by Mary Morris
Repacking, I climbed over the back of the seat to Aleck.
“Giddap!”
The reins flapped: we were off. The dust was laid; everything was keen and fresh; indeed the appetites of the mosquitoes were very keen.
When I got back to Kitwangak the Mounted Police came to see me.
“You have been in to Kitwancool?”
“Yes.”
“How did the Indians treat you?”
“Splendidly.”
“Learned their lesson, eh?” said the man. “We have had no end of trouble with those people—chased missionaries out and drove surveyors off with axes—simply won’t have whites in their village. I would never have advised anyone going in—particularly a woman. No, I would certainly have said, ‘Keep out.’ ”
“Then I am glad I did not ask for your advice,” I said. “Perhaps it is because I am a woman that they were so good to me.”
“One of the men who went in on the wagon with you was straight from jail, a fierce, troublesome customer.”
Now I knew who the hero was.
MILDRED CABLE
(1878–1952)
and
FRANCESCA FRENCH
(1871–1960)
No two Western women travelers and writers in modern times knew the desert in the way Mildred Cable and Francesca French did. With French’s sister, Evangeline, the three missionaries, known simply as “The Trio,” crossed and recrossed the Gobi Desert five times in the fifteen years between 1926 and 1941. Yet their writings do not have the ring of melodrama of much of the writing of their time, nor do they sound the shrill note of the overly pious. Instead, Cable and French weave stories against a quiet, forceful desert backdrop, showing controlled respect for the spirit of the places they encounter. Upon leaving China, the trio visited missions in New Zealand, Australia, and India. Their last venture together was their journey to South America in 1950, when Mildred was 72, Francesca, 79, and Evangeline, 81.
from THE GOBI DESERT
There is one caravan route which occasionally brings a merchant from Paotow or the Temple of the Larks to the banks of the Etzingol River. It is called the Winding Road, and most of those who use it are straightforward business men, dealers in pelts, camel’s hair or liquorice, but now and again it brings a man whose object it is to disappear from his native land and never be heard of again. Such men often have a strange background, and they travel under an assumed name and on fictitious business. Sometimes there is even a price on their heads. The Etzingol camping-grounds are an attractive place to the mock nomad, for there is good profit to be made in handling barter and exchange among people who are so elementary in methods of commerce as these Mongols. Such enigmatic guests generally join the caravan at a small halting-place, and hope for a free passage by acting as cook’s helper or junior puller. The bash* is not deceived, nor is he surprised if, before the journey’s end, they fail to report when the camp moves on, and are never seen again. If any comment is made he will merely remark, “To every man his own business,” and dismiss the subject.
A strange chain of circumstances brought us in contact with such an exile. We were drinking camel’s milk and eating zamba† in a Mongol tent one day when a man lifted the door-curtain, stepped inside, and, according to Mongol custom, exchanged snuff-bottles with the host. After this correct greeting the stranger sat down and was given a bowl of milk, while the interrupted talk was resumed. Our host was eager to know something of our country, and asked many questions regarding its King, its customs, its people, and regarding certain strange inventions the wonders of which had been reported to him. “Was it really true,” he asked, “that there were carts which flew in the air?” He knew that one horseless cart sometimes crossed Mongolia, but he had heard that it often refused to move, and that camel-caravans, though they travelled more slowly, might overtake the huge monster where it lay stuck in a rut. He had heard of the “iron road” at Paotow, but had never himself seen it, nor had he any wish to do so, for, as he said, “In this country camels are best.” He spoke fairly good colloquial Chinese and expressed admiration of our easy use of that language, to which we replied that before we came to these parts we had already lived for many years in Central Shansi. At these words the new arrival looked sharply in our direction, then turned away and continued his conversation in Mongolian about the business which had brought him there. It was quite clear that his interest had been arrested, but we were used to being the centre of notice in such a group and thought little of it. Presently he turned and spoke to us in Chinese, and it was evident that, though dressed as a Mongol, this was his native tongue and his intonation was that of Shansi. “From which part of the province did you come?” he asked. I mentioned the name of a city where we had lived for many years, but he said little more and soon took his departure. Later in the day we met him in other tents, and he always asked us a few questions in Chinese and always left us hurriedly.
