
+my fellow-guests who saw me set out on foot for Siem Réap that Sunday
+afternoon, gave me credit for being at least half mad. I have often
+suspected as much myself. The native town was nearly five miles away
+along that almost excellent French road by which we had come from the
+edge of the flooded forest on the evening of our arrival, and obviously
+it would be at least as great a distance back to the _sala_ again. But
+it was a delightful walk, even while the sun was pouring its rays like a
+molten flood of gold down into the roadway, and with every step forward
+its aim became less exact, so that the infinitesimal streak of shade
+along one dense forest wall gradually grew to be worth attention.
+
+There were road-signs as in France, now and then an ox-cart with two
+wheels drawn by as many oxen. On the whole, though, the road was
+deserted, and for a long distance there was nothing but the Chinese wall
+of unbroken forest close on either side, with frequent visions of lianas
+in blossom, and in the streak of sky above, occasional flashes of
+strange tropical birds. Then there came scattered villages,
+water-buffaloes at pasture, more bourgeois birds sitting serenely on the
+spines of the beasts as on a telegraph-wire, naked children who live in
+the water, their gleaming skins mirroring the sun like the scales of a
+fish. At length, some little distance from the ruins of the ancient
+city, there began an almost endless succession of thatched huts back
+among the trees, stilted villages, so to speak, for every one of them
+was raised head-high above the ground on more or less haphazard posts
+that had once been the trunks of small trees. None of these simple homes
+had a clearing about it. The inhabitants had wisely cut away only enough
+of the underbrush to give themselves room to move and to plant a little,
+and they lived completely in the shade of the great forest about and
+high above them. Steps were cut in the earth bank of the little river
+that more or less followed the road, down to the water’s edge and what
+seemed to be fish-traps. There were also some simple but ingenious nets,
+and strangely shaped boats, the smaller ones paddled, the larger poled.
+A quiet Sunday-afternoon languor that was probably perpetual rather than
+only weekly hung over everything. The leisurely splashing of water
+called attention every little way to a large wheel, made of now
+age-blackened bamboo, that forced the river to lift itself by the
+scoopful into the little gardens beyond the houses. The slow regular
+thump of a wooden pestle worked by foot-power betrayed here and there
+woods-dwellers caught in the act of having to hull rice for their
+evening meal, in the hollowed upright section of log that serves them as
+mortar. Otherwise, there was only the forest and its natural noises.
+
+Siem Réap, of which I had once before had a fleeting moonlight glimpse,
+was almost a city, in the Cambodian sense. For the Cambodians are not a
+townspeople, but prefer the woods, which, with a bit of tilled soil,
+gives them all they need. The place was entirely Siamese, its little
+houses all perched on piles and its temple decorated with golden horns;
+and even these were tucked back into the forest that crowded the wider
+place in the road closely on either side. Evidently the inhabitants
+sleep on the openwork bamboo-splint floor of their porches, as some of
+them were already, or still, doing now, with the sun barely touching the
+tree-tops. It was not always easy to tell the sexes apart at a glance,
+for girls and younger women cut their hair in the ugly Siamese pompadour
+fashion, slightly longer than that of the men. Grandmothers, old men,
+and priests dispensed with theirs entirely, having more or less recently
+shaven skulls. Both sexes wore like a short skirt a mere piece of cloth
+wrapped about the hips and thighs, a costume so simple that most
+Cambodian girls never learn to sew. Some of the younger women,
+especially if they were far from the family clearing, had a cloth thrown
+carelessly over their breasts; but about the house and in its immediate
+vicinity they had nothing above the waist to hamper them from working,
+or from suckling one of their interminable infants, carried on the hip,
+Hindu fashion. There seemed to be much bathing and washing of clothes,
+such as they were, reminding one of Ceylon. Bougainvillea hung in purple
+masses about the wooden house of the French _résident_ and some of the
+other better buildings. Police in half or full khaki uniforms, topped by
+a kind of tam-o’-shanter, seemed out of place in this languid Eden.
+
+
+The Cambodians are a slow and quiet race compared with the Chinese, even
+with the Annamese, so gentle that even the shoulder-poles of their oxen
+are seldom weighted down with heavy loads. The Tai, as the race to which
+they belong is better known, are about equal in civilization, under
+equal circumstances, to the Chinese, according to those who know them
+well, except that the Tai are superior in personal cleanliness and the
+lack of monkey-like curiosity, and the Chinese in foresight and
+industry. Here there was none of the crowding of staring or chattering
+throngs about the foreigner, so common an experience in China. The
+Cambodians seemed to have a greater sense of personal dignity. As a
+people they appeared a little surly toward the French, therefore toward
+white men in general, though this may only have been bashfulness.
+Physically the individual type is more sturdy, and observers agree that
+they are much more reserved in their personal habits, than the
+surrounding peoples. In situations where the Annamese squirms and howls
+the Cambodian shows neither fear nor excitement. Simple timid souls,
+however, manly and infantile at the same time, they are too naïve to be
+any match for the world of to-day. Though they are physically stronger,
+laborious in their leisurely way, intelligent, and not easily swayed
+from their purposes or beliefs, they will let a puny Annamese chastise
+them without any attempt at retaliation, because they are afraid of the
+tricks this more sophisticated fellow might play upon them if they dared
+to resist. For though the Annamese really look down upon, even hate, the
+French, they are regarded by the other races comprising Indo-China as
+the special pets of the foreign rulers. Being nearer in their own
+sophistication to the modern wisdom, or trickery, of the Westerner, they
+know much better how to turn the presence of the French to their own
+good than do these isolated woodsmen of Cambodia, a prey to all sorts of
+rascalities. The spirit of tolerance, renunciation, non-resistance, of
+this timid forest-dweller who ornaments his body with symbolic
+tattooings is so great as to make what in the Chinese seems to be that
+quality appear none at all.
+
+So while Cambodia is rich, the Cambodian is poor. “Wealthy as Cambodia”
+was for centuries a byword among the Chinese. The yearly flooding of the
+Mekong, the Nile of Indo-China, annually brings down a new covering of
+rich soil for all the delta. Yet even the hasty traveler notes the far
+greater prosperity of less fertile Cochinchina. There is only thatch in
+Cambodia; in Cochinchina, inhabited by all the races of Indo-China,
+including the Cambodians, there are tiled wooden houses, always a sign
+of prosperity, for the fear of fires causes any race to get beyond the
+thatch stage as soon as possible. Not merely the Chinese, with their
+special privileges, but the Annamese, so easily outdone by the
+Celestials in commerce, become in their turn the harsh commercial
+exploiters of their simpler neighbors, not only the Cambodians but the
+Moï, the Muong, and the Laosians. Even the recently arranged export of
+Cambodian cattle to Manila has proved of no real help to the people
+themselves, for they are often cheated out of their working cattle by
+the tricky Chinese or Annamese traders.
+
+The Cambodian is exclusively an agriculturist. Even though he makes his
+own tools, carts, and houses, that is merely an adaptation to his
+isolated life. In whatever he does he works with the spirit of the
+genuine artist, which means that he gives too little attention to
+getting all possible material benefit from his labor. Thus during the
+past several centuries this little people—they are barely a million and
+a half—has been terrorized, vanquished, despoiled, forced to fly, in the
+dry season, before the Siamese, at the mercy, in the wet, of the
+Annamese flotillas. The first were looking for slaves, and deported
+people en masse to cultivate their lands of the Menam; the second came
+killing the people off and driving them out in order to take their lands
+for themselves.
+
+To come through the forests and see so low a type of humanity, at least
+in so far as ambition and the ability to build lasting things go, and
+then suddenly see the towers of Angkor-Vat, through the half-cleared
+vista of the old cart road, is to refuse to believe that the ancestors
+of these built that. It shakes one’s belief in the equality of man; for
+surely without masters of higher type than these hut-dwellers of to-day
+this people could never have produced such things. But no, one reflects,
+peoples, like individuals, have their day, their prime, their productive
+years. They develop for centuries, then at a certain level accomplish
+rapidly for a time, then sink into old age. All our own real progress
+has been during the past few hundred years; we may soon cease to be
+productive, perhaps not even remain static, like the Chinese, but drift
+back down-stream, like these simple gentle Cambodians. Possibly some of
+their once great creative ability might be revived; more likely not.
+Besides, it is better to let others have the next chance, just as we
+each give way in turn to the rising generation, than to try to
+resuscitate what is past, as we sometimes try with the individual. For
+it is impossible to backwater in life.
+
+
+Though they have lived more or less intermingled for centuries, there
+has been little racial intermixture of the Cambodians and the Annamese.
+They are too nearly like oil and water, the real dividing-line between
+the Chinese and the Hindu world which makes the name “Indo-China” so
+fitting. It is only recently that Cambodian girls have not been
+forbidden to marry foreigners, and there are far fewer _mariages à
+terme_ with the French, and the resultant half-castes, than in Annam.
+Yet it is said that the Cambodian, interbred with some other race having
+more aggression in its fiber, makes an excellent human specimen. There
+is little repulsion between the Tonkinese and the Cambodians, for those
+two groups are historically little acquainted. But the two discordant
+races are so different that to train a French official in Annam, or even
+in Cochinchina, and then send him to Cambodia, is almost as bad as to
+send one from Algeria to Madagascar.
+
+Whereas the Annamese language is a singsong of many tones, like the
+Chinese, and they use, or did at least until the French came, Chinese
+characters for their writing—so that Japanese and Annamese, Korean and
+Chinese, could all read, though not speak, together—the Cambodian tongue
+is in one tone, like our own, and their writing is similar to that of
+Siam and India. Cambodian music seems such to Western ears. Their
+freedom from the cacophonic hullabaloo of the rest of the Far East gives
+the traveler ground for hoping that here at last he is running into our
+own Aryan influences again. The Cambodians accompany themselves on a
+kind of guitar, and are the only people in Indo-China who have so far
+been taught to play band music well.
+
+The favorite game of Cambodian boys is to keep a ball made of bamboo
+splints in the air as long as possible, kicking, striking, butting it
+with any part of the body except the hands—real football, which of
+course ours is not. Their dances, of immemorial tradition, are a kind of
+drama of pantomine ballet, perpetuating the old Hindu epics, given only
+by troupes of imperial dancers from the royal harem. The people
+themselves do no dancing.
+
+Once from the north, influenced by the more mystic Buddhism of Tibet,
+with Sanskrit as the language, the Cambodians are now of the Ceylon or
+southern Buddhist school, the language of which is Pali. The Annamese,
+on the other hand, inherited the harsher northern Buddhism by way of
+Mongolia and China. Thus the clergy, as disdained in Annam as in China,
+has great prestige in Cambodia. The monks are very simple, and in their
+piety at least are worthy the profound respect with which they are
+surrounded. Though they live only on what they can beg, they are not
+hermits and anchorets, as in the Chinese atmosphere of Annam, but live
+the monkish life in common in the numerous temples of the country, quite
+independent of one another. Priests become laymen, and vice versa, very
+easily; all Cambodians are in fact expected to don the yellow robe at
+least once in their lives. Most of them being country people, the monks
+do not find it repugnant to engage in manual labor. There are many
+woodsmen, brick-makers, even clock-menders and other industrious
+“artists” among them. Personally I saw none of this, but only meditation
+and begging; and I am quite ready to admit that I am hopelessly
+prejudiced toward those who withdraw from their share of the world’s
+work and troubles the world over. During the three months of the rainy
+season the monks of Cambodia practise “the retreat” and refrain from all
+pilgrimages; the rest of the year they go and come almost at will. Their
+five commandments are: thou shalt not kill, steal, lie, drink
+intoxicating beverages, or take the woman of another—which is not, be it
+noted, celibacy in the Christian sense. It is said that at least they
+never drink strong liquor, and so careful are they to avoid killing that
+they have a special word (“Bahboh!”) and gesture to drive off the
+militant mosquito without injuring it.
+
+There have long been _salas_, or public houses maintained by the
+government for travelers, along the principal roads of Cambodia, for the
+same reason that there are _dak-bungalows_ in India. They do not want
+strangers in their houses, which are semi-sacred; and from that to the
+Hindu belief in caste pollution by so much as an alien shadow is no
+great step. Suicide, as common among the Annamese as with the Chinese,
+is rare among the Cambodians, not because they are greater cowards or
+more generally happy, but because of their fear of vile reincarnations.
+They burn their dead, like the Hindus and the real Buddhists farther
+west; the Annamese practise the loathsome Chinese and Western custom of
+burying their corpses and keeping them as long as possible.
+
+The Cambodians have a feudal Hindu civilization, entirely distinct from
+the mandarinic, communal, oligarchical civilization of the Annamese and
+Chinese. In theory all land belongs to the king, and any that lies
+uncultivated for three years may be demanded by some one else as a
+concession. Only the produce is taxed, the assessments being gathered by
+royal delegates quite independent of the provincial authorities. In
+reality the French have not greatly changed the ancient order of things
+during their sixty years as the “protectors” of Cambodia. They have
+improved the ways of communication, beautified the old royal city of
+Pnom Penh. They have done much against smallpox: formerly those who had
+never had this disease were considered “not yet born to existence.” They
+were exempt from taxes; a girl could not marry, a boy could not claim
+the rights and duties of an adult, until a pock-marked face could be
+presented as a certificate of maturity. The French have given the
+country peace, external peace, that is; old residents say there is
+piracy in the provinces as usual, even more of it the past twenty years
+than a century ago. The French are impotent to stop criminal violence
+against the natives, and the local authorities have every interest in
+coming to an understanding with the robbers instead of fighting them.
+The Chinese merchants of Cambodia pay pirate insurance.
+
+[Illustration: One may still crawl about Angkor by elephant, though
+Fords are much more à la mode]
+
+[Illustration: Buddhist priests took their saffron-clad ease in the
+shade along the great moat of Angkor-Vat, beyond the tourist bungalows
+in the background]
+
+[Illustration: A rural Cambodian family at home]
+
+The French have kept the old forms of kingly rule; and “beneath an
+appearance of order there still reigns the old anarchy,” said a French
+doctor long resident there. Under cover of the French the ancient
+injustices of despotic Oriental rule have been perpetuated and
+modernized. It is next to impossible for an ordinary Cambodian with just
+cause for complaint to get satisfaction. The mass of the people dare not
+tell the wrongs done them, even were there some one both willing and
+able to listen to them, because of the fear of reprisals. In a forested
+Oriental country very few would risk giving testimony, even if it were
+not the Hindu-Buddhist temperament not to complain; for vengeance is
+easy. Native functionaries stick together; they are closely related to
+the ministers of Pnom Penh. Even if a case is taken directly to the
+French _résident_, about all he can do is refer the matter to the
+governor of the province involved, “for information.” There are many
+clandestine tariffs for legally gratuitous formalities. By law registry
+of birth is free; in practice it costs all that those concerned can be
+made to pay. There is a tax on furnaces used in the production of
+fish-oil; but because the same Cambodian word also means a little
+portable stove made of glazed earth, on which all Cambodia once did its
+cooking, tax-gatherers have laid by great personal fortunes, and most of
+the people have gone back to the three sticks stuck in the earth used by
+their ancestors to hold their rice-pots over a fagot fire.
+
+It is the old story of a very alien race unable to help, whatever its
+good will, except in superficial things that are easily understood,
+because it cannot get down into the deeper facts. In the French courts
+the interpreter reigns as absolute master, and erects a stone wall
+between the best judge and the parties before him. Even the making of
+good roads has augmented rather than decreased the helplessness of the
+people, for now French officials, often changed, dash to and fro between
+their posts, whereas in the days of slow native travel they got perforce
+some clear idea of the needs of the people. The French of course see to
+it that their rule is treated with full honors, whatever the results of
+it. There is a costly series of splendid fêtes at Pnom Penh in honor of
+each new _résident supérieur_, which contrasts sadly with the
+poverty-stricken people whom he comes in theory to help, and who must
+pay for all such festivities. The fact is that he rarely comes for any
+such purpose, but to follow his career with the least possible trouble
+and the greatest possible advancement. But in the eyes of the Cambodians
+the French are merely a passing phase, as the Siamese and their other
+conquerors were before them, and they endure this brief affliction as
+true fatalists do any other misfortune.
+
+The minister of the palace is the real power in Cambodia. A former
+interpreter—all who knew a little French when the French took upon
+themselves the “protection” of Cambodia naturally got in on the ground
+floor—imposed first upon Norodom as secretary-general of the Council of
+Ministers, is now a kind of political comprador. An intelligent hard
+worker, supple, well informed, speaking French fluently now, he has made
+himself indispensable to the superficial and unstable French
+administrators and is richer than old King Sisowath himself. Naturally
+he drew a marvelous personal advantage out of a situation that he was no
+doubt stupefied to find falling into his hands, and with an almost
+Chinese point of view toward political matters he tends to perpetuate
+himself, every day perfecting his double game between the king and the
+French _résident_, peopling posts with his relatives and retainers,
+keeping his political fences in order. It is the story of the rise of
+Charlemagne’s forebears all over again, in an Oriental setting. Some
+_résidents_ have tried to outwit this now richest and most powerful man
+in the kingdom, but he always comes out best. He is the real master; the
+other ministers, the crown prince, even the octogenarian king himself
+tremble before him, mute and resigned.
+
+To this have the descendants of the mighty Khmer sunk in the millennium
+since they were forced to abandon Angkor-Thom. Yet after all the
+Cambodians are the only people in the peninsula who have left enduring
+works of their intellectual past. Their great art, in which the
+grandiose perfection of the ensemble is combined with the most delicate
+finesse of detail, is their certificate as one of the great races of
+mankind.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER V
+                         NORTHWARD FROM SAÏGON
+
+
+On a blazing Sunday late in January I was off at six on a little train
+that carried me, not uncomfortably, from daylight until dark, through a
+jungle country of few villages and no towns. Bienhoa, half an hour from
+the Cochinchina capital, has rubber plantations of some extent, the well
+spaced trees still small but already adorned with sap-gathering tin
+cans. Beyond, jungle and forest soon began again, endless jungle-forest,
+so that there are countless acres available for rubber, and before the
+century is over this form of exploitation will no doubt have reached
+vast proportions. The wilderness, broken only by little clearings for
+occasional stations, was so dry in this hot prelude to the rainy season
+that it had almost the autumn colors of the north. Most of the land was
+deadly flat, but there were low hills now and then, densely wooded and
+brushed, especially after little Cochinchina lay behind us and we
+entered the great coastal strip known as Annam.
+
+For all the wilderness, a splendid road, with huge native trees well
+spaced on either side of it, followed the railway. Train and highway
+used the same bridges, which custom I found to be common throughout
+Indo-China. A horn manipulated by a loin-clothed coolie at either end
+warns the automobile driver whether or not it is best for him to
+proceed. For the bridges are only wide enough for one train or one
+vehicle at a time, and though the trains of Indo-China are not large,
+nothing short of a motor truck could dispute the right of way with them
+with any great prospect of success. There are of course no unprotected
+grade-crossings even in this faintly inhabited region, where an
+automobile a day is an event, and where there are few ox-carts and fewer
+pedestrians. As in France, the bridge and gate men govern themselves by
+the time-table rather than by the facts, though here it is a languid
+Annamese coolie instead of an old woman or a crippled war-relic who
+holds up traffic so much longer than necessary.
+
+The government owned and operated railways of Indo-China, destined some
+day to be joined together in one system, are not yet continuous. The
+eight hundred miles just then in running order were broken up into three
+isolated jumps along the coast, not to mention the line from Hanoï up
+into China that has been leased for a term of years to private
+interests. All are of meter gauge, burn wood, and make very good speed,
+considering their difficulties, as was proved by this day’s feat of
+covering the more than 260 miles between Saïgon and Nhatrang—longest of
+the three sections, even without counting the branch from the
+Cochinchina capital to Mytho—in the twelve hours between equatorial dawn
+and darkness.
+
+The French have evolved a curious type of train to fit the peculiar
+division of humanity in their Far-Eastern possession. The last car is
+divided into first-, second-, and third-class compartments. First-class
+accommodation consists of two crosswise seats facing each other in the
+center of the coach, and the second, with twice that capacity, differs
+mainly in the color of the leather upholstery. Third class, occupying
+half the car, has bare wooden seats of American arrangement. The rest of
+the train, unless it includes also a few freight-cars, is made up of
+fourth-class box-cars innocent of springs and with four rudimentary
+benches fore and aft the full length of them. Officials armed with
+government _réquisitions_, or passes, usually monopolize the first
+class, and even with their boxes and bags rarely fill it. Europeans with
+purchased tickets, an occasional Eurasian, and now and then a wealthy
+native, go second-class. Well-to-do natives, and the poorer French
+residents, endure the hard seats of the rest of the car, and only in the
+more populous regions do they fill them all. There are no color-lines,
+except that Caucasians are not allowed to travel fourth-class. This
+rendezvous of the Oriental masses is often packed to rush-hour
+proportions, and is so free from cramping rules that even rickshaws may
+be dragged in as baggage.
+
+The half-dozen of these springless box-cars for every
+first-second-and-third-class coach is symbolical of the proportionate
+division of classes in the population of Indo-China. To the simple
+countryman who occupies the rough _wagons_ making up the bulk of the
+train, even the third-class compartment represents such luxury that he
+comes to gaze in awe and what may be envy at the _richard_ who can
+afford to ride there. Yet even in the deeply upholstered center of the
+last car, fares are not so high as on our own railways. There are no
+sleeping-cars, for the simple reason that the trains of Indo-China do
+not venture forth at night. The back end of the last fourth-class car is
+commonly taken up with a makeshift buffet-kitchen, in which the
+privileged occupants of the rear coach may partake of not particularly
+Parisian food, salted with such a jolting as may or may not be an aid to
+digestion.
+
+All through the hotter hours the train twisted and squirmed its way
+among jungle-clad hillocks, the shades drawn, electric fans whirling.
+Farther north were sandy half-arid patches; then, two hundred miles or
+more above Saïgon, hills appeared and grew to be almost mountains,
+fairly well wooded and thick with underbrush. At length the forest gave
+way to scattered-bush land, resembling parts of Texas, untilled, perhaps
+because it is too arid for cultivation. There were almost no
+inhabitants, at least in sight. Here and there huddled half a dozen
+miserable time-blackened and dilapidated huts made of palm-leaves; now
+and then a garden-patch with a plastered house of dull-red tile roof,
+and outhouses suggesting plentiful servants, testified to the presence
+of some isolated French official or railway man. Perhaps there are towns
+along the edge of the sea not far away, since fishing and farming are
+the principal Annamese occupations.
+
+From Phanrang near the sea a branch railway that degenerates into a
+motor-bus carries passengers with time to spare up to the plateau of
+Langbian. For high up in the distant mountains to the left toward which
+the sun was descending is Dalat, an expensive hotel and hill-station
+which the European residents of southern Indo-China call their
+Darjeeling. All this mountainous region back of the narrow strip of
+rice-growing coast-land is inhabited by Moï, “savages” who wear
+breech-clouts and look at life accordingly. There are several
+undomesticated tribes scattered throughout Indo-China, some of them
+dangerous even to the white man who claims to rule over it. Many parts
+of the hinterland are unexplored by the self-styled rulers, and portions
+of it are impossible without a wild-man guide, who may not consent to
+lend his assistance. Queer claims are those of the Caucasian and
+Japanese races of ruling over this or that country when they only
+control the modernized edges of it.
+
+These Moï in their loin-cloths, most savage of the wild tribes of
+Indo-China and looking not unlike our Indians, hold some clusters of
+mountains where it is still not entirely safe to go. Some have renegade
+Annamese leaders; one tribe lives in trees, in which it builds little
+houses, out of wholesome respect for tigers. The visitor to the Moï is
+expected to announce his arrival and friendly intentions by beating on a
+drum set up at the entrance to every village, as we knock at a door. If
+his visit is agreeable, a man bearing rice comes out to escort him, and
+if he is prepared to give salt in return, he is made welcome. Though
+they have little or no intercourse with the rest of the world, the Moï
+suffered greatly from the recent epidemic of “flu,” and fevers and
+smallpox have often ravaged them. The average Moï woman has ten
+children, of whom only one or two reaches maturity. Thus the estimated
+three hundred thousand Moï are constantly decreasing. It is curious how
+many savage tribes have less success in raising their young than do most
+wild animals. Perhaps it is nature’s way of keeping down an intermediate
+creation.
+
+The Moï language, with no tones in the Chinese sense, sounds almost
+European. At the age of puberty boys and girls alike undergo the
+formality of having their teeth filed down to the gums. With some kind
+relative sitting on the chest of the sufferer, lying on his back with
+his head between the legs of a primitive vise, and with a wooden bit
+forced into his mouth, a medicine-man breaks off the teeth with stones
+and hacks and chips them away. It is their idea of making themselves
+beautiful, and the boy or girl who has not undergone this punishment is
+not considered marriageable or otherwise of adult status. After a day of
+this frightful work the operator leaves his victim covered with blood,
+his gums in ribbons, his lips like hashed beefsteak, and incapable for a
+fortnight of eating anything but liquids. Nor is this all, for the
+patient is then given a stone with which to continue the beautifying
+process himself, when he has a moment to spare, until not a sign of
+tooth remains above the level of the gums. Among some of the tribes the
+lower teeth are given a saw shape, so that the open mouth suggests that
+of an aged shark that has lost its upper plate.
+
+Dalat is the chief hunting-ground for tigers in Indo-China. So well are
+these hunts organized by the French that the brave hunter bags his beast
+as safely as royalty does. There is a French colonial official whose
+chief duty it is to oblige those who wish to boast that they have killed
+a tiger. One orders a tiger by telegraph—tiger _à la carte_, so to
+speak; the official sends out coolies to lay a bait that has reached
+just the right degree of olfactory attraction to the great cats, and in
+due season the bold hunter lays one low without the slightest risk. Thus
+Indo-China is full of successful tiger-hunters, without a scar to show
+for it. The Annamese down on the coastal plain live in such dread of the
+tiger that they never mention their greatest four-footed enemy except by
+the respectful title of Ong Kop (Lord Tiger), and in the woods your
+coolie will make a clawing sign rather than speak openly of the fearsome
+beast. Children have been carried off by tigers within a mile or two of
+the Annamese capital. Yet the Moï hunt them with primitive weapons that
+are hardly more effective than a sharpened pole. “Moï,” by the way, is
+simply the Annamese pronunciation of the Chinese character “man,”
+meaning barbarian, a term much used by these two races to designate the
+despised peoples who have not the honor of being of the same blood as
+they.
+
+Heavy clouds, and one gust of rain, as from the swiftly passing nozzle
+of a celestial hose, swept over the train late in the afternoon, though
+in Saïgon rain is unknown at that season. Near Tourcham real mountain
+ranges climbed down to the edge of the plain and crowded the railway so
+close to the sea that we caught several glimpses of it, and of waterways
+beautiful at high tide. The name of this all but isolated station is
+taken from the great Cham tower that stands on a hillock near it. The
+Cham were an ancient people, of Hindu civilization also, who occupied
+this coastal strip many centuries ago, long before the Khmer swept down
+into the peninsula, and they left behind them gray stone towers that
+stand forth weirdly in the wilderness of to-day. Mammoth rocks heaped
+themselves up into half-jungled hills as we raced onward between low
+mountains—the coastal group on one hand and the forerunners of the great
+Annamese chain inland on the other. Toward sunset the arid landscape
+grew green again, some paddy-fields and scattered villages appeared;
+then the region as far as the eye could see turned frankly to rice
+culture, though with cattle grazing now in long brown stubble. But this
+fertility did not last, even where there was evidence of plenty of rain
+recently; in its place came bush, primitive unpeopled jungle, trees in
+white flower shrouded with vines, kapok trees shedding their vegetable
+cotton, flatlands, or at most low hills. Patches of Indian corn and
+tobacco flashed by, clusters of miserable wattled mud huts with old
+straw or palm-leaf roofs that looked like beggars’ caps, but there were
+no people at all compared to almost any part of China.
+
+Nhatrang had a booming beach and a constant sea-breeze, and seemed
+spacious and pleasant, a trifle cooler than Saïgon. But this I take
+partly on faith, for I never saw it by daylight. Thick tropical night
+had fallen when the train came to the end of its rails, and almost
+before I knew it I had been whisked into the stopping-place provided for
+Europeans. This was a cross between a government _sala_ and a public
+inn, exactly what a French establishment in the tropics run by a
+slippered Alsatian who had completely forgotten his native land, except
+for its German accent, would naturally be. It seemed that I, the only
+European to whom Nhatrang was to play host that night, had broken a
+fixed rule of travel in these parts. Of two Annamese youths who had
+boarded the train some miles away to drum up passengers for two rival
+motor-buses, I had come to terms with the least respectable, whereas all
+Europeans hitherto had patronized the official mail-bus belonging to
+vested interests. But the terms were favorable accordingly, and as
+between outsiders and vested interests my sympathies are inclined to
+radicalism.
+
+I was called at three, and we were off again in the bootleg autobus that
+had clinched our agreement by carrying me from station to inn the
+evening before. It was still dark when we crossed a broad estuary or
+river by a _bac_ and struck off into what seemed to be mountains. A
+_bac_, as all diligent students of French know, is a ferry, but the
+genus that abounds in Indo-China is worthy a name of its own. How many
+times during my gasoline-propelled travels throughout the colony my eyes
+fell upon that capital T on its back like a helpless turtle, which meant
+one more river to cross by the precarious Annamese method, I refuse even
+to try to guess. As a special concession I might admit that there are at
+least a thousand bridges in Indo-China that have never been built, some
+of which I fear never will be. One is rolling serenely along a smooth
+French highway, swathed in that delight which comes from swift
+comfortable motion, so long as it is uninterrupted, when
+“Brrgrrum!”—another sign-board with the overturned T. The vehicle
+slithers down a steep and probably slimy bank, all but sinks a
+collection of ancient planks criminally put together, and stops just in
+time to keep from sliding off the farther end of them. If it is daytime,
+two or three or half a dozen Annamese of either sex and any age have
+been aroused from their siesta by the overworked horn and the compact of
+automobile and their disjointed sleeping place, which they begin
+forthwith to pole or gondolier across the fluid interruption to traffic.
+If it is night, profanity and slapping on the part of the chauffeur and
+his assistants may also be necessary to metamorphose the several huddled
+sacks about the intrepid raft into living beings and to move them to
+indulge in similar exertions. Sometimes, if the expanse of water is not
+too great, there is a rope or chain from shore to shore. The boatmen use
+chain-handles weighted at the end with a block of wood by means of which
+they wrap themselves easily about the transfluvial cable as it is
+dragged up from the slimy bottom. But whatever the method of propulsion,
+the craft is sure to run aground or meet some other form of delaying
+mishap before the crossing is completed, and to creak and groan and rend
+itself in a way to assure the inexperienced that his trip is about to
+end at the bottom of that particular strip of water. Nothing is more
+adaptable than the human spirit, however, and within a week a _bac_
+meant no more to me than entering the ring does to a bull-fighter.
+
+I traveled first class, at two thirds what the same privilege would have
+cost me in the regular conveyance of the _poste coloniale_. That is, I
+sat wedged into a corner of the front seat with the driver. His
+assistant, having yielded his usual place to me for whatever reward may
+have been promised him by his chief, rode for two days on the
+running-board, one bare foot hooked over the front door or one skinny
+hand clutching a support of the baggage-laden roof. It was a place
+convenient for his duties anyway, for these consisted in catching sight
+of the next kilometer-post in order to compute the fare of each new
+passenger, clambering along the side of the car like a chipmunk on a
+wall to collect it, slapping or booting with a bare toe pedestrians who
+did not speedily give the vehicle the widest possible berth, and
+watering the radiator wherever time and water were to be had, as if it
+were some jungle beast perpetually dying of tropical thirst. Behind me
+rode an average of fourteen Annamese, with a few babies usually thrown
+in. These second-class passengers enjoyed the privilege of being less
+likely than I to catapult through the wind-shield at one of the sudden
+stops that were always imminent; but no doubt the honor of my position,
+and the lesser likelihood of being sprayed with betel-juice by some
+garrulous fellow-passenger, made my double fare worth while.
+
+The chauffeur, like his understudy, was dressed in tropical French
+fashion, as was proper to his honorable calling, a soft felt hat crushed
+down over his head, his shirt-collar wide open, after the latest fashion
+of European beaches. Once he abandons the comfortable and pleasing garb
+of his own people, the Annamese jumps to the most ultra-modern mode of
+his rulers. Until I had met others of his clan who seemed to have
+learned the chauffeur trade in a tailor-shop, I considered this driver
+the last word in perpetual homicidal intention; looking back upon him
+from the vantage-ground of uninjured escape from Indo-China, I grant him
+perfection among Annamese wielders of the steering-wheel. For one thing
+he wore shoes, which is by no means common among his brake- and
+clutch-stepping compatriots, and the little French he tortured when
+there was no visible way out of it was at times within reach of an
+attentive understanding, in itself a rare virtue. His chief amusement
+was the crushing of dogs, those thin yellow dogs that are almost as
+numerous in Annamese villages as children and pigs. It was a kindness to
+the gaunt curs perhaps, but I never reached the point of taking great
+pleasure in seeing one of them disappear beneath us with one short
+helpless yelp. When he could not find enough of these pitiful animals
+within reach, he brushed against frightened _nha-qués_, the leisurely
+peasants of Annam, in order to see how far they could remove themselves
+in a single jump. Not a few of them made the records of mere athletes
+seem the performances of babes in arms.
+
+To be the driver of an automobile is to the Annamese more than a trade,
+it is a title. The first chauffeur of the _Résidence Supérieure_ at the
+capital of Annam wears the dragon decoration of his emperor, and other
+chauffeurs passing through Hué go to his garage to kowtow before him.
+The ease with which Orientals adapt themselves to our inventions is one
+of the wonders of the East. One would suppose that a people quite
+incapable of understanding, much less inventing, such a mechanical
+contrivance as the automobile would stand in awe of it, and of those who
+had contrived it. Not at all; on the contrary they take it as calmly as
+they do the growths of nature, as they do the miracles with which they
+credit their demons and invisible spirits, showing the same rage or
+surprise if it does not respond to their senseless chastisement as at
+their gaunt sore-backed domestic animals refusing to work under their
+heartless lashings.
+
+Thanks perhaps to French discipline, or because the Annamese are by
+nature a more quiet leisurely race, my companion on the front seat was
+not so wild as the average Chinese chauffeur. Yet on the whole it was no
+great pleasure to ride beside this solemn little brown man in his
+misplaced near-European clothes. Though it was always passable, the road
+was in places atrociously surfaced, for all the road-gangs along the
+way. Especially among the mountains that often came down to the edge of
+the sea it is no joke even for such famous road-builders as the French
+to keep up a highway in a land of tropical rainy seasons. An autobus of
+the same bootleg line, lying upside down in a creek where a bridge had
+broken down a week before under its thundering impact, did not give me
+that reassurance of complete safety at his high speed which the fellow
+himself seemed to have. It was bad enough to see one of the mangy yellow
+mongrels that slink about every Annamese hut disappear under our wheels
+every hour or two. I could comfort myself that these at least should be
+glad to be so suddenly put out of their lifelong misery. But in the
+course of the morning the nerveless Asiatic at the wheel succeeded in
+running over a handsome foreign hunting-dog loping along beside its
+shotgun-armed French master on a bicycle. Perhaps he did not
+deliberately overtake the animal—unsuspecting, because of the kindly
+European atmosphere it lived in, any such treachery as the orphaned
+mongrels of Annam are constantly on the lookout for—but he could at any
+rate easily have avoided it. The Annamese passengers, gazing back at the
+writhing corpse in the dust as we sped away, seemed to look upon such
+incidents as one of the pleasures of travel, due them in consideration
+of the high fare on these strange foreign vehicles. One had the feeling
+that they grinned and chattered and nudged one another not so much
+because of a certain more or less natural antipathy toward the race to
+which this particular dog was attached as out of sheer Oriental joy at
+beholding suffering. On the tanned mask of the driver’s face there was
+just the hint of two conflicting emotions; one the satisfaction of
+having added another dog, better than the average, to his score; the
+other a possibility of vengeance on the part of the Frenchman kneeling
+in the dust beside his dying pet, that transferred itself into a more
+deafening roar and breakneck speed than ever.
+
+
+That autobus trip from Nhatrang to Tourane was through much prettier
+scenery than the one by train the day before. For one thing the highway
+runs much closer to the coast than does the railway. Outcroppings of the
+great Annamese chain came down to the edge of the China Sea every little
+while, especially during the first day’s stage from Nhatrang to Quinhon,
+and our road wound and twisted, buckled and climbed, over high rocky
+spurs, along the sheer edge of breath-taking slopes, up and down between
+sea-level and several thousand feet above it, often with hair-pin turns
+high up along precipitous cliffs on the very edge of the densely blue
+ocean. It opened many magnificent vistas, of weird indentations, bold
+headlands, charming little beaches, now and again an unbelievably blue
+bay thickly speckled with the sails of tiny boats dancing in the
+whitecaps as to Pan’s pipes, yet seeming to have no fear. They were mere
+cockle-shells, these sea-going canoes of the Annamese fishermen, made of
+bamboo splints tightly woven together and covered with pitch. Scores of
+them, baking bottom up in the sun on raised frameworks and gleaming
+under a new coating as with varnish, lay along the road through Annam.
+Sometimes the road itself was made of bamboo splints, woven together
+into great mat-like strips six feet or more wide and in some places half
+a mile long. These carried the heavy autobus across deep sand, at either
+end of leaky _bacs_, in which it would otherwise have floundered almost
+as quickly as in the water itself.
+
+[Illustration: Motor-buses link together the railways of Indo-China,
+crossing broad sandy river-banks on strips of woven bamboo splints]
+
+[Illustration: In Annam prisoners working in the streets wear a light
+remnant of the old neck-torturing Chinese _cangue_]
+
+[Illustration: In the “Marble Mountains” are many grottoes, some of them
+elaborately fitted up as temples]
+
+[Illustration: An Annamese summoning a ferry from across one of the many
+rivers which still offer no bridges to automobiles]
+
+Deeply green wet jungle surrounded us much of the time, cactus
+stretching out spiny arms toward us. Blinding white salt marshes
+contrasted with a road in places so red that the saliva of a nation of
+betel-chewers did not spot it. Striking peaks of the coastal group
+alternated with tame stretches of dusty highway down at sea-level, gusts
+of rain from mountains of black clouds with blazing tropical sunshine.
+Wherever mountains and foot-hills receded enough to leave a suggestion
+of plain, however narrow, rice-fields filled every level space. The
+young rice of the first crop of the year was deeply flooded now,
+peasants plowing thigh-deep in it behind ponderous water-buffaloes that
+seemed to be in their element wading in slime. Some men and more women
+were clawing in the mud up to their biceps; others paddled about the
+fields in the light canoes of woven bamboo. Stones were so rare in some
+sections of this ancient route that the well-sweeps used for irrigation
+were weighted at the short end with balls of mud and straw. Along the
+road there was no more suggestion of fences than in China itself, but
+the smaller foot-hills were here and there cut up into green fields by
+thin lines of greener bushes.
+
+With an hour’s hot halt for refreshments for man, woman, and
+gasoline-consuming beast at a village boasting a tolerable Annamese
+imitation of a French restaurant, we rode on through scorching midday
+into the slightly cooler afternoon, ending the first day’s stage with
+sunshine enough left to photograph pretty Quinhon. In the last few miles
+big rice-plains had opened out; we had bisected a scattered town of some
+size; files of coolies had increased until the road became an almost
+continual procession of them. Quinhon is beautifully situated on a spit
+of sand and earth projected out into a bay surrounded by mountainous
+shores. Thus there are both mountains and sea on all sides of it, except
+where the road enters the one long street of the native town, merging
+beyond into shaded drives and foreign houses in garden-groves, none of
+them a hundred yards from either beach. The French suppress somewhat
+more successfully than the English-speaking races the tendency to insist
+on erecting in the tropics dwellings exactly like those at home, and the
+houses they build in Indo-China are not entirely unfitted to the
+climate.
+
+The ruling race monopolizes this tongue of sandy land running out into
+the densely blue, very deep harbor surrounded by high hills, where one
+small ocean steamer, flying the British flag, now rode at anchor. The
+native town is little more than two unbroken lines of shops, and between
+them and the French residences stood a whitewashed market building of
+modern lines, even at this late hour half filled and all but surrounded
+by squatting women in the woven palm-leaf hats of parasol shape that are
+the most prominent feature of every Annamese market. They sold all
+manner of native foodstuffs, fish from the sea, long rolls of dark-brown
+sugar wrapped in leaves, arec-nuts and the betel-leaves and lime that go
+with them, recalling the Indian women of the Andes selling cocoa-leaves
+and similar ingredients of an analogous mild vice. Though French paper
+piastres, fractional silver, and big copper sous are the ordinary
+Indo-Chinese medium of exchange, in the markets the masses still use
+_sapèques_, as the French call Chinese “cash.”
+
+It was at Quinhon that I saw for the first time in Indo-China, though by
+no means the last, prisoners wearing the _cangue_ once so common and now
+so rare in China. Instead of the great planks of Manchu—and
+Puritan—days, however, these contrivances about offending necks were a
+very light frame of wood, as if the French, though unable to do away
+entirely with an old Annamese custom left over from the centuries of
+Chinese rule, had insisted on softening this form of punishment. Native
+justice prescribes leg-irons too, and sentences men to hard labor even
+for not paying taxes, but French rule seems to temper Asiatic cruelty by
+wrapping bands of cloth about the ankles so that irons shall not chafe
+the skin. Most of the convicts also had an iron band about the waist,
+and this was connected with the leg-irons by two chains that clanked
+constantly with the prisoner’s short steps. Yet the fellows could even
+climb cocoanut-trees in these, and they did not seem to have any
+difficulty in getting permission from the soldier guards to step into a
+shop and buy cigarettes or the makings of the betel-nut cuds with which
+the black teeth of both prisoners and guards driveled. The men who thus
+dropped behind soon caught up again with their fellows, pushing and
+pulling two-wheeled carts of sanitary purposes and drawing loads of
+broken stone.
+
+For all its French colony, the people here gaped at a foreigner almost
+as much as in China—though perhaps it was merely because I was out in
+the sun and on foot at such an hour. They gathered to watch me write
+wherever I drew out my note-book and gaped open-mouthed at my antics
+with the camera that few of them seemed to recognize, but with more
+respect, or fear, than Chinese crowds show under similar circumstances,
+remaining quietly at some distance, like well trained children.
+Frenchmen, even women and children, began to appear when the sun neared
+the horizon, strolling under the trees and along the edges of the blue
+bay out on their breeze-cooled sandspit. At the more or less French
+hotel where Europeans passing through Quinhon spend the night I was
+joined that evening by the only man of my own tongue I met between
+Saïgon and Tourane. He was thin and lanky with long tropical living, but
+filled with Scotch humor, and announced himself the chief engineer of
+the steamer in the harbor. He did not seem to believe my tale that I had
+come all the way from Saïgon by land, much less that I hoped to go clear
+on into China without taking to the sea, though he had sailed into this
+and all the other little ports along the coast of Annam half his life,
+during which his chief pleasures were a meal and a “berth” ashore now
+and then.
+
+
+
+
+                               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.
+
+[Illustration: An Annamese girl, chaperoned by her small brother, sells
+her wares in the market-place of Hué]
+
+[Illustration: When it rains in Annam, as it does on every provocation,
+a simple straw raincoat covers either sex among the masses]
+
+[Illustration: Like the southern Chinese the Annamese are expert boatmen
+because they learn their calling long before they reach the dignity of
+clothing]
+
+[Illustration: Swinging in the village squares is a favorite diversion
+of the Annamese populace during the lunar New Year’s season]
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VII
+                            MAROONED IN HUÉ
+
+
+The river at Hué runs parallel to the sea, some twenty miles inland, and
+there is a screen of mountains to the south, the direction from which
+evil spirits come in Annam—just as the north, the reservoir of bitter
+cold and conquering Tartar tribes, is the quarter from which they are to
+be guarded against at Peking. There are also two islands near-by, known
+respectively as the White Tiger and the Blue Dragon. Hence it is not
+strange that the royal geomancers of several generations ago considered
+this the proper place to establish a new capital.
+
+It is a very roomy town, like all those of any size and importance in
+Annam, probably not so much from Annamese custom as from French
+influence. On the foreign side of the river, where the traveler is set
+down, are all those things properly pertaining to the French superlords.
+From the railway station a wide grass-sided boulevard along the
+river-bank passes in its mile or more of existence a rather imposing
+school, hospital, barracks, and government buildings, many comfortable
+French residences, the _cercle_ where the ruling race gathers of an
+otherwise empty evening over its coffee and wine, its dominoes and
+cards, and brings the traveler at length to another grocery-hotel named
+for the tropically energetic Morin brothers. Just beyond, only across
+the street from the French windows of the room assigned me, stands the
+palatial residence and offices of the _résident supérieur_, real ruler
+of Annam.
+
+The whole machinery of the actual government of the “protected”
+kingdom is confined to this side of the river, the south side,
+direction of evil influences. Probably the river was kept between the
+real and the puppet rulers purposely; the French have as good reason
+as the emperor of Annam to keep up the fiction of his sacredness and
+unapproachability. Yet space is still so plentiful in this French
+section of Hué that almost any official—and there are virtually no
+other European residents—has his own garden and greensward among
+trees, large enough to be called, with a little stretching of the
+southern Gallic imagination, a private park. In any habitable
+direction these shade away into thatched huts that may be tailor-shops
+and the like as well as native residences. Up a creek tributary of the
+river bulks forth on its knoll the tropical-weather-worn old
+cathedral, under a nap of fine vegetation, a contrast to the low
+insignificant buildings of the missionaries of Tourane. Not the least
+conspicuous thing on the French side of the river is the Monument aux
+Morts, in Annamese style, the names of the French heroes who went home
+from Annam to die in the World War facing the boulevard, where the
+passer-by can scarcely overlook them, those of the Annamese who made
+the great sacrifice for the “mother-land” around on the side facing
+the river. Of course he who takes the trouble to go behind the
+monument can read those also; possibly the emperor can even make them
+out with a powerful field-glass from the flagpole of his citadel, if
+he ever climbs so high; or it may be that the placid river is more in
+keeping with their memory than the road with its broken stream of
+Oriental and Western traffic.
+
+I found the weather in Hué quite different from that of Saïgon. When
+rain falls in Cochinchina it is dry in Annam, and vice versa, thanks to
+a high range between them. Ever since I had left Canton the weather had
+been bright and equatorial in temperature, but as I came northward the
+humidity had steadily increased in density, and now the rainy season
+this so plainly augured overtook me in earnest. For the first time since
+leaving Hong Kong I was comfortably cool, though white was still my
+favorite garb. It did not seem to be so with the French of Hué, however,
+perhaps because of some connection between that color and the sacredness
+of the emperor. There was an attention to dress worthy of descendants of
+Beau Brummel and his spouse, if he had one; but white suits for men were
+rather looked down upon, and of course to so much as step out of a
+bedroom without a coat on was almost as incredible a breach of
+civilization as in Brazil itself. A thick Scotch mist reigned all my
+first, and what I had planned to be my only, day in the capital; and
+that evening at the very height of the motion-picture tale on the wall
+of the outdoor covered sitting-space in the grocery-hotel courtyard
+tropical rains began to fall in earnest. Hardly did it let up again as
+long as I remained in Hué—except for the all-important day that
+justified my stay, during which the weather behaved _à merveille_. It
+poured without cessation, confining me to my hotel room, making even a
+dash across the courtyard to the other parts of the establishment a
+shower-bath with mud foundation, forcing me to put off my visit to the
+real Hué across the river, the “citadel” with its palaces, bringing
+forth again the cloth suit for which I had so roundly berated myself at
+Saïgon, and leaving me none too warm at that. Everything took quickly to
+mildewing, and in less than forty-eight hours pocketbooks and the extra
+shoes of those who owned them were covered with a delicate vegetation.
+Soon stories began to come in of dikes giving way, of thousands of
+coolies being rushed to save this or that town, built several meters
+below the river, so that a broken embankment would mean disaster.
+
+Nowhere could the rainy season have overtaken me with less cause for
+resentment, however, for I had to tarry several days in Hué rain or
+shine. I did not know this when I arrived, but found it out next
+morning, when I went to present to the “résuper” the letter of
+introduction I had won from some other official along the line. The real
+ruler of Annam, less telegraphically known as the _résident supérieur_,
+received me in his palatial dwelling and bureau a few steps beyond the
+grocery-hotel with a perfect Gallic mixture of courtesy and that
+something which leaves one no chance to presume upon one’s fancied
+importance. Yet the writer of that letter must have been either an
+important personage or the “résuper’s” boon companion in school-boy
+days, for it certainly could not have been my own virtues that won me
+the precious privilege the superior resident of Annam offered.
+
+In the course of our official platitudes he mentioned that the ceremony
+of the lunar New Year greeting of his loyal subjects to the emperor of
+Annam across the river would take place the following Tuesday morning.
+It was then Friday, and by Tuesday I had hoped to be leaving Hanoï for
+the Chinese border. But the most important personage of Annam went on to
+mention that, while only French officials were ordinarily admitted—which
+I found later not to be sternly true—he thereby invited me to remain for
+this crowning feature of the Annamese _Têt_. This very special favor, I
+gathered from his meticulous deportment, was not so much in my own honor
+as to that of the then still gratefully remembered country to which I
+belong.
+
+Expert as I was in my academic days at ministering to the gastronomic
+demands of my fellow-students, I have never been a good waiter. For some
+inexplicable reason the loss of time brings me more bitterness than the
+loss of money, though of the first I have habitually far more to spare
+than of the second. Certainly I did not care to squander wantonly in Hué
+the better part of a week that I had planned to spend in hurrying back
+to my family in Canton, with whom communication had been rare and
+precarious. Yet I felt it a duty to my curiosity, if not to my country,
+to attend one royal levee before the time comes to settle down to a
+respectable life of immobility. There are few such ceremonies left in
+the world, and still fewer of them are open to Europeans—as the East
+insists on considering Americans. I murmured a polite acceptance.
+
+But life is an incessant series of ups and downs in this vale of tears.
