Korea & Her Neighbours/Chapter XV

IT surprised me much to find that only one foreign resident had visited Mukden, which is only 120 miles distant by a road which is traversable in winter, and is accessible by river during the summer and autumn in from eight to ten days. I left Newchwang on the 3rd of July, and though various cir- cumstances were unpropitious, reached Mukden in eight days, being able to avoid many of the windings of the Liau by sail- ing over an inundation.

The kindly foreign community lent me necessaries for the journey, but even with these the hold of a "pea-boat" was not luxurious. My camp-bed took up the greater part of it, and the roof was not much above my head. The descent into the hold and the ascent were difficult, and when wind and rain obliged me to close the front, it was quite dark, cock- roaches swarmed, and the smell of the bilge water was horri- ble. I was very far from well when I started, and in two days was really ill, yet I would not have missed the special interest of that journey for anything, or its solitude, for Wong's lim- ited English counted for nothing and involved no conversa- tional effort.

For some distance above Newchwang or Ying-tzu, as far as the real Newchwang, there is a complication of muddy rivers hurrying through vast reed beds, the resort of wild fowl, with here and there a mud bank with a mud hovel or two upon it. At that time reed beds and partially inundated swamps stretched away nearly to the horizon, which is limited in the far distance by the wavy blue outline of some low hills.

We ran up the river till the evening of the second day be- fore a fair wind, and then were becalmed on a reedy expanse swarming with mosquitos. The mercury was at 89° in the hold that night. I had severe fever, with racking pains in my head, back, and limbs, and in the morning the stamping of the junkmen to and fro, along the narrow strip of deck out- side the roof, was hardly bearable. Wong had used up the ample supply of water, and there was nothing wherewith to quench thirst but the brown, thick water of the Liau, the tea made with which resembled peasoup.

On the morning of the third day it began to rain and blow, and for the next awful four days the wind and rain never ceased. The oiled paper which had been tacked over the roof of the boat was torn into strips by the violence of the winds, which forced the rain through every chink. I lay down that night with the mercury at 80°, woke feeling very cold, but, though surprised, fell asleep again. Woke again much colder, feeling as if my feet were bandaged together, extricated myself with difficulty, struck a light, and got up into 6 inches of a mixture of bilge water and rain water, with an overpowering stench, in or on which all things were sunk or floating. Won- dered again at being so very cold, found the temperature at 84°, and that I had been sleeping under a wringing sheet in soaked clothing and on soaked sacking, under a soaked mos- quito net, and that there was not a dry article in the hold. For the next three days and nights things remained in the same condition, and though I was really ill I had to live in wet clothing and drink the "liquid cholera" of the flood, all the wells being submerged.

Telegrams later in the English papers announced " Great floods in Manchuria," but of the magnitude of the inundation which destroyed for that season the magnificent crops of the great fertile plain of the Liau, and swept away many of its countless farming villages, only the experience of sailing over it could give any idea.

In that miserable night there were barkings of dogs, shouts of men, mewings of cats, and general noises of unrest, and in the morning, of the village of Piengdo opposite to which we had moored the evening before, only one house and a barn re- mained, which were shortly carried away. Many of the peo- ple had escaped in boats, and the remainder, with their fowls, dogs, and cats, were in the spreading branches of a large tree. Although the mast of my boat was considerably in the way, and it was difficult to make fast, I succeeded in rescuing the whole menagerie and in transferring it in two trips to a village on the other side, which was then 5 feet above the water.

We had reached the most prosperous region of Manchuria, a plain 60 miles in length, of deep, rich alluvial soil, bearing splendid crops, the most lucrative of which are the bean, the oil from which is the staple export of the country, the opium poppy, and tobacco. The great and small millet, wheat, bar- ley, melons, and cucumbers cover the ground, mulberry trees for the silkworm surround the farmhouses, and the great plain is an idyll of bounteousness and fertility. Of all this not a trace remained, except in a few instances the tops of the 8-feet millet, which supplies the people not only with food, but with fuel, and fodder for their animals„

The river bank burst during the night, and the waters were raging into the plain, from which I missed many a brown- roofed village, which the evening before stood among its wil- low and poplar trees. At 11 a fair wind sprang up, junks be- gan to move, and my boatmen, who had talked of returning, untied and moved too. After an exciting scene at a bend, where the river, leaping like a rapid, thumped the junks against the opposite shore, we passed one wrecked village after another, bits of walls of houses alone standing. The people and their fowls were in the trees. The women clung to their fowls as much as to their babies. Dugouts, scows, and a few junks, mine among them, were busy saving life, and we took three families and their fowls to Sho-wa Ku, a large junk port, where a number of houses were still standing. These families had lost all their household goods and gods, as well as mules, pigs, and dogs. On our way we sailed into a farmyard to try to get some eggs, and the junk not replying to her helm, thumped one of the undermined walls down. It was a large farmhouse and full of refugees. The water was 3 feet deep in the rooms, naked children were floating about in tubs, and the women, looking resigned, sat on the tables. The men said that it was the last of four houses, and that they might as well be dead, for they had lost all their crops and their beasts.