Next day we were watching baby camels at their frolics in an enclosure near one of the encampments when a rider broke through the tamarisk thicket, tied his horse to a branch of the growth, and strode toward us. It was the same man again, and he was evidently well known here too, for he joined the family group like an habitué. Once again he spoke: “You said that you came from Shansi. Do you know many of the towns?” he asked. “We know most of them,” I answered. We then talked of that province, of its various localities, its progressive Governor and of its prosperity, but again he broke off abruptly and chatted in Mongolian with the family, drank another bowl of salted tea, saluted, leapt on his horse and rode off.
Two days later we stood in the yurt which housed the head lama of the Etzingol. It was a handsome tent and richly furnished with all the goods which indicate nomadic wealth. The brass and copper kettles were of the largest and heaviest description, the bowls were made of polished wood rimmed with silver, and the zamba boxes were lacquered in golden-bronze tints. The raised portion of the tent floor was larger than usual, and on it was placed a long, low table spread with the complete paraphernalia of ecclesiastical usage. There was a filigree jug of holy water, a bunch of peacock’s feathers with which to sprinkle the worshippers, rosaries to mark the recitation of mantras, a bell to sound at rhythmic intervals, a little hand-gong and a small prayer-wheel, an effigy of the thunderbolt, a wooden crab, a hammer with which to strike it, a conch which is blown to assemble the lamas, and most important of all, a vase which held bamboo slips inscribed with answers to the prayers of those who wished to fix a lucky day for some undertaking. There were also many brass bowls filled with butter, and a brazier in which to offer it as a burnt-offering. Behind the lama was placed the great cockscomb head-dress, kept in readiness for ritual occasions.
Facing the temple furnishings sat a man of such an evil countenance that he might well be accustomed to hold intercourse with dark forces. He was draped like an idol, in yellow and deep red brocade, and never ceased from muttering the one sentence: “O mane padhme hum” (O thou precious jewel in the lotus). He had been saying it so perpetually and for so long that his chin was moulded by the words into a strange shape. He never took his hand from the beads, and the muttered prayer persisted during every break in the conversation.
Several times the door-curtain was lifted to admit a Tibetan or a Mongol who knelt to receive the lama’s blessing, and among them was the same sham nomad whom we had already seen so often. He made an obeisance to the lama, who sprinkled him with holy water, then sat down on the ground near me, and while my companions continued talking with the lama he began to question me again about the district of Central Shansi, its towns and its villages.
“Do you know Peach Bloom Farms in the Eastern Hills?” he asked. “The village is not far from the town where you lived.”
“I know it well,” I said.
“Do you know the Li family who live there?” he asked again, his face tense with interest.
“I do,” I replied, “and I have often stayed in their home.”
When he asked that question I immediately realised to whom I was speaking, but I think that I succeeded in so controlling the expression of my face that he suspected nothing. Now that I held the key to his identity, the striking likeness of this Mongol to my old Shansi friends, the Li family, was unmistakable. He listened intently, and I spoke as naturally as possible of the young daughter-in-law and her child, and of the death of the old parents. Though I sat in the Mongolian tent and talked with this mysterious stranger, actually I was more vividly conscious of standing in a Shansi courtyard at Peach Bloom Farms, where a young woman was pouring out a strange story which concerned her dead husband. I knew her well, for she had been first a pupil, then a student, under my care, and it was natural that she should speak to me in her perplexity. The boy to whom she was betrothed had been a firebrand of revolutionary activity from schooldays, and after the marriage, while the young bride cared for his parents, he went off to a distant town, where he became involved in a political plot. It was discovered and he was arrested, condemned to death and executed. Later on, the rough coffin holding his body was brought home and buried at Peach Bloom Farms among the family graves.