+The next words of the ruler of Annam turned my satisfaction into
+disappointment. When I—or it may have been the “résuper” himself—brought
+up the obviously important question of court costume, he remarked, “Of
+course you have with you your frock-coat and _chapeau de forme_?”—in
+other words the ceremonial head-gear of politicians and other successful
+exploiters of the general public. Or if not, it seemed, I could get
+along with _le smoking_—which as a Frenchman he of course pronounced
+“smocking.” Now _le smoking_ ordinarily means our more modest form of
+dinner garb, disrespectfully known as “soup and fish,” and not only that
+part of my wardrobe, but the even more absurd long-tailed livery of
+night life, I had left at Canton. The motive for this dreadful oversight
+had seemed sufficient in the days when it occurred. I did not care to
+have the Chinese bandits I was almost sure to meet on my way home have
+just cause for wreaking Bolshevik vengeance upon me by catching me in
+possession of such unsightly things, or give them the false impression
+that I was worth holding for ransom, or, more likely still, endure the
+painful experience of seeing one of them bedeck himself in that unseemly
+garb. I could of course not weep openly in so official a predicament,
+but it looked indeed as if for my carelessness in packing, my failure to
+remember the oft-learned lesson that the equatorial regions of the earth
+by no means forgo the perspiring amenities of social intercourse, I was
+to miss something which very few of my countrymen have seen. True, the
+“résuper” murmured something to the effect that some way would be found
+to _me tirer d’affaire_, but I took this to be merely a kind way of
+softening my unavoidable disappointment, and having received official
+permission to visit the palaces across the river under less interesting
+circumstances I took my leave.
+
+I had barely broken my first French roll and tasted my wine at the
+eleven o’clock _déjeuner_ when one of the black-turbaned “boys” in snowy
+white laid before me the card of the “Chef de Sûreté d’Annam.”
+Misfortunes certainly come in clusters. The chief of the security of
+Annam, police-head extraordinary of the land, suggested trouble, with
+emphasis on such persons as spies and unwanted visitors; hence it was
+with something akin to trepidation that I hurried out to the grocery
+division of the hotel and presented myself before him. Perhaps I had
+somewhere neglected to have something done again to my passport, and was
+to be ordered out of the country, which would not greatly matter, now
+that I had lost the privilege of hobnobbing with the emperor, except
+that they might send me back the way I had come, or perhaps from Tourane
+as the most convenient port, and spoil my plan of going all the way from
+Angkor to Canton by land.
+
+I found the bearer of the dreaded title an upstanding, soldierly, yet
+genial fellow, in the act of sampling a newly opened keg of olives. The
+_résident supérieur_, he remarked, after the customary words of
+greeting, had sent him to see me. So I was in for it, even as I had
+feared! But to my astonishment and growing relief the chief of Annam’s
+security showed no signs of official wrath. Conversation ran along in a
+perfectly neutral manner until my fellow-guests in the dining-room must
+have been nearing the sad French substitutes for apple-pie. Then at
+length, in a very tactful way—which was fortunate, since I am nothing if
+not sensitive—the guardian of the security of Annam introduced the
+apparently irrelevant and immaterial theme that he and I were of about
+the same build; to which, so long as he did not also charge me with
+rivaling him in manly beauty, I acquiesced. In short, he interrupted
+himself in the midst of some genial story based on the natural spiritual
+affinity between republican France and my own Republican land to say
+that he had come at the suggestion of his superior to offer me clothing
+for the coming ceremony. He would be glad to assemble the requisite
+outfit from his own wardrobe; he had already done as much, some years
+before, for another _journaliste_ from my country—what a barbarian and
+unprovided nation he must have thought us!
+
+[Illustration: Overlooking, from his flagpole, the palaces of the
+emperor of Annam]
+
+[Illustration: China itself cannot outdo the old bronze urns before the
+main palace of the Annamese emperor]
+
+[Illustration: The throne-room of the emperor of Annam, on the afternoon
+before the New Year’s ceremony]
+
+We began forthwith to take stock. For a moment it seemed that I would
+after all need only to wear his trousers, for the conference disclosed
+that in Annam _le smoking_ means black pantaloons topped by a white
+tuxedo coat giving up its duties abruptly at the waist, what is quite
+fittingly known in the dancing circles of the Far East as a “monkey
+jacket.” Nay, even a full-length white coat would do, and that I had. I
+was even the possessor of black trousers—if ever the baggage I had
+checked at Saïgon should catch up with me. But further discussion
+brought to light the annoying fact that those straying trousers had a
+faint stripe in them, and that would never do; it would be almost
+equivalent to _lèse-majesté_. Then that white coat—did it have one
+button or two? Two, as far as I recalled. “Sapristi!” The chief of the
+security of Annam threw up his arms in a gesture of dismay. A coat with
+two buttons would be worse than no coat at all in Annamese court
+circles, I gathered from his excited demeanor. Also I should have to
+have a vest,—beg pardon, purists of the editorial function, I mean a
+w’s’c’t—and that curse in any climate, let alone in the tropics, a stiff
+collar. All these things the chief expressed his delight to be able to
+furnish, and the day seemed to have been saved—until he glanced down at
+my feet. They were incased in brown shoes. Moreover, though I am not
+perpetually conscious of that fact, they must be large feet, compared at
+least with those even of athletic Frenchmen of my own build, for the
+chief not only disclaimed any ability to provide me with shoes of such a
+size from his own wardrobe, but doubted the possibility of finding a
+pair as large as that in all Hué. Plainly I have overlooked the
+opportunity of becoming a great popular comedian and riding in my own
+limousine. But surely Buddha would provide, in so small, or even large,
+a matter as that, and I planned to settle down in Hué for five days
+rather than wend my way homeward bitter with disappointment.
+
+
+Once I had reconciled myself to losing several days, Hué was by no means
+the worst place on earth in which to pass the time. My hotel room was
+more home-like than those for which we pay several times as much in our
+own beloved land; food, wine, and ice were in keeping with French
+standards, and if the evening movies in the hotel courtyard were not
+worth going to the Orient to see, the types of French colonials and the
+natives they attracted were, not to mention the numerous crosses between
+those two races. Then too the rain did now and then slacken, though so
+weary did the senses become of hearing it pour on the graveled road
+outside that it never seemed to do so. One briefly clear evening I took
+a walk in Hué itself, the walled but very much Frenchified imperial
+residence across the river from the newer foreign section. The river is
+so wide that seven big incongruous steel arches are needed to lift the
+modern bridge over it, and the town beyond proved to be extensive,
+though from the farther bank it looked merely like a façade of shops
+backed by forest. A whole village of queer boats, most of which spend
+their lives in bringing produce to the big half-covered market-place on
+the northern bank, were anchored about that end of the bridge. At first
+there seemed to be no great population. But gradually this impression
+gave way, as the town, orderly with wide right-angled streets, stretched
+leisurely on and on out various directions, long after one expected it
+to succumb to jungle or fields, until I began to wonder if there could
+be as much city scattered among the trees here as in the forest of
+Angkor-Thom.
+
+Whatever the French have left of shops and native handicrafts is outside
+the wall and moat of the imperial residence. Once, they say, these were
+labyrinths of narrow dirty streets; now they are neither labyrinthine
+nor unclean, and much of the picturesqueness one expects is lacking. In
+the wide-open shops that lined the principal extramural streets one saw
+Madrasis in little red fezzes, most of them with black-toothed Annamese
+wives, and children with the luminous eyes of the Hindu. But there
+seemed to be few Chinese merchants. The Annamese themselves evidently
+kept shop here more than is normal, perhaps because the capital with its
+swarms of loafing functionaries had impressed them with the ease of this
+sedentary occupation. Between the river and the mountains that shield
+the capital from evil southern influences there are many waterways, and
+sampans and humped bridges were frequent. But on the whole the charm of
+the Orient had been cleaned and modernized away.
+
+Much of the old atmosphere remained, however, within the _citadelle_
+which the native city partly surrounded. In Annam towns of any
+importance are encircled by ramparts and are known as citadels. Once,
+and in some cases still, the rather roomy residences of native
+officials, the citadels of Annam have little in common with the walled
+cities of China, teeming with jostling humanity. The crenelated walls of
+Hué inclose a space a mile or more square, but it is a newer, lower,
+much less imposing wall than the ancient ones surrounding Peking and
+most Chinese cities. A moat stagnant with water-lilies and other
+broad-leafed vegetation protects the wall, and short stone bridges older
+in appearance than they probably are in years give entrance to it in
+three or four places through Chinese-style gates. Inside is an
+astonishing spaciousness, trees and greensward and shaded boulevard-wide
+streets, a veritable park scattered with dwellings, as if nothing were
+so plentiful as space. With overcrowded China always in mind, I was
+constantly astonished at the roominess of Annamese cities. Within the
+citadel, Hué is a city of gardens, less a capital than a great inhabited
+park, more an Oriental Versailles than a Paris, not so much a center of
+hard official duties as a perpetual summer residence of Eastern
+potentates. As those on this side of the river really have very little
+to do with governing, the atmosphere is in keeping with the facts, and
+the ostensible rulers of Annam can spend their time growing flowers and
+parading their singing-birds.
+
+Never, surely, was another walled city so bucolic as this residence of
+the sacred emperor of Annam. Quiet and calm reigned everywhere along its
+wide roadway under trees that joined together overhead into an almost
+concealing forest. Lotus ponds, as covered as the moat with flowers and
+big green leaves, lay here and there through the half-forest; many of
+the houses—most of them, I was to learn later, the homes of
+mandarins—were set in roomy gardens surrounded by low walls with
+imposing gateways. With its broad river and its canals, bordered with
+water-palms, its flower-decked bungalows, its wide silent roadways, the
+chimeric roofs of its palaces, the splendid circle of its forest, its
+quiet and cleanliness, Hué was indeed a great contrast to China. One day
+when for a little while the weather was clear—no, not that, for the
+humidity was thick as cream, but at least the sun was doing its best to
+shine through it—I evaded the royal guards and mounted the iron ladder
+of the Eiffel Tower of a flagpole, which stands at the front of the
+citadel. From it the royal palaces stretched away among the trees one
+after another in a straight line, impressive by their colors, perhaps by
+their architecture, but never by their height, as if their builders
+scorned to take advantage of that cheapest means of exciting admiration.
+From this elevation little else than the palaces and the tree-tops are
+visible, but down beneath the foliage the stroller will find many humble
+huts made of poles and thatch, not only within the citadel but only a
+short walk from the palaces of the sacred Annamese emperor. Yet about
+some of these simple, but probably on the whole as comfortable, homes of
+the ordinary mass of his loyal subjects, there were some fine clipped
+hedges, as if these faded-thatch hovels were merely a means of
+disguising wealth still naturally modest from centuries of envious
+mandarins. Rich and poor have the same little squared garden, the same
+dwarf trees growing in pots of baked earth, the same water-jars sweating
+in the sun.
+
+He who is privileged to visit the home of a mandarin enters the
+principal room directly from the garden, without steps, and finds it
+furnished with a big bed of naked wood, with no other bed-furnishings
+than a porcelain pillow and a reed mat. Besides that there is a round
+table with stools, and the altar of the ancestors. This now sometimes
+bears a photograph of the deceased in the place of the ancient
+tablet—the one evidence of progress, and an unpleasant one, for it is
+far more agreeable to picture a bygone member of the human race from no
+other data than his posthumous name in Chinese characters on an upright
+stick than to behold him photographically in all the moles and wrinkles
+he left behind him in the grave.
+
+
+All this I did not of course see in one day; the rain was too incessant
+for that. Long as I remained I could not have seen it all if I had not
+defied the rain, helped thereto by the attitude of the natives toward
+it. A rainy day does not keep the Annamese indoors; like the inhabitants
+of most southern countries where deluges fall for days at a time, they
+make the most of it. I had only to glance out my hotel window to see
+scores of both sexes, bare to the knees, even to the loins, all ages
+wearing their mushroom hats and the palm-leaf rain-coats that turn so
+easily this way or that, according to the slant of the storm. On they
+went, carrying their shoulder-pole loads or doing whatever else the
+pursuit of their rice required of them, quite as if the sun were
+shining. It is so hot when it does that in some ways a rainy day is a
+more pleasant time to work; and what is mud when you can wash one foot
+with the other at any water-hole? Thus Hué on those wet days was a vista
+of broad graveled streets, lined by trees and grass and spaciousness,
+and dotted with human figures dressed only in palm-leaves, so far as the
+eye could see, like some strange Eden that defied any but the most
+practised eye to tell the sexes apart.
+
+As there seemed to be no prospect of the rain halting, I dived into a
+rickshaw one afternoon and went to visit the palaces across the river.
+It was as well that I had brought along my special permit from the
+“résuper,” for soldiers in the now familiar Annamese uniform of khaki
+rompers and blouse below a mushroom, brass-topped hat and above bare
+feet—here however with imperial yellow rather than the ordinary red
+wrap-leggings—expect a permit from Europeans, though coolies of both
+sexes were going freely in and out. A fine pretense this that the French
+are merely protectors; and incidentally it keeps other Western nations
+from finding out too much of what goes on in the privacy of the
+emperor’s own department of the governing of Annam. There is nothing
+very exciting about his palaces. So low that they are not seen at any
+distance, they are few and unimposing compared to the Forbidden City of
+Peking. Yet small as they are beside their Chinese counterparts, like
+the same thing not too exactly done in miniature, they are in general
+artistic and in some ways perhaps superior to their more pretentious
+Chinese models. One’s impression of them and of the dynasty they
+represent improved with seeing.
+
+Workmen on a bamboo scaffolding were repainting the exterior of the main
+audience-chamber, and Saturday afternoon being pay-day, even as in other
+lands, a group of mandarins with ladylike hands, on some of which
+cat-claw finger-nails still remained, sat at a table keeping books in
+French style and paying out French paper piastres to the men and women
+as they filed past. Building after building, Chinese wood-and-paper
+buildings under top-heavy tile roofs, all of imperial yellow, stretched
+lengthwise one behind another, like squads of soldiers with a passageway
+through the middle of them, as do those of a Chinese yamen, back to the
+main and finally the more private edifices. All these were inclosed
+within a walled compound. Under the incessant rain the polished tiles of
+the courtyards between them resembled great lakes of uncertain depth, in
+which all the surroundings were mirrored as in a broad horizontal
+pier-glass. The old bronze lanterns before the palace verandas, exactly
+full of rain-water, were as beautiful, as graceful, as any I had seen in
+China; and being carefully preserved in this still imperial land, they
+showed their fine points to better advantage. They are hardly the
+favorite lanterns of his Majesty, however, who is more French than
+Chinese in his tastes and thirsts.
+
+The gaudy audience-chamber was on the whole more conspicuous than
+lovely. The real throne-room, on the other hand, was a gorgeous place
+well worth seeing, in spite of a goodly supply of those chandeliers
+which seem to be Europe’s chief contribution to the splendor of Oriental
+kings. From a vast expanse of varicolored tiles gleaming as if they were
+made of glass, rose a forest of red pillars with imperial yellow
+five-clawed dragons climbing them. Decorations of every conceivable
+Chinese form and color, but with red in the ascendancy, added to the
+rich yet not chaotic ensemble. There were many fine vases, quite
+evidently Chinese, though the “guide” who saw to it that I chipped off
+no souvenirs and slipped nothing into my pockets called some of them
+French and contended that many of the others were made by the Annamese
+themselves, in earlier days, before those of his countrymen capable of
+such things had all died off. But they looked to me so much like
+Kingtehchen ware, the best of Kingtehchen at that, that for once I might
+have been tempted into a wager if one had been offered.
+
+Naturally there was the throne, and all the other things that go with
+emperors’ throne-rooms, but all those I was to see better during the
+ceremony that was keeping me in Hué. Suffice it to say that the
+throne-room of Annam was the most gorgeous place I had seen in many a
+moon, on the whole artistically pleasing, and—that the rank and file of
+Americans may understand just what I am trying to say—worth several
+million piastres, or about half as many dollars.
+
+Beyond came more long tile-covered rooms, shed-like in shape, in which
+were many spirit-tablets and tables covered with porcelain fruits. There
+were even some small baskets of real fruit, perhaps because it was now
+New Year time, when the spirits of the departed cannot be deceived with
+pretended food, and when their descendants are surest to remember them.
+All these things and many more stood in imposing array before the six
+shrines of the present dynasty. I fear, however, that with my
+incorrigibly plebeian mind and tastes I found most interesting of all
+the flocks of ordinary coolies with dusters and brooms, who roamed about
+all the buildings among these king’s playthings and slept on mat-covered
+boards beside them.
+
+
+The story of the emperors of Annam, since Gia-long asked through the
+bishop of Adran for the assistance of the French against his dynastic
+rivals at the end of the eighteenth century, is not an entirely happy
+one. Some of them have even lost their jobs entirely for not behaving
+themselves, or for disobeying the French. There was Thanh-thai, for
+instance, deposed in 1907. He had been cutting up—among other things one
+of his concubines, merely to try his hand at surgery. So the French, not
+realizing perhaps that such things happen even in Philadelphia, nay, in
+Paris itself, sent him into exile and called in a doctor to help pick
+out one of his many sons to take his place. The eldest they passed over
+as a plain idiot, and chose a boy in prison, who howled because he
+thought he was being led forth to have his head lopped off. By the time
+they had washed and dressed him in the imperial robes, however, and
+seated him on the throne with the jade scepter in his childish hand, he
+had reverted to type and was an emperor both in appearance and demeanor,
+scorning already the common people among his kowtowing subjects. But in
+1916, coincident with a certain busyness of the French at home, an
+independence movement broke out under this youthful king, which the
+French naturally insist was engineered by the Germans. The scheme was to
+have servants poison all the foreigners in the colony some evening, but
+some one “squealed.” So Jy-su, born in 1902, was also exiled to Réunion,
+a French island off the east coast of Africa, which he still graces with
+his surgical father and one favorite wife. There they are both very
+happy, according to the French colonials, who regard Réunion as a second
+Garden of Eden, and where the ex-Sons of Heaven “have all the women they
+want”—a French as well as a Mohammedan notion of paradise.
+
+All this gave the then reigning emperor, Khai-dinh, his chance. This
+French-ruled king of Annam, a rather distant relative of the man and boy
+he succeeded, came to the throne in 1916, when he was nearly
+thirty-five. He must have been troubled with something akin to vertigo
+by his accession, for until then, though he had been a kind of prince,
+he had enjoyed by no means the income or the importance of a railway
+station-master. If I have inadvertently called him king I apologize; his
+official title is Koang-de, Son of Heaven, written with the same
+characters as those for the Chinese Hoang-ti, son of a similar celestial
+realm. In fact the emperors of Annam claim descent from an imperial
+family of China, which had descendants to spare. Khai-dinh visited
+France in state in 1922, influenced perhaps by an American president,
+for that was the first case of an emperor of Annam leaving Annamese
+soil. It was even more important for him to go, however, for in the
+Indo-Chinese pagoda on the outskirts of the Bois de Vincennes he
+performed a ceremony to release from the necessity of wandering
+perpetually through eternity the shades of thousands of Annamese who had
+fallen in the World War, unsaved either because they had not been able
+to comply with the final rites of their religion or because their bodies
+had not been recovered. He also placed in a French school his son and
+heir—the only one, I believe, for all the wives Khai-dinh maintained.
+
+Khai-dinh was nearing forty when I graced Hué with my impatient
+presence, and was already anemic with tuberculosis. The other day he
+died, and twelve-year-old Vinh-thuy, the crown prince, ascended the
+throne under the name of Bao-dai (Greatness Sustained). But he returned
+at once to France to continue his studies, and Frenchmen will tell you
+that Annam is now governed by a Conseil de Régence, presided over by the
+mandarin Ton-that-tan. For in theory the emperor governs. In
+Cochinchina, which is admittedly a colony, a French lieutenant governor
+is the supreme functionary, but in the four protectorates the native
+sovereigns are still nominally the heads of the governments. Annam and
+Tonkin are under the Annamese emperor; Cambodia and a part of Laos still
+have kings. The native laws apply, unless a foreigner is involved, when
+the Code Napoléon is used. The protectorates maintain almost intact the
+laws and administrative machinery of the days when they were independent
+of French authority. The native sovereign appoints all officials, but
+the French _résident supérieur_ can reject any candidate; the native
+rulers dare not ignore his smallest suggestion, and the lesser
+_résidents_ keep a sharp eye on native functionaries in the provinces.
+New laws may be of either French or native initiative, but both sides
+must agree, which of course means that the French have the final word.
+All royal ordinances are drawn up, not only the French but the native
+texts, in the _Résidences Supérieures_. In Annam the old Chinese system
+of choosing officials and mandarins from among those who have shown the
+greatest proficiency in scholarship still more or less prevails, rather
+than the Irish system of our Western world.
+
+One wonders what the thoughts of Bao-dai will be when he comes back
+really to take his father’s place. Educated in French schools, Parisian
+during all his formative years, he will suddenly be plunged into this
+old-world atmosphere, to the customs, the ideas, the ideals, even the
+spirit of which he will surely have become a stranger. Will he regret
+the ardent life of the Occident he will have left behind, or will the
+old soul of the palace of his ancestors penetrate and possess him, and
+insensibly make him an Oriental potentate?
+
+
+I softened my enforced stay in Hué by also three times visiting the
+imperial burial-places some ten miles from the citadel, on the French
+side of the river. The low rolling hillocks close about the Annamese
+capital are covered with graves of the rank and file by the many
+thousands. Nearly all these mere mounds of earth were cleared and
+rounded off now for the New Year, the few still covered with grass and
+weeds suggesting very unfilial descendants or, more likely still, a line
+died out. As many Annamese as possible have themselves buried near the
+tombs of their sacred emperors, as the Hindu who can manage it has his
+body burned on the bank of the Ganges at Benares. The French are
+gradually restricting the grave-lands, but they must move slowly in a
+matter so important to an ancestor-worshiping race.
+
+All important Annamese make preparation during their lifetime for their
+burial, some building their own tombs, where they often come to sit in
+meditation. While he is still on the throne each emperor has a
+geomancer, or a consultation of geomancers no doubt, choose the site for
+his last resting-place, always in the shelter of a natural screen, a
+butte or hillock that will protect the dead from the evil spirits that
+are forever flying about through the air. In such a garden several
+buildings are constructed, their number and arrangement fixed by ancient
+custom, superstition, and rites. There is an inclosure for the material
+remains, a pavilion for the memory, a temple for the soul; our miserable
+way of putting all these together, so that we cannot commune with the
+memory of the deceased without seeming to smell his bones, is not the
+Annamese way. Thus things were conceived by the sages who erected beyond
+the gates of Peking the mausoleums of the Ming, and the Annamese
+sovereigns have since changed nothing of what they got from their
+Chinese masters.
+
+The royal tomb is the last residence of the sovereign, and in some ways
+the most sumptuous, as befits a palace of eternal repose. He may come
+back in spirit at any moment; therefore his loyal people are always
+prepared to receive him. Here is his great wooden bed, with its mat and
+cushions and porcelain pillow, not only for himself but for his favorite
+wife. Here is the tea, the rice, the _nhoc-nam_, or salty sauce in which
+the Annamese dip their food on the way to the mouth, cups of _chumchum_,
+or rice whisky, the arec-nuts, betel-leaves, and the little pot of lime
+that goes with them for his favorite minor vice, even cigarettes,
+everything he will need when he arrives. All these provisions are
+renewed every morning of the year, generation after generation, so that
+he will find nothing stale on the day when he finally comes. He will
+find again, arranged under glass, his royal playthings, the trinkets and
+gew-gaws, the jade shrubs, the precious crystals, the coffers inlaid
+with mother-of-pearl, the weapons he loved, even those great Sèvres
+vases which the ambassadors of a more respectful France sent him as New
+Year’s presents; more things perhaps than the living emperor has now in
+his living palace. Perhaps the worst punishment of Thanh-thai and his
+son, deposed in 1907 and 1916, respectively, is that they cannot have
+their tombs here among those of their ancestors—unless the French relent
+after they are dead, which for politic reasons of influence on imperial
+conduct in the future they probably will not do. That Khai-dinh
+succeeded in dying on the job was probably the most successful
+accomplishment of his life.
+
+Nothing in Indo-China has the charm of these old royal tombs; in them
+lives intact the melancholy beauty of old Annam. One can walk or
+rickshaw all afternoon about them, and never tire of seeing them.
+Perhaps the tomb of Tu-duc is the most striking; another can be reached
+only by boat. That of Gia-long, epic sovereign of Annam, founder of this
+dynasty and of Annam’s present subordination to the French, is not the
+most elaborate. He was so very busy getting back his kingdom that
+perhaps he did not have time to prepare properly his last place of
+repose, for with the aid of the French he chased out his usurpers and
+grouped under the rule of his jade scepter all the land of Annam, being
+the first native son to govern as master from the frontiers of China to
+the banks of the Mekong. Even the tomb of Tu-duc is unimposing compared
+to those of the Ming emperors of China. But they all have a setting in
+solitude among unexploited forests, and are kept in a state of
+cleanliness and repair rare in the great land to the north.
+Weather-blackened structures in a hot, rainy, and often humid climate,
+though originally reddish, blue, green, multicolored, some overgrown
+with a fine vegetation, these Annamese temples of the dead do not impose
+upon the heavens like those of China. They blend themselves harmoniously
+into their densely green surroundings, the fleeing lines of their low
+walls barely cut out against the sky. As in the palaces of the living,
+it is not in the elevation of verticals that their builders looked for
+beauty, but in the prolonging of unreflected lines, in the grace of
+colonnades, terraces, superimposed roofs nonchalantly stretching to the
+horizon. Nothing dominates except two slender grayish pillars lost in
+the verdure before each tomb, the symbolic camel’s-hair brushes of the
+man of letters. In the large court of honor stone mandarins mount
+perpetual guard, in a row on each side of the entranceway, their saddled
+horses and their little elephants beside them, all dull and
+weather-tarnished and sometimes crumbling away.
+
+But the stone mandarins, the horses, elephants, and mythological
+monsters guarding the royal tombs of Annam are only pathetic little
+things compared to those of China. Once I stood a living caretaker in
+the place of a missing stone one, and only by looking closely at the
+picture can one distinguish him from those of stone or plaster, whereas
+in China my head hardly reached to the knees of many an imperial
+guardian, and the horses, elephants, and camels of the Ming tombs are
+fully life-size. Nor are the materials so rich in these tombs. The
+dragons that unroll their coils on the roofs of glazed sun-polished
+tiles show signs of crumbling away; the bricks tend to disintegrate into
+the earth from which they came. Some of the most effective of these
+royal Annamese tombs are covered with pictures of scenes and people made
+entirely of broken crockery, pieces of porcelain cups, plates, bowls of
+Chinese design, and of many colors set in cement, much as the Annamese
+inlay their furniture with mother-of-pearl. Even fragments of broken
+bottles—nothing is so plentiful as bottles in French-ruled
+Indo-China—have been used in this way. These monuments recall the rags
+torn up and sewed together into the saffron robe of the Buddhist priest,
+because poverty is blessed. Yet even in this decoration the
+resting-places of the royal Annamese dead are beautiful.
+
+In the woods, as we were driving homeward from the tombs—my first visit
+having been by automobile—we met a boy carrying on his head bananas and
+some other fruit, his grandfather kneeling beside him at the edge of the
+road and burning incense in a bush. The chief of Annam’s security
+stopped his car. He was, I may have neglected to mention, in some ways
+an unusual Frenchman. Big and handsome, a soldier at Peking in the Boxer
+days, he spoke excellent Annamese and still knew some Chinese, and his
+interest in the natives was more than official and perfunctory—so much
+so in fact that one got a hint now and then that he sometimes felt the
+recent loss of his bachelor privileges, for all his enthusiasm as a new
+benedict. He spoke to the pair, and in the tone of an interested friend
+rather than of a martinet official. The result was a naïve frankness
+instead of a taciturn imitation of stupidity. It seemed that the son of
+the one and father of the other had “taken the sickness” while gathering
+wood, and they had come to implore the spirits of the forest to pardon
+him any harm he may have done them. They had come twice before, and now
+the father and son so much better that they were sure their amends had
+been accepted, but they were performing the effective rites once more,
+in order to be on the safe side.
+
+Though it is getting ahead of my story, such as it is, I came out to the
+tombs again on the afternoon of _Têt_ and found every one very busy
+about the royal mausoleums. The soldier-like caretakers whose permanent
+duties are there had freshly washed the very red coats they wear over
+the usual black Annamese garments. Men in these bright red tunics, some
+holding imperial yellow umbrellas over the trays covered with red cloth
+borne by others, were bringing the dead kings their New Year’s food.
+Mandarins, some of them evidently descendants of the emperors, came and
+donned transparent deep-blue cloaks over their black gowns, much
+decorated with French orders and the ivory plaques that denote the
+mandarin’s estate, and kowtowed inside and outside the tombs. Some of
+these ceremonies were elaborate, that at the tomb of Thieu-tri, which I
+chanced upon at the right moment, including a procession and
+incense-burning rites in the courtyard, with yellow and faded white
+parasols very much in evidence. Old women in purple, green, and other
+conspicuous head-bands and cloaks crowded the interior, where a high
+mandarin was master of ceremonies. There seemed to be no great objection
+to the presence of a European inside, except during the actual interior
+ceremony of greeting to the royal spirits, when the mandarin opposed my
+entrance in a resolute manner rare, especially toward the ruling race,
+among this easy-going people. Though I was the only foreigner nearer the
+tombs than the capital itself, I was no doubt perfectly safe from
+physical interference even had I persisted in entering, and perfect
+Oriental courtesy was shown me; but once again I sensed the probability
+that the Annamese do not love the French, from whom of course few of
+them distinguish the rest of us of the white race.
+
+[Illustration: The waterfront of Hué, capital of Annam, offers a
+contrast between its native craft and the French bridge]
+
+[Illustration: Once a visitor surreptitiously snapped this glimpse of
+the mandarins of Annam kowtowing before their emperor on New Year’s Day]
+
+[Illustration: The scores of homes of mandarins within the “citadel” of
+Hué were all richly decorated for the lunar New Year]
+
+[Illustration: Inside the “citadel” and near the sumptuous palaces of
+the emperor of Annam are the perhaps more comfortable homes of his
+humble subjects]
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VIII
+                       AN IMPERIAL HAPPY NEW YEAR
+
+
+I was called at six on the eventful morning, and as soon afterward as
+was consistent with that meticulous personal attention befitting an
+imperial audience I was whisked away to the palaces in the automobile of
+my sartorial benefactor. Those who have suffered similar experiences
+need not be told the feeling of interloper, of usurper, with which I
+wore my borrowed plumage, though to the naked uncritical eye I must have
+showed little of this, for the bemedaled stiff-necked officials deep in
+the seat beside me showed no signs of finding me incongruous. All had
+gone easily, except in the matter of disguising my feet. Look as I
+would, not only in the merchandising part of the hotel but among all the
+native shops, there was not another pair of shoes in Hué that could be
+stretched over those extraordinary extremities. In my desperation I had
+turned my brown ones over to the head “boy” with orders to blacken them
+every half-hour during the intervening days, and nights, orders
+emphasized by promises of great reward and by threats of corresponding
+punishment. It had not therefore been merely the rain that confined me
+to my chamber. When the crucial moment came success seemed to have
+crowned my persistence. The shoes were not only black, they had a hint
+of luster. If only the false color did not rub off before the show was
+over! It did, as a matter of fact, but not so completely, I flatter
+myself, as to call widespread attention to the deception.
+
+The ceremony was set for eight sharp. I suppose it might have been at
+Peking Manchu hours, and all over before daylight, but for the
+bed-loving French. A score of Frenchmen were already herded inside the
+door by which we entered the imperial courtyard, a side door, by the
+way, a detail not without its significance. Another dozen or two dripped
+from other automobiles not long behind us. The French officials had come
+in their best uniforms and their most numerous medals; some of the men
+in civilian dress wore gold medallions about their necks. All were not
+equally resplendent in the requisite court dress. Visitors must be _en
+tenue_, but that, it became at once evident, did not mean that one must
+strive for the elegance of a Beau Brummel. Some of the costumes had all
+too plainly been shaken free of their moth-balls too late to be pressed;
+others had arrived in the colony when the Franco-Prussian War was still
+a burning question. The group was sternly confined, however, in one
+respect: only the reputedly more manly sex was present, in any form,
+capacity, race, color, or condition of servitude. No woman, the sponsor
+for Annam’s security himself assured me, has ever seen this imperial New
+Year’s ceremony. Only persons in good standing, which in Annam does not
+include females, may by any hook or crook be admitted. Once two
+Frenchwomen had sneaked in by some still mysterious deception, and it
+had been the painful duty of the chivalrous chief of the security of
+Annam personally to drag them out of their hiding-place and chase them
+outside the grounds. Surely, whispered the incorrigibly skeptical spirit
+within me, there must be peep-holes known to the more enterprising of
+the emperor’s wives; but on second thought I decided that their
+superstitions probably accomplish what the sternest husbandly
+admonitions might not.
+
+We had been greeted one by one at the side door to the courtyard by two
+mandarins in the flowery costumes of old Chinese times, topped by the
+same stepping-block head-dress with absurd side-pieces to be seen on
+statues at the Ming tombs of China. Inside, scores of other mandarins in
+the same garb flocked together. All wore black knee-boots, ancient robes
+of varying colors, silks decorated according to rank—but you can see it
+all in old Chinese paintings or on the Chinese stage. Like so many
+things which last longest where they have been introduced with the most
+difficulty, the costumes and manners of Ming days remain officially
+correct in Annam centuries after they have been abandoned in China. Not
+merely do back-waters show the greatest stagnation, but the Manchus
+never conquered Annam, though they now and then got tribute from it. It
+was just as well that photography was forbidden; the absence of the
+colors in the developed films would have made them too bitterly
+disappointing. If there was any color in the spectrum missing in the
+gathering, or in the building and its decorations, I do not know its
+name. All the prism seemed to have been invited to the ceremony; and as
+if to supply any tone that had inadvertently been omitted, and to cause
+my gorge to rise with wrath after all the trouble I had taken to live up
+to the sartorial rules, who should come slinking in at the last moment,
+with the air of a cat returning to the comforts of an old-maid home
+after a night of dissipation on the housetops, but a Frenchman—though in
+his conspicuousness he looked more like a Swede or a Hollander—wearing
+the loudest check suit in the Ghettos of Christendom and carrying a
+camera! It is true that this last was promptly taken away from him. The
+French exploit their own colonies even in photographic matters, and this
+ceremony had been officially filmed some years before. Yet he not only
+was admitted to the courtyard but was allowed to sneak under cover of us
+respectable members of his race into the palace itself; and so help me
+if he didn’t even have on tan shoes! All through the ceremony he stood
+forth from our courtly throng of Westerners like a splotch of red ink on
+a white suit, though he made every effort except the two obvious ones to
+be inconspicuous. Political or social pull are powerful institutions,
+and audacity is not confined to American reporters.
+
+The great audience-chamber in which the New Year’s ceremony is usually
+held having been covered with a network of bamboo scaffolding for more
+than a year, his Majesty awaited us in the somewhat smaller but more
+sumptuous throne-room. The little “résuper,” in a uniform worthy of the
+admiral of the European fleet, had arrived with some of his staff last
+of all, as befitted his standing; and, piloted by the receiving
+mandarins, we had filed in by twos behind him and lined up on the right
+side of the richly decorated chamber—on the left or heart side of the
+emperor, be it noted, which is the place of honor in the Orient. Dazzled
+by the forest of pillars climbed by yellow dragons, I was at the very
+foot of the throne before I saw that the emperor was already there. He
+stood so still, and his garb and the racial and sickly yellow of his
+face blended so harmoniously into the ensemble of the imperial
+decorations, that even then I was not sure for a moment that I was not
+looking at a lay figure in his place. Yet he was not inconspicuously
+dressed. Again I plead my incompetence in the matter of inventories, but
+some of his garb could not have escaped the most unobservant eye. He
+wore an imperial robe of such richness of embroidery and decorations
+that even a woman, had her sex permitted her to behold it, nay, were
+she, by profession, both a dressmaker and the concocter of social
+columns, could not adequately have described it. Whether or not some of
+the imperial wives had put in a safety-pin here and there at the last
+moment I have no means of knowing, but the wearer himself could not have
+adjusted it to such a nicety without expert assistance of one sex or
+another. He stood in the embrace of a chair that the lineal descendant
+of St. Peter himself might have envied, two golden dogs half hiding his
+feet, which were incased in high boots of the Ming period and turned out
+at right angles, as if he were in imminent fear of tottering. They were
+so exactly such boots as those of his predecessors in a glass case
+near-by that they might indeed have been borrowed from it. On his
+imperial head sat an indescribably magnificent openwork crown of gold
+and precious stones, beneath which, later developments disclosed, he
+wore the ordinary black band-turban of the Annamese male. Many jewels
+gleamed from various parts of his person; on three fingers of his left
+hand he wore clusters of enormous diamonds, and as he constantly held
+that hand over the other, these stones drew the eyes like a flash-light
+in a darkened theater. In his clasped hands he held before his face an
+ivory wand containing a mirror, just such as are to be seen in old
+Chinese statues and paintings, and which has something to do with the
+holder’s unworthiness to look upon the spirits of his ancestors, if I
+have not bungled my theogony. His almost golden-yellow face was somewhat
+chinless, his form slight, even under the imperial robes, his general
+appearance so effeminate that he suggested Mei Lanfang, China’s most
+famous actor, aged by a decade or so and with the slight changes between
+Chinese and Annamese features, playing one of his inimitable female
+rôles.
+
+Evidently this chief ceremony of the ordinary Annamese year is one of
+the rough spots in the kingly career, for everything pointed to the
+suspicion that the emperor did not enjoy it. His face remained as
+motionless throughout the throne-room service as if it had been made of
+wax, but his body shifted nervously on his legs, as though the ancient
+boots were too tight for him, or the right angle at which etiquette
+required his feet to be set made standing difficult; and his little eyes
+roved constantly from side to side, especially toward the Europeans,
+until at times he suggested a trick poodle constantly in fear of doing
+something that would bring a whipping after the performance from the
+trainer who could only stand blandly by while it was going on. Though it
+was not unpleasantly warm so early in the morning, he wiped his face
+every few seconds with a folded snow-white handkerchief. Two men in
+musical-comedy costumes stood at the front corners of the throne and
+fanned him throughout the ceremony. It was not the hasty careless
+fanning of mere modern mortals; they stood at the strict attention of
+the old days when a head was lopped off for a grimace, and one after the
+other raised his fan of feathers on a handle taller than himself and
+waved it once downward at a dignified speed, continuing to alternate
+with such exact time between the strokes that they must have mentally
+counted the seconds.
+
+Two princes of the blood, dressed in robes of exactly that color, and
+whom I understood from a whisper from the owner of my raiment to be
+brothers of the recently exiled emperor, stood each on his mat on
+opposite sides of the wide-open front doors, ten yards or more from the
+throne. No other Annamese were allowed inside the throne-room so
+effectively graced by our broken double row of motley Europeans
+festooned about the first line of pillars on his Majesty’s left. All the
+nobility of Annam was gathered in the sun-drenched, flagstone-paved
+courtyard outside the open doors which the emperor faced, but for the
+moment all one’s attention was needed inside. Amid deep silence and
+formal attitudes the _résident supérieur_ stepped nearer to the throne
+and read in French a greeting in which he referred to his Majesty’s
+ascent of the same in 1916, recalling that he himself had been present
+on that auspicious occasion, that he was overwhelmed with pleasure and
+honor at his recent return to a place so near his Majesty’s sacred
+person, and in a capacity now that implied a recognition of his constant
+diligence in his Majesty’s service, and so on and so on, to the depths
+of French political rodomontade, with many references to the _Nation
+Protectrice_ thrown in.
+
+Then a young mandarin stepped up beside the “résuper” and read in the
+querulously singsong Annamese language what was evidently a translation
+of this masterpiece, written in Roman letters. Thereupon the emperor
+dived down into one of his voluminous sleeves, this very first motion he
+had voluntarily made since our arrival seeming to bring him a relief
+similar to that of a “living statue” at the drop of the curtain, and dug
+out a document written in Chinese characters on a long strip of
+cardboard folded accordion fashion. This he read in a better voice than
+his physique suggested, though not without a nervous break now and then
+in his unmelodious native tongue. From behind a dragon-climbed pillar on
+the other side of the throne appeared an old mandarin with a straggling
+gray beard, looking in his New-Year costume exactly like an ancient
+Chinese portrait cut out of its frame, who read, in an almost perfect
+pronunciation that seemed strangely incongruous coming forth from such a
+figure, a French translation of the emperor’s speech. This fourth act of
+the exchange of platitudes over, the emperor bowed low, the “résuper”
+bowed a trifle less low, and we Europeans moved grudgingly back, not so
+far but that we could still easily hear and see the chief actor in the
+ceremony, who now for the first time sat down, with an air which seemed
+to say that at least that was that. Every one else, including even the
+_résident supérieur_, stood throughout the entire throne-room part of
+the ceremony.
+
+
+Meanwhile in the courtyard outside attention had turned to activity.
+Scores of mandarins in the gay and fanciful attire of Ming days began to
+fall into ranks. The Annamese troops in blue, with brass-topped mushroom
+hats and imperial yellow leggings, but under command of a French
+officer, and carrying their long rifles with needle-sharp fixed bayonets
+French fashion, high on their shoulders, backed to the edges of the
+court and out through the gateways. For some time a great to-do reigned
+in the courtyard, but at length restored order disclosed six rows of
+mandarins lined up according to rank on as many strips of matting, each
+holding before his eyes in clasped hands a somewhat less splendid
+wand-with-mirror than that of the emperor. It was typical of human
+society East or West that three rows of still lower rank, no doubt the
+hard-working old souls on whom the real labor of government fell, were
+lined up outside the courtyard, where they could neither see nor be seen
+by the emperor, but where they went through the same maneuvers as those
+inside. Standing within arm’s length of one another in exact rows some
+two paces apart, the assembled nobles of Annam so vividly suggested a
+company of soldiers or a gymnasium class about to begin its setting-up
+exercises that one might easily have been struck by the absence of
+dumb-bells. On the side-lines throngs of flunkies in conspicuous
+garments began to make those loud discordant noises that represent music
+wherever the Chinese character is written, while others, in simpler
+costumes, added a weird vocal dissonance in voices of which fully half
+suggested eunuchs.
+
+The gymnasium-class aspect of the situation was not entirely accidental;
+the nobility of Annam was about to take its yearly exercise. Loud noises
+not unlike the “music” that incessantly assailed the ears rang out in a
+series of semi-military commands, at each of which the rows of mandarins
+in their flowered robes threw themselves face down, slowly, as if, what
+with boots, the wands in their hands, and the insufficiency of annual
+practice, they found it no easy task, and touched their noses to the
+pavement. Just inside the main doors the two princes of the blood, also
+facing the emperor on his throne, were doing the same exercises, their
+movements evidently serving as a signal to those outside and keeping the
+prostrations in unison. There were several series of these, three at a
+time, amid much hullabaloo, the emperor meanwhile sitting motionless on
+his uncomfortable throne, except that he now and then mopped his face,
+yellow as the ensemble of throne-room decorations with the filtered
+tropical sunshine upon them, with the still folded pocket-handkerchief.
+Each time there was a dazzling flash of the many diamonds on his left
+hand, which he always folded again over the diamondless right.
+
+In theory “ten thousand” mandarins of Annam—_ee wan_ is a number so
+easily said in any tongue that reads Chinese—come to prostrate
+themselves in the great courtyard of the palace of Hué on the day of
+_Têt_, but something less than that number beat their foreheads on its
+flagstones that morning. _Lam lie_, the Annamese verb to prostrate one’s
+self, means this stretching out at full length on one’s face and is
+still descriptive in this great yearly ceremony, though at other times
+the Annamese nowadays usually contents himself with bending the bust as
+if he were hinged at the waist, and shaking his own hands. As they
+finished, the mandarins backed a couple of steps toward the side of the
+courtyard, then turned and marched to the side-lines, while others took
+their places. All was done in very good unison, though not in perfect
+military precision, and everyone seemed to take the matter very
+seriously, as if a slip would be as dreadful as during a guard-mount in
+our regular army.
+
+Then came retired mandarins, in bright-red trousers under gowns reaching
+to the knees, and _no boots_. This, a whisper told me, is the sign of
+retirement; “I have taken off my boots,” means to the Annamese mandarin
+what cutting off his _coleta_ does to the Spanish matador, what the
+writing of his memoirs means to an American pugilist or politician. Each
+and every one of these old chaps was in stocking-feet quite plainly made
+in France, most, though by no means all, of the same color. They threw
+themselves down the same number of times as had those who had preceded
+them, some aged faces contorted as if they found the effort quite a
+trial. Two ragged rows of poor old fellows of low degree at the rear had
+not even been provided with mats, but had to bump their heads on the
+bare flagstones.
+
+Between the two front doors almost directly in front of the emperor,
+where he could not have taken his eyes off them if he had tried, stood a
+hat-rack bearing aloft all the tropical helmets and uniform capes of
+those Europeans who did not carry their hats in their hands. A servant
+had taken that of the “résuper” himself, but many others had refused to
+run the risk of having some royal retainer make off with theirs. It
+seemed as if the hat-rack might have been put in some less conspicuous
+corner, but perhaps it was an intentional symbol, a constant visible
+reminder to his Majesty of who made him emperor, and who could unmake
+him again in twenty minutes if he bungled his rôle. I could also make
+out through a door at the back of the throne-room the imperial rickshaw.
+It seemed to be at least half of gold, with richly yellow cushions; and
+the imperial rickshaw-man—who with a few other low-caste hangers-on
+peered in now and then, after the custom at all Oriental ceremonies—was
+in an incredibly ornate livery, also mainly of imperial yellow. Though
+he uses an automobile outside the palace walls, the emperor needs a
+rickshaw within, for it is nearly a hundred yards from the throne-room
+to his semi-European living-quarters.
+
+When the larger audience-chamber is available at the lunar New Year,
+trained elephants are brought from the imperial stables to do homage on
+bended knees before the Son of Heaven, but this sight was denied us. The
+kowtowing of the retired mandarins ended, his Majesty Khai-dinh stepped
+down from his throne, evidently no easy task in his heavy boots, for he
+moved on the polished floor like an octogenarian crossing smooth ice. He
+shook hands with the _résident supérieur_, then with the purple-robed
+old archbishop, and behind these three we all filed out into a
+semi-foreign dining-room at one side of the courtyard. There the emperor
+once more sat down at the back of the room, facing doors wide open on
+the yard, and again flanked by his two fanners, though these were not
+working now, possibly because it was after union hours. A young mandarin
+interpreter stood against the wall behind him; the superior resident of
+Annam took a seat on his left, and the rest of us subsided into the rows
+of chairs facing the emperor sidewise that filled the room. Khai-dinh
+knew some French, but like many others in the same boat he never
+ventured to speak it in public. Sometimes, before the interpreter had
+passed on the “résuper’s” remarks, he gave a sign of having understood,
+but he never seemed to attempt to reply in French. He now looked more
+human, permitted some expression to play over his features, among which
+that of relief was the most prominent, even smiled now and then. This
+showed that, unlike nearly all the mandarins that now mingled with us,
+his teeth were white, but that he probably chewed betel-nut. He smoked a
+cigarette as if he were accustomed to devour them but was now on his
+good behavior.
+
+The band played the “Marseillaise,” after which the emperor evidently
+made a brief speech, though in a voice that could hardly have been heard
+by the superior resident himself. The two more manly looking princes of
+the blood, both wearing glasses, seemed to speak French fluently and to
+be in many respects quite up-to-date, as they went about greeting their
+many friends among the Europeans. Evidently there was nothing wrong with
+his Majesty’s voice when he wished to be heard, for he went on talking
+to his respectful master even after the fire-crackers had been set off,
+which feat was as difficult as conversing in a subway express. The
+_pétards_ were tied in thick continuous bunches from top to bottom of
+bamboo poles terminating in a few leaves that had been set up at the
+four corners of the courtyard, and they kept up a deafening bombardment
+unbrokenly for at least twenty minutes, until they suggested the
+applause for a favorite candidate at a political convention. The yard
+was filled with white smoke and the flagstones carpeted with bursted
+crackers, and still the bombardment went on. A little earlier the
+booming of artillery had come from somewhere within the citadel,
+probably an imperial cannon salute, but if this still continued, as was
+likely, we could not hear it, so like the firing of thousands of rifles
+was the bursting of fire-crackers.
+
+Meanwhile we had all been served iced champagne, in which we drank the
+emperor’s health standing; and there were passed around plates of cakes
+and sweetmeats so elaborate that no one seemed to dare to touch them,
+though the Son of Heaven himself munched a bit. A fat Frenchman beside
+me wanted to know in a voice almost loud enough to reach the emperor
+whether there was _pas moyen avoir un cigare_, and a moment later these
+and cigarettes were passed in jeweled boxes, which contained also the
+ingredients of the betel-nut habit for those who preferred that to
+smoking. Some of the servants who passed these things had the strained
+eyes and high cheek-bones common to eunuchs, and looked on as if the fun
+of life meant nothing to them, as if they were still wondering what had
+happened to them in boyhood that they could not be like other men, much
+as a blind man must wonder what sort of sensation is sight. Or they may
+merely have been tubercular.
+
+There was evidently some way by which the initiated could tell when the
+bombardment was to cease, for the emperor arose and we all filed out
+after him just in time to hear the last fire-cracker explode as we
+reached the courtyard. We went on to the door of the throne-room, and
+there this queer medley of East and West ended with the Son of Heaven
+standing and shaking hands with each of us as we filed past him. I
+murmured New Year’s greetings from the United States in his ear, but
+either he did not catch my French or he had never heard of so
+unimportant a place. His fingers were slighter than those of a
+school-girl, and his grasp weak and without cordiality, though this may
+have been due to lack of experience with our queer Western form of
+greeting. We filed out between ranks of gaily dressed flunkies,
+musicians, probable eunuchs, past the troops in the outer courtyard, to
+our automobiles and rickshaws and sped away through palace and citadel
+gates and across the big seven-arch steel bridge, soldiers at the
+gateways saluting as we passed, and the populace looking after us not so
+much with envious as with curious faces, as if the thought had never
+occurred to them that they might also be admitted to the great imperial
+ceremony. The last glimpse I had of his late Majesty Khai-dinh was of a
+slight form in ornate Oriental get-up, framed in the doorway of his
+throne-room and shaking hands with a fat and pompous French merchant who
+wore a golden Annamese decoration about a neck on which a once stiff
+collar had wilted beyond recognition.
