Page:McClure's Magazine volume 10.djvu/580

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Though but a foot above high water, Manila is no small village, and contains some 300,000 souls. Of these, call 50,000 Chinese, 5,000 Europeans, 100 English, and 3 Americans.

The city proper is the walled town of old, stretching up the right bank of the river as you enter, and along the bay front to the south; and with its moats, its drawbridges, and heavy gates, it suggests a troubled past. It may be a mile square, and the narrow streets and heavily buttressed houses within are gloomy in the extreme. Upon the mile of walls that from the river run south behind the shore-road promenade are the batteries that cover the bay and river, and some half-dozen Krupp guns raise the tone of a motley lot of old muzzle-loaders as they look over the parapet, rising from the weed-grown moat, at either end of the fortifications.

Over opposite, on the left bank, lies the commercial town and the Chinese quarter, while further up the river, beyond the crowded Puente d'España, come the private residences and the governor's palace. Each church seems to localize a small district of its own; and while the old city only is spoken of as Manila, some of the surrounding sections suffer under such names as Pandacan, Binondo, Mandeloien, Malate, and Nagtajan. Out of respect to earthquakes, the houses are low built and without glass windows. Thin seashells set into lattice frames serve for glass, and the whole side of a house generally slides open in these frame sections. Cloth, not plaster, covers the walls and ceilings, since, in times of earthquake, it seems to mind its own business better than the plaster, which would at once throw itself on the neck of the baby or into the midday meal. Gas pipes aren't allowed, and the water mains, which bring in the city's supply from up river, run along over the ground on smooth cross-ties. For earthquakes are so epidemic that a small shake will make the old residents, who saw the city fall to pieces back in the eighties, turn pale, and either run for the street or get under the doorjambs.

Almost as famous as the earthquakes are the typhoons, which are born away down to the southeast of the Philippines, and come slowly swirling up the back coast till they find a break in the mountains, and cross into the China Sea, as a rule, about eighty miles north of the capital. A medium blow will capsize 3,000 houses, and other people than my friend the Englishman have gone home from business, after a sudden cyclone, to find only their upright piano on the spot where