“A week after his funeral,” the young widow was saying to me, “I came to the grave to mourn for my husband, and there I found a girl dressed, like me, in coarse white mourning. She crouched at my husband’s grave, wailing for the dead. I had never seen her before, and I asked her who she was and where she came from. She only said, ‘I have come to wail for my brother.’ ‘You are mistaken,’ I replied, ‘this is our family grave and my husband was buried here not long ago.’ She only shook her head and rocked to her wailing. I was frightened and ran home. There I found a stranger talking to my parents. He said that when my child’s father was condemned to death many tried to help him to escape, and a few hours before the execution a man was found who sold his own life for a large sum of money and let himself be shot in his place. That stranger said: ‘The coffin which is buried in your field does not hold the body of your son, but of the man who took his place, and his sister has come here to wail so that his spirit shall not be among the neglected dead. As to your son, he is alive, but he has fled to a distant country, from which he must never return to China.’ ”
Sitting in the lama’s yurt I thought of the old parents, of the girl who was neither wife nor widow, and of the grave which held the body of the man who had parted so carelessly with his life. I looked into the face of this mock Mongol and he gave me one searching glance. We both understood, but even at this distance from his home it was better not to say more, though I knew that I was speaking to the fugitive son, and he knew that I knew. He rose, gave the lama a final kowtow, turned to us with a Chinese salutation, and left the tent. He did not cross our path again, but his persistent inquisitiveness had not escaped the notice of our vigilant Chinese servants. They knew nothing of our side of the story, but took an opportunity to tell us that this man was no Mongol, but a Chinese fugitive, disguised and hiding in the forests of the Etzingol.
Desert dwellers have keener sight than other men, for looking out over wide spaces has adjusted their eyes to vastness, and I also learnt to turn my eyes from the too constant study of the minute to the observation of the immense. I had read about planets, stars and constellations, but now, as I considered them, I realised how little the books had profited me. My caravan guide taught me how to set a course by looking at one constellation, to check the progress of the night by observing the shifting position of others, to recognize the succession of morning and evening stars, and to observe the seasons by the phase of Orion in the heavens. The quiet, forceful, regular progress of these mighty spheres indicated control, order and discipline. To me they spoke of the control of an ordered life and the obedience of a rectified mind which enables man, even in a world of chaos, to follow a God-appointed path with a precision and dignity which nothing can destroy.
My guide also taught me another lesson, and that was how to walk by starlight. At first I stumbled and hurt my feet among the stones, but I saw that he walked as quickly, as securely and as freely by night as by day. Then I realised that he had used his daylight powers of sense to train the more subtle instinct which served him in the dark, and gradually I too learnt the art of training and then trusting my instincts until I also felt secure in the clear darkness, which is the only darkness that the desert knows. I remembered a wise word spoken by an old prophet concerning a man who was faithful and obedient yet who walked in darkness and had no light. Surely, like the desert wayfarer who walks securely by starlight, that man had learnt obedience and quick response in days of normal experience, and when dark hours came he walked confidently, his heart stayed upon God and relying on the certainties which he had proved in the hour of clear vision.
I recalled my early fears when the uncanny loneliness of the night made me shudder as I realised the utter isolation of our solitary way. We had embarked on an enterprise of which our most experienced Chinese friends spoke only in terms of warning; the natural shrinking from such loneliness, however, soon became a thing of the past, and those particular fears ceased for ever directly I realised that they were but the mock armaments of a foe with no power really to hurt, but who, a master in the region of fear, tries to dominate through frightening suggestions.
If, as those soldier-boys at Kiayükwan had so confidently declared, the Gobi is the haunt of demons, then the night should have been the time when their presence was most real, yet in fact it was more by day than by night that the word kwei (demon) was on the driver’s lips, and most often it was the desert dust-spout which provoked it. However breezeless the day, somewhere on the horizon a slender spiral of sand would rise, move, circle, walk across the plain, leave the earth and vanish in the sky. Sometimes the whole desert floor was alive with them. At a distance they seemed insignificant, but close at hand they were fearful in their cyclonic force. Travellers call them dust-spouts from their likeness to an ocean water-spout, but the desert dweller, certain that these waterless places are peopled by kwei, calls them dust-demons. The pillar of sand gives the impression of an invisible being daintily folding a garment of dust round its unseen form. Some whirl from left to right, and some from right to left. “This one is the male and that one the female kwei,” said the men; “you can distinguish them by the way they fold the dust cloak around them, right to left or left to right; see how they come in pairs.”