+
+
+I returned thus hastily to the grocery-hotel both because I could not
+decline the seat reserved for me in the chief’s automobile and because I
+wished to restore the borrowed plumage before something fatal happened
+to it. Moreover, my shoes were rapidly changing from their false African
+to their natural Asiatic hue. But that duty and the eleven-o’clock
+_déjeuner_ over, I hastened back across the river. The last few days had
+been very busy there, the market and the shops crowded, every one buying
+new mats, paper and real flowers, red paper lanterns, red strips of
+paper with Chinese characters written on them, and great quantities of
+other New Year’s necessities. As in China the people of Annam must have
+money for the _Têt_; not only must they pay their debts at the lunar New
+Year, but they must have new clothing, redecorate their houses and the
+tombs of their ancestors, feed well those departed souls and themselves,
+and gird themselves for another Sundayless year of labor or indolence.
+Now the market was closed, though more shops kept open than in China,
+perhaps because many of the merchants were not real Annamese. On the
+other hand theaters were working overtime; temples were crowded with
+newly dressed throngs; in sampans, hovels, and houses the ancestral
+altars were laden with flowers, fruits, pork, fish, fowl, and boiled
+rice. The evening before they had scintillated with gilded and silver
+things that gleamed under candle, kerosene, and electric lights.
+Everywhere there was a great going and coming, every one making New-Year
+calls. A green bamboo pole, with a few feathery leaves still at the top,
+had been set up before each house and temple, a woven-bamboo ornament
+far up most of them as a kind of roosting-place for the spirits of the
+air. The theory is, if I understood an explanation couched in far from
+perfect French, that these invisible flying wraiths will accept this
+homage to them and do no harm to the inmates of any house before which
+such a bamboo stands.
+
+The rickshaw-men had little chance to celebrate; their holiday resembled
+that of an Irish donkey on March 17. One of the chief New-Year sports
+even of those Annamese who usually walk was for once to ride in
+rickshaws, two and even three passengers in each vehicle. The women
+especially were in their newest and most resplendent garb—light and dark
+green, purple, rich brown, small children in every tone of red. Negro
+soldiers from other French possessions, their black faces emphasized
+under their white helmets, were hobnobbing with the poorer people in the
+outskirts, evidently held in as much honor among them as their white
+masters. A number of ordinary-looking young conscripts from France also
+mingled freely with the populace, and here and there one met a negro and
+a white soldier arm in arm, as one may see them side by side in the same
+squad on the drill-grounds of Indo-China.
+
+The Annamese seldom drink to excess, and they are not by nature
+quarrelsome or violent, but they dearly love gambling. So serious is
+this vice among them that the French now forbid games of chance except
+during the week or so of the lunar New Year season. Now one saw them
+gambling everywhere, men, women, and children. Women, even boys of six
+or seven, had set up gambling-boards in the streets, in the doorways of
+their houses, in the courtyards of those homes which had them, in the
+main rooms before the family altar. It was a simple game that engrossed
+most of them. A board was marked with chalk or paint into several
+squares, sometimes with numbers, some with crudely drawn animals in
+them. When all those who wish to take a chance have laid their money in
+the squares, the proprietor of the board throws out a handful of little
+disks from a bowl and counts them off four by four, the remaining number
+winning four times the amount of the bets on the lucky square. Besides
+this primitive form of fan-tan there were dice in a saucer with a cup
+turned down over them. When all the money is laid the cup and saucer are
+shaken and the result disclosed. In the public streets wagers ranged all
+the way from perforated brass “cash” to paper piastres; inside the
+larger houses especially much more serious stakes were the rule. Many
+French colonials criticize the government for gathering revenue through
+its opium monopoly and forbidding the lesser vice of gambling except
+during _Têt_.
+
+Within the citadel much the same ceremony, on a smaller scale, as that
+at the palace, took place in each mandarin’s home, with his relatives,
+friends, and the lower orders bringing the greetings. Among other New
+Year’s decorations there were many flags all about this forest-shaded
+town, the tricolor less in evidence than a red and yellow flag that was
+evidently the imperial banner. Scores of the homes of the mandarins
+within the citadel displayed over their gateways the flags of all the
+Allies, that of France double size and in the middle. All the rest of
+the day I met mandarins coming out of their low houses in garden groves,
+or from those of others of the same rank, or along the roads and streets
+on both sides of the river, usually in rickshaws. Some even of high rank
+did not scorn to ride double, after the common Annamese custom. They no
+longer wore their ancient Ming head-dresses or their knee-high boots,
+but still had on the gay garments of festival, such as cerise robes
+embroidered with flowers. I met several mandarin servants carrying home
+a pair of boots strung over a shoulder, with a cloth-wrapped bundle of
+holiday garments in one hand and the strange head-dress left over from
+the days of the Ming in the other, as if some of their masters also had
+been obliged to borrow _le smoking_ in its Annamese form, before they
+could bring their annual greetings to their emperor.
+
+[Illustration: An Annamese mandarin all dressed up for his New Year’s
+honors to his emperor; his servant behind]
+
+[Illustration: Servants of the mandarins carry home after the ceremony
+the ancient Ming accoutrements of their masters]
+
+[Illustration: Emperor Khai-dinh of Annam on his French-supported
+throne]
+
+[Illustration: Some of the most effective of Annamese tombs are covered
+with pictures and designs made of broken porcelain dishes set in cement]
+
+One recognizes a mandarin of Annam by the somewhat better material of
+his clothing and by a little wooden or ivory baggage-check on his
+starboard bowsprit, bearing his title or grade in Chinese characters.
+Some of them had been so brave, or have obeyed the French so well, that
+they wore on the other side French decorations enough to rival a
+staff-officer. Not all the mandarins surrounding the emperor of Annam
+are noted for either their physical or—the experienced eye could not but
+note—their moral beauty. Many were pitted with smallpox, and more of
+them were stoop-shouldered with loafing than were horny-handed with
+toil. Like Chinese above the laboring-class, these tax-gatherers from a
+hard-working people give no attention to their muscles, scorn indeed to
+use them when there is any way out of it, and are flabby and ungainly
+accordingly. Yet some of the staid old retired mandarins looked like men
+who had led a kindly and a scholarly life. Each generation the grade of
+a mandarin drops a notch, so that the privileged class does not remain
+perpetually the same, a scheme that might perhaps advantageously be
+applied in other centers of the human maelstrom. Titles of nobility are
+sometimes given for distinguished services—such, no doubt, as betraying
+to the French rulers independence movements among the natives—but these
+are no longer hereditary. I met one of the princes of the blood on a
+suburban road that New Year’s afternoon, still in his blood-red robes of
+ceremony, so out of keeping with his modern nose-pinching spectacles and
+the very ordinary rickshaw in which he rode. Here and there a coolie or
+a boy took off his palm-leaf hat to him, but that was the only visible
+evidence that his rank meant anything much to the populace, or to the
+prince himself.
+
+The people of Annam still treat their puppet emperor as the true Son of
+Heaven, however, though they cannot but know that he is chosen by the
+French. It is as if they considered the French merely an instrument of
+fate, as some Christians manage to regard anything that happens as God’s
+hand working in strange mysterious ways. Whatever he may have thought of
+this attitude of his loyal subjects, Khai-dinh did not by any means
+disdain the material conveniences of our upstart Western civilization.
+He never went outside his palace grounds except by automobile—a big
+imperial-yellow limousine with black top and red wheels, of French make
+naturally, and which had its blow-outs and other mishaps now and then
+quite like the Fords of the garden variety of mankind. Over on the
+French side of the river he had a suburban palace, a rest-house far from
+his crowded domestic circle. It is a very showy establishment in
+foreign, more exactly in continental European, style, with graveled
+driveways, _portes cochères_, plate-glass windows, the walls bright
+yellow with the intertwined letters AD on the gates. That afternoon it
+was gay with yellow flags, a color forbidden the ordinary people, though
+now and then a small child wears it with impunity—or it may be that this
+means the emperor once called upon its mother. Even in his palace within
+the citadel Khai-dinh had his apartments installed in European style,
+they say, though I cannot of course report this on first-hand evidence;
+his domestic realm was closed even to his French superior, for after all
+Annam is still Oriental. When the spirits moved him to spend an evening
+entertaining any cronies he may have had among the French colonials, he
+called his yellow limousine and repaired to his transfluvial palace. He
+drew and sculptured, not in the traditional Chinese-Annamese fashion,
+but after the manner of a not too talented pupil of the Beaux Arts. The
+French insist that he also was very happy, and they may be right. His
+salary for doing nothing was five thousand piastres a month; he had ten
+wives—his predecessor maintained a hundred, but economy is the watchword
+in official Annam since the war—and his dancers and all such necessities
+were paid for by the government. The “résuper” who really rules Annam
+and its emperor gets only fifteen hundred piastres a month and has only
+one wife, and as far as is officially known not even one dancing-girl.
+
+On March 19 there was to be an even greater ceremony in Hué—the
+emperor’s all-night vigil at the Temple of Heaven. Similar, though by no
+means comparable, to the imperial rite that took place yearly in Peking
+until the revolution of 1911 turned that Temple of Heaven into a
+tourists’ picnic-ground and China into a masquerade-ball republic, this
+ceremony has long been given every three years; but the French had
+decided that this one was to be the last. Thus do the pageantries of
+olden days drop unnoticed one by one under the trampling feet of time.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER IX
+                    THE PEOPLE OF THE EMINENT SOUTH
+
+
+Of the eighteen to twenty million people of French Indo-China two thirds
+are Annamese. That does not mean that Annam has so many inhabitants. The
+Annamese are the predominant people of all the lowlands of France’s
+Far-Eastern empire, not merely of Annam. Their own land, though nearly
+eight hundred miles long, is very narrow, containing barely sixty
+thousand square miles, on which between seven and eight million people
+manage to wrest subsistence almost entirely from a plain twelve to fifty
+miles wide between the mountains and the sea. Naturally they have
+gradually overrun the other divisions of Indo-China, submerging the
+other races there, just as the tricky, the less pleasing, the more
+sophisticated always drive out the naïve and the more lovable on this
+sad old globe of ours. Their Chinese religion of ancestor-worship,
+requiring every man by hook or crook to leave a son behind him, has of
+course much to do with this majority.
+
+As far back as history mentions it, what we now call Indo-China was
+under the sway of the Cham, then of the Khmer, tribes of a certain Hindu
+culture who subjugated the land and drove the aborigines, if such their
+predecessors were, into the mountains. Later they in turn were conquered
+by what we now know as the Annamese. One guess is that this dour people
+originally came from Tibet or the lower mountains about it. They
+themselves say that they once inhabited southwestern China—Yünnan,
+Kwangsi, Kwangtung, and Tonkin—at least five thousand years ago. Many of
+their customs and physical characteristics bear out this statement, but
+they are so mixed with the Cham and the other peoples they found in
+their new home that they have many traits not typical of the Mongol
+race, and one is every now and then surprised to find a nearly Aryan
+nose among them.
+
+Whatever their exact origin, they came down from somewhere to the north
+and filled, as tightly as a plump leg fills a stocking, this narrow
+strip of plain between the coast and the mountains, pushing back,
+killing off, and absorbing the tribes that preceded them. Highlanders to
+begin with, perhaps, they have now lived in tropical lowlands and rice
+marshes for so many centuries that they have gradually taken on tropical
+characteristics; hence it is not at all strange that they are the
+weakest and the ugliest of all those reputedly of the Mongolian race.
+Hardly of medium height, less vigorous than their neighbors, they are
+much like the Chinese, yet in many ways quite different from them also.
+They have been known to the Celestials for centuries by the name first
+given them when the two peoples came in contact with each other—the
+Giao-chi, or “Big Toes.” The noticeable spread of the great toe away
+from the others, suggesting mountain-climbing ancestors, is still
+conspicuous among them even in this day of French shoes. Though the name
+no doubt had its origin in that scornfulness of the Chinese for any race
+but their own, in due season the Annamese began to call themselves
+Giao-chi also, just as they followed the Chinese example in calling
+their country Annam, Land of the Eminent South, or words to that effect.
+As I may have said before, the white man’s name “Indo-China” is
+particularly fitting; France’s Far-Eastern possession is certainly the
+half-way station between the Chinese and the Hindus. The Annamese are no
+more really Chinese than are many of the Indian races that are called by
+that name, yet they are quite unlike the Hindu-cultured Cambodians and
+have nothing in common with the people of Laos, beyond the Annamese
+chain, who are akin to the Siamese. In mere physical matters they are
+not only smaller but darker than the Chinese, tawny, though less so than
+the Cambodians, with flat skulls, faces, and noses, protruding
+cheek-bones, and large mouths that are made doubly conspicuous by their
+permanently blackened teeth and thick lips swollen with what we miscall
+betel-nut.
+
+Thus we have come in leisurely sequence to the most conspicuous, the
+most despicable perhaps, certainly the most inexplicable point in the
+physical appearance of the Annamese. They have never practised
+mutilation of their women in the Chinese manner by binding their feet;
+infanticide is reputed to be very rare, if known at all; but about
+marriage time, which in Annam is early in life, every Annamese, of
+either sex, is expected to have his teeth lacquered black by a process
+said to be very painful. Recalling what a dentist can do to us in half
+an hour, it is not hard to believe that they suffer during a task that
+takes day after day. The lacquering loosens the teeth, but the
+_nhoc-nam_, or ground-fish sauce with which every Annamese seasons his
+food, tightens them again. The men are not so selfish as to force the
+women to go through the beautifying process alone, as in so many lands,
+but step up and take the same medicine themselves, so that the mouths of
+both sexes resemble rat-holes. Perhaps it is this that makes the
+Annamese seem more stupid than the Chinese they in so many other ways
+resemble—or perhaps it is merely their southern indolence of manner, or
+the circumspection of a subject race as compared to freemen.
+
+Every people has its own style of beauty, however, and to the Annamese a
+person is handsome only if his teeth are jet-black. “Any dog can have
+white teeth,” say the Annamese, looking disparagingly at Europeans. To
+them white teeth are not only ugly but immoral! For the _congaïe_, the
+Annamese girl, who has not blackened her teeth, is usually, if not
+always, some Frenchman’s darling.
+
+The blackened teeth alone would be bad enough, even if the people of
+Annam were not also addicted to a custom common to a large part of
+oceanic Asia. Almost all of them chew betel-nut, as we persist in
+calling it. It is really the nut of the arec-palm and the leaf of the
+betel-vine that often climbs this, mixed with lime to bring out the full
+strength of the ingredients. The wand-like arec-palms that rise straight
+and soldierly, as if they fancied they served some useful purpose and
+were proud of it, are the most conspicuous feature of any Annamese or
+Tonkinese village. Whenever a child is born one more of these slender
+trees is planted, with a betel-vine beside it, so that in time the
+infant also may have its “betel-nut.” Large villages are almost hidden
+in arec-palm forests. This tree produces nuts of about the size of a
+walnut, in green clusters like a bunch of huge grapes, which grow, like
+cocoanuts, just below the leaves. These, sold in the markets, the shops,
+everywhere along the highways and the narrow trails, are cut up, wrapped
+in a betel-leaf—whence the misnomer “betel-nut,” which does not
+exist—smeared with lime, and thrust into the repulsive mouth.
+
+A French colonial who had tried betel-nut once told me that he had a
+sudden rush of blood to the head and felt warm and excited all day long.
+Like opium, however, it was one of those things I prefer to take on
+hearsay. It is strange that in China, land of bad habits, this mild vice
+is unknown, unless we count the lower half of now Japanese Formosa. A
+few old French colonials get the habit, as they become addicted to
+opium, _congaïes_, and other customs of the East; but most of the ruling
+race have more respect for at least their outward appearance. The
+chemical action of the lime on the other ingredients produces a
+blood-red cud, so that betel-nut chewers look as if their disgusting
+mouths of apparently decayed teeth were full of blood, as if they were
+in the throes of a hemorrhage—and didn’t know it. Some Annamese girls
+would be good looking but for this blood-dripping mouth, repulsive even
+when closed, for the constant use of betel-nut not only destroys the
+gums but leaves the lips permanently swollen. On the other hand the
+lacquering of the teeth and the chewing of betel-nut somehow manage to
+save the Annamese from toothache, they say, though some of us might
+prefer to suffer the pain ourselves rather than pass it on to the
+beholder. The chemical action of lacquer and betel-juice in combination
+seems to kill the microbes that lead to the dentist’s chair in other
+lands, and no wonder; for surely no self-respecting microbe would take
+up its habitat in an Annamese mouth.
+
+In Hué and the two capitals alternately graced by the French
+governor-general the younger people of the better class show evidence of
+beginning to think of leaving off the enameling of their teeth, and even
+of abandoning the chewing of betel-nut. But both customs are almost
+universal among masses and classes alike wherever Annamese is spoken,
+and many, like our rural tobacco-chewers, are proud of the distance they
+can project the red saliva. This seems to be a favorite indoor as well
+as outdoor sport, for they spit the stuff everywhere, not only
+splotching with red every road and street in the land that is not
+already red by nature, but even the whitewashed walls of the homes of
+mandarins. In hiring an Annamese nurse-maid or cook one must insist that
+no betel-nut be used in the house, and even then one’s best things are
+likely to become gradually speckled with red.
+
+Though the race as a whole is not noted for its manly beauty, the women
+of Annam have a more pleasing appearance to Western eyes than do those
+of China—except when they smile. Their expression is more _piquante_, if
+you know what I mean. Those who become temporary wives of the French,
+and do not blacken the teeth, sometimes do not even chew betel-nut, are
+often pleasant to look upon during their younger years. To be sure these
+are hand-picked; but almost without exception, irrespective of age, the
+women of Annam are slender, sinuous, and graceful, with a sort of
+gliding walk, the countrywomen especially very erect, their arms
+swinging far behind them, as if they were constantly performing the feat
+of balancing their big palm-leaf hats. Many have beautiful hands, small,
+thin, and tapering, even though they do the hardest work of carrying and
+grubbing in the rice-fields. To Annamese taste the chief points of
+female beauty are black teeth, red heels—on bare feet, that is, not on
+shoes, as in the case of foot-bound China—and oval faces, in contrast to
+the round ones called for by Chinese standards of beauty. Great numbers
+of the women of the Eminent South have the longest hair that I—nay, even
+my wife—had ever seen, in certain cases reaching well below the knees.
+
+
+There are those, however, who consider inwardness more important than
+outwardness, and for them let us begin by saying that in disposition the
+Annamese are less gay, have little of the sense of humor so highly
+developed among the Chinese—unless it be that they put on a mask before
+the white man. This they do, of course, like any subjugated people, but
+one seldom catches them laughing even when they have no suspicion of
+being observed—seldom, that is, in comparison with that reservoir of
+laughter, the Chinese. A Frenchman tells us that of all the people on
+earth the Annamese have the greatest plasticity, are the most sly,
+cunning, utilitarian, and the most assimilative—though often
+superficially so. They show outward respect to parents and superiors,
+but seem to be insincere and incapable of deep devotion—not unnaturally,
+one would say, seeing that the race has been subjected for most of the
+past two thousand years. Never showing his real thoughts on the surface,
+conserving his own personality under all circumstances, the son of Annam
+adapts himself, passively resists, triumphs when he seems to be
+defeated. Those who know him well credit him with a great love of his
+native land, especially of the village where he was born. The French
+insist that the Annamese are great thieves, which, with all their
+faults, can hardly be said of the Chinese.
+
+During all the centuries that China held Annam enslaved, “like a kept
+mistress,” it became Chinese. It took from China its art, its morals,
+its writing, its costumes, its customs, its gods; it is so Chinese that
+there are still celebrated in the temples of Annam festivals and
+formalities that have not taken place in the Celestial Empire for
+hundreds of years. Now it is France that rules, and the Annamese have
+become French. If Russia had conquered them, asserts a Frenchman, they
+would have icons in their homes and sleep on unlighted porcelain stoves.
+Either they are naturally copiers or they have found copying the easiest
+way in a hot climate; long dominated, they seem to have lost through
+evaporation the “pep” of their probably highland ancestors. No doubt
+this explains why, although of old it was literary, artistic, responsive
+to the most subtle plays of the spirit, Annam never produced a single,
+great personal work, a great poet, an original architect, a powerful
+moralist, a painter or a sculptor of genius. “The foreign model shines
+through everything admirable between the Mekong and the Gulf of Tonkin.”
+The Annamese can work at the task in hand with infinite taste and
+patience; what he lacks in originality he makes up to a degree in
+ingeniousness; but the creative spark seems never to have flashed forth
+in him.
+
+I suppose it is this copy-cat characteristic that makes him show no
+surprise at the inventions of the West. You cannot startle this ancient
+Oriental world with the mechanical marvels of the new. It accepts them,
+but it is not astonished. Give the yellow race the telegraph, and they
+send telegrams; the phonograph, and they listen; the railroad, and they
+buy their tickets and take their seats—granted that there are any left;
+the automobile, and a self-confident young man pours in gasoline and
+steps on the starter, knowing only that for some reason this makes the
+thing go. The force of this people lies in its shrewd plasticity; the
+Annamese do not resist, they adapt themselves; they espouse on the
+instant the practices and customs of the conqueror. Endowed with an
+immeasurable pride, they strive, not to do their best in their own line,
+but to imitate their masters, to outdo them in their own field. It is
+not because they admire them, one suspects; it is merely to prove that
+they are as smart as any one else. Thus Annamese students, with
+centuries of memorizing Chinese characters behind them, often outdo in
+French even the French youths in their classes.
+
+Though they take so readily to Western inventions, no Annamese will use
+a mechanical contrivance if he can do without it. With all the
+corkscrews and can-openers in the world within reach of his hand, your
+_bep_, or Annamese cook, invariably draws corks and opens cans with his
+teeth. In putting fuel on his fire he prefers his hands to a shovel. You
+may show him better methods, but he continues to make sure of the
+condition of an egg by whirling it on its side; if it is fresh it will
+not whirl, according to the _bep_; the older it is the more it will
+gyrate, he insists. Try it on your own “strictly fresh” eggs some
+winter, ye slaves of the land of cold-storage—and if he is right they
+may be whirling still when spring comes.
+
+
+Though they sometimes eat sharks, the Annamese worship what they call a
+whale, really the dolphin or porpoise. According to legend, one of these
+acrobats of the sea once got under an emperor’s boat and kept it from
+sinking until it could reach shore. Even students in French _lycées_
+still believe this yarn, and if one of these “whales” dies and is washed
+ashore, it is given honorable burial with much ceremony. The Annamese
+worship trees, especially if they are huge, or very old, or of strange
+shape; and to propitiate the demons or to win the favors of the good
+spirits that inhabit them they put under them little vases of the lime
+used with the betel-nut that even spirits are reputed to enjoy. Scores
+of these tiny jars may sometimes be seen at the foot of a single tree.
+No Annamese will cut down those trees, such as the banyan, that are
+especially sacred. The French sometimes have to chop down with their own
+fair hands trees that are in the way of civic improvements. At Tourane
+two Annamese converts to Christianity were given good wages and all the
+wood in a huge tree that was hindering progress, and earned fifty
+piastres for two days’ work, fifty times their normal income. Being
+Christians, they did not of course care how many trees were cut down.
+There are other lands where so effective a superstition would be well
+worth entertaining.
+
+The religions of Annam are in the main those of China. Not only “whales”
+and trees, but big or queerly shaped rocks, the rat, the silkworm, the
+elephant, above all the tiger, which they never mention except by the
+honorable title “Ong Kop,” have their worshipers. But the most general
+cult is that of their ancestors and of the village genii. The local god
+may be some mandarin who ruled the village centuries ago, some native
+son who became a great scholar, some former mistress of an emperor who
+aided her native town in some crisis; or it may merely be a beggar or an
+executed robber, some great calamity after his death having proved that
+his spirit must be propitiated, perhaps a new temple built to enthrone
+it. In return for all this adoration the village genius is expected to
+protect the village from drouth, epidemic, and similar catastrophe.
+
+One can scarcely travel, however rapidly, through Annam without seeing
+one of these fêtes to the genius of some village or other. Parades
+riotous with color make their way along the narrow dikes, across the
+rice-fields, the fantastic costumes mirrored in the flooded sloughs. Not
+only do women take no part in the cult of village genii, any more than
+they can effectively worship an ancestor, but neither do any of the men
+except those village notables who are not in mourning and in whose
+family full peace and harmony prevails. I gather that if a wife has
+recently run off with a lover or wilfully blackened an eye of her
+notable spouse, or if a daughter has eloped during the year with a
+Frenchman but without benefit of clergy—though this is perhaps no such
+serious matter—the husband or father involved would not be available or
+eligible for the rites in honor of the village genius, but would pass
+the day in seclusion. An incentive surely to domestic harmony! The
+plebes of course have merely the honor of paying the bill, as in any
+other part of the globe.
+
+There are many temples in Annam, but the largest of them are small
+compared with those of China, and in many details they are distinctly
+different. Elephants appear among the decorations; dragons are not so
+numerous. The roofs tilt with a longer, almost coquettish, curve; the
+tropical climate has given them a more luxurious brown; there is rather
+an air of equatorial languor about them. Most of them are better kept
+too, as if either the worshipers were more devout or there were better
+supervision over the caretakers. But this is perhaps merely another
+example of the superiority in cleanliness and order of Annam over China.
+Possibly it is due to the presence of the French, who have ruled over
+them during the life of almost all those now living, that the Annamese
+have a little more conception of the line between filth and its
+antithesis than is given to Celestial understanding. Or it may be that
+on the whole the people of Annam are less noisome in their personal
+habits than their northern neighbors because they are less
+poverty-stricken, and because total indifference in sanitary matters is
+more swiftly and visibly punished in so tropical a land. At any rate
+there is no such slovenliness, no such stench, in the cities of Annam as
+beyond the northern border; for one thing they are mostly on the coast,
+with water plentiful, and they are small, none of those enormous
+conglomerations of humanity to be found in hundreds of places throughout
+China.
+
+Gaudily painted little temples, weather-blackened shrines, generally
+among trees, pass in constant procession as one hurries through the land
+of the Eminent South. Now and again another procession enlivens the
+landscape—a long file of people in their gayest robes, most of them
+carrying high above their heads the parasols that are usually forbidden
+to any but mandarins and foreigners, wending its way along the dikes.
+They are on their way to a temple, or taking part in a wedding, perhaps
+a funeral, in which latter case they carry with them gay paper
+imitations of everything the deceased will need in the after-world, from
+automobiles to concubines. Temple festivals are theatrical and musical
+entertainments as well as religious ceremonies, even as in our churches.
+Probably the mass of the people distinguish no difference. The charming
+oasis of the _pagode_, as the French call it, may suddenly have taken on
+life in the midst of the rice-fields. The dikes about it are covered
+with files of people moving toward it; where there was once a road or
+some other open space beside it there is nothing but streets of
+makeshift shops that have sprung up overnight. There are improvised
+restaurants, women roasting cakes; sellers of rice and _chumchum_, of
+sugar-cane and oranges, of arec-nuts and betel-leaves, squat on their
+heels near their round flat baskets—a whole village of fortune will have
+sprung forth from the soil. The swarming crowd rumbles and clamors and
+shrieks with full mouths, for this is the time when they are all
+gourmands and when the whole region becomes one great family. Narrow
+wooden benches bear rows of customers seated monkey-fashion on their
+heels, stuffing themselves with swiftly moving chop-sticks. Every one is
+dressed in his best, the villagers with floating black tunics, the
+band-turban tight about the forehead, on which it leaves a whitish
+streak untouched by the sunshine.
+
+The temple itself, usually deserted, is full of natives, chewing,
+spitting, shouting, their wooden sandals clacking. An air of gentle yet
+barbaric splendor radiates through the place; religious furniture,
+sumptuously carved and painted with lacquer or gold, gleams forth;
+parasols, silk banners embroidered with mottoes and attributes and
+moralities scintillate in the distilled sunshine. Everywhere, even in
+the most distant corners, candles and joss-sticks burn; blue clouds of
+incense cover with an impalpable veil the golden faces of the idols; the
+altars are loaded with offerings; pasteboard horses, richly caparisoned,
+spread their stiff legs. About the ritual vases, the big iron urns in
+which incense and paper prayers by the myriad are burned, sacred swans
+stand erect on bronze tortoises; every now and again the flame leaps
+high in an urn, devouring a package of bars of gold or silver, made of
+rice-paper painted white or yellow. Then suddenly, unexpectedly, two
+generals pop forth from the wings, their backs a quiver of waving flags,
+their lungs roaring forth challenges in a false key. With uplifted
+sabers they march upon each other and indulge in what is meant to be a
+terrifying pantomime, but nothing more serious comes of it than of most
+Chinese battles. Frightful noises resound from their armies following
+close behind them—two howling troops of ragged coolies shaking spears
+and standards. The stage becomes a whirling chaos of gleaming flags and
+shrieking soldiery, in which all visible likeness to a religious
+ceremony fades away into pure theatricalism.
+
+I was constantly running across religious celebrations. Sometimes gay
+paper boats, their sails all set, were started off down a river to
+appease the spirits of the stream. Or it might be at one of those
+neglected little temples without door or roof which the slightest
+village maintains for its local gods. First the worshipers _lam lie_,
+kowtow to the stone or mud tiger at the entrance, a tiger with great
+bulging eyes, usually sculptured in deep relief on a stone screen. Then
+they go to lay their offerings on the altar—horses made of red paper,
+pasteboard gourds containing sticks of incense, rice-paper ingots of
+gold and silver. Fire-crackers explode, what the Chinese consider music
+howls and shrieks, crowds swarm, the temple flares with decorations in
+colored paper. In the front chamber there usually sat a shaven-headed
+bonze wearing a golden paper crown and dressed in red, singsonging
+Buddhist prayers from a ragged tissue-paper book. Beside and behind him
+men were beating drums, large and small, or pieces of bell-metal, of
+resonant hardwood, sometimes adding falsetto voices to the uproar.
+Countrymen in not too clean garments crowded close on either side, until
+men with sticks drove them back, again and again, sometimes by throwing
+lighted bunches of fire-crackers into the massed throng. Old women with
+sickening black mouths, contrasting unpleasantly with the gay
+decorations, seemed to be the chief worshipers. The mandarin in a gauzy
+black cloak who kept order knew enough French to tell me that they were
+praying for peace, but not enough to specify just what they meant by it.
+
+Another time, elsewhere, strange sounds drew me to a house where men of
+professional countenance were playing on flutes, cymbals, tambourines,
+or their Oriental equivalents, while the people were lamenting in
+discordant voices. A family and its neighbors were praying about the bed
+of a sick woman whose body would not cease swelling for all the
+medicine-man’s mud plasters. That concert of uproar had lasted since the
+night before; it was merely a question of who would tire out first, the
+music, the sickness, or the invalid. Before I left, fire-crackers were
+thrown about to scare off the evil spirits that were wilfully causing
+the illness, and if that did not drive them away the master of
+ceremonies was prepared to toss about handfuls of tissue-paper piastres,
+in the hope that the covetous devils would leave the body of the sick
+woman to fight for the money. If even this should not succeed, the
+funeral procession starts with a band, followed by banner-bearers, then
+by other ragamuffins carrying in a little paper temple the spirit-tablet
+of the deceased, portable tables laden with roast pig and other
+delicacies, and finally the gaudy bier, surrounded by howling mourners
+trying to call the soul back to earth, perhaps against its wishes.
+
+
+As there is really no Annamese religion, so there is no Annamese
+literature, except the Chinese. Even their spoken tongue seems to be an
+ancient Chinese dialect. It is a monosyllabic language, depending on
+tones to give different meanings to the same words; and it is so
+difficult that those Annamese who know French prefer to converse in that
+tongue. A queer language indeed, explosive in pronunciation, so that the
+friendliest little chat sounds like a violent quarrel, and until one
+gets accustomed to it every conversation seems about to develop into a
+fist-fight—or at least its Far-Eastern counterpart, clawing and
+scratching. In writing, Chinese characters are used, therefore Annamese,
+Japanese, Koreans, Formosans, Chinese of the north or south, can all
+converse readily enough on paper; though as they do not pronounce the
+characters at all alike the spoken word is of no use among them. Half a
+century ago the French Jesuits gave the Annamese a romanized script, and
+now thousands read their newspapers in it. In fact the government has
+made this alphabetical writing obligatory in the schools, and it is far
+more widely spread than a similar effort in China. But it is no such
+simple matter as the uninitiated imagine to represent tones by an
+extension of accent-marks. With the reform goes the ability to talk to
+their neighbors on paper too, and the old classics are being lost to the
+younger generation, even as in Korea and Formosa under the Japanese.
+
+Polygamy is still legal in Annam, though for economic reasons it is no
+longer usual. It remains a not uncommon practice for the wife who has
+tried in vain for eight or ten years to bear her husband a son to put on
+an old woman’s bonnet and go out and buy him a second wife. Not a bad
+plan, surely an improvement on the extramarital secrecy of the West; it
+no doubt makes for a more congenial companionship and incidentally
+solves the servant problem, if ever there was one in Annam. Yet the
+Annamese wife has a better social position than in most of the Orient.
+
+Speaking of wives, in Annam kissing—except in the not few cases in which
+Frenchmen have taught a different style—consists in approaching the nose
+to the face of the loved one and sniffing, much as if one were smelling
+a flower. The harder one sniffs the more it proves one’s love—which is
+sometimes a real test!
+
+Naturally a ditch has dug itself between the younger and the older
+generation in Annam. Other customs, other manners, other points of view
+have grown up since the rule of despotic emperors changed to the rule of
+protective Frenchmen. When the old ancestral altar is replaced by a
+chest of drawers topped by a mirror it is not merely a question of
+furniture; something has changed in the heart, in the essence of things.
+The fathers wish to remain true to the spirit of old Annam; the sons
+wish to be “même chose Français.” Observing the two generations side by
+side, one has an impression of two different classes, almost two
+different races. The dissimilarity shows itself in the slightest matters
+of every-day life. Take, for instance, the well-to-do Annamese families
+the traveler finds dining in the more or less French hotels along the
+main routes of travel. The young people, often dressed entirely in
+European garb, their black hair cut in our fashion and glossy with
+brilliantine, eat their _tête de veau_ and _poulet rôti_ with ease,
+talking and laughing freely, while their constrained, embarrassed, yet
+always dignified parents, in their long gowns and the Annamese
+head-dress, handle knife and fork in one hand at one time, as if they
+were chop-sticks, and hardly succeed in swallowing a mouthful.
+Especially in the ports and the larger cities young Annam is growing up
+vastly different from his fathers. Far from reading the old classics, he
+knows only the _quoc-ngu_, the Annamese language transcribed in our
+alphabet, which he even beats out on a typewriter. At Saïgon or Hanoï he
+is resplendent with modernism, agitating, scheming, getting rich; but at
+Hué he seems to have taken refuge in the legendary past, in tradition,
+in the memory of his ancestors. How long even this spacious town on the
+banks of the River of Perfumes will remain what it still is, the natural
+place of refuge of the exalted spirits of the great princes of other
+times, seeking throughout the “protected” kingdom for a place to which
+our Western civilization cannot track them, is not hard to guess: just
+about the time necessary to finish the railway that is to unite the
+Annamese capital with Hanoï on the north and with Saïgon to the south;
+the time needed to replace the little hotel-grocery, celebrated among
+all the colonials of Indo-China, with the tourists’ palace already
+planned; the time it will take to build a few factories in which
+fishermen will be the workmen and princes and mandarins the bosses.
+
+Ah, well, the world changes. Not every visitor to Annam can see the
+prostrations of the “ten thousand” mandarins at Hué, and soon that
+ceremony too may be gone forever. The legendary Annam, the traditional
+Asia, is passing away. Roads, the automobile, the telegraph have upset
+all the old customs. Old-timers cannot tell a story of the olden days—of
+late in the nineteenth century—without sighing, “Ah, in my time ... but
+we shall never see that again.” We shall not, of course; yet there is no
+just cause to weep at our misfortune in arriving too late in a world
+grown too old. There are compensations. Western customs, introduced into
+Indo-China, have not destroyed the picturesque; they have merely
+transformed it. In the place of the adventurers turned administrators
+who, living like little kings far from control, inspired respect in the
+natives by tricks akin to sleight-of-hand, surrounded themselves with
+_congaïe_ like Oriental sultans in their harems, and dispensed justice
+in the shade of a banyan-tree, like some tropical Saint Louis, there is
+the Parisian boulevardier, far from his element, watched over by a wife
+who will see to it that _congaïe_ become nothing more romantic than
+seamstresses and cooks’ assistants. After all, the sedan-chairs that
+once crawled along the Mandarin Road by which Chinese officials went and
+came among their posts in Annam were no more worth coming to see than
+are autobuses, jammed so full of natives that their feet stick out from
+both sides of it, _congaïe_ wearing French shoes, an old Annamese
+dowager with a modern umbrella under her arm, “boys” with a golden tooth
+or two among their black-lacquered ones, bicycles among the baskets on
+the roof of the terror-spreading vehicle, an autobus so crowded that it
+looks as if the passengers were transporting it, like ants dragging a
+dead fly. Come to think of it, there is nothing more amusing about the
+myriad old temples of a mummified Far East than about a Buddhist priest
+in his saffron robe carrying a fountain-pen and riding a bicycle in his
+bare feet. The old _nha-qué_ bound to market with a string of “cash”
+over one shoulder may be gone, but in his place there are Annamese
+youths, still wearing black band-turbans above their misfit French
+clothing, counting out paper piastres behind the bars of the Banque de
+l’Indo-China.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER X
+                  HURRYING ON TO THE NORTHERN CAPITAL
+
+
+I was up at four the morning after the imperial ceremony, in
+sufficiently good mood to refrain from kicking the “boy” who had called
+me according to orders, and off in a heavy rain by a rickshaw assured
+the evening before by a combination of heavy subsidy and threatened
+penalty. The train from Hué to Dongha, completing the central stretch of
+the railways of Indo-China that begins at Tourane, ran close outside the
+moat of Hué citadel, the walled imperial city stretching from river to
+river. Beyond, a rich plain was almost completely covered with rice, a
+wet green plain backed by the mountain ranges, bulking against the
+western sky, that were never far distant on the left. The scantiness of
+the country, the paucity of its arable land, seemed to be emphasized
+here; for Annam gets very narrow indeed north of Hué, so narrow that it
+all but breaks in two. Yet it was surprising how many people were
+crowded into this slender strip of earth, how many things of interest to
+the hurried traveler too, for that matter.
+
+At length, hardly an hour beyond Hué, we rode out from under the clouds
+as from under a roof. For the climate runs in streaks up and down this
+narrow country. The weather again became, and, what was more to the
+point, remained, splendid, so that almost the only time I did not have
+brilliant sunshine during my two months in Indo-China was during that
+enforced delay at Hué. Another hour and we ran out of track, and were
+set off at 7:30 at a mere station, where I stepped into an autobus in
+which I rode until 8:30 that night.
+
+There were plenty of Annamese in the back four fifths of the vehicle,
+though it was not packed as the autobuses of Annam often are. For at
+this New Year’s season most people were either already at their
+ancestral homes or had no intention of coming. Just how the driver and
+his unfailing assistant were induced to work at such a time was a
+mystery, but that perhaps is one of the advantages of French rule. These
+autobuses run as regularly as the trains with which they connect,
+whether there are passengers or not, for at least there are the mails.
+In fact on the whole they run a little faster than the trains, which is
+perhaps one reason their fares are higher. My Scotch blood evidently
+having surged to the surface during my delay, I had taken before leaving
+Hué a second-class ticket, partly too, I fancy, in order to prove that
+the company would have to sell me one, in spite of my complexion. There
+had been no argument, though white men cannot ride among the natives in
+fourth class on the trains. But the Annamese agent at Dongha, as if he
+could not bear to see the race that ruled over his land mingling with
+his fellow-countrymen, insisted that I ride first class, that is, in the
+front seat, behind the driver this time. Or there may have been another
+reason; for when my recovered baggage was placed in the closed box at
+the rear of the car—also a first-class privilege, since freight and
+express, the parcel-post and the baggage of native passengers, was all
+piled up on the railed roof of the vehicle or tied along the
+running-boards—he mentioned casually that of course it weighed
+considerably more than the fifteen kilograms even a first-class
+passenger was allowed as free luggage; and as the rate for anything
+above that amount is nearly as high as for human flesh, I felt it only
+fair to slip a couple of paper piastres into his limp palm, at which he
+not only did not protest but even thanked me in imperfect French.
+
+This time I had a fellow-passenger of my own color. A Frenchman of
+sturdy frame and studious face, a khaki patch held in place over one eye
+by a cord that had left a thin white line free from sunburn diagonally
+across his intelligent features, had also stepped off the train. As the
+custom in England and its newer American counterpart of strict
+incommunicativeness between strangers unexpectedly meeting on the road
+does not apply among the hospitable French colonials of Indo-China, I
+soon discovered that my companion, though ostensibly in the customs
+service, was a novelist whose latest romance against an Annamese
+background I had finished reading the evening before. I might have been
+embarrassed at being discovered by so important a personage, an official
+to boot, occupying “European accommodations” at the price of a native
+ticket, had I not quickly learned that the novelist had not even paid
+second-class fare for his first-class seat, but was traveling on a
+government _réquisition_, which cost him nothing more than the asking.
+
+He had been in the customs service of Indo-China since early manhood,
+but chancing to be on furlough in his native land when the World War
+broke out, he had joined his regiment at once, fighting unscathed all
+through the war, until, three days before the Armistice, he had lost an
+eye. But the government had been kind. It had kept him on the pay-roll
+as a customs officer, but let him run about the country at government
+expense, to such things as the ceremony we had just seen at the court of
+Hué, in order that he might gather material for more writing. For your
+Frenchman realizes that even an honest novel, true as to local color, is
+useful propaganda; and Indo-China has a longing to be known, in France
+as well as in the world at large. Hawthorne and Whitman, I recalled, had
+not been paid their government salaries in order that they might go on
+producing what was perhaps even better literature than that of my new
+traveling companion. Nor could I remember having heard of any of our
+crippled war veterans receiving government aid in the production of art
+or letters.
+
+
+We made the constant good speed of a limited express, along a road
+raised a foot or two above the rice-fields, here dry but green, still
+flooded back toward the foot-hills. I could in fact have ridden a little
+less swiftly with more pleasure. For there being rarely any turn in the
+road, and no other vehicles, gasoline-driven or otherwise—luckily, since
+the roads of Indo-China are for one car at a time—we went over the many
+short bridges just wide enough for so ponderous a conveyance as ours
+with the roller-coaster feeling of a day at Coney Island. It was a
+gravel road in which grew grass that seemed to have sprung up during the
+last few days of rain; and there was never a fence or other protection
+from it even at the villages through which we roared so madly. Striking
+peaks stood out among those rows of ranges perpetually following us on
+the west; at the mouths of the several short rivers that looked like
+seas in the raging wind we were ferried across in the usual decrepit old
+_bacs_.
+
+At Donghoï or Quang-binh we were the first guests in a brand-new hotel,
+subsidized by the government in order that the few French travelers who
+go up and down the _Route Mandarine_ may have all the advantages of home
+during the _déjeuner_ and siesta that break the journey there. During
+that Parisian ceremony we picked up a French colonial burned a reddish
+bronze by half a lifetime at a country post beneath the equatorial sun.
+He went on with us for a few hours to his bungalow at the place where
+another _bac_ came across the sea to us at the call of a water-buffalo
+horn in the hands of a ferryman. Before it had fought its way to the
+southern shore there was ample time to enjoy the coolness of an interior
+in marked contrast to the facial and temperamental heat of its chief
+occupant, who, apologizing for the absence of his _congaïe_ to do the
+honors, had his “boys” serve us drinks cooled with the ice that was
+thrown off to him each forenoon from the south-bound bus. Without this
+daily necessity he could of course no more have endured life in his
+isolated station than without his respectful servants and his female
+companion. Most of the conversation ran on the selfishness of a few of
+his younger colleagues in expecting their own countrywomen to accompany
+them to such posts of “exile in the wilderness.”
+
+Every house or hovel of the natives had standing before it the tufted
+bamboo of the New-Year season, that signal to the spirits of the air
+that the people who live beneath it are pious and not to be
+molested—something akin to the hobo signs of our own land. In many of
+the villages the populace was childishly enjoying itself in swings made,
+supports and all, not too securely of bamboos crudely lashed together.
+Toward the middle of the afternoon we found ourselves making toward a
+great wall of mountains at right angles to the main ranges. It looked as
+if this ponderous autobus could not possibly pass such a barrier, at
+least without the united assistance of the passengers, and I recalled
+with some misgiving the ancient story of second-class travelers being
+obliged to get off and push, while those in first class had merely to
+walk. For the day was still uninviting to physical exertion, and my
+special front-seat privileges might not be honored in such an emergency
+without the two-piastre agent at Dongha to protect me. But the road
+found a way up and around and over the steep spur, twisting itself into
+hair-pin curves to climb a slope up which an old-style Chinese road went
+straight and unswerving, with the hardiness of the pioneer, to the
+remnants of a gate at the lowest point, not far from where our less
+virile modern route surmounted it.
+
+To all intents and purposes we had come to the end of Annam. What the
+Chinese named the Eminent South Country was usually reckoned as
+beginning on the north at the Gate of Annam, as this pass has been
+called for centuries. This was the old Annam-Tonkin boundary; there is
+still the vestige of an ancient wall built along the summit by the
+Annamese to protect themselves from invasion, and many great battles
+have been waged there. To-day the official boundary is much farther
+north, and does not signify anyway, for there is a fiction that Tonkin,
+the northern knob of the Indo-China dumb-bell, is now a part of Annam,
+ruled over by Koang-de, the Son of Heaven at Hué.
+
+The climb had opened out a great amphitheater of a valley,
+checkerboarded with rice-fields, a stretch of the sea with a curving
+beach that flashed in the afternoon sunshine, several other spurs that
+almost hindered our progress, and more rows of ranges, with densely
+green forests in the hollows high up on some of the ridges. On the
+southern side of the Gate there had been no forest, only a light brush;
+but it looked as if the northern slopes, blue-black now in the slanting
+sunshine, were all thickly wooded. Long pasturelands, rolling and bushy,
+dotted with red herds, almost completely crowded out cultivation for
+some distance. There were few inhabitants, but many tiger temples, all
+set in clusters of bamboos or trees, as if the wilderness that had
+driven out the rice-fields brought the dreaded beast that much nearer.
+The mountains had pushed us so close to the sea that for some time
+beaches and even islands seemed but a stone’s throw away.
+
+A slightly different human type appeared beyond the Gate of Annam,
+stockier, the women perhaps a bit better looking, or more nearly good
+looking—so long as they kept their repulsive mouths shut. In fact
+purists among the French anthropologists of Indo-China insist that the
+real Annamese are not in the handle of the dumb-bell at all, but in
+Tonkin, because south of the Gate so many tribes have been Annamited, so
+to speak, mingled in blood and culture with the conquerors from the
+north. Unlike their relatives south of the Gate, the Tonkinese were
+dressed in a cinnamon or tobacco-juice color that suddenly became as
+universal as black had been farther south, as denim blue is among the
+masses of China. The countrywomen, then their men, and finally all the
+hand-laboring class, took to wearing long cotton cloaks of this reddish
+brown hue. I found later that this is colored with _cunao_, the
+vegetable dye in which the masses north of the old boundary dip their
+clothing, so that all Tonkin wears the same conspicuous livery. More
+exactly it is inconspicuous, in much of Tonkin; one might fancy it had
+been adopted as a protective coloring, not only so that betel saliva
+would not show on it, but because so much of the soil of the Tonkinese
+plains is reddish that everything, earth, water, people, their clothing
+and their cattle, anything that comes in contact with the earth, took on
+this _cunao_ color. Centuries of toiling in flooded rice-fields
+reflecting a tropical sun had indeed given even their faces a similar
+tint.
+
+There were fewer male Psyche knots here than farther south, hair-cuts
+for men being now popular. The women had suddenly taken to skirts, in
+place of the voluminous thin-cotton trousers of Annam proper, and
+dressed their hair differently, wrapping the braid once about the head
+and letting the rest hang down like the tail of a Hindu turban. But the
+most conspicuous change was that the palm-leaf hat of toadstool shape,
+which I had grown to associate forever with the country people of Annam,
+had given way, among the women only, to a most astonishing head-shade.
+Of grindstone shape and size, being easily two and a half if not three
+feet in diameter and perfectly flat on top, with a brim six or more
+inches wide forming a perpendicular circle about them, these astounding
+hats made also of leaves, perhaps of the banana, looked like a tub set
+upside down on the head. More exactly they sat on a little round support
+tied to the top of the head, and were so unwieldy on this slight fulcrum
+that whenever the wind was blowing or the wearer under motion the
+struggle to retain her head-gear seemed to be much more difficult than
+the carrying of her shoulder-pole burden. The men continued to wear the
+smaller cone-shaped mushroom hats that had roofed the rural population
+all the way from Cochinchina, as if they realized how foolish they would
+have looked in these immense grindstones, or knew the futility of trying
+to compete with their women in ornamental matters.
+
+The graves were now well weeded knobs on top of large raised circles of
+earth; the towns, almost as compact as those of China, were surrounded
+by high walls of growing bamboos. The more straggling towns south of the
+Gate of Annam had been encircled, if at all, by hedges of cactus or wild
+pineapple, concealing nothing; here every village was completely hidden,
+with an opening here and there through its bamboo wall like that to the
+lair of a jungle beast, so that with Tonkinese villagers going home
+consists in crawling away into the jungle like the tiger they so dread
+and honor. This lofty bamboo hedge is a vestige of pirate days, and of
+battles between towns and clans. Near the coast cocoanut-trees did their
+part toward the concealing, and of course the soldierly arec-palm with
+its clinging betel-vine was everywhere. Once or twice we passed fields
+of mulberry-trees, for Tonkin also produces silk. Women in the
+grindstone hat stood on little platforms and screened rice by pouring it
+out in the wind, rice to be hulled later by these same women stepping
+with their bare feet incessantly on the end of a heavy beam that drops
+its hammer-head into a stone or wooden mortar.
+
+
+It was well after dark when we came to a last _bac_, across an arm of
+the sea that seemed in the black night as wide as the British Channel,
+and were gradually poled and pulled and sculled by sleepy coolies toward
+the lights of Ben-thuy, where the railway picks up again. Another three
+years and trains will be running between Dongha and Ben-thuy; we had
+seen the half finished embankment now and then along the way. Within
+twice that time the traveler should be able to go entirely by rail the
+whole length of Indo-China, clear on to the Yang-tze perhaps, possibly
+even to Angkor, connecting with the lines of Siam, which already run to
+Singapore.
