Page:Farmers of forty centuries.djvu/365

Rh two rows of maize alternating with one row of soy beans, but not over twenty-eight inches apart, one stalk of corn in a place every sixteen to eighteen inches, all carefully hoed, weedless and blanketed with an excellent earth mulch; but still the leaves were curling in the intense heat of the sun. Tangshan is a large city, apparently of recent growth on the railroad in a country where isolated conical hills rise one hundred or two hundred feet out of the flat plains. Cart loads of finely pulverized earth compost were here moving to the fields in large numbers, being laid in single piles of five hundred to eight hundred pounds, forty to sixty feet apart. At Kaiping the country grows a little rolling and we passed through the first railway cuts, six to eight feet deep, and the water in the streams is running ten to twelve feet below the surface of the fields. On the right and beyond Kuyeh there are low hills, and here we passed enormous quantities of dry, finely powdered earth compost, distributed on narrow unplanted area over the fields. What crop, if indeed any, had occupied these areas this season, we could not judge. The fertilization here is even more extensive and more general than we found it in the Shantung province, and in places water was being carried in pails to the fields for use either in planting or in transplanting, to ensure the readiness of the new crops to utilize the first rainfall when it comes.

Then the bed of a nearly dry stream some three hundred feet wide was crossed and beyond it a sandy plain was planted in long narrow fields between windbreak hedges. The crops were small but evidently improved by the influence of the shelter. The sand in places had drifted into the hedges to a hight of three feet. At a number of other places along the way before Mukden was reached such protected areas were passed and oftenest on the north side of wide, now nearly dry, stream channels.

As we passed on toward Shanhaikwan we were carried over broad plains even more nearly level and unobstructed