The couple came gliding across the plain in our direction, then suddenly turned aside, passing quite close, yet enveloped in such a narrow whirlwind that the curtains of the cart scarcely moved, though we saw sand and stones lifted high from the ground. A laden camel can scarcely resist the full force of a dust-spout, and when I was caught in the fringe of one, it nearly swept me off my feet.
The scientific mind of the Westerner studies the phenomenon with a view to understanding the atmospheric conditions which cause it, but the oasis man who lives and dies among desert scenes believes that waterless places are peopled by spirits who desire to be reclothed with flesh. “The best for the demon,” they say, “is when a living human will let himself be possessed, but, failing this, the kwei uses the dust from which flesh is made as cover for its nakedness.”
The spirit which agitates the long night hours uses fear as its weapon, but the demon of noon is the demon of discouragement. When the chill of night is dispelled by the sun’s rays the heat quickly grows in intensity until the midday hour brings unutterable weariness to every member of the caravan. The landscape itself seems to take on a metallic and inimical aspect, and every hill and boulder is rimmed with a yellow aura which gives a hard and repellent outline to the unfriendly scene. The expectant joyousness of the morning start has faded away, pleasant anticipation of the journey’s end is still too far ahead to be any consolation, and although half the stage is accomplished yet there is as much still to cover as lies behind, so the half-way line brings no sense of exhilaration. This is the moment when the noonday demon has power to transmute ph
ysical exhaustion into such weariness of spirit as drains all joy from service, leaving only stern duty to issue orders. Inertia invades beasts as well as men, and it is useless to urge flagging powers to greater effort. This, however, is no new difficulty to the caravan bash, and experience has taught him how to meet it. A halt must be called and a pause allowed in which to release tension and recover poise. In the desert there can be no rest without escape from the direct rays of the sun, the glare and the scorching heat, therefore some shade must be secured. The shadow of a rock is best, but where there is no rock there may be a man-built landmark made of desert clay, which throws reliable shade. Sometimes there was only the plain and its uncompromising nakedness, then the desert guide taught me how to use the shadow of my own cart and seek refuge between its high wheels. A brief period of rest for man and beast sent the caravan on its way renewed in strength and courage. The noonday demon had been overcome by recognising the noontide right to relax.
The still days when dust-demons walk abroad are good for caravans on the march, but sooner or later the time comes when the camels, alert as a barometer to atmospheric changes, show signs of uneasiness and become restive. The driver knows the indications and scans the horizon for signs of the coming storm, then moves among his animals, tightening ropes and securing packs. Before long there is a distant roar, and a cloud like rolling smoke with a livid edge advances and invades the sky, blotting out sun and daylight; then suddenly the sand-storm breaks on the caravan. No progress is possible and human beings shelter behind a barrage of kneeling camels from the flying stones and choking sand. When such a blinding storm is in progress there is no indication by which to find the way, and the only safe course is to stay still until it has exhausted itself by the surcharge of its own violence. It is a stirring of earth’s surface which blots out the light of day, robs the atmosphere of its purity, blurs the outline of tracks and landmarks and takes all sense of direction from men, making them helpless to use even their natural powers of orientation. It cannot be overcome by resistance, and those who dissipate energy in fighting it will inevitably be exhausted by its fury. The camel-driver is too wise to waste strength in fight and, following the instinct of the camel that kneels in order to offer less resistance, he learns to shelter till the terrible blast passes over. Such a storm will not last many hours, and as soon as it has spent itself the sun reappears in a serene sky, the violently disturbed sand and stones sink to their own place, and the caravan can continue its journey.