+
+There were no accommodations for foreigners at Ben-thuy, merely the
+river-mouth port of the city of Vinh, where we were soon housed in the
+almost French hotel of a Spanish—er—lady of fortune. Vinh is a large
+town, for Indo-China. Three hundred and ten houses, a whole section not
+far from the hotel, had been burned that day as an unintentional
+addition to the New Year’s celebration, and the night air was still
+strongly scented with the conflagration; but this catastrophe had left
+only an unimportant vacancy in the civic area. The French showed little
+sign of interest in these popular misfortunes, so long as their own
+spacious part of the town, with its uncrowded dwellings on broad half
+forested lawns, remained undisturbed. Is it because they no longer hold
+in honor their own labyrinthine old cities that the French have given
+such an atmosphere of bourgeois order to the towns of their Far-Eastern
+empire by making them checker-boards of straight, right-angled streets,
+just as the Japanese have done in Formosa and Korea?
+
+Another “boy” risked his life by calling me at four again, though the
+train on which I wandered northward all that day long did not leave
+until two hours later, from a station a few blocks away. That journey
+from Vinh to Hanoï began as rather a stupid ride, but it turned out
+better than the morning promised. The little train, with its single
+three-class coach at the end of a string of modified cattle-cars for the
+populace, sat lower to the ground and was in some ways less comfortable
+than the autobus. A stone embankment from two to six feet above the
+rice-fields formed the basis for railroad and highway, which flowed
+together every little while into the same narrow bridges, with a coolie
+at either end to sound a warning. The plain, of more or less width
+according to how curious the mountains were to come down and look at the
+sea, was one vast paddy-field. Birds were numerous for a tropical land.
+Herons lay in wait for careless frogs at the edges of the rice-fields;
+the _crabier_, a brown bird showing a patch of white, like a flag of
+truce, when flying, plied its customary quest for edible crabs; a little
+reddish bird that seemed to have copied the garb of its human neighbors
+flitted here and there across the leisurely moving foreground.
+Water-buffaloes, almost one in three of them of the albino type, were
+plowing belly-deep in the slime of the paddy-fields or loafing along the
+dikes; whole Oriental families of them lay immersed in mud-holes,
+completely covered except for the ends of their snouts and their
+sagacious little eyes, recalling those tales of Annamese pirates hiding
+themselves indefinitely under water by breathing through two reeds
+thrust in their nostrils. Now and then one of these ponderous pachyderms
+presented his massive head threateningly toward our train, as if about
+to attack this new type of animal, but always decided at the last moment
+not to risk it and loped off into the flooded paddy-field on either side
+with a splash of wet mud.
+
+[Illustration: With each new year the Annamese clear of vegetation the
+graves of their ancestors, back to remote generations]
+
+[Illustration: I asked a living caretaker to fill the place of one of
+these of stone which guard the entrance to a royal tomb of Annam]
+
+[Illustration: In the heart of Hanoï, northern capital of French
+Indo-China, stands a delightfully picturesque lake of goodly dimensions]
+
+[Illustration: Annamese girls hold Sunday morning flower-market at this
+corner of the city-girdled lake of Hanoï]
+
+In places the land was so flooded from the recent rains that only
+graves, dikes, and the tops of the half-grown rice appeared above the
+broad expanse of water—except of course the villages and temples in
+their clusters of trees, standing wherever possible on a knoll too rocky
+to be cultivated to advantage. Villages close to the road were frequent,
+graves still more so, the dead and the living inhabitants both too
+numerous. The plain, flat as a billiard-table, the water and the exact
+rows of flooded rice shimmering like silk, was dotted with red cattle,
+some also plowing, and with redder people of all ages and both sexes, in
+various forms of undress, all toiling for their rice in the inundated
+fields. More exactly it was all one vast field, divided into all manner
+of queer shapes by narrow green ridges six inches above the general
+level. Brown men in faded tobacco-brown clothing—still more often women,
+who seem to do most of the work—groped about up to their thighs and
+biceps in the slime. Some were immersed to the waist; some paddled about
+in sampans; others stood in pairs on the dikes and tossed water from one
+field to another in a basket of woven bamboo splints hung in the middle
+of a long rope, or toiled alone shoveling water from one level to
+another with a huge wooden spoon mounted on a framework.
+
+The reddish-brown garments that had begun at the Gate of Annam were
+universal in the rural parts of this region. Some of the men in the
+fields were naked except for a shirt tied up about the armpits, but the
+women were more or less covered, though they are more careless than
+those of China about exposing the person. Trousers for women had for the
+time being entirely disappeared, though they were to appear again about
+Hanoï; a sign, I suppose, of the fast life of cities. Along the road
+close beside us women under shoulder-pole loads of anything, everything,
+trotting in constant files, like trains of leaf-bearing ants in the
+jungle, often left their long, sun-faded, red-brown cloaks swinging
+open, and not concealing all that the once white diamond-shaped
+breast-cover beneath leaves visible. Some frankly wore only that and the
+knee-high skirt, as if this season of hard labor was no time to be
+prudish in small matters. Almost all wore those great basket-like hats,
+some faded and frayed, some fresh from the markets to and from which
+endless streams of them forever jogged. A picturesque figure is the
+Tonkinese woman of the people, with her flat umbrella-hat, her loose,
+cinnamon-colored, knee-length jacket, her short skirt or very loose thin
+black trousers, her clacking wooden sandals in town or her noiseless
+straw ones in the country, her black-lacquered teeth bloody with the
+betel-juice driveling from the corners of her hideous mouth. Invariably
+she has a well built back, a pretty brown in tint, and suggesting to our
+society leaders how they too might have perfect forms—merely by carrying
+a hundred pounds or so across their shoulders to market several times a
+week.
+
+There were stretches where the land was almost bare, the fields
+yellow-green, with brownish graves, the foot-hills terraced, some of
+them cut up by bush fences but apparently uncultivated now. The
+forerunners of the mountain range were without vegetation, except for
+clumps of trees, among which the palm was the most common. In other
+places, where the demands of husbandry had not killed them, were whole
+forests of trees white with blossoms, bamboos that were like smoke
+spirals of blond gold, great kapok-trees, without a leaf on their
+whitened branches, but bearing immense bunches of flowers that turned
+orange by translucence against the blue of the sky. Finally the
+mountains came down so close to the sea that there were heaped-up hills
+cultivated in patches, though here, unlike China, the ratio between soil
+and inhabitants has never been such that anything more than the level
+land must necessarily be cultivated.
+
+Here and there on the muddy mat of the fields stood slender triangular
+rafts anchored or mired in the slime, raising in the air, with strange
+immobile gestures, disjointed arms, like gigantic field-spiders. Most of
+them bore on this base a rudimentary house, a roof of woven palm-leaves
+closed at the back with an old paddy-winnowing basket, a bundle of straw
+inside taking the place of a sleeping-mat. They were the shelters of the
+fishermen who come here whenever there is water enough to make it worth
+while to plunge into it the big square dip-net at the end of the
+balanced pole suspended at the front of the raft. Some were without the
+nets now, the bare bamboos on which these are fastened seeming to claw
+the air in their eagerness to be of use again. In places there were
+scores of these fishing devices, each with its little hut, its net
+balanced with stones and raised and lowered by a rope inside the hut, so
+that the fisherman does not need to expose his already bronzed hide to
+either rain or shine.
+
+Some time in mid-morning, masses of jagged rock, similar to the “Marble
+Mountains” of Tourane, began to rise from the plain, growing ever more
+numerous. They were identical, I was to find later, with those fantastic
+rock isles that dot by thousands the northwestern corner of the Gulf of
+Tonkin. This region has indeed been called the terrestrial Bay of Along,
+which is no misnomer, for these rocks also once stood out of the sea,
+before the earth came to fill in between them the flat plain that flows
+as level as the ocean all about them. Some of these gigantic formations,
+which were to follow me far down the West River into the Chinese
+province of Kwangsi, had patches of hardy vegetation on them; some were
+as bare as the forbidding mounds of stacked bayonets they suggested.
+They were of most curious shapes, forms as tormented as if the mountains
+had been tortured in their youth, some like rocks torn jagged by
+uncounted centuries of dashing waves. Now they grew up among the
+rice-fields, and continued for hours, fantastic, of every possible
+formation, attitude, posture, striking peaks and ridges with
+perpendicular, horizontal, diagonal strata, covered with thorny scrub
+vegetation wherever it could get a foothold. Some of those queer rock
+hills, half covered with plant life, looked like velour fedora hats
+carelessly tossed out on the plain; others resembled the slack heaps of
+a region of pulsating industry.
+
+All the rest of the day we rode among those mountainous heaps of rock,
+those phantoms of stone. Sometimes that afternoon the whole western
+horizon was cut off by a capriciously peaked range so hazy as to seem a
+gauze curtain, at other times so close that it appeared to hang
+threateningly over us. But always there was this vanguard of isolated
+rock heaps standing sentinel along the plain. I made the journey between
+Vinh and Hanoï three times before I finally left Indo-China, and I never
+tired of those eccentric nonchalant piles of stone, on land and sea, of
+which the “Marble Mountains” of Tourane are the southernmost
+outcroppings and the bandit-riddled cliffs along the Si-kiang near
+Nanning the most northern.
+
+The arable land was still more intensively cultivated and inhabited
+north of Thanh-hoa, a hot “citadel” of well built structures along
+orderly streets, which there is time to go and see if you will miss the
+midday meal at the station presided over by an Annamese woman with
+unlacquered teeth whose French is suspiciously fluent. Thanh-hoa station
+well outside the town is the luncheon-place of all foreign travelers
+between Vinh and Hanoï, whether by train or by automobile, and track and
+road run so close together much of the distance that acquaintances made
+there can be renewed from time to time during the journey. Those in the
+motor-cars now and then sped past us within handshaking reach, tossing
+over their shoulders gibes at our slowness, though we were not so slow
+at that. The towns grew larger, with some more or less European houses,
+an old church sometimes bulking above the trees. The mountains gradually
+retired to infinity; French appeared in the platform crowds, the Chinese
+merchants in our car increased as Jews do in trains nearing our own
+metropolis. Crowds were returning from holiday jaunts on this last day
+of the official _Têt_ season. French boys, and girls too for that
+matter, with nascent mustaches and bare knees, who had never been in
+France, were on their way back to school; French and half-caste hunters
+filled our car with dogs and guns, with dead rabbits, wild chickens and
+ducks, bagfuls and bunches of still less commonplace game. Though we
+took on more cars as they were needed, our coach was so overrun with
+standees that the mind was unwillingly carried back to the subways of
+another continent, while the fourth-class cars were almost as packed and
+jammed and chaotic as the soldier-abused trains of China.
+
+Passengers were piled three deep from engine to back platform by the
+time we reached Hanoï at six, and I found the city so busy that I had my
+first and only ride in a _pousse-choléra_, as the French quite fittingly
+call the iron-tired buggy-wheeled rickshaws usually patronized only by
+the natives. Certainly I should have had something akin to cholera if
+the journey to the post-office for my first mail in a long time and back
+to the Hôtel de la Gare had lasted much longer.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER XI
+                          HANOÏ AND THE TONKIN
+
+
+Hanoï, northern capital of French Indo-China, is somewhat larger and
+less obviously tropical than its southern rival, Saïgon. It is quite a
+city, with expensive modern buildings, electric street-cars—found
+nowhere else in the colony—railways in four directions, many
+automobiles, both of the taxicab and private limousine variety, several
+excellent hotels; in short, it is a little Paris of the tropics, with
+some advantages that even Paris does not have. Those hotels were a
+constant surprise, though I had seen almost their equal in other parts
+of the colony. Not only were they all you could expect of the French
+themselves, but their rates were surprisingly reasonable for these
+exorbitant times. Though I am getting ahead of my story again, we had
+later on two large rooms with bath, electric fan thrown in, excellent
+French food and plenty of ice, for three adults and two small children
+at 250 piastres a month. True, there were cobwebs visible in the corners
+of the high ceiling, bright little lizards paraded the walls, and the
+plumbing might have been more strictly up-to-date, but he is an
+inexperienced traveler who expects perfection anywhere.
+
+In the very heart of Hanoï, with the principal foreign streets on some
+sides of it and the native city on the other, is a large lake,
+delightfully blue and restful, bordered by a stone-faced embankment
+spaced with huge old trees. Out in it rise two little islands, one
+reached by a causeway, the other needing a boat, bearing respectively a
+famous old temple and a kind of pagoda. The beautiful, lazily tropical
+view across this broad deep lake in the heart of a city is one of the
+sights of the Far East, and gives Hanoï quite a distinctive atmosphere.
+In a well shaded corner on its shores there is, especially on Sunday
+mornings, a flower-market very similar to the one near the Madeleine in
+Paris, except that this one lasts the whole year round, and in place of
+the _bouquetières_ of Paris boulevards the sellers are black-toothed
+_congaïe_ in long cinnamon-brown coats, their swollen lips reddened with
+betel-nut, yet quite as commercially skillful and in their Oriental way
+just as coquettish as their Parisian counterparts.
+
+Rue Paul Bert, named for a former French commander, is to Hanoï what the
+Rue Catinat is to Saïgon. Along it are some very up-to-date government
+and private buildings, well stocked stores, and cafés overrunning the
+sidewalks. The tram-cars across this lead along the lake and through the
+native town to even larger government structures in a great park of the
+outskirts, now admittedly the headquarters of the governor-general,
+though even he hardly dares openly admit this down in Saïgon. There are
+other parks, one with a big stone water-tower that looks like a medieval
+dungeon, many streets of good foreign houses, most of them gay in
+Buddhist-yellow stucco, a big museum left over from a former exposition,
+and all the other adjuncts of French civilization. As in Saïgon, there
+is an imposing municipal opera-house, where a company subsidized by the
+government, at the cost of the natives, comes to sing each “winter” for
+the French residents, not to be outdone by that other Paris on the
+opposite side of the earth in any of the cultural things of life just
+because their lot happens to be cast so far afield. Most of the year the
+municipal theater stands idle, however, with a welcoming air toward
+anything that promises to be a relief from the monotony of the
+silvered-screen nonsense offered in another part of town. On my second
+visit to Hanoï its pretentious façade was adorned with the paper of an
+“Oriental Magician,” whose performance was as worthy of the solemn
+throng in full dress that filled the house as would have been those of
+his rivals elsewhere. The very atrociousness with which he massacred the
+bit of French needed to accompany his tricks had about it a tang of the
+occult East unable to express itself in our crude Western medium—which
+was strange in an Italian who called Newton, Massachusetts, home, and
+whose ultra-Oriental wife and chief stage assistant admitted in
+unofficial moments that she was born in Kansas.
+
+The rush and swirl of street life in Hanoï was even more nearly
+incessant than that of hotter Saïgon. Hawkers, improvised restaurants,
+hundreds of rickshaws, most of them thumping their wooden wheels on the
+ill-fitting axle, queer carriages, wheelbarrows again for the first time
+since leaving China, man-drawn freight-carts, automobiles bellowing
+their demanding way through flocks and shoals of pedestrians, all bore
+testimony to the importance of the northern capital. Superficially
+everything was French, down to the tiny bottles containing those
+_pierres à briquet_ required for the gasoline-driven cigarette-lighters
+of France, which one saw in the display-windows of native as well as
+French shops. The big department-store across the street from our hotel
+opened at dawn and closed from eleven until two, like almost everything
+else, so that its reassembling force was constantly breaking short both
+our night’s sleep and our afternoon siesta. But the red tape of buying
+there was as entangling as in France, with the added difficulty that
+prices quoted in francs and paid in piastres had to be figured according
+to the daily rate of exchange—often to our decided advantage. There
+seemed to be a general taste for French bread, and bottles by the
+coolie-load were so cheap and plentiful, in contrast to China, that
+every possible thing was made out of whole or broken ones—walls, garden
+borders, sidewalk edges, playhouses. But there did not seem to be much
+Frenchifying of native life except in these external details, and even
+with those the millions of the masses have little to do.
+
+Late January in Hanoï was cloudless, almost as hot as in Saïgon, more
+than ten degrees farther south, so that even in white again I was none
+too comfortably cool. By night it was often too hot to sleep well even
+stark naked under a languid electric fan, and one’s dozing was made all
+the more fitful by the rattling hubs of the _pousses-choléra_, those
+iron-tired, almost springless rickshaws of the masses, and of the larger
+coolie-pulled baggage and vegetable carts, that made a hubbub beneath
+our windows all night long like the passing of a regiment of
+lumber-wagons. Sometimes there might be a lull from about two until four
+in the morning, corresponding somewhat to the daytime siesta, but even
+then the streets were by no means so nearly deserted as they were around
+noonday. Plenty of good rickshaws, with wire wheels on large pneumatic
+tires and ample springs, as noiseless and comfortable conveyances as
+those of Peking and far better than the ones to be found in Canton and
+southern China in general, plied the streets of Hanoï. But they were
+used almost exclusively by foreigners, one European each, while the
+bone-breakers in which even mandarins were glad to save an Indo-China
+nickel served the natives.
+
+The rickshaw-men of Indo-China are so hungry for work that they always
+know, whether they understand him or not, where a possible client wishes
+to go. A score of times I had the same experience; all foreigners in
+Indo-China have had it: a mob of rickshaw pullers, seeing me come out of
+a hotel, a shop, a government office, the home of the lone Protestant
+missionary couple in Hanoï or of the customs officer turned novelist,
+rose up like a battling mob along the sidewalk, each vociferously
+offering his little seat on wheels, those behind thumping the others
+with their shafts, so common a trick that none of them show anger at it,
+as if it were all a part of the day’s work, of the eternal struggle for
+rice for their thin bodies and the many dependent upon them. “Rue de la
+Soie!” I cry to the uproar. All begin to shriek, to howl in chorus: “Moï
+connaître! Moï connaître!” I step into one of the vehicles at random.
+The others give a little smirk as of amusement to cover their chagrin,
+to save face by pretending that they were not keen for the job after
+all, while the lucky fellow speeds away straight before him, as if he
+knew the way perfectly. But he goes too straight ahead; the way to an
+Asiatic goal cannot be so direct as that, even in this less labyrinthine
+part of the Orient. I begin to grow suspicious; at the end of several
+full-speed minutes I stop him with “Mais, ce n’est pas—this is not the
+way to the Rue de la Soie, is it?” He has no idea what I am saying,
+longer experience will show me; all he understands is that I have said
+something. So he turns around and flees as rapidly in the direction from
+which we have come. I call out again, and though he still does not
+understand, he pretends to, and feeling that he must do something to
+satisfy me he forks off at random, to the right, to the left, no matter
+which, and continues to trot, now and then turning his head to look at
+me more or less surreptitiously, like a clever old horse, as if to
+gather from my expression some notion of where I wish to go.
+
+All very well for the old resident, who knows his way about town and is
+well aware that the two-legged horse between his shafts does not know a
+word of the French he so glibly pretends to understand. But it is hard
+on the new-comer, who has neither of these advantages, who does not know
+one street from another until he can read the signs on their corners,
+who speaks no Annamese, particularly so on the naïve American accustomed
+to put his faith in the truthfulness of the human kind. After he is lost
+completely he appeals perhaps to a native policeman, only to find that
+the officer knows even less French, and so, he discovers one by one, do
+the natives round about, even those in full European tropical dress. So
+that unless he happens to run across a French official or resident,
+which is unlikely in many parts of town or anywhere at certain hours, he
+is in for it. Perhaps, if he is lucky, he can make his more or less
+human horse understand that he wishes to be taken back to the place from
+which he started, or to a police station, where at least he can
+telephone for assistance, if central happens to have a smattering of
+French. Besides, it is no pleasure to drive these poor fellows far, with
+their thin chests heaving and their bare brown backs gleaming with
+sweat. Yet it is perspiring work to walk; the trams go only along a
+fixed route, and automobiles are expensive.
+
+The very next day I would find the same coolie, or one looking exactly
+like him, shrieking with the same effrontery, “Moï connaître!” if I
+asked him to take me to the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street;
+and at the end of the run, wherever that might be, he would stand
+holding out both hands cup-fashion in that engaging Annamese manner, as
+if he expected a fortune for the job. It is only a poor ruse to earn a
+few cents, for these _pousse-pousses_ are the most miserable and the
+least astute of the Annamese who serve the French and such few white
+foreigners as come to Indo-China. The “boys” who work for us are much
+brighter and know far smarter tricks. Certainly they are ingenious, if
+somewhat less so than their Chinese counterparts, capable of serving a
+ten-course dinner without cook-stove, dishes, or cutlery; but they are
+so artful, so cunning and sly for all their outward servility, that even
+he who tries to be continually on his guard is sure to be periodically
+duped.
+
+
+Though the streets in their own section of Hanoï bear the names of
+French heroes and politicians, the rulers from the West have not
+forgotten that it is after all a Tonkinese city. In the native town on
+the farther side of the lake—which is nothing like a native town in the
+Chinese sense of the word—the streets are also named in French, but not
+for the French. Instead, they have preserved as much of the old
+atmosphere as is compatible with sanitary requirements, including the
+ancient street names. The blue and white metal placards on each corner
+bear literal translations of the old Chinese-Tonkinese names for the
+trades once, and in many cases still, practised in them—for after the
+fashion of the East, those craftsmen or merchants carrying on the same
+work gathered in a single street or piece of street, instead of
+scattering to various parts of town.
+
+Thus the traveler can wander for interesting hours through the
+indigenous quarter intersected by the trolley, into the sweetish-scented
+Rue des Sucres, through the Rue des Cercueils, lined with heavy wooden
+coffins in the Chinese style—for the wealthy, massive sarcophagi richly
+carved, lacquered, gilded, or painted, each bearing the Chinese
+character for longevity; for the poor, thin bare boxes. The Rue des
+Médicaments is full of the ancient type of medicine-shops, its air
+pungent with the odors of dried barks, herbs, deer-horns, roots, plants,
+magic powders, tiger bones, talismans, all the somber and mysterious
+pharmacopœia of China, everything with which to combat the evil spirits,
+influences, fatal breaths of the Black Kingdom. In Furniture Street the
+tools of long ago are still in use; crude planes fly; saws sing; a
+chisel cuts its way through brass; a center-bit, still run by a string
+wound about it, creaks; files set the teeth on edge; chips and shavings
+dance madly about among unfinished pieces of furniture on the bare
+floors of open booths from which escapes a dry odor of varnish. Here and
+beyond are the shops of the inlaid mother-of-pearl things, from tables
+to jewel-boxes, for which the Annamese are famous—things to which
+steam-heat is so fatal, as the gatherer of souvenirs discovers soon
+after arriving home, though they stand the steaming heat of the tropics
+well enough. The people of Annam and Tonkin are good carvers and
+designers in the old models, but they are plainly not originators; there
+is more than a suggestion of the Chinese in all their work. Silk
+merchants carry on in the Rue de la Soie as they did centuries ago;
+Copper Street, a block long, is strident with workers in copper and
+brass; the Street of the Forgers—in the honorable sense of the
+word—teems with workers in heavy metals; there is the Street of Rice, of
+Veils, of Iron, of Flax, of the Cantonese, a street with shop after shop
+full of the gay paper things used in funerals, a street of workers in
+lacquer—for the Annamese lacquer other things besides their teeth—and so
+on, as long as the hardiest wanderer would care to stroll in such a
+climate.
+
+The trolley goes on, through the Rue du Grand Buddha, past the temple of
+a great statue that is small compared to similar figures in China,
+Mongolia, and Tibet, on along a shore of the big lake, as distinguished
+from the _petit lac_ in the heart of the city, to the Village du Papier,
+where native paper is made of bamboo shavings or of bark. The brown
+outside of the bamboo gives second-grade paper, the white inside
+first-quality, and most of it is turned into false money to be burned at
+funerals and graves. The raw product is cooked to a pulp and then
+pounded in a granite mortar with a stone pestle. Women, standing before
+the vats in which the pulp floats, swirl the water and lift out on
+bamboo slats the film that form on top, then lay each sheet on a soggy
+pile that would seem to defy taking apart after stacks of them have been
+pressed to squeeze out the water.
+
+On one side Hanoï is bounded by a wide boulevard on a high dike along
+the Red River, which comes down out of China and spreads its fertility
+in a long straight streak diagonally clear across Tonkin, a dike not
+high enough, however, for sometimes it lets the river into the city.
+Here one may muse upon the contrast between East and West while gazing
+at the telescopic perspective of the longest bridge in the Orient—as the
+French, if not the Tonkinese themselves, will proudly tell you—a bridge
+which in one sense is very ugly and in another almost beautiful. Eight
+hundred and ten meters from end to end, it carries across the Red River
+all the railway trains leaving the city except the daily one to and from
+Vinh to the southward; and just then it was being widened to carry
+automobiles also, so that no longer would motorists be forced to go down
+a steep and often slimy bank to a miserable _bac_.
+
+
+One train across the bridge follows the Red River northwestward to
+Laokay and goes on two days farther into China by a line marvelously
+engineered through magnificent mountains, to Yünnanfu, whence the French
+have now and then had hopes of pushing their trains clear to the upper
+Yang-tze. Across it, too, goes the branch-line to Langson and the “South
+Gate” of China, by which I left Tonkin on my way back down the West
+River of Kwangsi to Canton, up which the defeated Tai fled centuries ago
+before the conquering Chinese. We were soon in uncultivated jungle, as
+north of Saïgon, though the undergrowth was much thinner here, with
+brown fields and slopes of wild hay now and then, and stations that
+consisted of a sign-board and a woodpile. But every little while there
+were a few huts and some cultivation. Then came mountains covered with
+trees and underbrush, more and more abrupt rocky mountains, and the sun,
+so long imperious, suddenly disappeared for good and all the seventeen
+days back to Canton. Though the altitude was not great, within an hour
+it grew so cold, in contrast to the month behind me, that I changed to
+my heaviest clothing, thereby reducing my baggage by half. At the end of
+the train a special car carried a lone general, with whom, though I did
+not then suspect it, I was to lunch at the _Résidence_ at Langson. As I
+alone graced the first-class division of the three-part car, one might
+have thought that a simple way of cutting down expenses and paying
+French debts would have been to let the general share the compartment
+with me, particularly if we were to sit down to the same _déjeuner_. But
+the French cannot treat their great men in that simple fashion.
+
+[Illustration: The ladies of Annam lose any claim they have to beauty
+when they open their mouths on black-enameled teeth]
+
+[Illustration: Thi-ba, who did her best as guardian of our children, was
+equally set against bobbed hair and skirts]
+
+[Illustration: For days one may steam in and out among the fantastic
+rock islands of the Bay of Along]
+
+[Illustration: Tropical vegetation sometimes commandeers sustenance on
+the rock peaks]
+
+The world had become little more than low mountains punctuated with
+forts on rocky eminences when I reached the place from where the little
+Peugeot of the _résident_ was to carry me over the border into suddenly
+and totally un-Tonkinese scenes. The Foreign Legion serves in these
+picturesque strongholds along the Chinese frontier, a picturesque crew
+themselves, whom the French find it safer to confine to such isolated
+posts than to turn loose on Hanoï and other cities. Though no German
+travelers were allowed to land in the colony, there was a whole company
+of Germans among these guardians of the frontier, as well as many
+Russians and sprinklings of at least a dozen other nationalities,
+adventurers, down-and-outers, fugitives from justice—for there is no
+extradition from the Foreign Legion—above all men who do not care a
+tinker’s damn so long as life remains interesting and as free as
+possible from dangerless monotony.
+
+The usual route for those from the outside world who visit Hanoï is by
+rail or automobile from Haïphong, or rather, vice versa, also across the
+great bridge. There were always the same scenes on these journeys
+through Tonkin, but one never seemed to tire of them—broad endless
+stretches of rice-fields, women in long copper-colored coats and
+grindstone-shaped hats skimming along good roads under shoulder-pole
+loads, boys and sometimes girls loafing on the backs of water-buffaloes
+grazing among flocks of white ducks, others of these ponderous animals
+plowing belly-deep in slime, still others in their glory, with only eyes
+and nostrils protruding, beautiful gates into low temples, banyan-trees
+of four or five trunks, with little vases of lime and often a few tombs
+under them, villages of huts among the feathery bamboo groves, a tomb
+with a flat-topped tree over it, a boat with a sail moving through a
+rice-field, though no waterway is visible, two women watering a field by
+means of a basket between them in the middle of a long rope, graves of
+different shapes dotting the dead-level country near-by, cactus hedges,
+almost naked countrymen washing their legs beside the track, a girl
+toiling with a hoe almost as big as she, a man who owns no buffalo
+plowing in deep water with his cow, a little hut thatched with straw
+surrounded by a grove of very green trees, still larger groves in the
+distance with white buildings peeping out of them, a beautiful tree
+spread like an open umbrella, its branches almost touching the ground,
+roofs coyly curling up their corners, still another apparatus, like a
+huge corn-popper hung on three poles, for lifting water from one field
+to another, sometimes a big wooden spoon manipulated by one man, still
+more likely by one woman, two pagoda-shaped pillars at the entrance to a
+tomb, implying that the deceased was a scholar if not a gentleman, a
+coolie laboriously making his way through the rice-fields by a dike-top
+path not wide enough for the rickshaw he is dragging behind him, other
+such vehicles with two, even three people in them, scampering across the
+flat country behind small runners, dim mountains forever in the
+distance—and there ahead lies Haïphong, an important city and port now,
+the first houses of which sprang up about the barracks of the French
+cantonment in the days when France and China disagreed as to the
+“protection” of Tonkin.
+
+
+I had heard so much of the Bay of Along among the French colonials,
+confirmed by what I had seen of the terrestrial part of it from Tourane
+to Nanning, that I realized the foolishness of leaving Indo-China
+without spending a few days cruising about it. That would have been
+impossible, there being no regular service and I still unable, for all
+my more than a quarter century of toil, to buy a yacht or even charter a
+steamer, if the French authorities had not been so proud of their famous
+bay that they would not hear of my turning my back on the Far East until
+I had given them my unbiased opinion of it. So they lent us the _Tuyen
+Quang_, a comfortable floating chalet in the customs service, with a
+picturesque Corsican captain whose French outdid our own in foreign
+accent. I say “us,” for this time I took along not only the family I had
+brought from Canton but Thi-ba, lacquer-toothed Tonkinese nurse-maid of
+our children.
+
+We steamed away one sunny morning before the heat and humidity became
+unbearable, down the river by which steamers from China and the rest of
+the outside world come to Haïphong, and within two or three hours found
+ourselves in the midst of the justly famed, or rather, the most unjustly
+little known, fairy-land of Along. It was like roaming among
+mountain-tops at sea. The rock formations were unlimited, fantastic,
+incredible—round rocks springing sheer out of the bluest sea on earth,
+rocks like mushrooms, the waves having worn them away about the base
+until they seemed to stand on stems, rocks that looked as if they were
+floating, or were upheld by pedestals incredibly small for such massive
+things, rock islands of the most fantastic shapes to which islands can
+aspire, some with holes washed clear through them, some looking
+supernatural where gashes of white rock met the black shadows thrown by
+them, cliffs, precipices, palisades, with vertical, horizontal,
+diagonal, zigzag strata—the sheerness was so remarkable that we could
+scrape the sides of them with our large steamer and be in so little
+danger of striking the bottom that the sailors were not even told to
+heave the sounding-lead.
+
+How many thousands of these rocky islands there are floating on the blue
+waters of the Bay of Along only the architect of the universe knows; the
+human mind could not count them. Yet never were there two of the same
+shape. With every hundred yards forward we found ourselves looking
+through another narrow vista upon row after row of pointed rocks, always
+varying in size and form, in distance and color, new ones with every new
+opening, though one would have thought Nature had already rung all the
+changes possible, used all the models and molds in her factory. Each was
+of some unique configuration we had never seen before, as if they were
+all parties to a masked ball every member of which had succeeded in
+getting himself up in some novel way to surprise and delight the
+beholder. Morning, noonday, or evening, when the sun rose or when it
+set, great vistas of them stretched as far as the most piercing eye
+could see in any direction we chose to look. Calcareous rocks washed
+down during the centuries to the hard basis of which they were made,
+broken by weather, water, and time, with windows, arches, doorways, now
+a tree standing forth in silhouette in one of these, here an island
+depicting a whole cock, from comb to tail, another looking like a group
+of black monkeys made of stone, some veritable mountains of stone slabs
+laid together like huge bricks, some with tiny crescent beaches, whole
+horizons of fantastic peaks, monuments of every possible form—and
+beyond, more vistas of heaped-up rock through every narrow opening.
+Magnificent as they were, they seemed at times rather pathetic too,
+standing, floating, here for so many centuries in their unrivaled
+beauty, yet unknown to almost all the world that prizes so highly many a
+vastly inferior scene, unknown even to most of that European nation to
+whom they “belong.” An endless wilderness of rocks so poignantly
+beautiful in their stillness, their solemn isolation, their majesty....
+The far famed Inland Sea of Japan hardly seems worthy of a place on the
+same hemisphere.
+
+Many of those steeple-pointed islands are as bare as the sea itself, but
+vegetation covers them wherever it can grow, so that some are green as a
+spring meadow. On the larger and less impressive ones there was
+sometimes a complete cover of bush, with plenty of small game, the
+captain said, where they are not too sheer. But ordinary trees cannot
+get foothold on most of those gigantic needles; only some contorted
+cypresses, intertwisted lianas, represent the forest, wild pineapple
+here and there humping its wicked backs. On one of them is a little
+cemetery of Frenchmen who died of fever or dysentery far from their
+native land.
+
+There are grottoes and tunnels in many of these floating mountain-tops.
+We took a life-boat one afternoon nearly two miles through one of them.
+It was dark as a Paris sewer, the bottom, clearly seen beneath a
+flickering torch, covered with millions of oysters half an inch thick
+that recalled the sand-dollars on the coast of Maine. The grottoes, too,
+were reached by small boat, then by climbing steep stairways of stones
+roughly piled up or carved in the rock. The greatest of these led first
+into a sort of reception-hall, beyond which opened a narrow tortuous
+corridor, its walls perpetually sweating. Though two solemn Annamese
+sailors with sizzling torches of waste or rags in an iron cage at the
+end of a pole, on which they occasionally poured thick oil, preceded us,
+we advanced by feeling with our fingers, the smoke pricking our eyes and
+suffocating us, our elbows tight against our sides. Then suddenly at a
+turn came the sight that gives this cave its name of Grotte de la
+Surprise. A vast amphitheater of tumbled rocks, into which streaks of
+daylight fell as sheer as at the bottom of a crater, yawned at our feet.
+The light of the torches wavered capriciously on rock walls striped with
+green, with purple, with violet, a setting and lighting as fantastic as
+that of any Broadway musical review. Stalactites flowed down from the
+great vaulted roof like a cataract of stone, nay, of pure marble,
+stalagmites large as century-old tree-trunks climbing to meet them, some
+already forming great pillars that gave the place the aspect of a mighty
+cathedral. Misty shafts of light played on pulpits carved by nature, on
+pillars almost as symmetrical as man could have fashioned, on great
+shimmering heaps of stone with the same semi-glossy sheen one sees on
+pure-camphor piles in Formosa. Certain columns seemed to be formed of
+millions of shells piled up as if by some prehuman, pigmy bricklayers;
+others were like the trunks of massive trees, their stone roots twisting
+themselves into the stone soil like those searching for nourishment
+among the ruins of Angkor. Here hung a colossal stone beard, there a
+marble veil with a gleaming white fringe; in places the cold water
+dripping forever down through the centuries had made stone things that
+looked like mammoth frogs, a monkey, a turtle with a scaly back; in
+certain vistas the grotto suggested the interior of a vast tobacco-barn
+in the drying-season. Maidenhair ferns had crept in as far as they
+dared; now and then, doubled, quadrupled, by the echo, sounded the
+piercing cry of a bird of which we saw nothing, except the gigantic
+shadow of its wings.
+
+This endless forest of floating stone islands is a fisherman’s paradise.
+Each evening and sometimes oftener my wife and I dived into the
+incredibly blue sea—though the Corsican captain, to say nothing of the
+Annamese crew, evidently thought us mad—and saw between us and the
+bottom, hundreds of feet down yet seeming so near that we felt in danger
+of striking our heads, fish of every kind and color, pinkish fish of the
+tint of the albino water-buffalo, red, purple, green, white fish.
+Natives in henna brown peered forth from some of the smaller grottoes;
+more of them were at home in their fishing-boats, square golden-brown
+sails of which often broke the deep blue surface. Whole clans of
+fisher-folk spawn, live, and die among these calcareous rocks, satisfied
+to leave this, their native land, only now and then to sell their fish
+and buy the few things they need that cannot be found here among these
+clustered sea-bound spires. Our steamer now and then called in, by three
+short blasts of the whistle, all the sampans and sailing-craft within
+hearing, and examined their papers. Finding these in order, and neither
+opium nor girls in their holds, we bought fish and sea-monsters of them
+for the next Parisian dinner and parted, outwardly at least, friends. It
+seems that with its thousands of hiding-places for malefactors, the Bay
+of Along has been notorious for two crimes: the smuggling in of Chinese
+opium, and the smuggling out of Annamese girls. Old women still lure
+girls away and deliver them somewhere in the bay to Chinese junks, which
+sell them in the open market farther east. Enticed, drugged, kidnapped,
+hidden among the islands and in the grottoes, these girls have supplied
+a trade between wicked Annamese and Chinese men of the pirate family
+that has flourished for centuries, and even the French have not yet been
+able to do away with it entirely. When pursuit grows too warm the
+miscreants slit open the bellies of the girls so that they will sink
+quickly, and by the time the pursuers overhaul them all traces of blood
+may have disappeared in the blue waters.
+
+Three heavenly days we cruised about the Bay of Along in our private
+yacht, and we might have gone on for thirty and found something new
+every hour among the floating rocks of every shape stretching clear to
+the Kwangtung coast of China. The French authorities, and certainly the
+Corsican captain, did not seem to care how long we stayed. But all
+things must have an end. We turned back much against our will, and by
+noonday there was steaming hot Haïphong in the offing again.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XII
+                        THE FRENCH IN INDO-CHINA
+
+
+Much as we all hate to be fed plain knowledge, preferring our learning
+disguised with the sauce of entertainment, like castor-oil in
+orange-juice, I fear we must taste a few of the bitter spots in the
+history of Indo-China before we can properly savor the present position
+of France in her greatest Far Eastern possession.
+
+All the land from Tonkin to Cochinchina was conquered and colonized by
+the Chinese more than two centuries before the beginning of the
+so-called Christian era. From that time China ruled the region off and
+on; it was in fact five times a Chinese colony. Once, shortly before
+Christ, a woman of Annam governed for three years, but after another
+brief hiatus or two China held unbroken sway from the third to the tenth
+century, until the revolution of 968 A.D. During that millennium Annam
+took on a complete Chinese culture, and has kept most of it down to this
+day. Then there were various native dynasties until 1407, when, under
+the Ming, China again ruled until 1428. Even after that, though there
+was no interference from Peking, and the Manchus held Tonkin only in
+name, the people of the Eminent South, like Siam, Burma, and other
+former dependencies, paid a modest tribute to the northern emperor, as
+the easiest way out of risking more fighting. Koang-de, the Annamese Son
+of Heaven, was still considered a vassal of the emperor of China—the
+occupants of the throne at Hué are in fact still proud to claim descent
+from the Chinese imperial family of before the days of the pigtailed
+Manchus. Toward the end of Chinese domination the Annamese could
+function even in China proper as mandarins, generals, and still higher
+officials, so that the line between the two peoples was almost
+obliterated.
+
+In the mess that followed the Manchu conquest of China, a Tonkinese
+fisherman founded a new dynasty, which ruled at Hanoï until the end of
+the eighteenth century. Then, the country having naturally broken in two
+in the middle, a rebellion overthrew the ruling Nguyen family of the
+south and the Tai might have taken the country in hand, had there not
+arisen that epic hero among the Annamese, Nguyen-anh, who in 1802 took
+the name of Gia-long. This founder of the present dynasty united under
+one rule what are to-day three of the five divisions of
+Indo-China—Annam, Tonkin, and Cochinchina—establishing his capital at
+Hué, being the first to group under the jade scepter everything from the
+frontiers of China to the banks of the Mekong.
+
+But his victory was not so complete or so simply won as this may sound,
+and strictly speaking he did not rule as master, for he had to pay for
+calling in outside help. As usual it was a squabble between native
+factions that gave the less naïve Europeans their chance. Though they
+had already begun to visit these shores in the way of commerce during
+the sixteenth century, the French first had official contact with Annam
+in 1787, when the future Gia-long was fighting to recover the position
+of his family. Finding himself, in his war with the Tai and three
+brother usurpers, in imminent danger of being driven out of his native
+land, he ill-advisedly followed the suggestion of the French bishop of
+Adran and sent an embassy to France asking for protection. He got it,
+with a vengeance. Also the wise bishop, who thought this a fine chance
+to counterbalance the growing political power of England in India, got a
+splendid tomb and a lot of Indo-Chinese streets named after him. Fearing
+perhaps that the embassy would not put things strongly enough, the
+bishop went to France in person and got promise of help from Louis XVI,
+or whoever ruled in his name. Before the assistance was delivered,
+however, Gia-long-to-be had to make a treaty with Louis promising to
+cede to France the islands of Touron and Poulo Condore off the coast of
+Cochinchina and give the French a concession at Tourane. Then the French
+sent troops from Pondicherry and helped Nguyen-anh to overthrow his
+enemies and to acquire by 1801 sway over all the present Indo-China
+except Cambodia and the Laos, in short to become Gia-long the Great.
+
+Though Gia-long died in 1820 without perhaps suspecting the truth, this
+opening wedge eventually led to the establishment of French authority
+over all Indo-China. But the successors of Gia-long showed themselves
+“very ungrateful” to the French. His immediate successor, his natural
+son Minh-mang, broke off with Europe in order to get the support of
+China, and after considerable rough work, including the massacring of
+many native Christians, died by falling off a horse, a failing he seemed
+to have in common with some modern princes, leaving behind him
+seventy-one children, of whom forty-nine were sons—not a bad record for
+a man who died young. The choice among these must have been difficult,
+and it does not seem to have been particularly successful, for the son
+who followed him under the name of Thieu-tri left no great fame behind
+him. But then came Tu-duc, who massacred many more native Christians and
+their European missionaries. Though they probably wanted to be martyrs
+anyway, the killing of the ecclesiastics was made the pretext for the
+declaring of war. A Franco-Spanish squadron took Touron and finally
+Saïgon; Tourane was seized by the French; Tu-duc, besieged in his own
+capital at Hué, gave up all Saïgon Province; and by 1867 all lower
+Cochinchina had passed into the possession of France and became the
+French colony it has remained ever since.
+
+Cambodia was already considered a protectorate of France; for Norodom,
+father of the present octogenarian king, Sisowath, had for better or for
+worse placed his country under the protection of the French in 1863. The
+French gradually crowded upon the Chinese in upper Tonkin, to make up
+for the British advance in Burma, and there was long and sometimes
+severe fighting, with “some splendid feats at arms,” according to French
+historians. There was an opposition or anti-imperialistic party in
+France, but as usual this minor opinion was crowded into the background.
+This time the French intrenched themselves in the citadel of Hué and put
+on the throne a new emperor, the old one fleeing among the Moï after
+massacring several thousand more native Christians. The war for the
+possession of Tonkin lasted a long time. In 1873 Dupuis and a hundred
+French soldiers captured Hanoï, though it was the Portuguese and Dutch
+who had long had “factories” in the rich delta of the Red River; and
+China, which had given her Tonkinese vassals no more assistance than she
+did the Burmese against the British, was at length forced to acknowledge
+all Tonkin to be under the “protection” of France. Thus by 1885 the
+whole of present-day Indo-China, from end to end and from Siam to the
+China Sea, a country about the size of Texas, therefore larger than
+France, was consolidated under French rule; except that the Angkor
+region was added later. Plainly speaking, though the French talk of
+“treaties” as if an equal sovereign people had requested them to take
+over the task of governing, not only Cochinchina but all Indo-China was
+stolen bit by bit as a result of the simplicity of Gia-long and the
+killing of those French missionaries in 1858. Bright little pupils will
+recall that the French had similar schemes afoot in Mexico at the very
+time they were fighting for Saïgon, and in Asia one realizes that the
+Monroe Doctrine has certainly changed the face of America from what it
+might have been.
+
+
+The French conquest of Indo-China, some of it by trickery and some of
+it, notably the Tonkin, by real warfare, is merely a part of Western
+covetousness in the Orient, not the individual sin of an individual
+nation. We can condemn that Western aggression without losing the right
+to give full praise to the French soldiers who did the dirty work, just
+as we can condemn modern industrial exploitation without charging
+present conditions in Indo-China particularly to France. Once we grant
+the righteousness of “imperialism,” of the conquering “for their own
+good” of colored races by the white, once we accept that trite tricky
+phrase of imperialists, “the white man’s burden,” any possible charge
+against the French is quashed. It is the old question: Is it good or is
+it bad for white nations to take over weaker peoples who cannot govern
+themselves well in our sense of the word—and who are so well worth
+exploiting? Is it better to be chaotic, “backward,” but independent, or
+modern and exploited? Is it better for a country even as civilized as
+France to take hold of these poorly governed races, these inefficient
+countries, and make them settle down to business and behave themselves,
+even if the “protector” does pay himself well for the trouble? Great
+minds set in cement will tell you, but I cannot; I find my judgment
+depending on the color of the day, the way I have slept, my breakfast,
+the mail I have received; it is a perpetual struggle between my
+reflected and my indignant self. And of course each individual will
+condemn or praise this modern way of acquiring colonies that are not
+called colonies, of subjecting people who are not admittedly subjected,
+according to his background, his environment, his wealth, and the job he
+holds, perhaps also to the breakfast he has eaten.
+
+At any rate exploitation is visibly the _raison d’être_ of the French in
+Indo-China, though the Indo-Chinese are no more exploited than are the
+great mass of our own people at home by those few who have the
+strangle-hold in industrial matters, and by no means so much as are the
+people of “independent” China by their own legal and bandit rulers. One
+of the trump-cards in this modern game of colonial exploitation is a
+tariff. There are swarms of customs officials whose duty it is to see
+that nothing gets into or out of Indo-China—or even through it, for that
+matter—without paying heavy charges, swarms of Frenchmen with native
+assistants who examine every spool of thread that comes in from anywhere
+except France, so that it takes all day to get a few dollars’ worth of
+“foreign” goods through the customs. Things from France pay no duties,
+submit to no formalities, any more than the French need passports or
+lose time in landing. But all others, whether persons or things, are put
+to trouble and expense. A box of cigars selling for three dollars in
+China costs seven dollars in Indo-China, though its Philippine place of
+origin is as near one country as the other. Every kind of French drink
+is available, but no others; even British whisky can be had only if it
+is smuggled in. Every box unloaded from the average ship comes from
+France; everything not of local origin in the average shop is French,
+even those things which France produces much more poorly and much more
+expensively than other lands. A Ford coming direct to Indo-China pays 45
+per cent duty—125 per cent if it comes indirectly—and sells for about
+eighteen hundred piastres, or more than nine hundred dollars gold. The
+little cars for which the French are noted cost from thirteen to fifteen
+thousand francs, so that it depends on the exchange of the day which car
+you can afford. There are not only import but export duties on
+everything, even paddy, or unhulled rice, nay, a duty even on the
+gunny-sacks it goes out in. More than that; everything merely passing
+through Indo-China, as the shortest or most convenient route between two
+parts of China, is opened, carefully examined, and assessed, though in
+this case the charges are called “transit dues.” Indeed, the more
+toothsome things from foreign lands are not infrequently consumed by the
+examiners and the empty cans sent on to the consignees.
+
+Does all this money, paid in the end by the inhabitants thereof, go to
+the “protected” country? You have three guesses, if so many are needed.
+_La Métropole_, that is, France, gets real returns from its Far-Eastern
+possession; it is no altruistic “white man’s burden” the French are
+carrying there. Every year Indo-China sends France a check for about
+twenty million piastres. That nice little filial Christmas present of
+ten million dollars comes mainly from the _douane_ and _régie_, that is,
+the customs and the tobacco, opium, and other government monopolies.
+Besides this the “protected” people pay the cost of military occupation,
+not to mention many millions more in official salaries and the like.
+
+But what France officially gets out of Indo-China is a mere drop in the
+bucket compared to what Frenchmen get by individual exploitation of a
+land where they have special privilege. French commerce has a virtual
+monopoly in almost anything except rice and betel-nut. There is plenty
+of iron, innumerable other natural resources, but the French encourage
+no modern industries in the colony, because they prefer to import from
+France the products of their own factories, so that after all it is the
+French capitalists and workmen at home who are “protected.” Take sugar,
+for instance; they export the crude at low and import the refined at
+high prices rather than help the natives to have their own refineries.
+Perhaps the best example of modern industrial exploitation of a
+“protected” people is the coal-mines in the northeastern corner of the
+Tonkin, which we visited on the second of those never-to-be-forgotten
+days in the Bay of Along.
+
+The mines of Campha or Hongay, on the northern shore of that great
+wilderness of floating rocks, are open cuts, like those of the Japanese
+at Fushun near Mukden, or the iron-mines of Daiquirí in the mountains of
+eastern Cuba. There is no flaunting of the dreaded earth-dragon by
+digging down into the earth. Black terraces, mammoth stairways, are
+piled up the reddish hillsides, great amphitheaters cut in the hills,
+their walls so smooth and so sheer that one might think the coal was cut
+in huge slices, as from a gigantic cake. This precious region was
+discovered by a French forest-ranger wandering the woods along this
+coast no longer ago than 1905 and 1907. To-day the cuts are so large
+that the natives pickaxing on the slopes look like ants on gigantic
+black stadiums scaling the heavens. The roads through them lead from one
+grade to another, on and on, cutting through the villages, following the
+edge of the bay that is sprinkled much farther than the eye can see with
+those fantastic protruding rocky mountain peaks.
