Page:Ports of the world - Canton (1920).djvu/29

 angrily when the fish evade the trap thus set for them. And, since the dripping nets come out of the water empty more often than not, the reader can imagine the crescendo of feminine screams which assails the ears just as easily as if he himself were there to see and to hear the fisher women call down the wrath of Heaven on both the fish and any humans who may happen to be within screaming distance.

The crews on the fishing boats seem to fear the wrath of these Chinese Amazons as much as the people of medieval times feared the wrath of bedraggled, hook-nosed witches, who were supposed to spend most of their time concocting strange brews in three-legged kettles and riding in the clouds astride brooms all hung with cobwebs.

There is something weird and uncanny about it all—funeral boats, screaming fisher women, brass cymbals, junks, sampans, river pirates, lacquered coffins, half-naked men, howling mourners, cockroaches in honey, and snakes in broth. It is almost unbelievable, almost impossible of conception to us Americans who usually live a sane, well-ordered sort of existence. The people of an American city, were they to live their lives in such a fashion as do those in Canton, would be considered eccentric, if not actually mad; but the Cantonese take their mode of living and their customs as calmly as you please and find nothing unusual or strange about them. And it is this feeling which makes Canton so enchanting to trousered, shirted, shoe-wearing, soap-using Americans. In Canton we find once more the eternal truth of that trite, shrewd observation: "One-half of the world knows not how the other half lives." The least that can be said for Canton is that it is different. Exceedingly, strikingly, abruptly different. Canton is Canton, just as New York is New York, and Paris is Paris, and Mexico is Mexico. It couldn't be otherwise.

A breeze has sprung up by this time, and the surface of the river is broken into numberless ripples which dance a sort of listless, rhythmic, measured dance, and cause the smaller boats to move up and down as the bobber on a fishing line rocks in the watery bed upon which it is