A fearful sight presented itself at Sho-wa Ku. There the river, indefinite as it had previously been, disappeared alto- gether, and the whole country was a turbulent muddy sea, bounded on the east by a range of hills, and to the north and south limitless. Under it lay all the fruits of the tireless in- dustry and garden cultivation of a large and prosperous popu- lation, and the remorseless waters under the influence of a gale were rolling in muddy surges, "crested with tawny foam," over the fast dissolving homes.

On this vast flood we embarked to shorten the distance, and sailed with three reefs in the sail for 13 miles over it, till we were brought up by an insurmountable obstacle in the shape of a tremendous rush of water where a bank had given way. There we were compelled to let go two anchors in the early afternoon. The wind had become foul, and the rain, which fell in torrents, was driven almost horizontally. Nothing that suggested human life was in sight. It might have been " the Deluge," for the windows of heaven were opened. There were a muddy, rolling sea, and a black sky, dark with tremendous rain, and the foliage of trees with submerged trunks was alone suggestive of even vegetable life and of the villages which had been destroyed by the devouring waters.

In 13 miles just one habitation remained standing, a large, handsome brick house with entrance arch, quadrangle, curved roofs, large farm buildings, and many servants' houses, some of which were toppling, and others were submerged up to their roofs. There was a lookout on the principal roof and he hailed us, but as there were several scows about, enough to save life, I disregarded him, and we sailed on into the tempestuous solitude where we anchored.

The day darkened slowly into night, the junk rolled with short plunging rolls, the rain fell more tremendously than ever, and the strong wind, sweeping through the rigging with a desolate screech, only just overpowered the clatter on the roof. I was ill. The seas we shipped drowned the charcoal, and it was impossible to make tea or arrowroot. The rain dripped everywhere through the roof. My lamp spluttered and went out and could not be relighted, bedding and cloth- ing were soaked, my bed stood in the water, the noise was deafening.

Never in all my journeys have I felt so solitary. I real- ized that no other foreigner was travelling in Manchuria, that there was no help in illness, and that there was nothing to be done but lie there in saturated clothes till things took a turn for the better.

And so they did. By eight the next morning the scene was changed. The sky was blue and cloudless, there was a cool north wind, and the waste of water dimpled and glittered, the broken sparkle of its mimic waves suggesting the ocean after a destructive storm has become a calm. After sailing over broad blue water all day, and passing " islands " on which the luckier villages were still standing, towards evening we sailed into a village of large farmhouses and made fast to the window- bars of one of them, which, being of brick, had not suffered greatly. Eleven of the farms had disappeared, and others were in process of disappearing. The gardens, farmyards, and open spaces were under 5 feet of water, the surface of which was covered by a bubbly scum. The horses and cattle were in the rooms of the brick houses where many human be- ings had taken refuge. A raft made of farming implements ferried the people among the few remaining dwellings.

At that farm the skipper brought a quantity of rice for his family, and by a lovely moonlight we sailed over the drowned country to his village. The flood currents were strong, and when we got there we were driven against two undermined houses and knocked them down, afterwards drifting into a road with fine trees which entangled the mast and sail, and our stern bumped down the wall of the road, and the current car- ried us into a square of semi-submerged houses, and eventu- ally we got into the skipper's garden, and saw his family mounted on tables and chairs on the top of the kang.

Two uneventful days followed. The boatmen were in cease- less dread of pirates, and I was so ill that I felt I would rather die than make another effort.

Arriving within 3 miles of Mukden, Wong engaged a pas- senger cart, a conveyance of the roughest description, which is only rendered tolerable by having its back, sides, and bot- tom padded with mattresses, and I was destitute of everything ! Nothing can exaggerate the horrors of an unameliorated Chinese cart on an infamous road. Down into ruts 2 feet deep, out of which three fine mules could scarcely extricate us, over hillocks and big gnarled roots of trees, through quagmires and banked ditches, where, in dread of the awful jerk produced by the mules making a non-simultaneous jump up the farther side, I said to myself, “ This is my last hour," getting a blow on my head which made me see a shower of sparks — so I entered the gate of the outer wall of beaten clay 11 1/2 miles in circuit which surrounds the second city of the empire. Then, through a quagmire out of which we were dragged by seven mules, I bruised, breatliless, and in great pain, and up a bank where the cart turned over, pulled the mules over with it, and rolled down a slight declivity, I found myself in the roof with the cameras on the top of me and my right arm twisted under me, a Chinese crowd curious to see the “ foreign devil," a vague impress of disaster in my somewhat dazed brain, and Wong raging at large ! Then followed a shady compound ablaze with flowers, a hearty welcome at the house of Dr. Ross, the senior missionary of the Scotch U.P. Church, sweet homelike rooms in a metamorphosed Chinese house, a large shady bedroom replete with comforts, the im- mediate arrival of Dr. Christie, the medical missionary, who pronounced my arm-bone “splintered " and the tendons severely torn, and placed the limb in splints, and a time of kind and skilled nursing by Mrs. Ross, and of dreamy restful- ness, in which the horrors of the hold of the " pea-boat " and of the dark and wind-driven flood only served to emphasize the comfort and propitiousness of my surroundings.