+
+When we visited Campha, the black quarries swarmed with workmen, clothed
+in once reddish-brown cloth, now so dirty that they blended into the
+background against which they toiled. According to the mine officials
+and foremen these Annamese coolies are very lazy miners; certainly they
+seemed unwilling, after the manner of slaves, as if they were asking
+themselves who is benefiting by all this hard labor to get out of the
+hillsides the black stuff that is of no use to them. In fact the
+atmosphere of Annam in general is unwillingness, when working for
+Europeans, in antithesis to that of China. These beings dressed in sooty
+rags, these men wielding pickaxes with thin arms, have little to gain by
+their grueling labor under an imperious sun. There were women on the
+slopes also, their mouths bleeding with the sustaining and comforting
+betel-juice, and behind the coal-wagons _nhos_ ten years old, their worn
+faces under the coal-dust seeming forty, bent double their gaunt little
+bodies, half covered with black rags and tatters, their bare feet
+covered with a hard sole of the dust in which they forever trot for ten
+or fifteen cents a day.
+
+We were carried in chairs and on horses up the slopes from where the
+cars of coal are loaded into barges with little houses at the stem, a
+kind of Paris green scattered over the top of the coal to keep the
+workmen from stealing a little of it to sell. We went so high that we
+could look down not only upon all the town below, but across a great
+stretch of the blue rock-strewn sea. There was not a temple or pagoda in
+the native town, not a flower, not a single bamboo hedge before the
+native houses, no more slim straight arec-trees topped by a parasol of
+leaves, no smoking incense, but belching chimneys, and pickaxes. Instead
+of the pastoral quiet of other Tonkinese villages there was a great
+roaring as of a waterfall, as of some great battle—the noise of the
+sifters. In contrast to this super-civilization there are wild animals
+in the surrounding bush; tigers come now and then to eat a coolie, when
+old age makes them more cunning than swift and strong, for they do not
+need much strength to carry off a mere human being.
+
+But soon the 10.30 whistle blew, halting the work until two in the
+afternoon, and we came down for the _apéritif_ in one of the houses
+where the French live in the comfort they will not be denied even in the
+wilderness—and where even the women could not understand why my wife and
+mother, why our not yet four-year-old son for that matter, would not
+join them in a cocktail.
+
+The hardest job at the mines is to get workmen, to bribe coolies to work
+here in the bush, and to keep them from running away again. Everything
+has been tried, and nothing works. As soon as the Tonkinese has a few
+piastres in his substitute for a purse he leaves the mines and returns
+to his rice-fields—and who can blame him? At the time of _Têt_, which
+also is nearing the time of harvest, all wish to escape to their
+ancestral villages again, and then especially they run away by the
+thousands. Every ruse and stratagem is tried, for the massed overseers
+and guards do not suffice. For instance, wages are paid only for the
+last fortnight of the preceding month, so that the workmen must either
+remain or lose many days of toil by running away. In order that they
+shall not starve, however, and out of pure philanthropy as it were, the
+company gives those who have worked well a piastre every ten days, which
+they call “making an advance.” Another scheme to hold them is to build a
+big covered market, a movie booth. Not long ago one bright administrator
+discovered a still better plan. Missionaries installed at the mines
+would keep there at least the Catholics, he thought. So an Annamese
+father of the Spanish missions was imported and a little church
+constructed for him, and the new parish already has some seven hundred
+coolies whom the confessional and a fear of future damnation keep from
+running away.
+
+Sometimes, on the other hand, when floods carry away the dikes of the
+Red River, devastating the rice-fields so that famine settles down upon
+the delta, the _nha-qués_ flock to the coal-fields by whole villages, to
+find the rice they cannot get at home, and then there are as many as
+twenty thousand coolies dotting the great black stadiums, and a good
+year for the mine syndicate. As each new mine opens, at every new
+terrace begun, a Chinese man comes to set up his four planks and lay out
+his bowls of rice and provisions, often before a single shovel-stroke
+has been struck, as if he smelled profits from afar as the vulture
+smells carrion. He will be rich, this fat, physically flabby fellow with
+his freshly shaven head and his smooth, imperturbably smiling face, from
+the profits garnered from their wages, while the new coolies are still
+only poor ragged and dirty miners, longing to run away.
+
+The coolies of Campha and Hongay are of no importance to the court at
+Hué, and not only is there no mandarin to rule over them, but not even a
+French functionary, except a gendarme who pompously decorates himself
+with the title of commissary. The real master is the mine; the mere
+people are nothing; as in all this modern world of industry property is
+everything, human life a mere pawn. The syndicate owns everything for
+many miles round about: the fields, the woods, the houses, the roads,
+the railways that carry the coal down to their jetties, the barges, the
+whole port, even the church with the sharp steeple, everything from the
+bowels of the earth to the slightest sprig of grass that may force its
+way through the coal-dust. If a village stands in the way of a new mine,
+so much the worse for it; down it comes; and when the syndicate
+constructs a new one farther on each native is made to pay part of the
+cost of his new house, so that he will be bound to the soil like a serf.
+The company is self-sufficient too; it produces everything it needs,
+from its tools to the rice for its coolies; and it is rich enough to be
+beyond the dreams of avarice, were there any such locality. The
+sixty-four thousand shares of stock offered at sixteen million francs a
+few years ago are to-day worth more than half a billion. The net profits
+the year before my visit were more than the total capitalization, not
+counting a twenty-million-piastre reserve.
+
+One might conclude that at least this kingdom of coal brings its tribute
+to Indo-China, to debt-ridden France. Not at all; it does not even
+furnish the colony the coal it needs. Almost all of it goes to Japan,
+which pays well. Saïgon and Hanoï demand coal in vain; such factories as
+there are have to send their orders to Cardiff, and the railroads fire
+with wood, devastating the forests. After the fashion of modern
+industrialism, that present-day descendant of feudal tyranny, unknown
+stockholders suck the marrow from the country, dividing the profits
+among themselves, and leave nothing either for the colony or for France.
+As in France, the rich run away with the money that should be paid in
+taxes and leave “nothing but the hatred of thousands of coolies.”
+
+As in these coal-fields, so it is with most rich enterprises in
+Indo-China; many a scandalous fortune has been created there since 1914,
+yet the public treasury takes no account of them. Not only is there no
+tax on war profits but not even an income tax. For the laws of France do
+not apply, and the law of the colony is to exploit it and the people
+thereof, not the Frenchmen who make their fortunes there. Nowhere in the
+world perhaps are war-profiteers more favored than in this rich French
+protectorate, for they can keep everything for themselves, down to the
+last piastre. “They are as miserly with their gold as they were with
+their blood when the war was on,” a French traveler bitterly puts it,
+adding that all those enthusiastic young men who conquered Tonkin gained
+for their country were the swollen profits accruing to the holders of
+stock in such things as the mines of Hongay. It is a misfortune that the
+people liberated by France from the tyranny of their mandarins, he goes
+on, fall now into the power of these new tyrants; bad, because little
+grains of misery make a mighty ocean of revolt, and just over the
+frontier of China there are something like half a billion yellow men who
+are gradually waking up. “For the true mandarins of to-day are no longer
+those lordlings in yellow robes and silk tunics, so proud of their long
+overdue finger-nails, whom we saw bumping their heads on the palace
+pavements at Hué, but negotiators and financiers, adventurers who now
+carry no rifles on their shoulders but operate far from the jungle, by
+thrusts of the stock exchange.”
+
+
+As we have already descended to statistics, let me go on to say that
+Indo-China is now credited with about 20,000,000 inhabitants, of whom
+two thirds are Annamese, 1,300,000 Cambodians, more than 1,000,000
+Laosians, and half a million aborigines of various races. To be still
+more statistical, the latest census, now some years old, gave the total
+population as 18,983,203, of whom 16,256 were French and 1191
+“foreigners.” Most of the French and nearly all the “foreigners”—that
+is, non-French Caucasians—are in Cochinchina and Tonkin, more
+specifically in Saïgon and Hanoï. To-day there are some 30,000 Chinese
+and other alien Asiatics not included in the round figures above; and
+for the 18,000 Europeans, more than 90 per cent of them French, there
+are fully 40,000 Eurasians!
+
+Many French colonials think it would be better to abolish the pretense
+of “protectorates” and really rule the whole country in name as well as
+in fact, make it all a colony, like Cochinchina, in order to do away
+with the sleek practices of the native mandarins and other
+functionaries, particularly in Annam. Either, they say, let us have a
+direct and undisguised French administration or return to a real
+protectorate, with kings and emperors who would not feel themselves
+annihilated, who would have the impression of being guided, counseled,
+even directed, but never dominated. On the other hand the French way of
+ruling through native chiefs pushed along by Europeans is a good system,
+and it is hard to see how native go-betweens of some sort could be done
+away with entirely.
+
+For the French officials, particularly those higher up, being French as
+well as officials, rarely know any other language than their own; and
+therein lies perhaps their gravest fault. For they and those they rule
+over are at the mercy of any scamp who poses as an interpreter. Some
+French functionaries get official credit for knowing one of the native
+languages, but they seldom speak enough of it to get along in court, for
+example, without calling in the _interprète_. Just as there is a
+pidgin-English along the China coast, there is in Indo-China a
+pidgin-French, using only the infinitive of verbs and always the _toi_
+form, so that “Toi connaître?” takes the place of “Savez-vous?” and so
+on, irrespective of tense or gender. It is an amusing tongue, which
+“boys” probably find as queer and as hard to learn as we do their
+quarrelsome Annamese. As in the case of foreigners who become so fluent
+in the bastard English of Chinese treaty-ports, it would require little
+more effort to acquire a speaking knowledge of the native tongue.
+
+Individually the French officials of Indo-China are agreeable gentlemen,
+at least on a par with their counterparts in other white man’s colonies.
+But the government atmosphere is much like that of old Spain: no one
+seems to come out for his health or primarily for the benefit of the
+natives. While there is not the “squeeze” of China or the graft of
+Tammany, still there are ways of turning a politician’s honest penny. It
+is less dishonesty, however, that constitutes the official flaw than
+lack of ardent personal interest in the task in hand. “The soul of the
+missionary and the educator is what the ‘protectors’ of such a people
+should bring to their task,” a French _publiciste_ asserts. “But few
+officials will accept the sacrifice of wasting any more time and energy
+than necessary in a place reputed inadequate to their merits. The only
+thought of the average French colonial official seems to be to ‘make a
+hit’ with his superiors, for his own benefit and advancement, and get
+back to the fleshpots of Paris as soon as possible. He has no ardor, no
+initiative; the ethnic and social milieu being closed to him, his
+business becomes mere routine; he does everything with only one thought
+in mind—his career.”
+
+The French have of course done much good for Indo-China. They have
+improved the cities, planted parks, opened ports, built roads such as
+the Far East had never seen before; and some one would certainly exploit
+the people if the French did not; their position is decidedly preferable
+to the anarchy over the Chinese border. But the guardians pay themselves
+well for their services. The government departments are greatly
+over-staffed; even the hurried traveler gets the impression that the
+colony is a refuge for deserving wards of the government who cannot be
+accommodated at home. The Council meets once a year in Hanoï and once in
+Saïgon, which among other things gives a change of scene, a “winter” and
+a “summer” capital, with lots of travel pay for mileage between them.
+The higher officials in particular are shifted often from one division
+of the country to another, whereas there should be two quite distinct
+sets of rulers, dividing the colony on ethnographic lines; for Cambodia
+is as different from Tonkin as Morocco is from Réunion.
+
+The majority of the French officials in Indo-China are from the Midi,
+like most of her colonials. The speech of many of them sounds almost
+Italian, to say nothing of that of the Corsican river-captains and the
+like, who speak with a genuine foreign accent. This is natural, the Midi
+being nearer the sea and having few industries to absorb its ambitious
+sons. Yet they do not love the tropics. Most of them are frankly bored
+with life in this distant possession and, outside their routine tasks,
+are interested mainly in café pleasures and the joys of feminine
+society. There are some exceptions, of course, some who do their
+gymnastics every morning and some who become mighty hunters before the
+Moï. Now and then a scholarly fellow takes advantage of his ethnographic
+opportunities. But on the whole there is little unnecessary mingling
+with the natives, little outdoor life, except under café awnings, few
+excursions, fewer _piqueniques_ than one would expect in a land of good
+roads to delightful places and automobiles in which to reach them. Lest
+I be accused of pessimism, let us listen to a critic of their own
+nationality:
+
+  The Frenchman imports into the Orient the immortal principles of
+  absinthe and café gatherings, as the German does his beer and the
+  Englishman his sports. Individualists, rarely knowing any modern
+  language except our own, we have therefore a national selfsufficiency
+  and a suggestion of provincialism, which betray themselves the moment
+  we escape from the superficial cosmopolitanism of Paris—of a part of
+  Paris and a certain stratum of Paris at that. Café habits and the
+  customs of the politician, narrow-mindedness and prejudice,
+  disparagement, the faults of individualism, give our colonial
+  officials an incapacity for agreement and of organized collaboration,
+  a tendency to ignore realities, and to pay themselves with words. All
+  the colonial official’s thoughts seem to be turned toward his past,
+  toward the _Métropole_; the society he has left behind still obsesses
+  him. He learns nothing, and he can teach nothing. The discouraging
+  reality that surrounds him quenches his eagerness to know. How often
+  that has been impressed upon me when I wished to document myself on
+  Indo-Chinese conditions! To most Frenchmen the delightful landscapes
+  of Annam, the artistic tombs of Hué, the noble adaptation of a temple
+  to its site, all that remains dead-letter. Most of them are as
+  disdainful of the ancient people they have come to rule over as was
+  the famous governor, Maurice Long, who did not know a word of the
+  language, of the history of the country he ruled, and forged for
+  himself the most erroneous, even the most pernicious impressions of
+  its future destiny.
+
+An old British captain, sailing the Far East for the past forty years,
+and familiar with most British colonies, insisted that, unlike his own
+people, the French do not coddle the natives of their possessions.
+England, he asserted, caters to the natives, gives them education and
+too much self-rule, and is all the more despised for it. Asiatics do not
+understand kindness and sympathy; therefore the French are respected.
+You must not mix sentiment with the ruling of inferior races, or for
+that matter of any other subject races, he went on; “for instance, you
+do not seem to be having an entirely happy time in the Philippines.” The
+French themselves assert that there is more liberty under their form of
+colonial rule than under that of the British. I rather doubt it. Though
+the outward French attitude of equality irrespective of race or color
+may sometimes give that impression, in the end liberty in French and
+British colonies probably sums up to about the same total.
+
+It is true that the color-line is less tangible in Indo-China than in
+American or British colonies. French boys are deferential and even
+obedient to half-breeds, even to well dressed natives, such as an
+American or English boy brought up in a colony would scorn to glance at.
+Native and Eurasian boys of Indo-China act toward white boys as if they
+quite expected to be accepted as their equals, though that attitude does
+not exactly hold among adults. This freedom of intercourse has its good
+points—and certainly its bad. Yet the Frenchman is at heart no democrat;
+the line of cleavage is social rather than racial. There is every
+stratum of French society in Hanoï, from the haughty governor-general to
+the conscripts from manure-heap villages in rural France, and the common
+soldier is closer to the native rank and file than he is to the high
+officials of his own race, the governor-general socially more allied to
+high-class natives than to his own clerks and troopers. Yet on the whole
+it is better to be white. At the _guignol_ near the tiger-cage in the
+big park about the palaces of the governor-general the Annamese
+policeman raps on the head native children who do not behave, but is
+very deferential to the white children who sit elbow to elbow with them.
+On the other hand the sweat-dripping French soldiers who come out of
+their cloth-inclosed cages between the acts of these popular outdoor
+Punch-and-Judy shows and smoke a cigarette before going back to their
+stifling duties as showmen again are regarded by the upper-class
+Annamese more as servants than as lords. There are not only French
+children with their amas in the front seats, and half-breed ones already
+posing as French, as they will through life, but purely native children
+as well; and not far away the adults sit or saunter and listen to the
+good band concert, or cluster before the monkey-house and other cages,
+without any outward evidence of that racial dissonance emphasized in our
+own or British colonies. The best hotels in the colony make no
+distinction between French and Annamese, or any combination of the two
+races; the Annamese wife of a Frenchman “will be admitted to any circle
+in France to which the social position of her husband corresponds.” Yet
+Indo-China is almost the only place left where one still sees white men,
+and women, slap and otherwise manhandle their servants, and some
+Frenchmen speak to native railway men and the like in a way that in any
+other country would bring them the quite proper request to betake
+themselves forthwith to where it is reputed to be warmer than in the
+earthly tropics.
+
+
+A French novelist whose background is Indo-China rates its “scourges”
+(_fléaux_) as—in the order of their appearance to the newly arrived
+colonial perhaps—sun, “boy,” _congaïe_, alcohol, gambling, opium, and
+madness. Most of these are self-explanatory. The “boy” alone is
+sometimes enough to drive the exile to drink, if not to madness, and it
+is not infrequently he who more or less surreptitiously brings in the
+_congaïe_, perhaps his own sister, sometimes even his own wife. The
+_congaïe_—normally a perfectly respectable Annamese word for girl—is in
+colonial vernacular what in France is known as _petite femme_, and by
+many other names, some of them far less complimentary, in every land. As
+our own pretty but stupid girls go into the movies or the “Follies,”
+those of Annam become the temporary wives of the French. There is a lot
+of romance about the _congaïe_, from those of the “Madame Butterfly”
+temperament, until one finds that she is sometimes hired by the week,
+like a _bonne à tout faire_, and is often passed on to a successor with
+the furniture. Nor is she the Oriental doll she is painted by romantic
+Latin novelists, though during her first few terms of service she may
+have youthful charm and perhaps be pretty. Many Annamese mothers do not
+blacken the teeth of their daughters because they wish them to live with
+Frenchmen, especially if they are the daughters of other Frenchmen,
+which is said to make an ardent combination much sought after among
+colonial Lotharios. But the _congaïe_ must love her François indeed if
+she eschews betel-nut for his sake; she is more likely to teach him the
+habit. There is little visible public opinion against these temporary
+matings, though it is said that the best class of Annamese look down
+upon the practice at least as much as do the most nearly prudish of the
+French. As in France, marriage is very difficult and its unofficial
+rival very easy; one may even take the _congaïe_ back to France as a
+servant.
+
+One sees half-breed children now and then even in thatched hamlets far
+from the centers, while there are plenty of both children and adults of
+mixed blood in any city. Wherever there is a Catholic community cynical
+French males suspect any one in the slightest degree off color as having
+French blood contributed by the “missionaries.” The opposite
+combination, with the male Annamese the “protector,” may sometimes be
+seen—a Frenchwoman in Annamese trousers in some wayside village or
+peering forth from some native den in the cities. There were several
+instances in Hanoï of Frenchwomen legally married to Annamese, most of
+them imported after the war. The wife of a furrier who won a gold medal
+and his French bride at the Marseilles exposition of a decade ago never
+went out, but stood looking through her _grille_ like a captive animal.
+The Parisian wife of a barber in Haïphong lived in the not too large
+room of the barber-shop, with a bed off in one corner behind a bamboo
+screen that did not even conceal from observant clients that she was
+soon to contribute to the Eurasian population. The government is now
+refusing licenses for such marriages, but that naturally does not do
+away with similar unions as long as Frenchwomen are ignorant of the
+color-line or indifferent to it.
+
+The French think that they cannot live in the tropics without a pith
+helmet, a cholera belt, wine, and a woman. One might add ice in the
+place of song. They have a curious belief amounting almost to a
+superstition that to take off _la casque_ in the sun, even the reflected
+sun, be it only for the instant needed to mop the brow and sweat-band,
+will almost surely be fatal, so that every little while the thoughtless
+“foreigner” is startled by raucous shouts of warning, and assailed with
+screams of dismay if he so much as thrusts his head out a window without
+his helmet on. Yet they constantly see the natives bareheaded, and
+either I must conclude that this, like the cholera belts with which even
+the women seem to torture themselves, is an unnecessary burden or that
+my own head is more _dure_ than those of the notoriously hardheaded
+French.
+
+
+Of the eighteen to twenty million inhabitants of French Indo-China only
+the males over twenty years of age among the perhaps seventeen thousand
+French residents can vote—for the deputy from Cochinchina to the French
+Chamber of Deputies and for a delegate without a vote from the
+“protectorates.” Naturally those elected are Frenchmen. The number of
+French in Indo-China might have greatly increased of late, contends one
+party among this slight electorate, were it not for more or less
+official opposition. “For many of the rulers, the free Frenchman, the
+Frenchman who is not a member of the administration, is regarded as a
+troublesome intruder, an unknown incumbrance, a suspected person, a
+constant addition to the problem. This anti-French politics arose from
+the spirit of autocracy of those Cæsars with clay feet, Long and
+Baudoin, with their avowed hatred of every French civilian in the
+posture of a man.” This party insists that there should be a “white
+proletariat,” that many a young Frenchman, released from the army there,
+for instance, could live well in some part of the colony with his
+“companion,” and even contribute a large progeny, to the advantage not
+only of himself but of France and Indo-China. If only the government
+would find some means of helping him to raise and educate his children,
+they insist, he would be far happier than at home and gradually help to
+bridge over that gulf between the French and the natives. The point of
+view of this group is that of Brazil: that there is nothing wrong in
+mixing racial strains, legitimately or otherwise, that on the contrary
+this mixture of races should help to cement together more closely the
+different elements and perhaps breed a stock that would better endure
+the climate than does the pure white. In other words, they would emulate
+in human form the success of breeding hardy, tick-impervious, but runty
+tropical cattle with India bulls.
+
+Offhand the impartial observer would say that there should be a “white
+proletariat,” that not merely French capitalists and officials should
+have the advantages France’s “protection” of this part of the world
+offers. But the governing class insists that there shall be none, or no
+more of one than is unavoidable, and for that reason does not now allow
+conscripts to be discharged in the colony when their time is up, even
+though, unlike those of higher social standing, they may be willing to
+marry their _congaïe_, produce legitimate offspring, and agree to remain
+in the colony for life. Nor do those in power encourage the coming of
+colonists from France. Yet, contend the self-appointed spokesmen of the
+“white proletariat” who are so bitter against what they call the
+“anti-French” policy of the officials, it was precisely because of the
+sacrifice of these “_petits blancs_” that France lost many of her other
+colonies.
+
+Some of the complaints of the Annamese against the French are so well
+put in one of the novels of my companion from Hué to Hanoï that I cannot
+do better than to quote him:
+
+  You have seized Annamese in the streets of the large cities, with all
+  possible vexations, for the sum of two piastres owing to the
+  government, yet you subsidize each year a theater troupe at the cost
+  of 80,000 francs [written when exchange was much higher than now]
+  merely to amuse a handful of French during the three winter months.
+  You have inaugurated the régime of the _corvée_ for the building of
+  roads, or of buying out of it at a high price, promising the
+  population that for this it would be exempt from payment in kind, yet
+  by roundabout means you continue to requisition the inhabitants of the
+  villages for nothing more than that you may be able comfortably to
+  roll along in your automobiles.
+
+In other words road-building in Indo-China is quite as it was under us
+in Haiti, by _corvée_, or payment of road taxes in labor. For three
+piastres a man could buy off from the ten days a year required of him,
+but the _coolies voluntaires_, who had even to bring their own food,
+were often taken far from home and sometimes kept for months. When food
+gave out they renounced their nominal wages, glad to get home at so
+slight a sacrifice. As in Haiti, the explanation of the officials is
+that subordinates in the field did things contrary to the orders of
+those higher up, but this must be entered in the column of dubious
+excuses.
+
+But to go on with the plaints of the Annamese against their
+“protectors,” as interpreted by one whose history and temperament have
+made him as nearly sympathetic as the average Frenchman ever becomes:
+
+  The money you so cruelly cause to be sucked from the population you
+  spend almost entirely on your own luxuries and pleasures, your own
+  well-being; you spend next to nothing for the good of the natives, to
+  help them to profit by the procedures which modern science puts within
+  the reach of industrious, laborious people. The poor people everywhere
+  say that the government deceives them by using tortuous schemes to
+  increase imposts that are already heavy. They say that your protection
+  is not what it seems to be on the surface, that while a European can
+  go anywhere, except sometimes among the wildest tribes of the far
+  mountains, there is still almost as much robbing, kidnapping, virtual
+  banditry as ever among the natives when no Frenchman is looking on.
+  You let the people be ruled by native mandarins, pure bandits whose
+  immorality is no longer doubted by anyone—former “boys,” liberated
+  criminals, head gardeners who have known how to please by combining
+  pretty parterres and by offering flowers to the women of your
+  officials, intriguers and unscrupulous adventurers, beardless youths
+  who have won the favor of your ladies, sons of mandarins with the most
+  corrupted habits—whereas under the old régime this important mission
+  as father and mother of the people was confided only to men of forty
+  or more whose worth was proved. The greater part of the mandarins to
+  whom you have accorded your confidence are rascals who exploit the
+  people in the most shameless manner. We call them patented pirates,
+  differing from real pirates only by the brevet given them by the
+  administration, with the aid of which they can legally pillage more
+  easily and with less loss of honor than real pirates and smugglers.
+
+  You do next to nothing for the higher education of the Annamese, for
+  fear, you say, of making outcasts [_déclassés_] of them, as if
+  advanced instruction could make a degenerate of a man. It is said
+  everywhere that you wish to keep the native at an intellectual level
+  low enough to be able more easily to make him your slave. Thus you are
+  false to the mission you gave yourselves to civilize the people. You
+  cannot understand what attachments you would create between yourselves
+  and the Annamese if you set yourselves resolutely to teaching them
+  everything you know, without _arrière-pensée_. You have an example in
+  the Chinese, who, though they treated us more severely, had nothing to
+  regret for having inculcated in us all their civilization, all their
+  knowledge, to such an extent that Annam became a China in miniature.
+
+  You have too much pride; you disdain the natives too much; you believe
+  yourself to be of a divine essence compared to us whom you keep at a
+  distance, as if it were a question of a vile, abject race, worthy at
+  most of being your servant. You are jealous of our slightest
+  qualities; you cry out against our slightest faults, which for the
+  most part you have noticed among the scum of our race that surrounds
+  you, and which you attribute to all of us in general, without knowing
+  that the true honest Annamese takes care not to approach you, not
+  being able to support your arrogance, your conceit, your insults.
+
+Yet though the Annamese, particularly of the Tonkin, fought long and
+valiantly to keep from being “protected” by the French, and there have
+been some revolts since what is considered the final conquest of all the
+Indo-Chinese empire, notably that abortive scheme to poison all
+Caucasians one evening in 1916, on the whole they now seem contented, or
+at least reconciled, and fairly friendly. Do they perhaps see the
+advantages of French rule, and recognize that some one would exploit
+them if these aliens from the West did not; or is it merely the fatalism
+and the infinite patience of the East that gives them the outward
+appearance of comparative contentment?
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XIII
+                       OVER THE MOUNTAINS TO LAOS
+
+
+Early April found me back in Hanoï, this time as a family of five rather
+than a foot-loose individual. It was not the place I had left two months
+before. Constantly heavy skies gave it a gloomy oppressive atmosphere
+not at all like those brilliant days of late January. Almost perpetual
+rain, even though it was not always heavy, made the life of the city
+less chic, less lively. With even the big wide streets covered with a
+light _couche_ of mud and water, the large French community seemed to
+dress in its older clothes rather than in its Parisian best. In a
+hundred ways the change in weather made other things different. But the
+natives, especially the toiling masses, were evidently used to a season
+that had befallen them yearly for who knows how many centuries; for,
+covered with big pancake hats and palm-leaf rain-coats, they splashed
+about in their bare feet almost as happily as in the brilliant month of
+January.
+
+Luckily Sunday managed to be fine long enough to confirm my reports on
+the zoo and _guignol_ and the band-concert in the governor-general’s
+park, and convince all three generations of my family that a month in
+the little Paris of the East would be the great contrast to life in
+China which my first glimpse of it had promised. It was still brilliant
+too, and already hot, when I took the train next morning for Vinh,
+through a land everywhere lush green now, to be met at the station that
+evening and carried home by the _résident_ in person. For though I had
+not known it until a day or two before, the journey through Laos,
+Indo-China’s largest, most distant, and least known division, could only
+be made more or less officially, with the willingness and connivance,
+sometimes the actual help, of the French authorities. That part of it
+which I proposed to visit could hardly be reached even on foot without
+government permission and aid, and only those whom the governor-general
+considers _personæ gratæ_ may expect either. The time will soon come
+when that great region northeast of Siam will be made the commonplace
+stamping-ground of tourists, but so far the roads were only started and
+the hotels not yet begun even on paper. Still, the French were not
+averse to begin to let the outside world from which tourists eventually
+come know what will some day be in store for them.
+
+The _résident_ did me the honor of driving his big Peugeot next day
+himself, though to save face he took along his native chauffeur, as well
+as a “boy” to act as general servant. We turned back north for
+thirty-five kilometers along the railway by which I had come, then swung
+sharply west from the macadam road upon a gravel one that was by no
+means poor. At the first village officially recognized by the French the
+army turned out—a score of Annamese soldiers in white knickerbocker
+uniforms and red wrap-leggings, with the familiar brass-tipped mushroom
+hats, all of them barefoot except the sergeant, whose heavy high shoes
+on the ends of his thin legs gave him a resemblance to a diver about to
+descend to the bottom of the sea. With stiff leather cartridge-boxes in
+the pits of their stomachs, their French rifles with the long sharp
+bayonets, usually carried sidewise high on their shoulders but now held
+stiffly perpendicular before them, and as spick and span as only native
+troops under European command can be, they stood at rifle-salute behind
+their young French officer with raised sword, the very personification
+of the East under Western training, while the _résident_ leisurely got
+out and inspected them as deliberately as if it were a pleasure to stand
+motionless in full dress beneath a tropical sun. Once these formalities
+were over, however, and arms had been grounded, the two Frenchmen shook
+hands and fraternized like exiled brothers.
+
+While they are hardly a military people, any more than the Chinese, the
+Annamese had compulsory military service for all men between the ages of
+eighteen and sixty long before the French came. In fact they were so
+often called to arms that the field-work was largely left to their
+wives, which is perhaps why the women seem even to-day more at home in
+the fields than the men. Nor has the country lost its militaristic
+aspect under the French. Besides the white conscripts from overseas to
+be seen at important points, native soldiers are constantly in evidence.
+Astonishingly well groomed and set up compared to the armed ragamuffins
+of China, they commonly salute all Europeans with a gravity that further
+distinguishes them from the saucy, leering uniformed coolies of the
+soldier-ridden land to the north.
+
+Naturally, most of these _linh_ are Annamese, though each of the four
+protectorates has its own soldiers, nominally under command of its king
+or emperor—“semi-volunteers” they are usually called, and quite
+properly. For even to-day it is no business of the king or emperor, much
+less of the French, whether or not they are volunteers in the true sense
+of the word. Mandarins or other officials tell each commune how many
+recruits it is required to furnish, and they are duly furnished, without
+embarrassing questions. The notables of each village choose those who
+shall leave it for eighteen months of service, at the ratio of one
+recruit to every six adult males, and naturally they do not include
+their own sons among them. Their training over, the youths may return to
+their homes, but are subject to call until the age of sixty. Many prefer
+to remain under arms longer than is required, and with this system
+France—or the native sovereign—has a reserve of very respectable size,
+some of whom have served five, ten, and even fifteen years. The French
+assert that conscription is hardly necessary, that most of the soldiers
+of Annam are real volunteers, that all the men of Annam wanted to go to
+France at the time of the war to fight for the “mother-land.” If so,
+this indicates a patriotism, or at least a wanderlust, not in keeping
+with the manner of most of them, though it is true that a visible pride
+shines forth in the brown faces of those few native soldiers, usually
+noncommissioned officers, who display two or three French medals across
+their breasts.
+
+
+An hour or more later we crossed a river by a _bac_ and raced
+comfortably on along grass-grown roads for the rest of the morning. The
+rice-fields had given way to brush and forests, the plain to ridges and
+ravines, to a semi-wilderness in which the scarcity of people was in
+great contrast to the endless files of cinnamon-clad coolies of both
+sexes jogging under their shoulder-pole burdens, the files of
+wheelbarrows carrying produce to market, pack-animals among which our
+snorting conveyance created a panic reminiscent of the early days of the
+automobile, and to the crowded hat-roofed markets themselves, close
+beside and even in the road, on what might be called the Annamese side
+of the river. For though we were still geographically in Annam, almost
+no country in the world is so narrow as this one in the vicinity of
+Vinh, and almost nowhere do conditions change more quickly, once the
+crowded, rich, flat coast-land between the Gulf of Tonkin and the
+Annamese chain has been left behind. Already we began to meet
+tribespeople very different from the Annamese. Barely two hours from the
+railroad there appeared women dressed from just above the nipples barely
+to the knees, in primitive skirts wrapped about the lower waist,
+carrying heavy loads of wood, with a forehead-strap similar to that of
+our Indians. They were Muong, that is, “wild people,” though their
+wildness showed mainly in their timidity as they slipped off into the
+jungle below the raised road. We had not merely changed regions at the
+_bac_; we had entered a new world, stepped back several centuries.
+
+We raced incessantly westward, for all the grass in the road, along
+which a path meandered as constantly as if forever dodging the evil
+spirits that can only move in a straight line, like a rifle-bullet,
+never encountering another vehicle—except once, when we missed by inches
+meeting head on at a brush-hidden turn the only automobile of the day.
+Toward noon we stopped at a Muong village, where we picked up a French
+colonist with holdings scattered among the foot-hills of the Annamese
+chain. The two Frenchmen of course were already acquainted, and there
+was the usual _apéritif_ before we sat down to a surprisingly good
+_déjeuner_ in a more or less public rest-house. More exactly it was no
+longer surprising to find good meals provided even in the wilderness,
+for your Frenchman will not endure gastronomic hardships; and since good
+meals are always more important to him than arriving, nearly three hours
+had slipped away before there was any indication that we were to move on
+again.
+
+Meanwhile, on the heels of our arrival, the Muong chief of the village,
+closely followed by three or four retainers in bare feet, loose white
+panties, and more or less picturesque regalia, had come to welcome my
+high-rank companion. The chief wore a blue suit, instead of the usual
+black or cinnamon brown of the Annamese, and in honor of the occasion
+and of his own standing he had a blue cloth wound turban-fashion about
+his head. Also a volumnious cloak of mosquito-netting or cheese-cloth
+with huge sleeves, in which he clasped his hands together in a manner
+that increased his resemblance to a Chinese Buddhist priest, covered him
+to the bare ankles. He and his satellites brought us, as the city
+fathers of Muong villages do all important visitors, according to the
+_résident_, a basket of eggs and several bottles of what looked like
+water. Knowing that such a beverage would be an insult to a Frenchman, I
+made inquiry and found that the bottles were filled with a native liquor
+of such deadly voltage that even my wine-loving companions did not
+venture to sample it. While the chief acted out his respects, the most
+lowly of the attendants laid out the ten eggs on a brass platter and set
+it with two of the bottles of rice-alcohol on the earth floor before the
+seated _résident_. Only then did the chief speak, accompanying his
+greetings with many low bows, showing none of the friendly half-gaiety
+of the Chinese, but rather an air of being inwardly frightened. The
+_résident_ replied, somewhat carelessly, with a bit of the native tongue
+that was at least fairly fluent. Then the chief and his attendants
+withdrew, and the eggs and the bottle stood where they had been placed
+until we departed, when they were either retrieved by the chief or fell
+to the lot of the rest-house servants.
+
+
+The colonist went on with us to the night’s halt by a road now crawling
+along the edge of a precipice, now across serried ranks of what my
+companions called _montagnes russes_, sharp ridges over which we
+incessantly bounced, alternating with constant drops to low filled-in
+runways in place of bridges, a wilderness all about us. But after all,
+tropical jungle has less of interest, at least after the first visit, to
+any one except the trained naturalist, than the seemingly greater
+variety of flora in the temperate zone. There was still something left
+of the afternoon, for all our generous midday halt, when we reached the
+military post of Cuarao, across the river from the highway and a mud and
+reed garage offering tropical accommodations to a car or two. One of its
+several white buildings of an official character, which looked so
+imposing against the background of Muong houses and jungle, had rooms
+for the three of us, opening off the soldier-trodden compound and
+roughly comfortable except for the heat.
+
+There are three crops of Indian corn a year in this region; and among
+the small craft of various sizes on the river below were many narrow
+little boats full of ripe husked ears that gave the scene flashes of
+color. The Muong prefer rice, according to the _résident_, but the land
+left them is so hilly that the toil of raising it is more than they will
+endure. Wild-looking Muong mail-carriers, each with a small bag, hung
+about the rowboat ferry between the garage and our quarters as if they
+were in no hurry whatever to cross and be off on their fifteen
+kilometers of the Postes et Télégraphes relay. It was a reminder that
+the mail service of Indo-China under the French is by no means the
+equal, in proportion to the difficulties involved, of that of China
+under international tutelage. But on the other hand one can telegraph
+anywhere within the colony, from almost any hut, at a cent a word, in
+English, French, or the native tongues, and be sure of prompt and
+accurate delivery. The traveler long inured to the unreliable,
+expensive, often hopeless telegraph system of China, unfortunately not
+under foreign management, could forgive the French almost anything for
+this boon. During all my journey through Laos I never took the trouble
+to write letters to my family in Hanoï, with the probability of reaching
+there again before they did, but spent a few cents each evening for a
+telegram, and kept as closely in touch with them as if I had gone home
+each evening; for never once was I more than two hours in receiving a
+reply.
+
+I have spoken before of the complete security of Europeans almost
+anywhere within France’s Indo-Chinese empire, whatever the complaints of
+the natives. No doubt it was to make us feel doubly safe that soldiers
+beat a hubbub on bamboo sections all night long about the post as a
+proof that they were awake and on guard. But there are dangers,
+according to some of the tales with which my companions whiled away the
+evening. The _résident_ of one of these wilder provinces, for instance,
+had broken five ribs when his automobile ran into a deer unfamiliar with
+modern traffic rules. A French soldier stationed on the Tonkin border
+was attacked by a tiger, an animal reputed always to take its victim by
+the back of the neck; and as this man chanced to be carrying a
+blanket-roll across his shoulders, he killed the beast with his knife—or
+his bayonet, for he himself was never clear on that detail—without
+getting a scratch. Tiger stories are legion in Indo-China, and many of
+them are as free from doubt as this one, which is fully authenticated—or
+documented, as my fellow-travelers put it.
+
+
+The _résident_ drove me a few miles farther in the morning, halting at
+the edge of another river, where we had made telegraphic rendezvous with
+the authorities of the next province. Here and there a path went off up
+into the woods to clusters of Muong houses; now and again we met a file
+of these jungle people sidling along the edge of the road. The men did
+not look greatly different from the Annamese. Their eyes were a little
+less oblique, their faces at close range shaped more like our own; there
+was a bit more wildness, naïveté, timidity, or something countrified
+about them; but the surest way of telling apart the males of the two
+races was the manner in which they carry their burdens—the Annamese on
+the shoulder-pole, the Muong in baskets on their wives’ backs. The men
+themselves sometimes carry in baskets also, and even larger loads, but
+only when the available supply of females makes it necessary. The women
+who trail behind them could not possibly be mistaken for those of Annam.
+They were much less independent, each hiding behind her husband at sight
+of us, following close on his heels as they hurried silently on. They
+wore little above the waist except the loads they carried on their
+backs, secured by a band across their foreheads. A cloth about their
+heads and another barely covering their plump breasts were evidently
+concessions to the prudish world of the highway, for at home in the bush
+a blue-embroidered skirt from the waist to the lower thighs seems to be
+all that Muong public opinion requires. A long bodkin protruded from a
+queerly arranged knot of hair worn somewhat to the side of the head. The
+long round basket on the bare back drew taut the supporting cord across
+the forehead, a small board with two holes in it keeping the two strands
+apart. Each woman wore at her left side a section of bamboo as a pocket,
+and carried by another cord over one shoulder a canteen in the form of
+another piece of bamboo, several feet long, and filled with river-water
+with which to quench the thirst of her lord and master. Some of the
+brick-colored male savages bore a lance over one shoulder, and most of
+them had a long tobacco pipe of tiny bowl thrust like the bodkins of the
+women through their knot of hair, or worn in the belt like a cutlass.
+There was some evidence of tattooing, but the naïveté of their faces and
+manner and the attitude of the half-naked women were the most typical
+features. Between the men and the women there seemed to be a deep social
+gulf, something like that between servants and masters among the wealthy
+of other lands.
+
+Here and there within sight along the road were a few Muong houses, all
+standing man-high on piles, a kind of gang-plank with cleats forming an
+outside stairway to a rounded veranda under a low overhanging thatch
+roof at one end. Men squatting over their long pipes and children at
+play evidently monopolized this portico, which the women only approached
+with the obsequious manner of those who feel themselves intruders. A
+smaller veranda at the other, always the southern and sun-baked end,
+served them as kitchen and place of recreation. Most Muong hamlets are
+far from the grass-grown highway, and one can scarcely blame them for
+preferring solitude and simplicity, though their roosters and cur-dogs
+probably make the nights as hideous there as the soldiers with their
+bamboo drums had ours at the post of Cuarao. The _résident_ whiled away
+the time with stories of this “wild” timid race, one of which concerned
+a great chief of the Muong who had always gone about as naked as his
+forefathers of pre-French days, until, having been decorated with the
+medal of the Legion of Honor, he went to Vinh and bought himself a
+magnificent jacket to pin his decoration on. Since then he had never
+been seen without the jacket, and his brother was always following him
+with envious eyes, though whether he envied him the medal or the jacket
+was not clear.
+
+
+We had waited nearly an hour when there appeared on the other side of
+the not very large stream a sumptuous Fiat strangely out of keeping with
+the wilderness about us and a startling contrast in transportation to
+the leaky old _bac_ by which I crossed to it amid the blessings of the
+_résident_ of Vinh. It was to have been there at daylight, but it soon
+became evident that even a high-priced Italian car cannot move faster
+than the chauffeur that drives it. We were off as soon as my modest
+baggage had been stowed away, along a still grassy road cut between the
+steep mountain-side and the stream, the scars of the evidently recent
+road-building already almost completely obliterated by the impulsive
+tropical vegetation. Here and there a path meandered along the road, and
+on it passed picturesque Muong women in scanty garments, all of them
+carrying baskets and some of them suckling babies as they walked,
+climbing the rocks as high as possible whenever they caught sight or
+sound of us. Birds of rich colors flitting in and out of the jungle gave
+us as hasty glimpses of themselves as did the Muong women who sought
+refuge in the thick underbrush on the stream side of the road. There
+were flapper birds, too gaily dressed to be useful or even virtuous
+members of ornithological society. One of them had a brilliant blue
+back, tail, and wings, red feet, and a velvety-brown throat above a
+snow-white breast that gave it the appearance of wearing either a
+low-necked evening-gown or the white shirt of a dinner-jacket. Its
+fantastic Semitic beak and cardinal-red head was topped by a purple hat
+adorned with a single aigret. There were matronly birds in black, with
+wings of the rich brown of Tonkinese clothing, actress birds in
+exaggerated, even indecent costumes, birds that changed appearance
+entirely, as if they had suddenly put on a disguise, when they opened
+their wings and showed the under side of them; there were birds that
+were mere streaks of white, flashes of fire in the sunshine, birds with
+tails longer than themselves, birds that made a noise like the pounding
+of a section of bamboo with which Chinese watchmen make nights
+miserable, or Buddhist bonzes call upon the charitably minded. Yet they
+sang less than did the crickets or katydids, less than the queer members
+of the lizard family sunning themselves on the rocks, confirming a
+memory that the whistle or call of jungle birds is often monotonous but
+rarely musical. Once I caught sight in the stream below of a ridiculous
+member of the duck family, swimming and strutting about among his modest
+female mates in a costume so gaudy and incredible that he must have
+designed it himself. We were so closely flanked by the prolific
+vegetation that this part of the trip was like taking a journey through
+the heart of the jungle in an easy-chair, or on the magic carpet of
+Arabic legend. Memories of the tiger stories I had heard the evening
+before, and elsewhere, crowded upon me. There were panthers in these
+forests too, and herds of gaur, a wild cattle like the aurochs, two
+meters high, of little trouble to the people but very dangerous to the
+hunter. Yet the only visible peril was the constant tendency of the road
+to make hair-pin turns on the sheer edge of great gorges.
+
+The chauffeur, dressed in full European style even to his tropical
+helmet, seemed to be a mixture of French and of several Indo-Chinese
+bloods. Instead of driving like the madman that most chauffeurs of
+Indo-China resemble, making every turn an attempt at suicide, every
+downward slope an effort to hang up a new speed-record, he was so
+overcautious that I no longer wondered at his failure to be on time at
+the rendezvous. While I am not one of those who like to fly along the
+brinks of precipices, I rather prefer that to crawling like an ox-cart
+when a stretch of straight wide road lies in clear view ahead. Twenty
+kilometers from the _bac_ he halted where we should have been three
+hours before, at a village which seemed to be named Muongsen, and
+announced that he could not reach our destination that day. It happened
+that my trip through Laos was absolutely set in cement, since I had to
+be somewhere else at a definite date, and this fellow and his chief, the
+_commissaire_ of Xieng Khuang, had been advised of that fact by urgent
+telegrams from the governor-generalate itself. But the Caucasian part of
+him seemed to have exhausted itself in his appearance without touching
+his character. Or perhaps he had once run into a water-buffalo or
+spilled himself down a mountain-side.
+
+I was protesting against halting for the day while it was still fully an
+hour short of noon, when a white man unexpectedly turned up. He was a
+tall, good-looking, splendidly built fellow, with the appearance of a
+big blond Frenchman who had lived all his life in the open; and he wore
+the blue uniform of a French colonial officer. Yet he was no Frenchman
+for all that, but a native of Bavaria, who had lived as a boy in New
+York—at Sixty-fourth Street and Second Avenue, he still remembered. Now
+he could speak only French—besides Annamese and several tribal tongues
+of Indo-China—and was as Gallic in temperament as he was blond. Having
+entered the Foreign Legion when he was fourteen, he had been with the
+French ever since, and was now a second lieutenant in command of a
+village station higher up on the plateau ahead. With him was a
+French-Annamese woman of possessive manner, though no startling beauty,
+who called him husband.
+
+Hospitable as he was handsome, he insisted that at least I could not go
+on until we had performed the Frenchman’s midday rites. We had to
+prolong the _apéritifs_ an hour or more before we could sit down to a
+several-course lunch in a hut grocery of very respectful serving manners
+and a not total ignorance of French cooking. For according to the
+lieutenant and his no less hospitable companion, it would have been a
+great breach of bush etiquette not to wait for the other “European” in
+the village. He was the chauffeur of the general-in-chief of all
+Indo-China, and had been left behind with his car _en panne_ while the
+general had climbed on into the mountains in a Citroen “caterpillar”
+that had been serving him as baggage-trailer.
+
+This other “European” turned up at last and proved to be a Guadeloupe
+mulatto, who lost little time in claiming that his grandmother had once
+been a great personage in Bordeaux—which, after the way of French
+ladies, was not at all impossible—and who either had never heard of
+American conventions where negroes are concerned or judged from my
+hand-shake that I had outgrown any such prejudice. Simple and naïve, yet
+with all those amusing little idiosyncrasies of courtesy and their
+opposite common to the French, he was a bit bashful at first, until
+convinced by my manner that I accepted him as a social equal. His
+misgivings had plainly nothing to do with color but with the natural
+gulf between a mere corporal turned general’s chauffeur and a traveler
+sponsored by the governor-general himself. Thereafter he was at his
+ease, and his big eyes rolled like those of a minstrel-show end-man
+whenever he heard anything even mildly surprising, and he became
+convulsed with gaiety at the slightest suggestion of anything humorous.
+The lieutenant thought I might get more willing service out of my
+chauffeur if we invited him also to sit down with us; and what with the
+Muong and the Laosian servants who waited upon us, the mixture of races
+about the rough but well garnished table at which we finally gathered
+could hardly have been increased without going in search of other
+individuals.
+
+The conversation hovered chiefly about the women of Laos. The lieutenant
+asserted, and was borne out by his wilderness companion of the sex under
+discussion, that to touch the hair or breasts of a Laosian woman is a
+more serious crime than actual violation. In fact Laosian law prescribes
+a much more serious penalty for the former than for the latter
+indiscretion, and the lieutenant in his judicial capacity had often been
+called upon to try cases under this strange code. Naturally, he
+explained, again abetted by his lady-love, what the Western world
+considers the lesser of the two crimes might be committed entirely
+against the will of the victim, while the other.... In brief, here was
+an example of Oriental wisdom to which the other side of the earth has
+not yet attained.
+
+In a case of what, in the language we were then using, is called
+_tromper le mari_, the Laosians again outdid us in their sense of
+justice. By their law the lover is punished for the first offense, the
+woman for the second, and the husband for the third! For, as the
+lieutenant said, and his domestic partner again agreed, the woman who is
+party to such an act a second time must have some of the guilt; and the
+husband who is so inattentive as to be _trompé_ three times is either a
+fool or is knowingly permitting it, and deserves punishment in either
+case.
+
+[Illustration: The women of Tonkin combine hat, sunshade, and umbrella
+in one unwieldy contraption]
+
+[Illustration: The Muong women wear little above the waist, except the
+loads they carry]
+
+[Illustration: The guard turned out to greet my companion, the
+_résident_ of Vinh, at the first village on the way to Laos]
+
+[Illustration: The Muong chief of our noonday village came in state,
+bringing eggs and native fire-water]
+
+The gentleman of color from Guadeloupe confirmed all these statements
+and added the information that when the husband, or the “man,” is a
+soldier, like himself and the lieutenant, or is for any other reason
+away from home for six months or so at a time, it is impossible for him
+to avoid betraying his wife, or she him. This recalled to the lieutenant
+that the code of Laos allows the woman a divorce without contest if the
+husband stays away from her longer than the length of time he said he
+would when he left. What an importation this would be in our civilized
+West! One might fancy that it would make the men of Laos more punctual,
+more aware of the value of time, than the subway victims of our great
+metropolis. Yet it is not so, far from so. The lieutenant contended that
+this is a very just law, for the suffering of the woman from long
+absence, whetted by the uncertainty of the return, is obviously more
+than she can stand, more than she should be expected to stand. His own
+darling feebly denied this, but the men agreed with many sage shakings
+of the head. It is as bad as expecting a man to live six months without
+a woman, they went on, with extravagant gestures, as if trying to clinch
+the argument with the most ridiculous analogy they could hit upon.
+Gradually the tone of the conversation drifted to the other side of the
+shield, the subject of parents. Both men asserted that they had loved
+their mothers but not their fathers. “A man’s mother can only be one
+person; there can be no doubt about her,” the mulatto argued, with all
+the gravity of a chief justice, “but his father may be any one of
+thirty-six.” Whereupon there were general roars of laughter and
+agreement, while the typically French dinner came to its end with
+demi-tasses as naturally as a sentence does with a period.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XIV
+                               EN PANNE!
+
+
+With the influence of the lieutenant I managed at last to get under way
+again, not without hope that we might reach somewhere before nightfall,
+since the sun was still almost directly overhead. At Muongsen there
+begins one of the greatest automobile climbs I have ever seen, up and up
+and forever up through the jungled ranges of the great Annamese chain,
+an ascension unforgettable both for its magnificence and its danger. We
+climbed abruptly to an elevation of fifteen hundred meters, a full mile
+above sea-level, without moving forward a mile on the map. The road,
+forever clawing itself a place in the flank of the mountain, constantly
+making great detours, looking always for an opening, a gap to slip
+through, writhed like a tortured snake, struggled fiercely upward, grew
+dizzy with effort, took breath again, and climbed valiantly onward. On
+the left, or, worse still, on the right, the abyss always yawned. Our
+wheels touched the edge of space and flung stones off down sheer wooded
+slopes into _le vide_—emptiness; in many places there were curves so
+sharp that we had just room between the jagged mountain wall and the
+bottomless pit to make the turn by backing and filling where the
+slightest miscalculation might have meant destruction. Even then we
+barely got by without striking a lamp on the recently blasted
+mountain-side or dropping a hind wheel over the edge. I began to
+understand why a man, particularly an aging half-caste, whose lot in
+life required him to drive even now and then up or down this fly-footed
+route, might easily become too nervous ever to speed again and might
+grow to have the downcast view of life in general of this crawling
+imitation of a chauffeur.
+
+Between the trees of every size there were glimpses here and there for
+an instant of the great Annamese chain we were struggling to surmount.
+The narrow little boats fighting their way up the rapids of the river we
+had crossed again at the beginning of the climb had long since
+disappeared; the river itself was gone. Giant ferns, valleys full of
+banana-plants, perfect tenement clothes-line mazes of jungle vines,
+range after blue range of the densest forest-jungle sank beneath us, and
+still the climbing continued, steadily, inexorably, forever. It was like
+duplicating by automobile my wild journey through the jungles of the
+upper Malay Peninsula, now two decades ago. Sometimes, when the road was
+completely exhausted, it went a little way on the level, but only long
+enough to catch its breath, as quickly as do the barrel-chested Indians
+of the Andes, before digging its toes into the mountain-side again. The
+air became fresher; the humid scent of the tropics disappeared; with
+every wheel-turn it was more pleasure to breathe. Behind and below us
+lay an ocean of branches, a vegetation so compact that it filled the
+vast ravine of the visible world to its very edges, like an overflowing
+bowl of greens, an immense panorama of verdure dotted with densely black
+patches of shade that looked like the mouths of caves.
+
+There were many long thatch-roofed bridges, some of them curved, some
+with sharp angles, bridges of timbers and rough-hewn planks evidently
+cut on the spot, some covered with woven bamboo splints, bridges
+supported only by the upright trunks of trees along the sides of them,
+so that even the least nervous of travelers could not but have wondered
+whether they would always hold the weight our heavy car suddenly put
+upon them. Many similar bridges had been abandoned and left to
+disintegrate into the jungle again, because the road had been cut
+farther back into the hillsides. When this new road gets officially
+opened and there are cars in both directions—many cars, the French hope
+and believe—there should be magnificent possibilities of accident, for
+rarely indeed can one see five yards ahead, and often fog half or fully
+fills and conceals mighty ravines into which a false twist of the
+chauffeur’s wrist would have sent us crashing among the jungle tree-tops
+hundreds of feet below. I looked anxiously askance at the graying fellow
+at my side on whom my life depended, and was startled suddenly to
+discover that after all he was a mere savage in loin-cloth and bare
+feet, however much his half-French features and his wholly French garb
+might strive to conceal it.
+
+It was an expensive luxury for the one or two automobiles a week that
+traveled over it, this road up the face of the mountains, costing seven
+hundred piastres a kilometer, about seven hundred dollars a mile, even
+in this continent of low wages. The workmen were paid only thirty-five
+piastre-cents a day, and must furnish their own food; hence one could
+scarcely blame them if they did not hurt themselves with work. Piles of
+stone, broken or to be broken, lay in long carefully slope-sided heaps
+at frequent intervals along the way, recalling France and its
+_cantonniers_; but the road was built rather in “American style,”
+according to a French engineer I met later, especially on the curves,
+because the famous old highways of France were not designed for speeding
+automobiles. We passed scores of Annamese men, nearly all of them gaunt
+and sickly looking, thin, lemon-yellow, feverish pictures of misery,
+squatting in miserable grass huts that had been thrown up for the
+road-building, or dawdling along the way. Always with the air of being
+half scared to death at sight of a white man, they were pitifully
+obsequious, all snatching off their hats and most of them even the rag
+they wore about the head under it, at the same time backing against the
+mountain wall or to the extreme edge of the precipice and bowing low
+with the palms of the hands together. I have seldom seen human beings as
+sad looking as these Annamese road-builders. There was no gaiety, no
+life at all compared with the harder working and more miserably living
+Chinese, though one was still constantly puzzled to know whether this
+related race was merely suppressed, depressed by French treatment, or
+naturally gifted with solemnity. At any rate we rode frequently through
+bowing ranks of bareheaded coolies in rusty clothes and with
+fever-stricken faces, who could not have greeted me more obsequiously
+had I been the governor-general himself. In fact more deference was
+shown me on this trip into Laos than is received by most European
+sovereigns of to-day.
+
+It astonishes us from the temperate zone of the West that the Annamese
+or Tonkinese prefer the malarial and overcrowded rice-lands of their
+coastal plains to the rich upper regions of their country. But the most
+wretched of them have a horror of the hills, even though their ancestors
+seem to have been highland men; so that it is always a difficult job,
+often requiring actual governmental force, to get even a few hundred
+coolies from the plains, where they are often half starved, to come up
+and help build these roads; and the few French exploiters of highland
+plantations look almost in vain for workmen. Criminals sentenced to hard
+labor are sometimes used in such enterprises, and often the _corvée_,
+calling for forced contributions of labor on the roads, has had to be
+invoked. In the cities it is no uncommon sight to meet a column of these
+miserable fellows, wretched already, though perhaps only the recruits of
+a labor agency, marching to a train under command of a half-breed, like
+a file of condemned exiles. When moving from one camp to another almost
+all these downcast fellows carried a cloth-tied bundle in their hands or
+at the end of a bamboo over one shoulder, so that they resembled a
+tropical imitation of a procession of American hobos “hitting the ties.”
+
+There seemed to be no women in these road-building camps, which perhaps
+accounted for half the appearance of misery, the great susceptibility of
+these plain-dwelling descendants of hardy highlanders to disease in the
+hills furnishing the rest of it. But it seems to be psychological more
+than physical, according to the French; ancient superstitions make the
+mere thought of living in the mountains sickening to them.
+
+Higher up there were two or three villages that seemed to have
+inhabitants of both sexes and all ages, some of whom we now and then met
+making their way along the winding, perpetually climbing road. The sound
+of our horn drove them mad. The more fearful tried their best to climb
+the sheer earth or rock wall of the blasted mountain-side; the others,
+as if imploring us to be merciful and realize that they would run away
+if they could, snatched themselves bareheaded and, placing their hats
+against their stomachs, tried to break their spines in kowtowing to me
+as they might to a long dead emperor suddenly returned to earth. A few,
+less obsequious, or less quick-witted, watched us pass with open mouths
+and stupefied expressions, bawling children scurrying in and out between
+their legs. Near the top of the climb there suddenly appeared horses and
+other pack-animals, and the panic we created among these unusual
+carriers in Indo-China could not easily be described. We passed not a
+few traveling pigs along the way too, for wherever there is Chinese
+culture there must also be pork. Though they are credited with infinite
+patience, the Chinese will not drive pigs to market. But the Annamese,
+more afraid of work perhaps, rather than more patient, usually try to,
+with a cord tied to each porker’s leg. This may possibly be easier than
+the Chinese way of bodily carrying them, two on a one-man shoulder-pole
+or one between two men, so that carrier and carried, bound to market in
+this undignified manner, seem fellows in misery. In Hanoï and the larger
+towns of Annam this more certain form of transportation may also now and
+then be seen. But the Annamese pig is ordinarily driven, which is hard
+on motorists. For most of the pigs we met were too strong for the
+holder, and yet not quite strong enough to get away entirely and dash
+themselves over the mountain-side. Therefore, as they seemed bent on
+suicide in any form—and who could blame them?—the car always had to wait
+while the would-be pig-driver and several of his fellows united in one
+mighty tug of war that dragged the squealing animal out from under our
+wheels. For the most foolhardy of Annamese chauffeurs, however
+disdainful of the pig-driving populace, would scarcely have risked
+running over one of these porcine obstructions on this pathway along the
+bottomless pit.
+
+
+It was in many ways a delightful trip, doubly so because one knew even
+without being told that very few travelers had ever made it. But good
+things often come to a violent end, though to tell the truth I had felt
+it in my bones that trouble lay in wait for us. I claim no prizes as an
+automobile driver, but I certainly could have given that mixture of
+races in French garb several pointers on how not to drive up a high
+mountain. Again it was overcaution rather than recklessness that worked
+his undoing. Never would he let the car get a reasonable start, with the
+result that it had to pump its heart out to make a snail’s pace. I
+carried no driver’s license for Indo-China, and should not have
+considered it courteous to my host ahead to practise with his new
+Italian-minded car on such a road if I had; hence I was totally at the
+mercy of this mingled son of caution. A dozen times we snorted to a halt
+before the maltreated engine quit entirely, fairly near the top. The
+chauffeur’s mental reaction to this emergency seemed to be to sit where
+he sat until the Goddess of Mercy or some one else came to help him out,
+with the probability about a week off of another car passing. When at
+last I prevailed upon him to get out and look at his engine, at least
+out of curiosity, all he knew was to lift the hood, when he fell into
+contemplation before the motor, mute with stupor, as if he had
+discovered this strange machine for the first time, until I expected him
+to bow down and kowtow in the dust before it. He seemed to know as much
+about the workings of automobile engines as of the gods in his temples,
+and to have the same dread of looking into the secrets of their power.
+But then, when I came to think of it, even I, effete product of a garage
+and repair-shop on every corner, knew no more about it than he did, so
+that after all he had been right, and there was really nothing to be
+done except what he had started to do—calmly to sit and wait for help.
+
+That was no easy task for a man whose hair is habitually ragged of edge
+because he cannot endure to hold the penitents’ seat in a barber-shop,
+and when we had been broken down long enough to prove that neither of us
+could do anything useful about it, I walked on. Gusts of rain had fallen
+during our climb, pedestrians each lopping off a banana-leaf as an
+umbrella and dropping it where the shower ceased. But the second-hand
+one I picked up at the next emergency proved that as an umbrella a
+banana-leaf is waterproof, at least to the tropically inexperienced,
+only when one sits down under it. Luckily the showers were short and not
+very intense, and within an hour or so I was striding over the summit
+and down upon a few simple buildings. It was a military post named
+Nong-het, which turned out to be the station of the Bavarian-born
+lieutenant and his mixed lady-love, who had indeed invited me to stay
+with them on my return, should it happen that the rains made impossible
+the itinerary I had planned. Much good that did me now, with the
+hospitable pair still down at Muongsen.
+
+The Annamese sergeant in charge massacred a few words of French, beating
+them out between his black teeth in a clogged stream from his betel-nut
+bloody lips, and there was no great difficulty in getting enough of his
+confidence to seat myself in the faded cloth easy-chair under the thatch
+roof of the lieutenant’s earth-floored porch. In fact it was not long
+before I could have coaxed his cook to cook me something, if we had been
+able to find anything to cook. Obviously I could not broach any stores
+there might have been inside the lieutenant’s thatched house, though it
+was locked with a piece of jungle twine, even had I been sure that the
+sergeant would permit it. In the long thatched barracks across the
+smooth earth parade-ground there were different kitchens and “beds” for
+the Annamese and the Laosian soldiers who made up the garrison, the
+former sleeping on wooden platforms, Chinese style, and the Laosians on
+soft springs of woven bamboo; and there were similar differences in
+cuisine and other customs. But that made it all the more difficult to
+convince the sergeant that surely there must be something native that
+could be made edible for “ung Flançais,” as he persisted in calling me.
+Plainly the lieutenant or his protective companion had taught the
+sergeant the solemnity with which the rites of the table should be
+treated, and the sacrilege of mixing culinary breeds.
+
+Finally, thanks to my well known persistence and persuasiveness, there
+appeared some rice and the toughest chicken for its tender age that I
+have ever met in all my travels, nay, on Broadway itself. This trial
+over, and a path worn in the parade-ground while we discussed beneath a
+sardonically grinning moon the propriety of my continued presence in the
+post, the sergeant at last consented to have collected for me in an
+outhouse a bundle of straw and a ragged blanket which I was just as well
+pleased not to have seen by day—or even by torch-light; and just as I
+was dozing off there came the choral shrieks, growing slowly louder, of
+a great gang of coolies whom the chauffeur had requisitioned to push the
+car over the summit to Nong-het. The suspicions of the sergeant and his
+post having been allayed by the chauffeur’s acknowledging me, I found
+somewhat better quarters, now that my cot had come, out in the
+half-finished stone garages into which the Fiat had been coolie-handled.
+The chauffeur being hopeful, for some reason, of making the wop
+contrivance go on again in the morning by gasoline rather than by
+coolie-power, we turned in, he, somewhat less downhearted, curled up on
+the back seat of the car. Perhaps he thought whatever injuries the car
+had suffered would heal during the night.
+
+He actually did get the thing under way again, long after sunrise, on
+three or five or seven of its four, six, or eight cylinders, as the case
+may be, and we covered twenty-seven kilometers along a now merely hilly
+road. Early during that feat we met and paused to chat with a French
+lieutenant driving back to Muongsen the Citroen _chenille_ that had
+carried the general-in-chief to Xieng Khuang, the same in fact that had
+crossed the Sahara the year before; and but for that fatal optimism of
+motorists so long as their wheels are turning we might easily have had
+him repair whatever damage had been done us. Apparently neither of us
+thought even to mention our difficulties of a few miles back, yet almost
+as soon as the “caterpillar” was out of sight my substitute for a
+chauffeur halted before another cluster of huts, called Sala Nam-lien,
+and refused even to try to go farther, saying that something disastrous
+would happen to us if we attempted to proceed. As nearly as I could make
+out from his ignorance of his father-tongue, the car was certain to
+explode and strew itself and us all over the Annamese chain if he
+annoyed it any longer. Possibly Italian cars do succumb to such fits of
+Latin temperament; at any rate I was in no position effectively to argue
+the matter, and assassination is regarded as more or less reprehensible
+even thus far from the haunts of civilization.
+
+Though I only suspected it then, I was destined to know Nam-lien better
+than I know my own birthplace, nay, than Paris or Rio de Janeiro. It
+consisted of a dozen thatched huts with earth floor and wattled walls on
+either side of the wide space that served as road, one of them the
+_sala_ or rest-house for French travelers. Two bare woven-bamboo cots
+and a rough wooden table comprised the furnishings of this, unless one
+also counted the soft layer of dust on the earth floor as a rug. A few
+things such as eggs were purchasable about the village—though I should
+have been in hard luck indeed if I had not taken official advice and
+brought a few canned supplies with me—and a native was available to boil
+water and do the simplest form of cooking.
+
+There I spent the rest of the day, sitting in the automobile, the only
+really comfortable place in the vicinity, reading, with a walk for
+exercise’ sake thrown in. During that time I had much intercourse, in so
+far as that is possible without a common speech, with one of the
+principal tribes of the region. I had known the Miao, or, as the French
+call them, the Méo, in southwestern China, though there my acquaintance
+had been mainly with the “Flowery Miao” in their extravagantly colorful
+dress. These were “Black Miao,” a much more independent tribe, and with
+almost no color in their black or dark-blue garments, sometimes set off
+by a dull red or purplish wine-colored scarf about the waist. Both men
+and women, often riding on horses, were a wilder tawnier type than their
+flowery relatives, their sturdy independence as plainly to be seen as
+their bare feet; for none of them, of either sex, had ever tortured
+their feet with shoes. Their sunburned hair and eyes were more nearly
+brown than black, and both sexes wore the hair long. Most of the men had
+carelessly wound turbans of dark cloth, a few of them wore Chinese
+skullcaps and dressed their hair Chinese fashion, old Chinese fashion,
+more exactly, for the majority still had queues, often hanging unbraided
+loosely about their shoulders. Another custom among these sturdy
+mountaineers is the wearing about their necks of heavy silver rings of
+all shapes. These are evidently concerned with their tribal
+superstitions as well as being their idea of combining adornment with
+safe banking. All silver money that falls into their hands is turned
+into rings; men, women, even the children, all wear them, large and
+small, from mere twisted silver wire to veritable horse-collars, some
+with open ends, some fastened with silver padlocks. Sometimes there are
+as many as half a dozen on a single neck, even of men on their way to
+work in the jungle. The richest of them clanked like perambulating
+pawnshops whenever they moved.
+
+A critical observer might have wondered why they do not spend for
+shirting some of the silver dollars they turn into neck-rings. For the
+men wear a shirt or jacket that covers everything except what a shirt is
+most expected to cover, leaving bare a foot or more of the waist, with
+the navel as its central point of departure. But to every race its own
+ideas. The girls are not prudish, yet not at all forward. For their
+jackets, open almost to the navel and giving frequent half-glimpses of
+the breasts, were plainly designed for comfort rather than coquetry, as
+were their plaid skirts reaching hardly to their bare knees. The women
+walk with a powerful yet not ungraceful swing of the hips and a saucy
+flirting of their short pleated skirts, of which they are perhaps quite
+unconscious. Some of the men wear the tattooed blue panties ending in
+ruffles just below the knees that are common in Laos and the Shan
+States, but this is evidently due to extratribal influence, just as are
+the flowered silk gowns a few of the well-to-do among them wear after
+the fashion of the Chinese. The men, and sometimes the women, carry
+crude daggers in home-made sheaths; some had a long slender rifle, a few
+of them crossbows of a simple form, and most of them smoked or carried
+in their sashes pipes of sometimes elaborately tortured shapes. They use
+pack-oxen as well as little horses, but most of them, of both sexes,
+carry in a basket on their backs, though Chinese influence perhaps has
+led some to fasten two baskets at the ends of a short, stiff whole
+bamboo over a shoulder, thereby losing all the advantage of the long and
+supple shoulder-pole of China and Annam.
+
+Some consider the Miao merely Chinese who in centuries gone by drifted
+down from the north, with a history similar to the Hakkas, but it is
+probably a better guess that they are of a more nearly aboriginal tribe
+than the Celestials. Sturdy enough in their natural habitat, they must
+live at least three thousand feet above sea-level to be either happy or
+healthy, just as the Annamese must stick to their miasmic rice-plains;
+and they never descend below that altitude if there is any way out of
+it. Of all the races of Indo-China the Miao are probably the most
+self-sufficient. In common with some other mountain tribes of Laos they
+burn off steep hillsides, normally every nine years, for their
+cultivation. When they need new fields to plant, they fell the biggest
+trees and set afire great patches of the jungle-forest, destroying wood
+and lumber enough to supply a large city for years to come. This burning
+is partly to drive off the blackleg fever and partly to give room for
+grass for their cattle; and as cinders make good fertilizer for a few
+years, their crops are abundant until it comes time to burn off another
+mountain-side. As this burning by patches has probably been going on for
+centuries, much of Laos is not so forested as one expected it to be, but
+often covered with those half-grown forests which the French call
+_brousse_. Yet with all the uneven growth there are many magnificent
+panoramas of densely forested ranges.
+
+
+I spent that night in the _sala_, and when, late next morning, it was
+still evident that the substitute for a chauffeur did not propose to do
+anything about it except to settle down there in the vain hope that some
+day some one might come along who might do something to help us out, I
+set out to walk. It was still about fifty miles to Xieng Khuang, but
+certainly there was more prospect of reaching there on foot than of
+having help turn up within the same length of time. Moreover my supplies
+were distinctly limited, even if the loss of time could be made up by
+abandoning the best part of the trip and returning as I had come.
+Besides, I am far better at walking than at waiting, and nothing after
+all is more delightful than walking, especially on so splendid a route
+for it—high enough not to be too warm, the great jungle-forest opening
+new vistas, springing new surprises at every turn, at every rise of
+ground, so few of the tiresome human race as hardly to bother at all,
+and at every corner the chance of an adventure. So I swung off almost
+light-heartedly, even if to the mingled worry and disgruntlement of the
+worthless chauffeur, who evidently lost face with the village by this
+flaunting of his services and protection.
+
+I had walked about ten alluring miles, or perhaps merely kilometers,
+when to my vast astonishment a big automobile came suddenly down out of
+the west upon me. In the capacious back seat, the top stowed away behind
+them, rode the general-in-chief of the French forces in Indo-China and a
+colonel aide. Having waited in vain for the conveyance that was to have
+brought me to Xieng Khuang in time for them to return by it, they had
+been forced to drain the province of its last thing on wheels, the
+Berliet—one car of each make seemed to be the rule here; once the road
+was officially opened they should know which performed best—of the
+_vice-commissaire_. Never have I been more pleasantly treated by a
+chance passer-by on the road. If the general’s importance weighed
+heavily upon him he was an expert at concealing his burdens. To be sure,
+the fact that he also had been the guest of the ruler of Xieng Khuang
+whose hospitality I had been—enjoying? no, let us say suffering—since
+stepping into the Fiat of distressing memory, and that, having expected
+me two nights before, they had about come to the conclusion that I had
+been eaten by a tiger, may have had something to do with his geniality.
+For it seemed that the donkey masquerading as a chauffeur who had been
+sent for me had not disclosed to the harassed head of the province an
+inkling as to our plight, though one can telegraph in Indo-China from
+almost any tree-top.
+
+The general was strongly of the impression that I should come along with
+them rather than continue my walk until the returning car overtook me,
+and the semi-guest of a government does not flout the opinions of its
+chief military officer. In fact the general had an insistent way about
+him, though it had on the surface none of that big-stick gruffness of
+too many of our own army officers. The change from walking to riding
+left me somewhat chilly; the general insisted that I put on his coat,
+which had been lying in the seat beside him. I protested that the
+insignia of such high rank did not become me, that he himself might need
+the garment. His reply was typical of an old campaigner in many lands,
+of one who had served France in almost all of her colonies:
+
+“_Je n’ai jamais froid, jamais soif, jamais faim, jamais chaud._ When
+any of these things threaten me, _je fume une pipe_, and they disappear
+in a puff of smoke”—and suiting the action to the word he lighted up
+again.
+
+We were soon back at the _sala_, where there remained enough of my
+meager supplies so that I could do my share toward providing a luncheon.
+While we ate, the fellow who had been sent to fetch me told the general
+some badly pronounced tale of why it was dangerous to try to go on,
+lifting the hood to prove it. Again it seemed to be something to the
+effect that he could make the car go all right, but that if he did so
+the engine might blow up at any moment. He seemed to convince the
+general, who was probably no automobile expert, and naturally the
+colonel always agreed with a superior of such high rank; hence there was
+nothing left but for me to agree also. I might have stayed on at Sala
+Nam-lien and, if the Berliet and its Annamese driver had the luck that
+had been denied the Fiat under the inexpert ministrations of the son of
+caution, have been picked up by it sometime next day on the way back
+from turning the general over to other transportation in Muongsen. But
+the general insisted that I give them the pleasure of my company as long
+as possible, and on second thoughts it was better not to trust myself to
+spend another night within reach of that mixed-breed chauffeur.
+
+[Illustration: The chief sport of the mountain-dwelling Miao of Laos is
+the making of assorted neck-rings of silver dollars that might better be
+spent for shirting]
+
+[Illustration: The Miao women of Laos take no back seat for their men]
+
+[Illustration: A Kha woman of the semi-wild tribe that is said to be the
+aboriginal race of mountainous Laos]
+
+
+Besides, it was a pleasure to travel over that great mountain-side road
+once more, even though I might be less successful in climbing back to
+the plateau, and although the platform-bed in the rest-house of Muongsen
+was several times harder than the cot I had left over the mountains. The
+lieutenant of the Citroen “caterpillar” had the Guadeloupe-driven car
+ready for action again, and in spite of all the decorating Muongsen had
+done for him the general insisted on continuing eastward toward
+nightfall, leaving me alone in the riverside _sala_ like the janitor of
+a ball-room amid the embellishments of an abandoned banquet.
+
+I set out once more next morning before daylight upon that great climb
+from Muongsen to the plateau of Laos. This time fogs all but hid the
+world about us and made the road-gangs along the way seem more miserable
+than ever. But this Annamese chauffeur knew his trade and his car much
+better than did his predecessor in my affections, and while a man not so
+disgusted with a continual run of bad luck as to be willing to take some
+risk for a change might have complained at the speed he made on the
+brinks of bottomless precipices, we were soon at Nong-het over the
+summit again, then back at Sala Nam-lien, still adorned with the stalled
+Fiat, in time for a skimpy lunch. From there on, the Annamese let no
+grass grow under his wheels. In fact I wonder if any ever grew again in
+some of the spots they touched in our semi-aërial dash across the
+eastern half of Tran-ninh. It was startling to be able to race what
+seemed hundreds of miles along an excellent, even though grassy,
+automobile road through so primeval a region.
+
+There was some more climbing, though it was by no means so strenuous as
+the ascent up the face of the Annamese chain, and at length, beyond a
+waterfall that came down the mountain side within hand-shake of the road
+in a beautiful cascade of many strands of silver among jungle and forest
+choked rocks and, dashing under the highway, dropped far down below to
+form a reunited stream, we came out of the great forest that had
+surrounded me ever since the first afternoon out of Vinh. Here, a
+hundred kilometers from the border of Annam, amid a plateau growth of
+scattered oak-like scrubs, there was much open country, of reddish
+rich-looking soil, though few inhabitants. In fact all Laos, largest of
+the five divisions of Indo-China, being about the size of Italy and not
+unlike it in shape, has, if the recent census was accurate, only 818,755
+people, of whom 280 are French and eight—count them, eight!—are
+“foreigners.” About us lay vast rolling meadows of great beauty, as
+virgin as a world in which animal life had not yet been created. The
+general-in-chief, who had seen most of them, thought this great plateau
+of Xieng Khuang the finest region in the French colonies. There were
+some cactus-trees of striking forms; then the mountains closed in again
+on a narrow valley that seemed once to have been broken up into
+rice-fields, though this may have been an illusion. Small villages
+appeared once more, this time of the real Laosians, villages of thatched
+houses raised on poles well above snakes and possible floods, with a bit
+of cultivation about them. Each house had rounded gable walls at either
+end, one a kind of family veranda all but covered with a curving roof of
+thatch, where visitors are received and the family does its gossiping,
+the other a granary and store-room, where the cooking also seemed to be
+done. The walls of the houses, everything possible, in fact, were made
+of strips of narrow palm-leaves folded over a stick, forming panels
+overlapped like shingles. Many small but stout horses dotted the
+landscape here and there. I had not seen a grave for days; the Laosians
+dispose of their dead like real Buddhists; the Miao pile heaps of stone
+over their corpses.
+
+This time fortune showed me unusual favor and we made the whole trip
+from Muongsen, including the stop at Sala Nam-lien, in a single day, as
+we might have done three days before but for the overcautious chauffeur.
+In fact we turned up at Xieng Khuang toward the end of the daily siesta,
+and I spent the rest of the afternoon in French formalities with the
+colonial officials of that distant but little known Garden of Eden.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER XV
+                      DOWN-STREAM TO LUANG PRABANG
+
+
+Having ended on Saturday instead of Wednesday afternoon the first stage
+of a journey that at best had seemed in the beginning hardly possible in
+the time available, I made a tight fit even tighter by spending Easter
+Sunday in Xieng Khuang. For the _commissaire_, so long absent from the
+world at large that time had come to be a mere academic expression to
+him, had done so much to make my stay agreeable that to have hurried
+away again next morning would have been to increase a common French
+impression that to Americans personal convenience is more important than
+courtesy. Visitors do not come often to Xieng Khuang; besides, there are
+things of interest there, and whatever is worth doing, be it only a
+journey, is worth doing well.
+
+There was the _commissaire’s_ zoo, for instance, a score of pets ranging
+from some distant member of the leopard family to monkeys that looked
+like puffballs, fittingly domiciled in his garden, with or without
+chains to assure their allegiance to a master from whose hand the
+fiercest of them ate with murmurs of pleasure. There are said to be more
+species of animals in the forests and on the plains of Tran-ninh than in
+almost any other space of similar size on earth—tigers, panthers, bears,
+gaur, gibbons, monkeys, deer, pythons, boa-constrictors, and a host of
+lesser serpents; a cobra was chased out of the yard of one of the French
+residents that very day; and the museum maintained this quarter-century
+past by a tropic-emaciated Frenchman was easily proof that the province
+is an unspoiled paradise of the ornithologist and the collector of
+butterflies and insects.
+
+I spent the morning in a hot walk about the scattered thatched town,
+climbing to jungle-guarded half-ruined old stupas on the rounded hills
+behind it. Priests of the yellow robe had again appeared, dawdling about
+their simple monasteries with the leisureliness of men who know that to
+step on an insect means to be set back that far on the long and
+difficult road to Nirvana. Speaking of insects, the people of Tran-ninh
+boast that they are never troubled by mosquitos, because, all their
+domestic animals being at home under their pole-legged houses, these
+pests are so busy down there that they never trouble to rise to human
+height. The custom of living over unconfined stables is further
+exonerated by the warmth the animals are reputed to give the
+householders above—for so thin-blooded a race needs its central
+heating-plant also, during the short tropical “winters.”
+
+It was market day, and well fed, almost haughty women, with many
+brilliant reds and yellows in their dress, were squatted in the shade
+over their semi-tropical vegetables, and pottering homeward again in
+long broken files. They had almost nothing in common with the Annamese
+women, except their sex and the protection of the French. Their lustrous
+hair piled in great black glossy heaps on the top of the head in an
+intricate fashion, usually with a saffron, rose-yellow, or red cloth
+about it, and most of them with stomachers of similar gay colors, they
+were striking examples of the unrestricted portion of the human race. In
+complexion they were much like ourselves plus many layers of tan, but
+were noticeable for bad teeth. The Laosians do not enamel their teeth,
+but most of them chew betel-nut; and the women seem less unequal
+socially to the men than their Muong, even their Annamese and Chinese
+sisters.
+
+In Xieng Khuang there stands a monument to six Frenchmen, five of them
+killed in France during the war, and one, like the dozen native soldiers
+whose names also appear on it, _tué par les Méos rebelles_. It seems
+there was a great Miao uprising in the Laos during the winter of
+1918–19, the bloodiest battle of which took place at Nong-het, between
+the “rebels” and the French, more exactly the native soldiers of the
+French. It was no surprise to be told that German agents and money had
+fomented the rebellion, though saner French residents admit that the
+Miao had long wished to be ruled by their own rather than by Laosian
+chieftains. That was no unnatural demand, and by the terms of the peace
+now reigning between them and the French it has been granted. Nor does
+this change seem to put any great burden upon Miao justice, for in cases
+involving more than five piastres the contestants may appeal to the
+French authorities, whom they evidently trust more than they do their
+own chieftains. The end of the rebellion was typical of these
+stiff-necked mountaineers. The French issued an ultimatum that the Méo
+must submit by 9 P.M. on a certain day; and at 8:59 exactly, while the
+French commanders sat with their watches in their hands, the Miao
+chieftain strode in and capitulated. The puzzle still remains how a race
+without clocks managed to time themselves so dramatically. Now they seem
+quite friendly, though it is not they who put their palms together above
+their heads and come to the squat when a white man goes by.
+
+It would never do to quote to our own prudish-tongued land all the
+conversation that passed between perfectly respectable members of the
+little French colony of Xieng Khuang over the _apéritifs_ and the
+Parisian repasts in the _commissaire’s_ big living-room. For it turned
+largely on matters of sex, even when, perhaps even more so when, any or
+all of the three or four French wives of the little official group were
+present; and those who have lived with them know that the French can
+bring a blush to the cheek of a New England spinster without having the
+least notion that they are skirting the precipitous edge of frankness.
+One wife, I recall, was vehement in her denunciation of the Germans
+because they have so many children to the family, implying that as the
+French are unable to compete in that line with their enemies over the
+Rhine, her beloved native land was sure to be the loser in the end. Yet
+she and her husband, an officer in the colonial gendarmerie, had been
+married nearly fifteen years and showed every outward evidence of being
+able to add to the decreasing population against which she fulminated.
+But I did not ask the obvious question. It was amusing, when it was not
+pathetic, to observe how all these groups of French colonials seem to
+consider it axiomatic that they should not be expected to produce
+children. Their very manner voiced their conviction that in consenting
+to “exile” to the colony which they helped to rule they had done enough
+for _la patrie_; and those who contributed a child or two in addition
+were rather pitied, and pitied themselves, as the victims of an unkind
+fate or a deplorable accident. In this community of Xieng Khuang, for
+instance, the ten or more French residents, most of them married, had
+one child—that is, legitimate white child—a baby girl.
+
+The huge _commissaire_, now half invalid but still a great force in his
+province, and beloved apparently by all classes of its residents, was a
+survival of the earlier colonial days, when a man in his present
+position was virtually king of all he surveyed. His half-dozen
+pure-blooded dogs all wore stout canvas pants to assure their offspring
+against mixture with the local mongrel breed. But some officials had not
+taken the same precautions with themselves, and had several
+brown-complexioned children at school in Hanoï, though they were
+bachelors. I am sure they would not look upon mention of this as unkind
+criticism, any more than it is meant as such. It is all in the point of
+view. Neither they nor any of the French wives and husbands composing
+the official community of Xieng Khuang saw anything wrong in this
+situation. Had some prudish member of the English-speaking races opened
+a discussion on the subject with them, he would not have got beyond
+being assured that it would have been inhumane of the _commissaire_ to
+expect a French wife to share with him the hardships of his productive
+years, when Tran-ninh was a houseless and an iceless wilderness, and
+that he was therefore compelled to vent his affections upon the native
+women.
+
+
+The _commissaire_ could still, with assistance, hoist himself into the
+back seat of a topless automobile, and that afternoon we drove out to
+see the archæological puzzle of Xieng Khuang Plain. It did not need the
+assurance of my immense companion, or of his antithesis, the
+Midi-tongued vice-commissary, whose Berliet was still the only available
+vehicle in Tran-ninh, to see that this great plateau should have a great
+future, in the modern Western sense of the word. Its climate is as
+delightful as its soil is fertile. One French colonist had already
+covered a bit of it with splendid fields of wheat and corn, while his
+pineapples were almost worthy of Hawaii. Yet somehow I caught myself
+hoping that it would never serve the exploiting portion of the human
+race as anything more than the excellent airplane landing it was
+already. Its present pristine glory was too infinitely removed from the
+horrible picture that sprang up in my mind as I listened half-heartedly
+to the enthusiasm of the two _commissaires_, of such plains in my own
+land debauched into cheese-box cities by real-estate “developers.”
+Humanity is scarcely so precious that it must be fed or housed at the
+loss of such glorious spaces as this one across which we rolled toward
+_les jarres_.
+
+Far out on the great plain, some miles from Xieng Khuang, are scores of
+immense stone jars, the mystery of which no man has yet solved. They are
+made of what the French call _grès_, a natural composite not unlike
+sandstone, yet quite hard; and they are so large that those I climbed
+into reached to my armpits and gave me almost room to squat. Many have
+fallen, some only partly, but the majority are still upright, for all
+the centuries that have rolled over them. Stone covers, some of them
+broken, lie on the ground among the jars, many of which are decorated
+with little clay Buddhas set up on them by the pious modern inhabitants.
+There are five hundred or more of these jars, in two groups a few miles
+apart; and the French, after their manner, though there is no money to
+be made out of them, have built what they call an “automobilable” road
+to both clusters. But even they have not been able to solve either the
+origin or the purpose of the jars. Made by some race lost in the
+prehistoric mists—for recorded history found them already here, much as
+they are to-day—they are the more puzzling in a region where there is no
+natural stone of this kind whatever. Amateur archæologists of Tran-ninh
+contend that they must have been brought on rafts across the lake that
+probably existed then where the plain is now, and set up on little
+islands that have become the knolls on which they still stand a bit
+above the general level. Were they used for storing food, as
+hiding-places of bootleg liquor, or were they places of burial? So far
+as appearances go they might have been either coffins or granaries.
+There are no signs of bones in them, however, no broken bottles or
+food-remnants either. But then, even bones would have had time
+completely to disintegrate during the unknown centuries since the stone
+age in which the jars may have been made, as they certainly were long
+before the pyramids, and probably before the monuments of Stonehenge.
+There remains the further mystery of how that prehistoric people, of
+which there are still found stone hammers, knives, and what seem to have
+been arrow-heads, fashioned these great hard-stone receptables.
+
+
+Notwithstanding the time I had lost I decided to go on with the trip as
+planned, trusting to my own speed and my ability to induce speed in
+others to bring me through in the time available. So I was off once more
+before daylight, the _vice-commissaire_ doing me the honor not only to
+lend me his Berliet and his Annamese chauffeur again, but rising to
+accompany me in person across the plateau and on into magnificent
+pine-forests. The road, planned to be continued some day across the next
+province to the borders of Siam, died out about seven in the morning at
+a hut or two called Muongsuoi. Within an hour the alleged horses that
+had been sent there days before to wait for me were ready, and I was off
+on the next stage of the journey. Two Laosian men chosen by the
+_commissaire_ himself did their utmost to accompany me, as I hurried on
+all day by a trail through abrupt mountains covered with mighty forests
+along which it would have been a delight to saunter for weeks. Now and
+again a tropical rain did its best to delay me—first, as a warning, some
+isolated drops, astonishingly large and heavy, then suddenly a general
+tambourining on the leaves, quickly followed by torrents of water
+beating down in mad fury, the light lowering until it seemed to be
+growing dusk at midday. But I could not afford to be delayed merely to
+save myself and the men behind me a drenching, and except for the
+briefest noonday halt for cold fare washed down with red wine I raced
+incessantly on, into the evening, darkness, the blackest of nights. The
+little horses had long since lost all ability to carry me at anything
+like the pace I could make on foot, even had it been possible to ride
+them in the stumble-footed tunnel beneath the forest where it was
+impossible to see an obstacle even at the moment of sprawling over it.
+The last hour or more was down what felt like a great trough in the
+earth, set at a sharp angle, and in this I slid down to the Nam-khan
+River at 9:30, establishing a new record; for never before or since,
+many a French colonial and native ruler has assured me, has any human
+being gone from Xieng Khuang to Muongyu in a single day. I admit it
+sadly rather than boastfully, however, for though fate seems always
+driving me on at top speed, the record I would prefer through such
+scenery and bucolic delights as lay behind me would be that of the sloth
+family.
+
+Out in the far outskirts of the earth one who at home is but a mere
+human insect among our wealthy and political great, our nobility of
+prize-fighters, football and movie stars, had been mistaken for a real
+personage, and the king of Luang Prabang himself had sent his own
+son-in-law to bring me to his capital. He was to be the fourth or fifth
+king I had ever seen, the second or third with whom I had spoken or
+exchanged the hand-clasp of greeting, and the only one, perhaps forever,
+who was so glad to make my acquaintance that he had sent to fetch me.
+The kindly reader, I am sure, will pardon my emotion. For I suspect that
+even he would boast of such extraordinary honors, equal in their
+Oriental way to being commanded to present one’s self at court in
+Windsor—with a foot-note as to Queen Mary’s sartorial requirements!
+
+The plain facts of the case were that _Chao_ Duong Chan—the “Chao”
+meaning prince in the language of this region—seemed to look upon me,
+even in the incredibly mud-bespattered state in which I burst forth from
+the jungle night, as his social superior. At first, evidently, he
+refused to believe I was I, not because of the bedraggled rags to which
+the day had reduced what no longer ago than that morning had been a
+costume fit to be seen at a _commissaire’s_ table, but because a
+telegram had apprised him of my departure, and every one in Laos knew
+that I could not reach Muongyu that same evening, whatever the evidence
+of the five senses. But in time the impossible was admitted
+accomplished, and the rest-house to which I had retired became a place
+of pilgrimage. We were down in the realm of woven bamboo splints again,
+and they were used for everything—walls, floors, rafters, granaries,
+fences, beds—though not for boats, as in Annam. The building to which I
+had climbed well above the damp and snaky ground was therefore so soft
+underfoot that there was really no need to open my cot, though nothing
+in the form of furnishings was to be seen. Gradually a murmur in the
+night became the sound of muffled voices; torches flashed here and there
+in the darkness, and at length there crept silently up the very slanting
+ladder masquerading as a stairway one barefooted smiling Laosian man
+after another, each bringing me a bouquet of heavy jungle-flowers in a
+banana-leaf cone, the traditional greeting to honored visitors to the
+kingdom, as the flower necklace is in Hawaii. Behind these village
+authorities, after a fitting lapse of time, came the prince himself,
+manfully erect, who presented a document from the government of Luang
+Prabang setting forth his rank and explaining the errand on which he had
+been sent. He was a slender young man of aristocratic features, this
+_gendre du roi_—son-in-law of the king, to translate one of the two
+languages on the paper he had laid before me—a prince in his own right
+many generations before he had married one of the royal daughters. He
+wore a reddish _sampot_, the adult diaper of Siam, Laos, and Cambodia,
+and a white jacket of French military cut, starched and spotless, as did
+also the chief local authority. He spoke excellent French; had in fact,
+unless my memory fails me, been at school in France, and all in all was
+a man whom any one might have thanked a king for offering as a companion
+on such a journey as lay before me.
+
+
+We were off down the small river about seven next morning. To have
+started earlier, with a heavy fog filling the whole valley of a stream
+bristling with rocks and rapids, would have been dangerous. The king’s
+son-in-law and I each had a boat, though I should have liked better to
+have had him with me, for the sake of information as well as
+companionship. The craft were what the French call _pirogues_, long and
+narrow, as slim and long in proportion as a lead-pencil, sharpened at
+both ends, and just about as easily turned over. They were frailly made
+of boards barely an inch thick, tied together with vines, with a
+prairie-schooner top of banana-leaves held in shape by a network of
+bamboo splints, and movable back and forth as sun, wind, rain, or lack
+thereof suggested; and mine had a raised platform with a mat in honor of
+my super-princely rank. It was of about the size, and the comfort, or
+its antithesis, of the mule-litter of northern China, which it strangely
+resembled in its jerky overbalanced gait, teetering so incessantly that
+I could not even write rough notes in it. I had four boatmen, two at
+each of the slightly raised, distant, pencil-like ends of the craft, all
+wearing tattooed breeches but not much else. Sitting cross-legged and
+half pretending to paddle, these typical _piroguiers_ of Luang Prabang
+seemed the personification of laziness, until one saw them in the
+rapids, the rock gorges, the genuine waterfalls they dare to shoot.
+
+The prince in another pirogue always followed me as a sign of my high
+rank, not, I am sure, because he wished me to risk the countless rapids
+first. Each time I was certain the frail craft, writhing beneath me like
+a living being, would be dashed to pieces on the rocks that bristled
+everywhere and on which it scraped its bottom ominously at every drop. I
+was astonished, astounded as often as we emerged safely from another of
+these racing foaming perils. Yet though they worked like demons in the
+rapids, these boatmen of the Nam-khan, compared with the Chinese, with
+the Indians of the Amazon when they shovel water, were lazy after all,
+dabbing their narrow paddles into the stream and pulling them out again
+like playing children, and most of the time resting completely from that
+exertion. Again I disclaim any desire to criticize; had theirs been my
+lot in life I should certainly have worked as they did, rather than at
+the beast-like pace of labor that prevails in China. It was natural,
+since they can always pole their way up-stream, that they had never
+learned to toil like their South American prototypes, except in short
+spurts in the rapids.
+
+Now and again the prince and I got out and walked ahead, while the
+boatmen stopped to study a maze of rocks that we were quite satisfied to
+let them try alone. Every few hours a cluster of jungle houses stood out
+in a tiny half-clearing on the high bank of the river, and most of these
+we visited. At each village the chief and the other men of importance,
+usually including several yellow-robed priests, came to pay their
+respects. Instead of snatching off hats or head-cloths, and performing
+an antic between a courtesy and an exaggerated bow, the form of salute
+in Luang Prabang is to come to a complete squat. Obsequious as this
+looked, it was evidently merely a gesture of politeness, for even the
+men of highest rank who had any intercourse with the prince,
+representative of the king in person, dropped to their haunches, and
+rose to human stature again only when the interview ended. In making any
+request of him, or in receiving anything from him, even the boatmen
+squatted, holding both hands, palms together, above the head. The
+village notables wore _sampots_ of many colors—purple, pink,
+grass-green—topped by khaki coats of uniform cut, which they evidently
+donned in our honor. Always they brought us leaf-wrapped cones of
+flowers, usually on banana-leaf platters. A supply of these bouquets of
+greeting, one concluded, must be kept on hand for emergencies.
+
+The women were usually the first to see us, for they were constantly
+bathing themselves and their naked urchins in the stream; and they were
+clever at getting into or out of their barrel-like single garment
+without unduly exposing themselves. I saw more bathing on that journey
+down the Nam-khan than during my two years in China, and less
+uncleanliness in all Laos than in the smallest Chinese village. The
+women of Luang Prabang, especially along the rivers, are no burden to
+their fathers and husbands so far as clothing is concerned. In every
+village we visited they were naked to the waist, and did not know it; at
+least they did not seem to be conscious that in other, often less modest
+lands, such a costume might be frowned upon. They wore a single piece of
+cloth, spun from cotton grown on the spot, and woven on hand-looms under
+their long-legged houses. Colored in the thread with dyes made from nuts
+and vegetable growths of the region, this strip is simply wrapped about
+the waist. Or, in the case of a few of the youngest, which in that
+backward land still means the more modest women, the unmarried perhaps,
+or at least those who had not yet borne a child, it is wrapped about the
+lower two thirds of the breasts, with correspondingly more of the legs
+showing. Thus one recognized the girls of flapper age by their shapely
+brown legs and the matrons by their resemblance in costume to the Venus
+of Milo. Once a child has arrived, the exposure incident to suckling it
+seems to overcome virginal modesty; or in the absence of offspring pride
+no doubt soon joins carelessness in casting out the habits of
+maidenhood, so that there were displayed the scrawny pendent udders of
+the sterile as well as the withered rags of old age. The sight of a
+white man appeared to move some of the women to cover their breasts, a
+mere matter of deftly raising the garment. Whether this gesture was a
+recognition of the susceptibility of the French—who surely could not
+have issued non-exposure decrees!—or a mere matter of politeness, like
+the male squat, there was no means of knowing.
+
+Though they did not thrust themselves forward, the women of this region
+were not so retiring as those of most of the Orient. Some of them were
+distinctly good-looking, well formed, their skin of an almost golden
+color, enhanced by the frequent bathing of most tropical peoples; and at
+least one of these village maidens would not have looked at all out of
+place in a famous Broadway review—except that she was far too modest
+both in dress and demeanor for such company. With the conversation at
+Muongsen still in mind, I took care not to touch these fair damsels in
+getting photographs of them, though with difficulty, since it has become
+almost second nature during two decades of wandering among camera-shy
+peoples to arrange by hand my subjects to the camera’s liking. It would
+have been a sad ending to so officially attested a trip to have been
+charged with one of the most serious crimes in the Laosian code!
+
+The people of Laos struck me as the most pleasing unspoiled race with
+which I came in contact in all my Far-Eastern wanderings, though I might
+have formed a less favorable opinion if I had tried to make my way among
+them without being sponsored by king and princes. We brought up at the
+end of the first day at Sop June—at least so it sounded—in time to
+photograph most of the inhabitants before concocting a dinner from our
+supplies over a beach fire. There was barely room in my narrow boat at
+the foot of the village bank to set up my cot, but with China and its
+crowded, filthy, noisy waterfronts in mind this was a haven of rest
+indeed. Next morning two big fat otter came out to gaze upon us from the
+foot of the often precipitous shore, looking in their wet coats, shining
+in the slanting rays of the rising sun, as large as seals. To my
+satisfaction, since I have none of the hunter in my soul, they
+disappeared in the water again before my royal companion could get his
+rifle ready, much less aimed. Something convinced me that he, too, was
+just as well pleased, that the Buddhist within him really condemned this
+aping of ruthless Western ways, with the added Oriental risk of losing
+face if he had shot without bringing down the quarry. Birds in
+comic-opera costumes flitted singly and in groups across the faces of
+the inclosing forest walls, a flock of parrakeets, screeching like a
+dismissed chorus, sometimes flying clear across the river. Big fish now
+and then jumped well out of the water, as if to take a look at us or at
+the scenery. Or they may have been reconnoitering, for curious
+wigwam-shaped fish-traps, held down by heaps of stones on a platform
+part way up them, are placed at the heads of rapids on the Nam-khan.
+Then there were weirs, draining into jug-shaped baskets with small
+entrances which forked prongs made almost impossible as exits, with a
+single opening in them just wide enough for the narrow pirogues to slip
+through; and even these were made impassable to the fish by a row of
+bamboos, one end of each held down in the river and the upper floating
+one pointing down-stream.
+
+The villages were as much alike, once one had seen a few of them, as our
+own stereotyped cities: from half a dozen to a score of
+woven-bamboo-and-leaf shacks, light as big baskets, raised on posts, in
+a little clearing overrun with children, curs, pigs, and chickens—four
+forms of life all but universal the world over—and little else except
+the surrounding jungle. Chickens of both sexes, perhaps I should have
+specified, for in this one matter the people seemed to believe in
+monogamy and to have as many roosters as hens. It was in one of these
+villages of the Upper Nam-khan that I saw the first of still another
+race, the Kha, which some consider the real aborigines of these forested
+mountains of the ancient kingdom, as they are indubitably the oldest
+remaining inhabitants. They were wild but harmless-looking men, wearing
+earrings, their women adorned with still larger ones. A Kha woman down
+from the mountains—for like the Miao they are a highland people—had
+tattooed arms and, at least while the prince and I were there, was
+completely clothed from neck to calves, in derided contrast to the
+river-village women. In another village several dirty Chinese peddlers,
+plainly not much liked by the natives, sat almost insolently on the soft
+bamboo-splint floor of the clean _sala_ maintained for more cleanly
+visitors. It was in this same village that our boatmen knelt before the
+assembled authorities and asked that new boats, or new boatmen, be
+provided, as they were tired or homesick or something. To any one
+accustomed to seeing the boatmen of China toil many times harder, often
+day after day for weeks at a time, than these tropical fellows had for
+little more than a day, there was something childish about them. The
+petition was promptly refused, and in due time we took our leave and
+went on down the ever wider and gradually less swift rapid-bristling
+river.
+
+
+Finally, in the middle of the second day, we were forced to grant the
+boatmen’s request, for there came a rapid so Niagara-like that no boats
+can navigate it. All our baggage and supplies were turned over to
+coolies, behind whom we walked in blazing noonday sunshine and deep sand
+around the falls to another pair of pirogues, waiting for us ever since
+the prince had passed here on the slow up-stream trip to meet me, and
+were off again down an increasing river until well after dark. The new
+crew were twin brothers of the old, and the change of boats had made
+little change in the endless series of rapids, for rarely was there not
+at least one roaring in our ears—until, toward evening, they came
+farther and farther apart as the river spread out into a wide and almost
+placid stream. Palisades and precipices had marked the place of changing
+boats; farther down there were rock cliffs again, the ever larger river
+cutting circles among them, mighty rocks that seemed to have tumbled
+down from them jutting forth from the edge of the stream. The current
+was still swift, yet after a long afternoon of racing down-stream there
+was the same jagged heap of mountains just behind us, turning reddish
+lilac and purple from the setting sun ahead. Bamboo rafts, with little
+houses on them, made their way more slowly down the stream, so placid
+now that it mirrored the ever-lower hills densely covered with
+jungle-forest, networks of lianas, some trees completely shrouded in
+vines, whole hillsides of huge banana-plumes, flashes of birds across
+them. Women wearing nothing but skirts were getting water from the
+river; others, especially at sundown, were bathing themselves and their
+naked children. Bonzes in dirty yellow robes, loafing, or horse-playing
+to use up the energy their calling does not permit them to waste in work
+or domestic happiness, showed themselves here and there along the way.
+The people seemed darker, burned to an almost Madrasi color.
+
+We landed well after dark, climbing a long flight of steps cut steeply
+in the earth bank, to find ourselves in a considerable town, as towns go
+in Laos, with a big, almost a palatial rest-house for distinguished
+travelers, and a military commander in khaki to greet us. To my
+astonishment—and to that of many others, it transpired—I found that my
+boat trip was ended. From just over there in the woods, it seemed, an
+“automobilable” road ran to the royal capital, and a Ford would come for
+us in the morning. Royally done indeed! Usually it takes nearly a week
+for this journey down the Nam-khan, but the high waters of spring had
+favored us beyond all precedent.
+
+Next morning we strolled a couple of kilometers through splendid
+forests, to ride twenty-seven more in America’s most plebeian conveyance
+along a fair dirt road that the jungle had already covered with grass in
+places, through incessant forest. Kapok falling from huge
+vegetable-cotton trees whitened the ground in large patches. Some of the
+tribes of Indo-China weave it into cloth. There were trees so covered
+with white flowers that they looked incongruously like those of our
+northern clime shrouded with the wet snow of spring.
+
+I reached Luang Prabang town before the sun was high, being delivered at
+the door of another hospitable _commissaire_, this time still young and
+energetic and with a French wife equally devoted to her official duties
+and to their two small children. All the little French colony was still
+breathless with the news the telegraph had brought them the evening
+before, that I had accomplished the journey from Xieng Khuang to their
+very doors, as it were, in three days. There were hints that they
+credited this partly to American black magic. For in this wilderness
+land of perfect telegraphic service I had not only exchanged greetings
+with my family in Hanoï every evening except the one on the river, but
+the authorities at Xieng Khuang, Luang Prabang, Vientiane, even Hanoï,
+Paris itself for all I know, had been instantly advised of every step of
+my journey.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XVI
+              KNIGHTED IN THE KINGDOM OF THE DIVINE BUDDHA
+
+
+Luang Prabang, venerable capital of the ancient kingdom of the same
+name, is a spacious town of a few wide French streets, softly paved, if
+at all, with narrow Laosian streets like lovers’ lanes between them. It
+is well wooded, with roomy yards usually whispering with palm-trees. In
+other words it is not a city at all, in the crowded, noisy, Western
+sense, but a leisurely congregation of separate dwellings of simple
+lines, each in its ample garden-park, or at least with sufficient ground
+so that its opinions or doings need not interfere with its neighbors. In
+short Luang Prabang town is in many ways what idealists picture the
+cities of Utopia to be, whatever insurance companies may think of the
+fire-risks involved in more thatch than tile roofs. It sits on a bank of
+the upper Mekong, more exactly the Me Nam Khong, that snaky
+dividing-line between Siam and at least half of Indo-China, which in
+time becomes one of the most important rivers of the Far East. Just here
+it happens that it is not the dividing-line, for a large chunk of Luang
+Prabang kingdom lies on the Siamese side of the river. Tiresome persons
+of statistical temperament tell us that the capital stands 340 meters,
+about 1135 feet, above sea-level; but one would hardly know it from the
+number of overcoats required. In fact, though it was still April, my
+host the _commissaire_ knew the futility of expecting a guest from the
+temperate zone to sleep until he had been cooled off with a jaunt by
+Ford through the tepid after-dinner night.
+
+There were two Fords in Luang Prabang, that which had come for me at
+Don-mo and one belonging to the king. It would of course have been bad
+manners for the _commissaire_ openly to emphasize his real bosshood by
+sporting the better car; besides, the garage mechanics of the capital
+are as inexperienced as filling-stations are rare; hence the
+transportation that had been placed at my disposal lacked something of
+the regality of its rival, particularly in the matter of diligent
+polishing. There were also some horses, a few elephants, several
+victorias, even three or four rickshaws, though these, except perhaps
+that of the king inside the palace grounds, might as well not have been
+imported, for there were no men in this languid Eden both able and
+willing to pull them. Nearly every one walks in Luang Prabang,
+barefooted and silent, unless he travels by boat. For the most important
+conveyances are the long narrow pirogues, some of them surprisingly
+large, hollowed out of single tree-trunks, which ply the Mekong and the
+Nam-khan that flows into it above the town. On the bow of each boat
+there is almost sure to be a bouquet of flowers, a pretty custom, even
+if it is probably based on a superstition, and one in keeping with this
+gentle people of a land so kindly treated by nature. Huge fish are
+caught in the Mekong, weighing a hundred and fifty, two hundred,
+sometimes even two hundred and fifty—not pounds, but kilograms, fish so
+big that it takes ten men to carry one of them and one man to carry a
+severed head. It is easy to understand what the flap of such a fish-tail
+sometimes means to the fishermen in their frail vine-tied canoes. But it
+is just the fishing for such a people in such a climate; for every time
+they catch a fish they can—and usually do—rest for a week without going
+hungry. Racing pirogues as much as twenty paces long lie bottom up on
+bamboo-horses under little thatch roofs here and there upon the high
+weed-grown river-bank at the edge of the capital, being used only in
+November during the annual regattas. For rowing—more exactly paddling—is
+the athletic sport of Luang Prabang.
+
+The main street of the capital, dying out at either end in semi-jungle,
+is lined by a long market, facing the entrance to the king’s palace. But
+for that matter there is a market just outside the royal palace in
+Madrid, too, and many beggars also, which here seem to be unknown,
+unless we count the yellow-clad priests sauntering along with their
+begging-bowls in the early morning. Even such an Eden as this is not
+without its serpents, however; and rattling chains on the legs of
+prisoners working about the town make strange contrast both to its quiet
+gentle atmosphere and to the regality of its king. The gay garments,
+especially of the female branch of the population, make doubly
+picturesque the market and the long lanes of greenery that represent
+streets. The women of Luang Prabang capital, unlike their country
+sisters in the rest of the kingdom, usually wear a thin silk or cotton
+scarf of bright color over their bare breasts, half covering them, and
+slipping coquettishly off when they wish to make an impression on one of
+the opposite sex. The Laosian women of the bush think no more of their
+uncovered breasts than they do of their bare feet; these sophisticated
+girls of the silken scarf in the capital recognize them as an asset.
+There was something about their every gesture that recalled our own
+flappers—with betel-nut taking the place of gum and of lip-stick. Yet
+their coquetry may be largely innocent, for the French assured me, in
+some cases rather regretfully, I thought, that in Laos there are few of
+the _congaïe_ facilities so common in Annam.
+
+The king’s wives, and the girls of the royal family and of the wealthier
+class, wear a kind of swimming-vest, usually white, in addition to the
+brilliant scarf. Perhaps his Majesty does not wish charms meant for his
+own eyes alone to become even visually common property. Yet the royal
+wives themselves on the way to market had about them a hint of coquetry,
+even toward a foreigner, which seemed to be totally lacking among their
+sisters of the bush. Many of the girls of Luang Prabang wear enormous
+silver or pewter anklets, some of them weighing twenty piastres or more.
+Others wore chains of ten-cent pieces. So many French silver piastres
+have been turned into these anklets, bracelets, the metal collars of the
+Miao, and other forms of adornment that it is little wonder Indo-China
+now uses almost exclusively paper money.
+
+Luang Prabang means Kingdom of the Divine Buddha. What more natural then
+than that there should be many Buddhist temples, shrines, and
+monasteries in its capital? Indeed there are so many on both sides of
+the river that the town might easily be mistaken for a holy city,
+devoted to priests and pilgrims. Some of the temple compounds are bare
+ground scattered with yellow-roofed buildings of Siamese or Burmese
+character, with big stupas made of mud bricks and more or less overgrown
+with vegetation, with mere cells raised on piles, in which languid
+bonzes meditate. Others are covered with groves of trees, shaded by
+masses of palm and banana leaves; but in them all great calm and quiet
+reigns. Just behind the main and market street fronting the royal palace
+is a rocky ridge called Pagoda Hill, two hundred feet above the plain
+and half encircled by the Nam-khan by which travelers unworthy of Fords
+come to the capital from the east or south. It is worth climbing if only
+for the view it offers of the idyllic city and its surrounding
+semi-jungle; and along it ramble queer old religious structures,
+including one built over a gigantic “footprint of Buddha” in the native
+rock. What feet that far-famed son of India had, and what seven-league
+boots, to have scattered, so long before the coming of railways and
+Fords, his bare footprints so far and wide over the Orient!
+
+Some of the old priests of Luang Prabang are honored as demigods by the
+people of the kingdom. They step forth from their holy dwellings only
+with a ceremonial parasol held over them, by one of the surrounding
+group of youngster attendants in the same bright yellow; and the French
+_commissaire_ himself was almost servile in the respectful politeness
+with which he treated the most holy of them all, whose attitude
+sometimes suggested that it was he who had the upper hand. These bonzes
+may not even kill a flea, though the provocation must often be almost
+too strong to be borne; but they may eat beef and the flesh of other
+animals killed by some one else. Even the cynical French residents say
+they are real celibates, that they would be expelled from the order if
+they were caught breaking this particular vow. It might be harder to
+keep were not all young men expected to be priests for a year or two, as
+those of European lands become soldiers, only the ones to whom the
+monastic life appeals retaining the yellow robe, which the great
+majority soon discard for marriage. Little less sacred than the priests
+are the dogs that all but overrun the capital, eating the food laid out
+for gods and bonzes, much as the sacred oxen of India take their toll
+from pious shopkeepers. Held in a kind of Buddhist reverence by the
+people and more or less protected by the priests, these mongrels are not
+even subjected to muzzle or license, though the French would like to
+improve their rules of sanitation to the extent of exterminating the
+harmless but self-confident curs.
+
+But the French do not insist on imposing their religious beliefs on
+their wards and colonies. In Luang Prabang they go so far as to provide
+for the up-keep of the temples and monasteries in the annual
+governmental budget. In a way this is a means of supporting the
+educational system, for the priests act as schoolmasters to their
+novices. In great contrast to China, there is not a single Christian
+missionary in all the Kingdom of the Divine Buddha, not even a Catholic
+priest. There was almost a sense of relief in finally getting completely
+beyond the reach of missions, however good an opinion one may form of
+mission work in some of its phases. For in certain moods one feels a
+species of boastfulness in our insistence that so alien a race give up
+its own beliefs in favor of our more or less generally accepted guess as
+to the after-world and how to reach it, in our Western efforts to impose
+our philosophy of life upon a people that has a not unworthy one of its
+own, and one that seems to make them much happier than we are.
+
+
+I had come to Luang Prabang, however, on the special invitation of its
+king, and my chief duty and pleasure was to pay him my respects.
+Ignorance is ever embarrassing, so the natural prelude to such an honor
+as a royal audience was to find out something concerning the king and
+his kingdom, as one skims through the chapter-headings of an author one
+is about to meet. That ancient land is hardly known even to our
+encyclopedias, to say nothing of our school-books, but a few basic facts
+were available in the jungle-framed French offices of the capital,
+offices strangely similar in their atmosphere of _paperasses_ and
+official dignity to those French staff headquarters I had served in
+during the war. Languid as it is, Luang Prabang’s history is not without
+its exciting moments. For its origin one must go back to that great
+Nan-chao kingdom, with its capital at Tali-fu in the southwestern corner
+of China, founded in 629 A.D. and destroyed six centuries later (1234),
+not by the Chinese but by their Mongol ruler, Kublai Khan. The Kingdom
+of the Divine Buddha is one of the remnant kingdoms of the great Tai
+race which, once holding a part of what is now China, was gradually
+driven west and south, losing or attaining culture until it varied from
+the high civilization of the Khmer to almost illiterate tribes,
+according to where its new lot was cast. Best known to the outside world
+by the Siamese word for man (_lao_), or as _shan_, from a Chinese word
+used in Burma, this people still prefers to be called Tai.
+
+Laos has eight divisions, of which Luang Prabang is the largest and the
+only one still boasting a king of its own. A century ago most of it
+belonged to ethnologically related Siam. I have already mentioned that
+this greatest division of French Indo-China, about as large and of much
+the same shape as Italy, has fewer inhabitants than Detroit. This is
+largely because it was so often sacked, and its people killed by the
+Chinese, who wanted the land, or carried off by the Siamese to populate
+her sparsely settled regions along the Menam. A traveler who visited
+Luang Prabang in 1872 found it the most compactly built city of Siam,
+with the single exception of Bangkok, which it in some respects
+resembled. But of several disasters the greatest seems to have been in
+1887, when the Black Flags of Taiping days in China burned and almost
+completely destroyed and depopulated it, so that perhaps it is not by
+choice of its up-and-coming citizens that it is so roomy, pastoral, and
+ideal a city to-day.
+
+The same altruism and love of their fellow-man that has given the French
+the arduous task of protecting the rest of Indo-China led to their
+present position in the affairs of Laos. About the time the Chinese from
+Yünnan were pillaging Luang Prabang kingdom a Frenchman named Pavie was
+sent there on a mission. The father of the present king, born _Tiao_
+Kham Souk, who lived from 1837 until 1904 and reigned under the name of
+Ritthithamaronjsac—though he was more popularly known as King Zacharine,
+and probably not entirely on account of his sweet disposition—was an
+absolute despot, descended from a long direct line of similar rulers.
+For the Kingdom of the Divine Buddha has been a kingdom as far back as
+the memory of its people goes. Zacharine became a great friend of Pavie,
+at least according to such data as was available in the French
+government offices of Luang Prabang, and when the Siamese failed to
+protect him, as they had promised, against the Chinese, he went to Siam
+under Pavie’s wing; and later, in a quarrel with the Siamese, who had
+burned and looted and carried off most of the people of Vientiane and
+Xieng Khuang, he made the mistake, like his royal neighbors of Annam and
+Cambodia, of calling in the French. By 1893 Siam had been compelled to
+give up all claim to this ancient kingdom and to the magnificent
+highlands of Tran-ninh, and all Laos became a European dependency under
+the protection of France.
+
+
+My host the _commissaire_ chose a victoria for our descent upon his
+royal ward, no doubt feeling that to have used his Ford would be to call
+unnecessary attention to himself as the only possessor, besides his
+Majesty, of so regal a conveyance. Besides, the leisurely open carriage
+was far more in keeping with the calm and woodsy atmosphere of the
+metropolis of Laos. The king’s palace is a building mainly in French
+style, more like a hotel with a steeple-cupola than the abode of an
+Oriental potentate. It stands in a fairly spacious yard, not quite large
+enough to be worthy the name of park, on the eastern bank of the Mekong,
+at the foot of the hill graced by Buddha’s footprint; and it was
+somewhat in disorder. Chairs were kicking about the foreign-style
+dining-room, and there were other suggestions of a late party and
+oversleeping servants. The building was quite new, it seemed; there were
+few decorations on the walls yet, though a man had come all the way from
+Paris to cover them with paintings. Evidently he had found the climate
+not conducive to constant work, particularly work paid for by the day by
+a protected people; for surely he could not have discovered a means of
+squandering his time in the social amenities of the king’s harem, and
+there was no other means of accounting for his Oriental leisureliness of
+execution.
+
+Royal servants went to announce us, though word of our coming had been
+sent ahead, and while we waited I mentally reviewed the information I
+had gleaned from the Oriental Almanach de Gotha it had been my privilege
+to consult at French headquarters on the eve of my royal reception. I
+make no claim as to its exactness, and still less to that of my memory;
+but there is a probability that both of them are approximately correct.
+_Tiao_ Sisavang Vong Somdet Prah, present king of Luang Prabang and a
+direct descendant of an endless line of its kings, was born in 1885, on
+July 14—no wonder he is a favorite of the French—and succeeded his
+father Zacharine in 1904. His mother was not his mother, so to speak.
+For _Tiao_ Thong Di, first wife of Zacharine, still known as the Queen
+Mother, and real ruler of the royal household, bossing even the king
+himself in domestic matters, according to reliable verbal information
+from a French and feminine source, had no male children. The second-rank
+wife, _Tiao_ Thong Si, daughter of a high mandarin related to the royal
+family, gave birth to the present monarch; but in Laos as in China every
+child is officially the offspring of the first wife. His father
+Zacharine seems to have been a temperate person, considering his
+advantages, for the king has only three half-brothers and six
+half-sisters; though it is possible that Zacharine died with certain
+secrets buried in his bosom, Occidental fashion. Half-sisters and
+half-brothers may marry in Luang Prabang, by the way, which is not
+without its effect on the reigning house. Also _Tiao_ Sisavang Vong
+Somdet Prah has at least this much in common with his English colleague,
+that he had an older brother who died, leaving him unexpectedly heir to
+the throne.
+
+The latest calculations were that the present king had fifteen wives and
+about forty children; on this second point he did not seem to be very
+exact himself, no doubt finding it difficult to keep strictly up to date
+in domestic events within his household. Yet he did not look either worn
+or dissipated, when presently he came in to shake hands and sit down
+with us, perhaps because the Queen Mother takes so many of the palace
+cares off his shoulders. Seven of his sons were studying at the _Lycée_
+in Hanoï; and the crown prince, Savang Vathama, then sixteen, was
+nearing his bachelor degree in a similar institution at Montpellier in
+France, with the avowed intention of studying law afterward. The king
+himself had a purely Laosian education under Buddhist priests until King
+Zacharine sent him to a French _collège_ at Saïgon. Later he went to the
+Ecole Coloniale in the Rue de l’Observatoire in Paris, where French
+youths prepare for a career in the colonies. He came home once when his
+father was ill, but upon his recovery was sent back to France to get
+together a printing establishment with Laosian characters and to learn
+how to run it, which makes him more or less related to the late kaiser,
+bookbinder.
+
+The king was plump and pleasant, handsome for his race, by no means
+betraying his all but forty years. It was easy to imagine the girls of
+Luang Prabang, if not indeed of France, “just crazy” about him, quite
+aside from his royal rank. He had a frail Oriental mustache and that
+beautiful bronze-brown complexion of his race. Unlike most European
+monarchs he is purely of the blood of those he reigns over. But his
+Majesty indulges in the chief minor vice of his people, and the only
+blot on his manly beauty, and not even that of course to the fair ones
+of his own land, was that his teeth, though they were not enameled, were
+discolored and his lips somewhat bloody with betel-juice. Even now he
+seemed to be nursing a quid, though with a regal finesse that it would
+have done our secret chewers of tobacco good to see.
+
+[Illustration: Wind-sieved rice is the principal food of the rural
+inhabitants of Luang Prabang]
+
+[Illustration: With a silk scarf worn loosely over a shoulder the women
+of Luang Prabang capital are more coquettish than their waistless
+sisters of the country districts]
+
+[Illustration: The palace of the king of Luang Prabang sits placidly on
+the bank of the upper Mekong]
+
+[Illustration: The king turned out his chief dancing-girls and masked
+male entertainers for my approval]
+
+He wore a white cork helmet, a black bow-tie about a standing white
+collar on a stiff white shirt with the round cuffs of a decade or more
+ago, and a snow-white three-button coat which, in so far as my meager
+knowledge in sartorial matters is trustworthy, was of the latest model.
+The fact that the middle buttonhole was attached to the upper button may
+have meant either a dreadful ignorance of Western ways or merely
+unseemly haste in leaving his harem; or it may have had no significance
+whatever. His feet were quite properly incased in low black shoes of
+faultless last and luster, but—let the spinster reader blushingly turn
+the page here—he wore no trousers! His rank and calling, it seems,
+forbade him these final touches to an otherwise perfectly European
+costume. Instead, his thighs were inclosed in the _pha_ or _sampot_,
+such as is worn by both sexes in Siam and adjoining countries under
+Siamese influence. It was a kind of short skirt, evidently of silk and
+of colors verging on the gaudy, drawn between the legs and tucked into
+the belt at the back, reaching to just below the knees in front and
+“rather less than ‘arf o’ that be’ind.” Naturally a full-fledged king
+could not leave the hiatus uncovered and keep his self-respect.
+Therefore between _sampot_ and shoes the royal legs were clad in silk
+stockings of which the most regal young lady of our own land might have
+been proud—except that in her case they would no doubt have been of a
+color to deceive the uninformed observer into thinking she wore no
+stockings whatever, whereas in backward barbarian Luang Prabang this
+would have been bad form. These were jet-black and reached so far up the
+back as to suggest that they were held by a band about the waist.
+Indeed, it was immediately evident that the king had missed a splendid
+chance for extra decoration by not wearing a pair of red garters just
+below the knees.
+
+A goodly proportion of the royal income must be spent on stockings. For
+I was assured, not merely by common rumor but by all the Frenchwomen in
+Luang Prabang—of whom there are three or four—that his Majesty will
+under no circumstances wear anything but silk about his shapely legs,
+and that a stocking with the slightest hole in it is immediately
+discarded. It would be easy to imagine his wives, of whom he fortunately
+has fifteen, scrambling for these discards of the royal wardrobe, and
+racing for their darning needles, were it not that in Laos even the
+wives of kings do not wear stockings.
+
+But do not for a moment gather from all this that _Tiao_ Sisavang Vong
+Somdet Prah had the slightest hint of the barbarian in his appearance.
+Except for the sacred _sampot_ in place of trousers, and the proof of a
+king’s income between that and the shoes, his Majesty would have
+attracted no attention whatever in a Palm Beach crowd, unless it were by
+his athletic build and his agreeable undissipated smile, and, at close
+range, the light touch as of fresh blood on his lips beneath the thin
+well clipped mustache. In fact of all the kings with whom I have
+hobnobbed he was the most pleasing to look upon, and to all outward
+appearances a gentleman not even given to bullying his wives. His lapel
+was adorned with the little red button of a French decoration—the Legion
+of Honor, I fancy, though I confess to a deplorable ignorance of these
+important matters—and a gold watch-chain hanging from this drew
+attention to what was evidently not the thinnest of watches in the
+outside breast-pocket. A signet-ring not unlike those of our West Point
+and Annapolis graduates encircled his wedding finger, and he wore a cord
+of what looked like ordinary string about each wrist.
+
+This cord decoration is something peculiar to Luang Prabang. The
+_commissaire_ wore them also, as did his baby son; possibly his charming
+lady did too, though I am not sure that mere women are worthy of them.
+Cords are put about the wrists amid elaborate ceremonies and must be
+worn for at least seven days if they are to be effective in preserving
+the wearer from evil. The king himself had come to tie those about the
+wrists of the _commissaire’s_ newly born son and heir and thereby assure
+it constant good luck through all the menaces to health among European
+infants living in the tropics. The French are good colonists partly
+because of their wisdom in keeping up and even taking part in such
+simple and harmless native customs, which the average American and
+British colonial official would probably scorn as “poppycock,” if he did
+not actually try to uproot them. “Poppycock” it is, to be sure, but the
+effect which a little sympathy in such matters has on native populations
+is not.
+
+
+The king spoke a fair but throaty French, but was not exactly talkative
+in that tongue, whatever he may be in his own and in the intimacies of
+his harem. In fact, contrary as it may be to our movie and popular-novel
+conception of royalty, he was rather bashful, with a school-boy dread of
+making a mistake in the foreign tongue he was using, and at the same
+time evidently fearful of doing or saying anything that might displease
+the French. His demeanor was a curious mixture of regal old-family
+pride, a pride reaching so far back that we mere moderns from a
+barbarian world were not worthy of knowing the secrets of life behind
+it, and of the anxiety of the star in a royal movie being filmed under
+the eye of the manager of the great Jewish corporation that is “putting
+him across.” All of which did not remove the first impression that
+_Tiao_ Sisavang Vong Somdet Prah would be a fine fellow to take along
+for a tramp or a swim, and that it would not be long before one could
+begin calling him “Prah Old Top.”
+
+All hands seemed a little ill at ease. Having exchanged the usual
+platitudes, we stood about doing nothing much, paused with admiring mien
+before a new bronze bust of the king, covered with medals and
+decorations, and a good likeness, though of no better color than his
+actual complexion, but showing neither the betel-red lips nor the
+cigarette that drips almost incessantly from them. His Majesty handed
+out atrocious French tobacco-monopoly cigars worthy of a Chinese
+_tuchun_, but wisely stuck to cigarettes himself, smoking one after
+another in rapid succession. We chatted a little on general subjects,
+the impression growing that the king’s French was good enough if only he
+could have thrown off the feeling that it would be an intolerable
+disgrace for a king to make an error in speech. Can it be this that
+makes modern monarchs and presidents so taciturn? Among the thoughts
+that passed between us I gathered that he wished to visit the emperor of
+Annam when Khai-dinh celebrated his birthday the following year. I have
+never heard whether he was able to do so, but if he and his
+fellow-protégé, whom he so far had never met, were allowed to get
+together out of hearing of the French they must have had a great
+chat—provided of course that they had a language in common.
+
+At a mere suggestion from my companion, and as if it were a relief from
+a tense situation, his Majesty graciously stepped to the main doorway of
+the palace, an excellent jet-black background for a blazing tropical
+sunshine that outdid anything Hollywood can devise in lighting-effects,
+and posed for his photograph. Another merest hint from the _commissaire_
+and _Tiao_ Sisavang Vong Somdet Prah went off at once like a small boy
+to dress up for his picture, and came back in a surprisingly short time
+in his most regal robes, a radiant royal costume quite beyond my power
+to describe. All the medals on the breast of bronze near-by were now in
+place on the living model; he was again in women’s silk stockings, quite
+evidently brand new, and this time held up by round-the-leg garters of
+brilliant hue. A green and saffron flowered-silk _sampot_—but how
+foolish for a man who cannot even describe a ball-dress well enough to
+give his wife any conception of it to attempt so impossible a job as
+this!
+
+Never have I found a king more docile in meeting my every suggestion.
+Barely a whisper from me and he ordered his throne-room decked out in
+its coronation best, had his royal attendants summoned. Cringing
+flunkies brought in swords of state, big golden bowls, a marvelous hat
+of half cowboy half women-of-the-plume-days style, studded with jewels,
+and with a Burmese-pagoda top. Ascending his throne, the king assumed
+his most regal aspect, his white gloves flashing like those of a traffic
+policeman during a Catholic procession. The master of ceremonies of the
+palace himself brought tables and other regal paraphernalia to offset my
+lack of a tripod; two men in green, each holding a great sword, knelt
+fearfully at the foot of the throne, and—and I muffed the picture. No
+doubt the nervous tension of photographing kings on their thrones in
+their coronation-robes would be enough to cause an even calmer and more
+experienced photographer to misjudge tropical light conditions; at any
+rate I so under-exposed that strip of film that only those with keen
+eyesight can make out more than the general lay-out of the throne, and
+the king’s white-gloved hands on his richly sampotted knees.
+
+Lesser catastrophes have left broken hearts, but it did not so much
+matter about that throne-room picture after all, for, again at the
+merest suggestion of the _commissaire_ and as promptly as a circus seal
+obeys its trainer, the king once more stepped to the spotlighted doorway
+of the palace, hat, robes, medals, and all, to give my camera another
+trial, finally posing with his French boss at his side. The
+_commissaire_ was also in all his glory. Three great medals that proved
+he had done this, that, or some other brave deed—for he was not a man to
+have successfully bootlicked this, that, or the other high
+authority—blazed over his heart. His white uniform coat and black
+trousers had fancy neck, waist, wrist, and trouser-seam bands; he wore a
+sword, with rich belt-tassels, and carried white gloves, though the
+white _casque_ on his head and the black shoes on the blistering
+pavement had nothing unusual about them. In short his dress was as out
+of keeping with his plebeian name of Mill—were names translated—as it
+was with the simple backwoods life about us. Finally his Majesty, of his
+own volition unless my eyes were momentarily off their guard, was
+graciously moved to insist that I also stand beside him in the doorway
+spotlight and let the camera again do its worst. In vain did I plead my
+unworthiness to be thus immortalized, like one of the boon companions of
+his Majesty, particularly in my vagabondish incongruities of rumpled
+semi-whites, once-tan shoes still half decided to be black, a necktie
+that insisted on the right to be temperamental in a tropical climate, a
+pocket bulging full of—how should I know what? The king, I long
+afterward noticed, wore quite a different face in these pictures in true
+royal garb than that of the genial boulevardier he presented in mufti,
+something like his own elder brother, with all the cares of state upon
+his shoulders.
+
+But all this was only the beginning of the honors that were heaped upon
+me before that epoch-making day was done! Immediately after the signal
+distinction of being photographed by the resplendent _commissaire_ at
+the side of the even more luminiferous king I was knocked breathless—or
+at least I might have been if the _commissaire_ had not that morning
+whispered to me the possibility of what was to happen next, probably
+before the king himself had thought of it; in fact there had been subtle
+hints to that effect as far back as Xieng Khuang, if not in Hanoï
+itself—by the announcement that his Majesty was about to confer upon me
+his most regal decoration, the most prominent of the many medals on the
+breasts of the _commissaire_ and of the king himself, both in bronze and
+in the flesh, the highest honor of which this protected Oriental
+potentate is capable, something corresponding in Luang Prabang to the
+order of the Rising Sun in Japan, to wit: the order of the Million
+Elephants and the White Parasol! For you must know that Luang Prabang is
+not only the Kingdom of the Divine Buddha but even more officially the
+Kingdom of the Million Elephants and the White Parasol, just as King
+Sisavang Vong Somdet Prah’s real title is Master of Heaven and of Life.
+I do not know whether it is actually claimed that there are so many
+pachyderms in the kingdom at the same time, but a little exaggeration is
+always admissible in the tropics; or it may be that the souls of
+departed elephants are also included in the reckoning.
+
+The king announced his magnificent intention by a little speech in
+French, with a manner strangely like that of a school-boy sentenced to
+make the class presentation speech to a favorite teacher, and from it I
+gathered that I was to be decorated because I was the only American—and
+the word he used made it mean of either North or South America—who had
+ever done his humble capital the honor of visiting it. The only one of
+whom there is any official record, no doubt he meant, if indeed he was
+not indulging in a bit of royal spoofing; for it is known by many, if
+not by the king himself, that at least one Protestant missionary once
+came through the kingdom on a scouting expedition, and the chances are
+that he was American. But naturally he had not announced himself to the
+constituted authorities of a country that does not allow Christian
+mission work, and it may be that he did not enter the capital.
+
+I had hitherto always been under the delusion that the bestowal of an
+order meant the pinning on of the corresponding medal by the bestower’s
+own fair or sunburned hands, and with war days in France in mind I knew
+not what moment I might get a betel-juicy royal kiss on either cheek.
+But this dreadful misgiving was but another evidence of my appalling
+ignorance. On the contrary, to be decorated evidently meant merely being
+given permission to decorate myself. It is true that there was handed me
+later in the day an engraved diploma, in Siamese and French, bearing
+here and there three elephant-heads surmounted by a white parasol, and
+with my name written on the dotted line by a master penman who certainly
+had not learned his calling in a Buddhist-monk school. It was neatly
+rolled inside a section of bamboo to protect it from the rainy season
+that was almost certain to break upon me before I reached modern forms
+of transportation again. In fact I am not sure that the king did not
+personally bring me this diploma, though I do know that it was prepared
+in the French-staff-like government offices far from the royal palace.
+But the medal itself, the visible public proof that I have been honored
+beyond any of my fellow-countrymen, any of my fellow-hemispherites for
+that matter, I should have to spend many francs for in a
+department-store at Hanoï, if ever I reached there again. Being as
+Scotch of disposition as I am abhorrent of the red tape incident to
+making a purchase in a French department-store, I should certainly never
+have squandered that hard-earned money, even with the franc at one of
+its lowest ebbs, had not the family tyrant absolutely insisted, refusing
+even to discuss the matter. She won of course, and the gaudy
+elephantine-parasol trinket and the ribbon in Spanish colors that goes
+with it has been tucked away somewhere among my rarely-unpacked
+belongings ever since. Ah, those happy bachelor days when a man could do
+exactly as his whims or his conscience prompted!
+
+I might wear that medal now, or at least the modest lapel-ribbon that
+stands for it, if I did not realize the injustice that would be to those
+of my veteran friends who, having risked their eyesight and digestion at
+Paris and Chaumont over maps of the western front, are entitled to
+display similar adornments to an envious, disappointed world, or if I
+were not fearful of being mistaken for a visiting Elk or Moose or some
+other fraternal wild animal and dragged into the gilded cages provided
+for those creatures. My resentment at being forced after all to decorate
+myself, by way of the pocketbook, has subsided, for it seems the same
+rule is true of Phi Beta Kappa pins and class numerals; but I shall
+never entirely forgive Luang Prabang for bringing me as near as I ever
+expect to come to the divorce courts. For when everything was over, and
+I had broken the great news to my son at Hanoï in the telegrams we
+exchanged on that most auspicious occasion, which chanced also to be his
+fourth birthday, I discovered to my domestic dismay and perpetual regret
+that the order of the Million Elephants and the White Parasol is also
+conferred upon women—at least of France and allied countries—and that if
+the king had suspected that I had a wife—queer I did not show it after
+nearly five years of married life!—he would have—but what is the use of
+bewailing what is past and done with and irreparable?
+
+
+The decoration speech over, the king ordered out his dancing-girls,
+deathly pale with hastily floured faces, and his male entertainers, in
+masks meant to be terrifying, the gaudy colors of their festive garments
+contrasting with the scarcity of soap discernible through the crevices
+of their costumes. They posed rather fearfully. Some of the girls were
+as young as ten, I am sure, and certainly none of them were over twenty,
+for the king has a Broadway taste in these matters. Dancing-girls and
+masked male figures alike wore an elaborate head-dress in the form of a
+pagoda—the Rangoon style of pagoda, not those of China—which suggested a
+close cultural relationship between Luang Prabang and Cambodia. As to
+the welter of colors that flashed forth from them in the blazing
+tropical sunshine I shall not even attempt to say anything; just let the
+bootlegged imagination run riot, so long as you do not forget the
+reddish teeth and the swollen lips driveling with betel-nut that gave
+them the look of ghouls that had just eaten a warm corpse, or of
+harmless childish-faced trolls that had been caught in the act of
+gorging themselves with currant jelly in the royal jam closet.
+
+Neither the dancers nor their king gave any sign that I had outstayed my
+welcome; nor was I expected to back away from his Majesty when at last I
+voluntarily took my leave. But I have a suspicion that there was more
+frankness in the attitude of the baby elephant that was cavorting about
+the royal lawn in the wake of its chained and mahout-ridden mother. For
+when I tried to coax it into a proper filial position for a photograph
+the little beast set out after me in a manner entirely out of keeping
+with its status as the property of a tame king. So graphically could I
+still describe this experience when I reached Hanoï again that to this
+day my son regards the time when the elephant “switched its trunk” about
+me as the height of my intrepid career.
+
+The king of Luang Prabang keeps a number of royal elephants; and he is
+no nonentity as a business man either, by the way. Supplementing his
+salary, if the word suits a monarch, of forty-six thousand piastres a
+year, and thereby offsetting his consumption of silk stockings, he has
+much private property, including great forests and sawmills, in which
+many of his elephants work for him. For a time some of the royal
+elephants were assigned the task of dragging rollers used in the making
+of roads about the capital; but they are a tender beast, for all their
+size and reputed longevity, and even with only four or five hours of
+labor a day, at their two-mile-an-hour gait, with the privilege of
+resting every third day, two of them died from this unwonted exertion.
+The king, evidently no figurehead in his capacity as business manager of
+his personal estates and property, protested, and from four to six
+water-buffaloes to each roller now take the place of an elephant.
+
+In theory the many wild elephants in the Kingdom of the Divine Buddha
+also belong to the king. When new recruits are needed in the royal
+stables, some of the wild beasts are caught by digging pits. Then a tame
+and a wild one are chained together, leaving the wild elephant to tug
+furiously at a collar with sharp iron points in it. The most bellicose
+are fastened to a tree by a lasso about a hind leg until they are worn
+out with struggle and hunger, when the two largest _éléphants de chasse_
+available take the captive between them and shake and roll him until he
+decides, like the man who foresees the lawyer fees involved in an action
+for divorce, that after all he will be happier in the domestic state.
+Most of those captured do not wait for this third degree, but, suddenly
+resigned to their new fate, give in to the barbed collar and stroll
+homeward with their false brother, pulling up tufts of good grass as
+they go and calmly tapping each mouthful on a front foot to shake the
+earth off the roots before transferring it to their dainty mouths.
+
+
+Whatever the baby elephant may have meant by accelerating my exit from
+the palace grounds, the king himself evidently had no intention of
+dismissing me so cavalierly. For within an hour of our arrival home,
+that is, at the rambling one-story soft-brick house of the
+_commissaire_, with its crowing roosters—if I could rule a king I should
+at least banish roosters from the back yard on which the windows of my
+honored guests opened—his Majesty came alone in his Ford to return my
+call and stay to lunch. He had changed back into civilian garb—not the
+same garments of course in which he had first received me—perfectly
+European again except for another gay silk _sampot_ and black silk
+stockings out of a newly opened box. Were kings relieved of the task of
+dressing and undressing, what duties would there be left for most of
+them anyway? He was received like any other invited luncheon guest,
+though he was always addressed as _Majesté_ by the _commissaire_ and his
+well chosen wife, and the half-dozen French functionaries they had been
+able to scrape together in the kingdom. In lieu of a box of chocolates
+his Majesty had sent ahead some Laosian food that is served as dessert
+at the royal table. One dish was a kind of custard cooked in small
+cocoanuts, the base of the husk cut down to resemble the shank of a
+goblet, and preserving the cocoanut taste. Another was a kind of
+vermicelli covered with nut dust, not unlike a similar dish in China.
+The ordinary people do not indulge in such delicacies, which are
+reserved for the royal palace. Even there, according to my hostess,
+there are few changes of menu. The king was well versed in Western table
+manners, though he did not take a very active part in the conversation,
+which of course was in French. He showed up best as a sympathetic
+listener, and was easily amused. In so far as my own almost unknown
+country was concerned, he seemed to be particularly interested in the
+Mormons and in what the French call the _régime sec_. He laughed for
+some time in his merry yet kingly way when told that Brigham Young had
+forty wives and a corresponding number of children, apparently without
+seeing any connection between this and his own fifteen and forty
+respectively. Or it may be that he was laughing at the plight of Brigham
+from the vantage-point of his own experience. The _régime sec_, in other
+words, prohibition, he plainly did not understand at all, any more than
+does the average Frenchman, and there was nothing to be gained in trying
+to make clear the American point of view on the subject. He would of
+course have been horrified to learn that there are persons in that
+benighted wineless land from which I came who have never heard of his
+ancient kingdom; nor did I feel it quite safe to pad out the
+conversation by bringing up the question of silk stockings in its
+relation to our national economic problem, for one can never be sure
+just how sensitive kings may be on these very personal matters.
+
+It became more and more evident, however, that _Tiao_ Sisavang Vong
+Somdet Prah was not born anybody’s fool, even if circumstances and the
+foolishness of his father Zacharine had left him and his kingdom in an
+embarrassing position. There was something behind his Oriental-Gallic
+courtesy and his almost perpetual smile. Nor did he seem to take himself
+or his regality or his white elephants or any of the rest of his royal
+trappings too seriously. On this subject of white elephants, by the way,
+he mentioned that one was now supposed to be on its way to him, some
+Laosian merchants among his loyal subjects having captured or purchased
+such an animal that had been seen in a distant part of his kingdom. He
+thought Bangkok used to have one but that his Siamese peer was now
+forced to do without this adornment to their respective kinghoods. They
+were not white anyway, he went on, but rather a pinkish light-gray, like
+the albino water-buffalo; and his manner implied that whatever his royal
+cousin of Siam might think about it, a white elephant to him would be
+merely an interesting addition to his menagerie. “May you live as long
+as an elephant!” is a common form of greeting in some parts of the East;
+but quite aside from the doubtful kindness involved, it is based on one
+of those many mistaken beliefs of mankind, according to the king,
+corroborated by all the French present, who asserted that no elephant
+ever lives longer than have many men and women. As monarch of what may
+be the most elephant-infested corner of the globe he should be a
+credible witness on the subject.
+
+All through the luncheon the punka over our heads had moved in fitful
+spurts, for the coolie squatting on the cool _dalles_ of the veranda
+outside fell asleep even in the presence of royalty. His Majesty was as
+hard to get rid of as an awkward country cousin, and the hostess grew
+visibly fidgety before he finally remounted his Ford, for her other
+guests included the doctor who should long since have been back at the
+government hospital, and other functionaries eager to take up their
+protective duties again, yet who could not of course show any desire to
+leave so long as their monarch and master remained. One somehow had the
+feeling that a king would wish to get back to his affairs of state, or
+at least to his harem, as soon as possible, but this one gave evidence
+of so greatly enjoying his luncheon party that he seemed capable of
+sitting there forever listening and smiling.
+
+
+There are really four kings in the Kingdom of the Divine Buddha, or were
+until one of them recently died. None of them are to be replaced,
+however, as they pass on toward Nirvana, except this real one with the
+title of _Majesté_. The others are merely _Excellences_. Twice a year
+all the chiefs of Luang Prabang, which is a province of Laos as well as
+a kingdom, come to the capital for a conference under the French
+_commissaire_. It is a leisurely conference, one fancies, for the people
+of Luang Prabang, high or low, do not include the word “hurry” in their
+active vocabulary. Not long before, the king had gone to Hanoï, whether
+for praise or a scolding no one but the governor-general seemed to know.
+Nine of his suite missed the return train to Vinh, and one old mandarin
+wept like a child because he could not believe that anything,
+six-o’clock trains particularly, started at the very moment these
+strange white people said it would. He had been barely half an hour
+late, yet the conveyance had left without him! From Vinh, by the way,
+all but the most important members of the party had to walk home with
+the coolies, while the king proceeded by automobile over the route by
+which I had come. Even the prince who had been sent to meet me at
+Muongyu had made this long tramp. Evidently the position of prince has
+its drawbacks in an ostensibly absolute Oriental monarchy—for that Luang
+Prabang still purports to be, with the French merely advisers to the
+hereditary despot. You may marry a king’s daughter, but that does not
+mean that you may ride in the king’s Ford. But the travelers by
+automobile gained nothing in time, for the whole outfit had to wait a
+couple of weeks at Xieng Khuang until the baggage caught up with it,
+while the undressed monarch remained officially incognito until his
+trunks arrived. On another occasion a French aviator took him to his
+forest-girdled capital in a single day.
+
+There are ceremonial occasions when the king comes to the home of the
+_commissaire_, not by Ford but on an elephant, and is carried up the
+steps seated on his throne, white parasols over him and a great retinue
+about him. The French residents condoled with me particularly because I
+had not reached Luang Prabang _quinze jours_—a fortnight—earlier. For in
+the Kingdom of the Divine Buddha New Year’s had fallen on April 12 that
+year, and with it comes the ceremony of the _petit serment_, as
+distinguished from the _grand serment_ in November; that is, the
+swearing of fealty to the French and to the king—please note the order.
+Then the king rides on several elephants, I gathered, though probably
+only one at a time, and is carried through the town on his throne,
+followed by long processions of notables and mandarins in white jackets
+and _sampots_ of every color of the rainbow, if not indeed several which
+it lacks. The common people, all the inhabitants of the capital except
+the Annamese and the French, kneel and bow their heads to the earth, for
+then they must not look upon their king, though it is said a few of the
+least reverent sometimes do get a glimpse _à la dérobée_. To judge by
+the pictures French residents had taken of the recent ceremony it was a
+sight worth coming two weeks earlier to see. In them all the inevitable
+cigarette was dangling from the king’s lips; no ceremony is so solemn,
+no place so sacred, that _Tiao_ Sisavang Vong Somdet Prah will go
+without his smoke. As many a photograph of the few remaining European
+monarchs and their possible successors shows, he has good precedent for
+thus openly indulging. Perhaps it is a sign of increasing democracy; or
+such informal and plebeian habits may always have been shared by kings,
+though our expurgated histories do not mention them. Cigarette or Ford,
+however, the people of Luang Prabang take their king very seriously,
+more seriously than he does himself. The native doctor at the government
+hospital, educated in Hanoï and outwardly entirely French except in
+complexion, kneels and touches his forehead to the floor before he gives
+medicine to one of the king’s sons in the palace nursery.
+
+[Illustration: Knighted in the Kingdom of the Divine Buddha]
+
+[Illustration: Two royal elephants saw me off from the palace, the
+youngster showing a desire to make me depart on the run]
+
+[Illustration: A Miao woman on her travels carries bed and food]
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XVII
+                           SPEEDING SOUTHWARD
+
+
+From the capital of Luang Prabang I again broke all existing records by
+making the trip overland to Vientiane, the French capital of Laos, in
+five days. Normally this takes twelve, or at the very least ten, and
+every articulate person in the metropolis of the upper Mekong insisted
+that it would, or at any rate should, be quite impossible to accomplish
+this journey within the time I chanced to have at my disposal.
+Fortunately my ideal host of Luang Prabang, and a few others who had
+also seen our army in France, though neither he nor they had ever been
+in the Western Hemisphere, admitted that perhaps an American could do
+it, especially an American who had made the trip from Xieng Khuang to
+Luang Prabang capital in three days and a couple of hours. At any rate
+the _commissaire_ and the king he served offered to do all they could to
+help in what they considered a very dubious undertaking.
+
+Once again I loudly disclaim any desire to hurry; there is nothing I
+dislike more. Yet as between the misery of rushing and that of missing
+some important part of a country through which I am permitted to pass
+once in an existence I prefer to hurry. If only I had been born
+believing in the delightful doctrine of the transmigration of souls,
+with the assurance that there would be plenty of other lives after this
+one in which to roam through every corner of this interesting if often
+disillusioning old footstool of ours, no doubt I could be as phlegmatic
+and time-impervious as any Oriental backwoodsman.
+
+This time I had to hurry because the fortnightly steamer from Vientiane
+was to leave on the following Thursday morning, the first day of May,
+and it was already midnight on Friday when I finished my packing, got my
+bamboo-protected diploma of decoration safely tucked away and a few
+supplies bought, and turned from a final social evening with the
+_commissaire_ family into the last soft wide bed in some days to come.
+It was doubly too bad that I had not arrived _quinze jours plus tôt_—a
+fortnight earlier, for then I should not only have seen the ceremony of
+the _petit serment_ but I might have avoided the hardships both of
+hurrying and of the overland trip. Perhaps I am getting lazy in my old
+age, or it may have been the climate, and the recent exertions of swift
+travel and royal excitement; at any rate I should have preferred to go
+down the Mekong with a floating village that had been prepared for a
+party of Frenchmen, and women, who had left just before I arrived. But
+for the automobile disaster on the way to Xieng Khuang I might have
+joined them; though I might not have reached Vientiane in time for the
+steamer, for with the water as low as it was then those floating
+villages sometimes take two weeks for the trip.
+
+More exactly they are floating furnished houses, a combination of raft
+and boats surmounted by three or four rooms and servant quarters, two
+small windows on each side of the superstructure, and all those
+refinements one expects among such a comfort-loving people as the
+French. At high water these house-rafts can go down the Mekong in fewer
+days than are required for the overland trip through the jungle, though
+by no means so fast as I proposed to make it; and at all times this way
+of leaving Luang Prabang is so usual that rarely does a Frenchman in the
+colonial service go by land. In fact most of those bound for the capital
+come up the river also, though that is a hard and tedious job—for the
+native boatmen. An official salary continues unabated irrespective of
+speed. Upon due reflection, no doubt, an income forever dragging at the
+heels of my personal exertions has much more to do with my weakness for
+hurrying than have any impressions on the transmigration of souls. This
+trip down the river is not only comfortable, but interesting and
+sometimes exciting, if not dangerous. The _piroguiers_ say prayers and
+throw food into the air, or place it, as well as flowers, on the bow of
+the boat before passing bad rapids, that the unseen spirits may be
+propitiated. But on board, all the amenities of French civilization
+prevail, from whist to the three-cornered drama, and romance has
+culminated and domestic disaster befallen during these long and too
+restful journeys.
+
+By trail Luang Prabang is 347 kilometers from Vientiane, nearly 225
+miles, which was quite a distance to be divided among five days, even
+with a slope of several hundred meters in my favor. Luckily those
+twenty-seven kilometers of “automobilable” road at the Luang Prabang end
+would again be useful, and there were about a hundred, with a growing
+tendency, stretching northward from Vientiane, leaving me something like
+a hundred miles of mountainous trail to cover on foot and horseback. To
+make matters worse it rained most of that Friday night, so that when I
+set off before the crack of dawn in the _commissaire’s_ Ford, the
+Annamese chauffeur did not promise to make record speed. This soft dirt
+road gets very slimy on the least provocation, and there were slopes
+enough during that mildly up-and-down ride through the forest to provide
+many a skidding place. By seven, however, we were back at the village of
+Don-mo, and if the local Frenchman had not been so slow in breaking away
+from his _congaïe_-shared breakfast in his thatched hut I should have
+been off again at once instead of half an hour later. Here I found three
+good horses, the _commissaire’s_ own mounts, with comfortable French
+cavalry-saddles. One was bestridden by a Laosian sergeant who had won
+two decorations in France, and one by another prince, _Chao_ Thong Souk.
+Related to the king and to my former emissary, _Chao_ Duong Chan, he was
+an equally delightful and helpful companion, a bit younger and, I
+gathered, unmarried, a youth of most pleasant manners and disposition,
+speaking excellent French. He had left the capital the morning before,
+with the horses, the sergeant, and half a dozen coolies carrying some
+supplies and all but the nightly indispensable portion of my modest
+baggage; now he and the coolies sped on ahead, leaving the sergeant with
+me as guide and body-guard, while I passed the unavoidable courtesies
+with the Frenchman in native garb.
+
+That over, we were off by a trail that had been cut more or less
+directly through the jungle-choked forest, first across the flat, then
+up a hill so steep that sweat ran even on horseback. Up this we had
+quite a job coaxing along the Laosian, or Pwun, coolies, who wished to
+stop and eat even before we overtook the prince and the others. When we
+did join them, it carried me back to my old care-free vagabond days to
+hear again the cry of “Kin kow!”—the Siamese equivalent to the “Come and
+get it!” of our army cooks—like the voice of a friend of long ago and
+far away. For the language of Luang Prabang is almost that of Siam, the
+writing quite the same. We ate and drank and pushed on again; one secret
+of breaking cross-country records is to give less than French attention
+to the delights of the table. It looked strange to see men wearing only
+a loin-cloth, and a dagger in a scabbard woven like a basket and held by
+a fiber band across the chest, putting up telegraph-poles; but the
+French insist on being able to talk to one another anywhere in
+Indo-China, and government ownership of telegraph lines has at least one
+advantage over the high-cost private system of the United States and
+China.
+
+No wonder the Chinese drove out the Tai! Two Laosian carriers bore
+between them about half the load of one Chinese coolie; they made much
+less speed, not to mention their many complaints along the way, and at
+that they had to be relieved every few hours, or at least at the end of
+a day. For a load I had often seen one Chinese jog along under day after
+day of from ninety to a hundred _li_ we had eight men; the cot or the
+valise that a Chinese coolie would carry at one end of his
+shoulder-pole, with as much at the other, and any odds and ends on top,
+these tropical fellows put in the middle of two long bamboos between two
+men.
+
+Do not misunderstand me as blaming them; as between the two I should act
+like the Laosians. But the difference indicated how great is the
+adaptability of the human frame, for these men were if anything larger,
+sturdier, certainly more visibly muscular than Chinese carriers. They
+were like those muscle marvels one sees in gymnasiums and in physical
+culture magazines, no good at all beside the wiry little shrimp when it
+comes to real sustained hardships. Unless hunger or the white man drives
+them, the Laosians do little work; they are so happy-go-lucky in their
+tropical fairy-land that their rulers even have trouble making them keep
+their communal granaries filled against possible famines. For that
+matter, neither do the Chinese work unless driven, of course; but they
+have been incessantly just one jump ahead of starvation for so many
+centuries that they do not remember, cannot imagine, anything else,
+until their frames have grown to endure, on far less food, what would
+kill a plump muscular Laosian.
+
+Up and down we went, through cool forests and over red-hot mountain
+ridges where too much good shade had been cut away for the telegraph
+line, with one hard river to cross. In this I lost the precious army
+canteen that had served me all through China, the sergeant having tied
+it to my saddle with a piece of vine. I might have known that there was
+no real string in such a land and been less careless about seeing my
+orders carried out. It was the most serious mishap of the trip, for
+without water always within reach even riding becomes a hardship in
+tropical jungle where streams are often hours apart.
+
+While prince, sergeant, and I looked in vain for the rushing stream to
+cast up the canteen, the coolies went bathing. They were all of the
+“black paunch” tribe, as distinguished from the “white paunch,” or
+untattooed ones, though it is not really the paunch that is decorated.
+The man of this branch of the Laosian or Tai race is never without his
+pants, even when he is stark naked. Nearly all of them are solidly
+tattooed in blue—invisible alas to the ordinary camera—from the waist to
+the knees, a wide tattooed belt with lacy ends about the floating ribs
+and a lacy effect like ruffles just below the bend of the knees. The
+design of this hip and thigh covering is always “lions” within squares
+with rounded corners, all touching one another, either as a protection
+against or to give the wearer the bravery of the lion. With the figures
+are mingled sacred texts, said to be Pali in Laosian or Siamese script.
+The priests especially are covered with these sacred writings, it is
+said, but one can never really know what is under the yellow robe. Women
+seldom if ever wear these tattooed substitutes for the Scotchman’s kilt,
+say those who should know, perhaps because they are in no danger from
+evil spirits, or cannot be saved anyway. Some of the men also had red
+tattooing on the upper part of the body, red squares on the chest, all
+sorts of things on the back, though none of them obscene nor as crude as
+the tattooing on some of our sailors. One of my men was overrun with red
+lizards; some were whole picture-books or comic supplements or intricate
+signs of the zodiac. There was one fellow whose whole back was covered
+with a lesson in arithmetic or geometry, even trigonometry for all I
+know, as if a small brother or a schoolmaster had used him as a slate.
+Others had only one leg tattooed, generally the left, or both of them
+only on the buttocks, or simply the fronts of the thighs, or merely
+spots here and there, all according to personal caprice, taste, swank,
+or an attack of cowardliness before the job was finished. Unlike most
+tribal decorations of the sort this tattooing may be put on at any age,
+whenever courage is ripe.
+
+
+I thought several times that afternoon that the men were going to give
+up entirely. They lay down in the road as if completely exhausted,
+something I had never seen a Chinese carrier do in all my two years of
+wandering in China; but finally we coaxed them at dark into a scattered
+little thatched town in the jungle on the edge of the clear rushing
+river that had made off with my canteen. The place was named Ban-long,
+with a waterfall to lull me to sleep in the basket-weave _sala_ where I
+soon stretched out on my cot, for we had to start very early again.
+There was difficulty in getting men in time, and without the prince I
+should not have been able to get them at all. But he, working most of
+the night through the obsequious village head-man, collected twelve
+substitutes for our eight lazy Pwun or Nuong carriers, and we were off
+in the soft, black tropical night between two and three in the morning.
+
+Two of the new men had gathered some sections of dried bamboo six or
+eight feet long to be used as torches, which made it to some extent
+harder than ever to see the way through the steep gullies cut deeply
+into the soil of the densest possible jungle and forest. Particularly
+was it hard going after the torches had gone out, much worse than if we
+had never had them, and for more than an hour we struggled in utter
+darkness over a devilish trail. It was one of those damnable trails that
+are always wading a stream, always the same stream at that, like a
+chatterer who can think of nothing original to say, and now and again
+climbing steeply up and down the bank of it. Daylight showed the dense
+vegetation deeply green, a land as far from China as if we were on
+another continent, and disclosed our dozen carriers to be Kha wild from
+the mountains, picturesque figures even in a land as out of the ordinary
+as Laos.
+
+Instead of tattooed pants or cloth _sampots_ these primitive fellows
+wore short cloth breeches like running-pants, and some of them had more
+or less of an upper garment also. They showed no tattooing, or at least
+very little, but rattled with bracelets of glass and other cheap
+materials, and had large earrings of all shapes, preferably not mates
+and if possible utterly unlike on the two sides of the same head. The
+few who did not have earrings put flowers or vine strings or leaves in
+the holes in their ears to keep them ready for more prosperous times.
+They had the eyes and the ways of the real wild man; yet, being former
+slaves, they were more docile than the Laosians or Pwun.
+
+Of the aboriginal tribes driven into the mountains by the Tai invasion
+of nearly two thousand years ago, it is estimated that there are still a
+hundred thousand of these Kha and other more or less indigenous stock.
+Thus there is a great mixture of races under King Sisavang Vong Somdet
+Prah, besides the “black paunch” and “white paunch” Laosians of his own
+race. At Muongsing, chief town of the military territory, administered
+by Luang Prabang, in a far corner of Laos, a French official counted
+thirty-two races, each in its own costumes and with its own customs, at
+the weekly market day. The Kha are a hill people who made complete
+submission to the former rulers of Luang Prabang, admitting themselves
+slaves, and now they accept the present monarch as king and are loyal to
+him, lending help of this kind upon royal demand, though one could not
+hire them as carriers in the ordinary way. These fellows carried a slim
+ration of glutinous rice in little round baskets with a telescope cover,
+and some uncooked rice in a cloth at the back of the waist, just as do
+some South American Indians. At their sides hung a kind of machete, in a
+sheath made of half a bamboo with wooden strips across it, much the sort
+of thing a Boy Scout turned loose in the woods might contrive. They were
+as small as upper grammar-school boys, and though they looked hardier
+than almost any tame people, they were really even less useful as
+carriers than the Pwun. They prefer to carry by a band across the
+forehead, but as my baggage was not arranged for that method most of
+them were forced to endure one end of the stiff whole-bamboo that takes
+the place of the wiser springy split-bamboo or hickory carrying-poles of
+the Chinese—because one of them alone cannot carry a real load. Yet on
+the whole the long file of silent, rather anemic fellows made better
+time, thanks perhaps to their lighter loads, than those of the day
+before.
+
+Unlike the talkative Laosians and in great contrast to the chattering
+Chinese these aboriginal mountaineers made hardly a sound as they
+plodded along. The language of Laos or Luang Prabang is less noisy than
+the guttural up-and-down Annamese. The men of the first day had spoken
+with an almost English intonation; Kha speech seemed a bit more Chinese,
+with much rolling of the _r_. Some of them spoke Laosian, but with what
+my prince called a “malabar” accent.
+
+In the mountains of Luang Prabang kingdom, high over several of which I
+passed on my overland trip, especially on this Sunday, one of the
+longest days of my life, the Kha live in as primitive conditions as in
+the days of Alexander the Great. The Kha villages I saw were the lowest
+type of human dwelling; filth and stupidity seemed to be the prevailing
+characteristics. All our romantic yarns about the simple life of savages
+leave us with the false impression that they are hardier than civilized
+people, and the writers rarely mention the dirty, the truly animal
+conditions in which they live. The Kha are as innocent of any idea of
+cleanliness as the lowest class of Chinese, in great contrast to the Tai
+about them, and it is not strange that they have more smallpox than the
+rest of the population. Some were so timid that I had to drive them out
+of their reed and grass huts into the light necessary for photography,
+just as one might drive some wild animal out of its warm but dirty lair,
+so timid that I had to manhandle a group of both sexes that came along
+the trail one day, before they gave up their temptation to run away
+without posing for my dreaded camera. In most of the huts grandmother
+and even skinnier grandfather were tending the third generation while
+the intermediate one was out in the hills in quest of a livelihood. Some
+of the villages had their basket-like thatched-top huts raised above the
+ground, like those of the other people of Laos; the commoner custom was
+to squat on the ground itself in a thatch structure like a flat wigwam.
+The women, and for that matter the men, were all naked to the waist, a
+disgusting custom in the case of the old women, whose breasts were as
+shrunken as if they were about to dry up and drop off. They gave one an
+unhappy reminder of how brief is the span of human existence. Old men
+and women alike had holes in their ears large enough to hold a cigar.
+
+All day we climbed over great hills, one veritable mountain range. Most
+of these were densely wooded; yet in places there was little real
+forest, but mainly _brousse_, especially the swift-growing bamboo,
+because they had so often been burned off. Here and there patches of
+hillsides, even of mountain-sides, were being or had recently been
+cleared in this primitive way and were now more or less velvety-brown
+and strewn with fallen charred trees. For like the Miao the Kha still
+burn a new strip of forest whenever they wish to plant, cutting down
+mammoth trees just to clear the way, and leaving them to rot. What the
+coffin-makers of China would not have given for some of them! But I saw
+nothing planted, perhaps because the end of April is too early in these
+highlands, as in the grass-grown rice-fields we came upon lower down.
+Every now and then a tiny hut as bright as if it had been made of new
+straw stood forth in the middle of a recent clearing, the sleeping-place
+evidently of a pioneer husbandman too far from home to commute. Upland
+rice, needing no flooding, and other jungle products are grown by the
+Kha and the other hill people, and sometimes carried to Luang Prabang
+itself, though most of them merely grow enough to feed themselves.
+
+The little clusters of very simple huts of the Kha were not near even
+this rarely traveled trail, but in places half inaccessible—and for many
+people wholly so—beyond valleys or great gullies across which they can
+look and see in miniature the very thin trickle of traffic and consider
+themselves in the world but not of it. One fancied they would not enjoy
+an apartment at the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street. These
+hardly accessible places were often so far apart that it would take
+hours of climbing to call on the nearest neighbor. No wonder, when the
+cluster of huts of the nearest girl is across three chasms and two
+ridges, that the swain knocks her on the head and brings her home
+without further formality, to save himself the labor of courting under
+such onerous conditions.
+
+In contrast to China, the only visible evidences of religious belief in
+these wilder parts of Luang Prabang kingdom are bamboo arrows and bits
+of woven wicker squares and the like, beside the trail here and there.
+These, the prince told me, were warnings, either that a trap of arrows
+had been set for wild animals somewhere on the path leading off into the
+_brousse_, or that a Kha village was engaged in formalities to which
+strangers were not invited. Docile as they are, the Kha have been known
+to kill even Frenchmen who have overlooked or persisted in disobeying
+these warnings. Hence little is known of the religion of this primitive
+tribe, except that it acknowledges innumerable genii, good and bad, and
+that there are many things the visitor must not do, many things taboo
+not only for the Kha themselves but for any one who enters their
+villages, because to do them would be to stir up the evil spirits to
+wreak vengeance on the villagers themselves.
+
+
+Now and again there was a mighty granite mountain with the sheer sides
+of the sky-scrapers it dwarfed in size, clothed with as much vegetation
+as can get foothold, vegetation made wilder and more hardy by the
+struggles of its ancestors in such places. But for long distances there
+were no signs of man, except the twelve carriers snaking along through
+the tall grass, touches of red in their old and often ragged and always
+weather-faded garments contrasting with their brown bodies and their
+black heads bobbing above the vegetation. We went for hours along a
+mountain ridge in a path all but obliterated by a wild grass often
+horseman high, with many splendid tiger-lairs. Great bamboos or trees
+had here and there fallen across it, so that there was sometimes just
+room for a horse to pass without its rider. These ridges opened out
+great green vistas of scrub and forest on either hand, and of the
+striking peaks of the long range over which we climbed most of that
+arduous Sunday, to end in rain and slippery going through ever hotter
+jungle. For at the end we went down miles of trail steeper than any
+stairway, into shaded jungle lanes, with rivers to cross incessantly,
+the raging rivers of another watershed. Down, down, down to what in
+season would again be flat rice-fields with earth borders set like trays
+one above the other. On the swift slope we passed an old man and a boy
+with a crossbow and some pencil-like arrows, who were evidently stalking
+birds, for all the rain. One of the pleasant things about simple “wild”
+people is the companionship between old men and boys—and, I suppose,
+between old women and girls when they are off by themselves—so much
+closer and more congenial than among civilized people, where the old
+have usually been educated entirely out of the naïve childhood point of
+view and cannot forget how much more they fancy they know than the child
+knows.
+
+Unlike the Chinese the Kha coolies were not afraid of the rain—or at
+least they were less afraid of it than of the prince. They slashed down
+banana-leaves as umbrellas and kept right on going. Yet a little rain
+makes a jungle journey quite different. The slopes become toboggans, the
+trails impetuous streams or quagmires, rivers rise until they cannot be
+forded, all vegetation wets whom and whatever it touches, leeches sally
+forth to seek whom they may devour—so that we were glad indeed when the
+rain let up a little and insects began again to chirp and birds to
+whistle rather than sing their gladness.
+
+We came down at length into the valley of Ban-napha, with a splendid
+sky-line of mountains behind it, and finally brought up, rather weary,
+at a _sala_, just long enough before dark so that we could hope to make
+preparations for another early start in the morning. Village chiefs bent
+low before the emissary of the king, putting their hands on their knees,
+for evidently this prince was not close enough to royalty to be worthy
+of the complete squat; or the people here may have been more
+independent. In turn the head-man of a village is a real boss—provided
+he has a very commanding way. This one of Ban-namon, otherwise known as
+Muong Kassy—_ban_ seems to mean town, and a _muong_ is a division
+something like the commune of France—did not have much head-man
+personality, or he had less respect or fear for princely orders than his
+attitude suggested; so that when I went for my daily conversation with
+my family I had also to wire back to the _commissaire_ and insist on
+fresh horses, for none had been provided, the strict orders of the king
+and the French notwithstanding. I did not wish to abuse the stout
+animals of my good host of Luang Prabang, and two days over such trails
+was a good week’s work for any horse, though I walked as much as I rode.
+But the threat to go on with them served excellently as a lever to move
+the prince to force the head-man to have other horses available in the
+morning. We knew they could be had, for we had seen not a few well fed
+ones in the fat wet fields of the little valley, along with
+water-buffaloes taking their ease in their beloved mud-holes.
+
+I found my way back from the telegraph hut through the densely dark and
+humid night to a two-room _sala_ with the usual springy floor of
+woven-bamboo splints, set in a wide grassy yard beside the trail. The
+sergeant, for whom this forced march was hard work, since he seemed to
+have brought back tuberculosis as well as a decoration or two from his
+war days in France, was worn out; and even the prince admitted that he
+was tired, though at his age one never really is. The Kha should have
+been most weary of us all, but they crawled obsequiously in on their
+hands and knees to bring me water in a section of bamboo or to hand me
+anything I asked or the prince sent them for. They ate jungle food that
+had very little in common with ours, out on the soft floor of the raised
+porch on which they slept. Somehow I was sorry to lose these simple
+picturesque fellows when we left Ban-namon.
+
+We were off again at daylight, with poor native horses, as if the
+head-man had picked, or had imposed upon him, the leanest in town, and
+with somewhat less “wild” coolies. We had marched in the rain for barely
+two hours when the cavalcade all halted at another town, with an humble
+_sala_, for a lunch all around and to change coolies again, though those
+from Ban-namon had hardly gone five miles. Probably that was all the
+weak head-man could get them to agree to do; or it may be that certain
+towns are definitely stations on this overland trail. The prince had
+only to order the village chief, or the inhabitants themselves, to
+furnish new carriers, however, and they were soon there, though from
+then on we changed as often as we came to a village, sometimes two or
+three times a day. The coolies still seemed to be Kha, but they were men
+who had come into more contact with the outside world than those who had
+been with me all that strenuous Sunday, and they had lost some of the
+ornaments, simplicity, and politeness. Perhaps they were not Kha at all,
+for they had all sorts of tattooing, and some of them had raised welts,
+like the bush negroes of Dutch Guiana. Each man according to his fancy
+wore a kind of kilt that was really a mere strip of cloth wound about
+him from waist to knees. Now and then we passed a woman on a journey, in
+a costume in which she would not have been unnoticed on Broadway,
+wearing earrings, neck-rings, two bracelets on each arm, and a
+barrel-shaped strip of cloth from nipples to knees, and carrying her bed
+and belongings, consisting of a sack hanging down from her forehead and
+on her back a rolled-up grass or reed mat on which to spend her virtuous
+nights.
+
+By this time I had fourteen coolies for what one Chinese would have, and
+often had, carried—except that the prince and the sergeant had a few
+things. With every change we seemed to get more carriers, as if they
+were bent on dividing the task until no one had anything much to carry;
+and at that they dawdled along, using every possible excuse to halt.
+Fancy me traveling with three horses and fourteen men, and most of my
+things in Hanoï at that! It was almost like a _safari_ in central
+Africa, such as my wealthy fellow-wanderers can afford. Certainly the
+passive resistance of which we have been hearing so much of late is no
+new doctrine in the East; your Oriental carriers or servants were past
+masters at it long before Gandhi was born.
+
+[Illustration: A Kha home in the mountains of Luang Prabang]
+
+[Illustration: Grandfather and grandmother of the primitive Khas tend
+the children while the intermediate generation seeks the family
+livelihood in the hills]
+
+[Illustration: Wherever his habitat, the water-buffalo is happiest when
+immersed to the nostrils in a mud-hole]
+
+[Illustration: One group of the many Laosian carriers who bore my few
+belongings across Luang Prabang]
+
+Or perhaps the fellows were spreading out my baggage as much as possible
+in order to give me more honor; for in Laos the importance of a traveler
+depends upon the amount of baggage he carries, the amount of trouble he
+puts the country to in getting him through it, even as in many other
+lands. The king never travels without an enormous retinue and tons of
+baggage, whether he needs it or not; and if he gets separated from it he
+withdraws into incognito. One reason the coolies of Laos cannot carry
+more is that each of them has a _musette_ containing his personal
+belongings and food, a knife in a wooden scabbard, and increasing odds
+and ends, until by this time they had nearly as much baggage as we, in
+sharp contrast to the Chinese, who, in a land of strong and constant
+competition, carry almost nothing of their own. On this third afternoon
+two men carried nothing but the loads of the others, and they seemed to
+be getting weaker as their own loads grew ever bigger. If this kept up I
+should have to have two men for every one who was actually carrying for
+me and my escort.
+
+
+Rocky mountain scenery increased, with great sheer cliffs, filtered
+sunshine on wet vegetation and brown. Here banana blossoms were a
+beautiful pink instead of the usual beautiful purple; there were giant
+ferns in great clusters, one leaf easily twenty feet long, a tree so
+covered with vines that it looked like an old ruined pagoda, cathedral
+aisles of damp and deeply shaded path. We crossed many streams; and—who
+says “wild” men do not know enough to invent speedy measures?—found on
+either side of them several of the two or three section pieces of bamboo
+which the people of this region use as water-pails. The men caught them
+up on one side of the stream, scooped them full of water as they
+crossed, drank as they walked, and threw them away again, to be picked
+up once more by the next comer from the opposite direction. All that
+third afternoon we went down with a small river through a narrow
+corridor of magnificent cliffs, everywhere wooded except on the sheerest
+faces—spires, turrets, pinnacles, stalactites and stalagmites, whole
+Milan cathedrals of jagged rocky peaks, scenery which, were it within
+two hundred miles of New York, would have a hundred thousand visitors
+every Sunday; yet here no one but a rare roving foreigner ever gives it
+a passing glance. Lost in the _brousse_ and unnoticed, it was like many
+an unknown thing, deed, person, in the self-styled civilized world—far
+greater than others many times better known because they happen to have
+won publicity.
+
+This region is noted for its leeches, especially during the rainy season
+that was now descending upon us. On that rainy Sunday afternoon the feet
+of my Kha were all bleeding, and were covered with the scars of what
+were evidently old leech-bites. These pests snatch upon the passer-by
+from the bushes overhanging the narrow trails, particularly after a
+shower; they get in somehow, even though one is not barefooted, soak the
+traveler’s legs and socks in blood before he knows they are there, and
+he may be all day or all night in getting the flow stopped. In the
+middle of this third afternoon, chancing to pass a hand over an ankle, I
+felt a disgustingly soft lump under one of my high socks. Suddenly
+feeling the other leg with misgiving, I found it had two such unwelcome
+guests. Not far beyond we halted at a lonely little rest-house in the
+bush, and while the men rested and washed their feet, some of them put
+lumps of tobacco, such as they used in their long slim pipes, and other
+jungle leaves, on the three wounds; but at least one of them did not
+entirely stop bleeding until the next day. In the shade of the
+rest-house sat an aged priest in trail-worn yellow robe, who was making
+his way slowly northward, though he was old enough to be done with
+earthly traveling, at least in his present body. If that lasted, he
+hoped—or perhaps we should say expected, for he looked like too true a
+disciple of Gautama to be still burdened with the earthy desire we call
+hope—to reach Luang Prabang toward the end of the next month.
+
+The last half of that day was bright with sunshine, through ever lower
+jungle between mountain ridges, until we put up on the broad springy
+floor of a _bonzerie_ in a place called Ban-phatang. The sergeant and
+his helpers from among the carrier coolies did our cooking out on the
+covered porch, some of the village round about languidly looking on; but
+the priests who occupied with us the building and porch showed little
+curiosity indeed. I had time for a shave, to the surprise of the
+beardless natives, then for a bath in the clear little river that raced
+past the town. Down this shot now and then a man with only a loin-cloth
+over his tattooed thighs, riding a little green bamboo raft, the only
+part of the craft above water being a raised place for a bundle of a few
+clothes and other belongings, and a jackfruit for possible hunger.
+Simple travel indeed! It made one long to be a care-free youth on the
+road again. Women were bathing children and themselves here also,
+especially now toward sunset, but no one came to stare at me, though in
+China there would have been a regular circus audience. Nor was this for
+lack of energy, for on the whole these were a well built, muscular, and
+very healthy-looking people, with few if any signs of a social disease
+so common in Annam and China and with almost none of the filth diseases.
+Though the women all showed their breasts and thought nothing of it, one
+never saw even a bathing man completely naked. So-called barbarian
+peoples, though they commonly wear only a loin-cloth or its feminine
+equivalent, are usually as exacting about having that in place as we are
+with our own clothing.
+
+The uncrowded, simple, but commodious houses of these Laosian villages
+are always set well apart and high above the ground, back among
+palm-trees, banana-plants, and the like. They do not have to crowd
+together and save all the arable land for rice to feed too numerous
+mouths, for here a gentle Buddhism takes the place of an
+ancestor-worship so ardent that offspring must be had at any effort and
+cost. Most families have round or square granaries like huge covered
+baskets made of wide woven splints and covered by a big thatch roof, all
+raised off the ground out of reach of rats. The simple houses themselves
+were of similar materials, a ladder of half a dozen bamboo or pole rungs
+leading up to the big porch at one end, and close to the floor, a tiny
+window or two that can be pushed open to one side. Such a village is a
+thousand per cent more pleasant than a Chinese town, even when there is
+no public stopping-place except in the same room with slightly
+supercilious priests who sometimes break sound sleep with their
+devotions. There is an incredible amount of bathing and great quiet
+compared to densely packed Chinese existence. Such a village is like a
+country home in its atmosphere, while those of China resemble
+tenement-living on the worst of East Sides.
+
+The half-naked women had little objection to posing for their pictures,
+though they were fully as modest as their sisters anywhere else. Some of
+them would not have commanded princessly salaries in a New York
+extravaganza, unless they could have worn masks; others were distinctly
+attractive even in features. Yet all this South Sea talk about the ease
+of life in such tropical Edens is largely nonsense. They take life more
+tranquilly, it is true, but they have a lot of hard work to do for all
+that, much more hard work than do the citified people of our own land
+who rave about this idyllic life on the sweat-band of Mother Earth, many
+things which they would in fact be quite unable to do; and there seems
+to be just as much force of public opinion, the same politicians and
+similar nuisances to make life miserable. If there are no coal strikes
+or gasoline despots, on the other hand there are leeches in a more
+literal form; though there are no trolley or motor cars, in compensation
+spring chickens sell at a nickel and really fresh eggs at two or three
+cents a dozen. A gentle unspoiled people, too obsequious by our
+standards, on the whole they lead a visibly happier life than do our own
+serious and hurried people of the West.
+
+These Laosian villagers grow their own cotton, and the women spin this
+and the kapok of their great tropical trees on a crude wheel without a
+felly, then weave it on hand-looms into the garment they wear as skirt
+or wrapper. Beneath many a house, or under the projecting porch roof at
+the end of it, may be seen the lady of the family, in the usual
+comfortable and economical upper garment of nothing at all, leisurely
+engaged at her household tasks, while others, some of them far from
+ugly, sit in the shade beneath their pile-raised dwellings weaving their
+simple wardrobes, in rather striking patterns and of excellent wearing
+qualities, on the crudest of looms, with a stick shuttle that is thrown
+back and forth by hand. They hull their rice as it is needed, by
+stepping on the end of a long pole ending in a big wooden pestle, which
+falls monotonously into a wooden mortar, a hollowed section of large
+tree-trunk. These seem to be the chief occupations, but there are many
+others, as the traveler with time to watch their goings and comings
+during a few evenings will discover. As in southern China, the
+pan-basket in which rice is screened and prepared for cooking is made of
+bamboo splints, but they use clean water rather than any filth in which
+to wash it. The most hurried Laosian journey is a great relief from the
+putrescence, the crowding curiosity, the debauching superstitions of
+China. I thought I liked the Chinese, but I was less sure of it after
+this trip among the Laosians of gentle Buddhist faith.
+
+The smallest village has a few Buddhist priests, the support of whom by
+giving them food seems to be almost the only religious practice of the
+lay inhabitants. The younger bonzes make the rounds each morning with
+their begging-bowls before the sun is high, and now and then a man or
+woman kneels on the ground as a priest pauses to perform for a moment or
+two some hocus-pocus in reward for the charity, and then turns abruptly
+away, as if to imply that the giver has had his money’s worth. Begging
+is not looked upon as in the West, but as something perfectly natural,
+so that neither giver nor receiver seems to feel he is doing anything
+out of the ordinary. If I may judge by my two princely companions, all
+Laosian Buddhists say their prayers before going to bed as religiously
+as any Christian, nay, as any true Mohammedan. But they were more like
+people thanking a kindly benefactor with unforced gratitude than like
+men praying out of dread of a punishing God, and the true Laosians at
+least showed little if any of the fear of demonology rampant among the
+super-superstitious Chinese. No doubt nature is so gentle with them that
+the religion of fear, the dread and consequent attempts at propitiation
+of innumerable evil forces always waiting to do them harm, does not grow
+up within them.
+
+On the other hand these naïve jungle-dwellers do not lack physical fear.
+They crouched at the trail-side raising palmed hands to me; in the more
+settled districts farther south long rows of them crowded against the
+wall of the mountain road, even turning their faces away, as if fearing
+a blow, which seemed to speak badly for their rulers, whether the old
+ones or the present French—or were they merely dazzled by my
+magnificence? When our pace grew too slow to be borne, I could always
+drive the coolies on by galloping after them shouting, whereupon they
+actually ran. But soon they settled down to an almost lazy stroll again,
+covering hardly half the ground of the incessant dog-trot of the
+indefatigable Chinese; nor were there by any means as many smiles and
+childish pleasantries as among those far harder workers and sufferers of
+many times greater hardships.
+
+
+There were good horses at Ban-phatang, and no difficulty, at least so
+far as I was concerned, in getting three excellent ones for another
+daylight start. We rode on down a fertile but narrow valley, closely
+walled on either side by high mountain ridges that gave us the sensation
+of descending a corridor of mountains all that fourth day. But as in
+China there was no place purposely provided for a road; we were
+constantly climbing rice-field dikes and making our way haphazard across
+what would soon again be flooded trays of pale-green paddy. There was
+one very striking wooded precipice—which would have been still more
+striking if some of the myriad rocks that seemed ready to fall at any
+moment had done so just as we were passing beneath them. Little huts on
+stilts everywhere awaited the coming of laborers to the fields, lying
+fallow in grass now, but planted in July and harvested in November.
+There is no water for flooding at other times, because it does not rain
+enough, though with the industry and ingenuity of the Chinese they could
+easily harness the rivers that run away toil-less to the distant sea.
+But there is no need to do so, because there is no such crowding and
+consequent hunger as in China and its slender little offspring, Annam.
+In many parts of those ardently ancestor-worshiping lands, particularly
+in Annam, there are three harvests a year, as there might be here if
+this people went in as strongly for children.
+
+On that fourth day I was riding well ahead of my party when I passed
+near a great jungle fire far up on a high hillside, probably set to dear
+off ground for new planting. Great masses of red flames, and brown,
+almost reddish swirls and columns of smoke, licked at the sky, and there
+was a great roaring miles off. At a mile it was like a battle on the
+Western Front, a constant irregular musketry that was evidently the
+bursting of the chambers of the bamboo and louder cannon-shots that were
+probably great trees falling.
+
+Had it been in China or South America, this important trail between the
+two principal capitals of Laos would be impassable, in spots at least,
+which is the same thing so far as an overland trip is concerned, during
+the rainy season that was now upon us. Thanks to the few French
+overlords, however, mile after mile was welded together by many
+woven-bamboo bridges that sagged like bed-springs under our weight.
+Birds sang; a gentle air and people made the trip a constant delight in
+spite of the perpetual necessity of forever hurrying on. The French hope
+to colonize the Laos, but I hope that they fail; it would be a pity not
+to have any such virgin lands and simple peoples left for our children
+and our children’s children to see.
+
+Then the country grew tamer, the people more independent, perhaps
+because we were now outside Luang Prabang kingdom, where the prince,
+having only French backing to his commands, was recognized as the
+servant of an alien king. We lunched at Vang-vieng, where a lone
+Frenchman in jungle-torn sun-scorched garb, who was doing some sort of
+work there with a band of coolies, probably in connection with the
+telegraph lines, insisted on loading me down with a bottle of wine. The
+little I had brought had given out, and he was sure I could never
+complete my hurried journey alive without that prime necessity. We
+changed coolies there, and again, with more trouble and a longer wait
+than we had ever had before, at another village well outside the old
+kingdom, and brought up by sunset at a jungle _sala_ in the wilderness,
+kept by a family sent there for that purpose by the French rulers.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XVIII
+                      VIENTIANE AND BACK TO HANOÏ
+
+
+We were off again soon after dawn, by a road instead of a trail, a wide
+road that is by this time no doubt “automobilable,” though a car could
+hardly have gone over it then even if one could have reached it, an
+execrable new road of five hours of incessant _montagnes russes_,
+constant ups and downs, and sadly in need of the shading tree-tops of
+the narrow trail. The prince and I left the coolies far behind before
+this torture was ended. The French are gradually pushing a highway from
+Vientiane to Luang Prabang, and the last few miles of this unfinished
+portion still had high earth pillars left in the cuttings to show how
+much was due the contractors whose coolies had excavated them with
+handbaskets. I lunched with the Frenchman in charge of the
+road-building, whose Annamese companion had recently given him another
+hostage to fortune, in a house on a hilltop overlooking a great vista,
+that in some ways resembled a South American hacienda. Here I took leave
+of the prince, who had changed his mind and decided not to go on to
+Vientiane. It was plain that he would have given much to do so, but
+evidently either the French or the king, or both, had him under strict
+discipline. A miserable Ford, that had been waiting for me since the day
+before in order that my hurried trip should be crowned with success,
+cranked up, and at two we chugged away in great heat over the last 106
+kilometers to Vientiane.
+
+There was nothing of interest to me on this last ride, though there
+would have been for one who had not made the delightful overland trip.
+The people were much less attractive nearer what we are pleased to call
+civilization, especially the road-gangs. Half-way in we met the big
+automobile of the chief ruler of Laos, sent to find what had become of
+me, thanks to a strong but unwarranted suspicion that the Ford had
+broken down. Thereafter the view of the surrounding landscape was as
+from an airplane, and I reached Vientiane in time for a glimpse of it
+before dark, and dinner with the cream of the large French colony—with
+children as scarce as elsewhere.
+
+Vieng-chan, which under the French has become Vientiane, is a place of
+former glory and power of the Tai race, capital of another of those
+kingdoms of earlier days. Its last great period of prosperity was
+between 1628 and 1652, after which civil wars dispersed its power and
+Luang Prabang declared its independence, though even in the eighteenth
+century it was still powerful. Then, in 1828, the Siamese destroyed the
+city, carried off and dispersed the people, and it has never been
+rebuilt. In 1893, when a treaty with Siam gave all Laos, all the land
+east of the Mekong and some west of it, to France, Vieng-chan became the
+French capital of Laos, as Luang Prabang is the chief native center.
+
+Formerly Vientiane had a hundred and twenty magnificent temples, so well
+built that, in addition to many ruins lost in the bush, some still
+remain symmetrical and perfect in general form, though their beams have
+rotted away and the masonry has been exposed to tropical sun and rain
+for a century. There are some striking doors giving entrance to roofless
+ruins; within the falling shell of a temple near the _Résidence_, in
+which I was lord of all I surveyed because of the absence of the
+“résuper,” two big Buddhas sit in the infinitely patient attitude of the
+East, though the rains fall and the sun beats down upon their
+coiled-serpent-covered heads, while the vegetation piously strives to
+clothe and hold them together as the mud and stone of which they are
+made crumble bit by bit away.
+
+Perhaps there is really nothing incongruous about Buddhist priests in
+bright-yellow robes riding the latest style of bicycle, or even about
+women who, wearing only a kind of skirt, with at most a thin gay scarf
+thrown hastily over the breasts, indulge in the same frivolous form of
+locomotion. But these things are likely to catch the attention of the
+visitor to Vientiane, at least during his first day there. Though the
+French have brought a few automobiles, the humped-ox cart—a curious cart
+with a movable axle and huge wheels higher than a man—is still the more
+common type of conveyance. Vientiane has an avenue of flamboyants of
+which it is justly proud, and a lot of good French residences, with a
+pleasant woodsy atmosphere out of keeping with the solemn air of French
+officialdom.
+
+Siam lies just across the river, and here the same race lives on both
+sides of the Mekong, though the Laosians on the other bank rarely come
+over to work for the French. From Muongyu onward all the men had worn
+their hair pompadour; at about the place the last Ford picked me up even
+the women, no doubt influenced by their Siamese sisters across the
+river, rather than by any world-wide movement to do away with the chief
+glory of the sex, took to cutting their hair man-fashion. At Vientiane
+the women on both sides of the Mekong have these absurd Siamese
+hair-cuts, each hair standing on end as if the eyes beneath it had seen
+a whole flock of ghosts, and as they also chew betel-nut to make
+themselves still more repulsive it does not matter that one can rarely
+tell the two sexes apart.
+
+The steamer of the Messageries Fluviales got stuck on a sand-bank just
+as its picturesque Corsican captain was moving up to take on his
+passengers, so that I not only had the residence of the chief ruler of
+Laos entirely to myself for nearly twenty-four hours, but was able to
+take in all the sights and meet nearly all the hospitable French
+residents. The boat got away at 2:30 and was off down the river, leaving
+me behind after all my strenuous exertion to overtake it. But that did
+not matter, for the thoughtful French had planned it that way, so that
+their distinguished guest might finish his siesta and spend no more time
+than necessary on the uncomfortable craft. About four some of them
+leisurely set out with me by automobile and put me on board at a stop
+made for my especial benefit as far down-stream as the road then reached
+beyond Vientiane.
+
+That afternoon we touched Siam and finally tied up at a place called
+Ban-along, where I slept well only because there happened to be room to
+set up my cot on deck, until we pushed off again at three in the
+morning. All day we steamed down the Mekong between Indo-China and
+Siamese jungles, now and then stopping at the French or at the farther
+bank. After the manner of the aggressive West, the French claim all the
+Mekong and allow no Siamese steamers on it. For centuries the Siamese
+and Chinese had most of the trade with Laos, which came and went by way
+of Siam; now the French are gradually diverting it, illustrating another
+of the advantages of protecting backward countries. No small amount of
+smuggling still goes on, especially in opium, and mainly engineered by
+the wily Chinese. Once some Laosian opium-smugglers who had tied up for
+the night at the Siamese bank were arrested by the Siamese police. The
+French, in keeping with their claim to the entire stream, made this a
+serious “diplomatic incident,” and to-day the Siamese can do nothing
+against smugglers and similar lawbreakers until they actually step
+ashore with their loot.
+
+A fierce storm at dark on the second day drove us up against the Siamese
+bank again, at a place that seemed to be called Ban-naqué, but we were
+off once more at daylight and pulled into Thakek while it was sitting
+down to its midday meal. There an automobile that had been sent over the
+mountains from Vinh was ready to carry me off at once, but there was
+time to spare and interest enough in this frontier post so that I
+decided to stay out the day. The chief French official was languid with
+fever and bored with life. The head of the police, on the other hand,
+with a still larger native family, seemed to enjoy this placid tropical
+existence, and when the sun began to show an appreciable decline he
+called a queer-looking official craft and took me across the river to
+Lakhone in Siam, the first time I had actually set foot in that
+progressive land in nearly twenty years. As far at least as this
+frontier village was concerned there did not seem to be any great
+change. The natives were of the same race and similar customs as those
+of Thakek, but had an air about them of saying inwardly, “Well, at least
+we are not subject to French nagging.” The difference between them and
+their cousins across the river must be much like that between a bachelor
+and a henpecked husband—and their communal housekeeping bore out the
+same analogy. Leg-irons seemed to be no detriment to prisoners who
+wished to run after us and beg money to buy opium, neither of which
+things would be permitted their fellows in French territory, at least
+within sight of Europeans. On the other hand there is less active
+unkindness to prisoners on the French side.
+
+There were a few games of tennis in Thakek when the sun was low, with
+even two or three white women among the players, and next morning
+comfortably after six I was off for Annam. A native secretary of the
+ruler-in-chief of Laos diffidently shared the back seat of the big open
+car with me, and the Annamese chauffeur of course had his assistant,
+confidant, and water-boy, for your Oriental driver will not go without
+company, be it only to have some one as a receptacle for his
+conversation. It had rained and there was much skidding between Thakek
+and Nakai; in fact at that time of year automobiles usually cannot get
+through, and ours was the last one that did before that season’s rains
+settled down in earnest. I had never been sure of getting back to Annam
+by this route—until I got there. Had it become impassable as early as
+usual I might have gone on down the Mekong by the incommodious
+Messageries Fluviales clear to Pnom Penh in Cambodia, with a bit of
+railway about some falls, and made all the journey from Saïgon to Hanoï
+over again, unless I could have crossed the mountains from Savannakhet,
+by a road still less likely to be “automobilable” in the rainy season.
+
+We turned up in time for lunch at a mountain shack in dense forest in
+which the “résuper” of Laos and his wife, about the most delightful
+people I met in Indo-China, were roughing it for a few days with their
+small son. I trust that the reader has not confounded Laos with Luang
+Prabang, which is merely the largest and most western division of it,
+its lone king decidedly subordinate to this lean and competent Frenchman
+whose palatial _Résidence_ I had occupied in Vientiane. Besides Luang
+Prabang and the 5^{me} Territoire that goes with it, and spacious
+Tran-ninh of Xieng Khuang, there are half a dozen other divisions in
+this sparsely settled territory ruled over by my _déjeuner_ host across
+the plain board camp-table.
+
+The secretary and even the extra chauffeur remained at the camp, as I
+should have done for the rest of that Sunday myself had I suspected how
+good the road still was from there on. Besides, an elephant-hunt was at
+its height near-by, an unusually large herd having been discovered
+almost within shouting-distance of where we sat. In Siam it is forbidden
+to kill elephants, because they all belong to the king. So they do in
+theory also in Laos, or at least in Luang Prabang, but with the French
+ruling over it and the Chinese ready to pay high prices for tusks, the
+sacredness of the king’s protégés is limited. In Canton we wondered
+where the carvers of myriad ornaments got all their ivory, rather
+suspecting them of relations with the local slaughter-house; in Laos one
+wonders where the hunters find sale for so many tusks. I heard much
+concerning the life of this region during that convivial _déjeuner_.
+Elands abound, and there are great herds of gaur, that wild cattle-like
+survivor from an earlier age which seems to be found nowhere else, a
+red-brown beast weighing on the average two thousand kilograms. There
+were at the camp half a dozen heads of this animal, shot within the past
+day or two, the foreheads unnaturally high, the female horns closer
+together than those of the male. The birds of these parts build no nests
+in the trees, because the monkeys, especially the black long-armed
+gibbons, steal their eggs. On the other hand partridge and quail, after
+building their nests in holes in the ground, roost in the trees as a
+protection against serpents.
+
+
+I thought often of that _résident_ of a Cambodian province who broke
+five ribs by running into a deer, as we raced on eastward by a
+forest-walled road as unpeopled as if it had been built for my especial
+use, bounding every little while over bridges held by vine and
+woven-bamboo cables, the bridges themselves merely a larger form of
+wickerwork or basketry. To my astonishment and, I am sure, to that of
+the chauffeur also, we had no difficulty in making the entire run from
+Thakek to Vinh in a single day, though it had not been certain that we
+could even make it in two, and a day later we might not have been able
+to make it at all. But even nature seemed to take an interest in my
+record-breaking trip, and we were agreeably surprised to find
+astonishingly dry parts of the road which should have been sloughs of
+despondency. It was still only a little after noon when we halted at the
+village _sala_ that had been officially chosen as my night’s
+stopping-place, just long enough to tell the servants that their guest
+was flying onward.
+
+Soon afterward we picked up a Chinese merchant from Yünnanfu, whose
+mandarin was nearly enough like that of Peking so that I astonished him
+by managing a meager conversation in his own tongue. He had two
+bullock-carts loaded with tigers—everything except the flesh—and many
+deer-horns, all valuable in the medicine-shops of his native land,
+especially the tiger-claws, to be powdered and drunk in wine by the
+faint-hearted, if I fully understood him. At the pace his native Jehus
+were making he would have been from ten days to a fortnight in reaching
+Vinh. I am notably softhearted, so when he and the chauffeur joined in
+coaxing me to let the Celestial go along with us, it seemed so much like
+making a man a present of ten days of life, more precious than money,
+that I succumbed—and for my pains was cramped for the rest of the trip
+into the off front seat, the left of course, usually occupied by the
+assistant chauffeur. The Chinese showed all signs of glee, even though
+he was of a race to whom ten days is no more than five hours, and paying
+off his simple Laosian bullock-drivers, he began loading his moth-eaten
+trophies into the car. I had miscalculated the loads, or fancied he
+would throw most of the worthless stuff away in order to ride with us;
+but no, indeed—I began to wonder whether he was even going to try to
+tuck the bullock-carts away in our maltreated conveyance. Of course the
+chauffeur got a nice little thing out of it—in fact he as much as said
+so in his hybrid Annamese-French, with a subtle hint that for this favor
+he did not expect me to tip him at the end of the run—and I have no
+doubt that all this had been cooked up between them when bullock-carts
+and automobile met two days before a few miles farther west. That would
+explain the extraordinary occurrence of leaving the assistant chauffeur
+behind; probably he eventually got his share of the grateful Yünnanese’s
+gratuity, for walking back to Vinh during the rainy season.
+
+[Illustration: This ancient monument in Vientiane, French capital of
+Laos, is the most curious remnant of its regal days]
+
+[Illustration: A door of a ruined palace or temple of Vientiane]
+
+[Illustration: Within the ruined temple the Buddhas sit, in the
+infinitely patient attitude of the East, crumbling away under the rains
+and disappearing beneath the encroaching jungle]
+
+[Illustration: Though the French have brought automobiles to Vientiane,
+this ancient form of conveyance still predominates]
+
+There were some coffee plantations, among corn and rubber-trees, that
+afternoon, the largest of them belonging to the man whom I had met at
+Cuarao on the outward trip; but he was not at home—this home, at least.
+We had already begun dropping down out of the great Annamese chain, the
+road in places a serpentine succession of descending curves
+magnificently framed in vine-clothed forest and precipices, and by three
+we were back in Annam again, another world, with its groves of slender
+_aréquiers_ climbed by betel-vines, its many villages surrounded by high
+thick bamboo hedges, its water-buffaloes of elephant and albino colors,
+its tombs and grave-mounds, its _bacs_ and rice-fields, its joss-houses
+and red-saliva-splotched roads, its myriad people in parasol-hats,
+diamond-shaped breast-covers, necklaces of grains of gold, black
+cheese-cloth overcoats, gowns of the color of tobacco-juice, its endless
+files of pole-carrying coolies of both sexes and all ages; in thinly
+populated Laos the battle with hunger is not so keen that children need
+to begin their labors so early.
+
+The Chinese and his tigers got off in the outskirts of Vinh, lest the
+government hear of the misuse of its official transportation, and the
+air was still more reminiscent of afternoon than of evening when I
+entered the same room of the French-Spanish hotel I had occupied when I
+first came northward along the Mandarin Road three months before. The
+chauffeur had protested that his orders were to drive me to the
+_Résidence_, but I felt that I had been overdoing French colonial
+hospitality, now that it was possible to provide for myself. Yet I was
+forced to dine with the _résident_ who had driven me away toward Xieng
+Khuang twenty days back, and he and his wife succeeded in convincing me
+that they were really disappointed because I had not come to occupy the
+palatial room they had once more prepared for me. For one can have no
+secrets in Indo-China. The incessant telegraph keeps one’s doings more
+in the public, or at least the official, eye than does the most flagrant
+of our yellow journals, and barely had I passed the village _sala_ that
+had been officially chosen as my stopping-place that night than a
+telegram had warned the _résident_ that the wild American was again
+breaking records.
+
+In early May the Vinh-to-Hanoï landscape is a sea of ripening rice from
+which those great black-gray rock hills of strange form and varied
+strata stand forth like fantastic islands. I cannot remember ever having
+endured a hotter day than that train-ride. This was the hottest time of
+the year, just before the summer rains, utterly cloudless and often
+without the slightest breeze. With June come torrential downpours and
+cooler weather. There was a wind that day, but it happened to be blowing
+in the same direction in which I was traveling. Going south would
+probably have been pleasant riding; going north was intermittent
+torture. When we stopped, as fortunately we did often and sometimes for
+fairly long periods, the breeze from the south made life quite
+agreeable; but as long as the train was moving, sweat poured forth as
+from a fountain. Even when it blew to advantage the wind was as if it
+came off a red-hot stove, and all day long there was not a fleck of
+cloud in the sky to temper the wicked sunshine. Cattle lolled in groups
+under the trees; water-buffaloes, if they were to be seen at all,
+squatted in their mud-holes; but though “citadels” were waffle-irons and
+the highway a burning strand, men and women in their broad hats and
+coppery-brown garments still trotted in endless files along it and the
+by-roads that were mere thin lines drawn in a vast expanse of greenery;
+for rice must be had for hungry mouths no matter what the weather.
+
+[Illustration: Endpaper]
+
+[Illustration: Century VAGABOND BOOKS of TRAVEL]
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+
+                          TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
+
+
+ ● Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
+ ● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
+ ● The caret (^) is used to indicate superscript, whether applied to a
+     single character (as in 2^d) or to an entire expression (as in
+     1^{st}).
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78626 ***