LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIf SAN DIEGO D> BOOI 428 Geo i r MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD FROM MILLS & BOON'S LIST JACK LONDON. By Charmian London (Mrs Jack London). With 41 Illustrations from Photographs. Two Volumes. 36s. net. THE PACIFIC TRIANGLE. By Sydney Greenbie. With 87 Illustrations. 18s. net. BY CHELSEA REACH. By Reginald Blunt. With 24 Illustrations, ios. 6d. net. SOMERSET NEIGHBOURS. By Alfred Percivall. Demy 8vo. 8s. 6d. net. MOTOR YACHTING FOR WOMEN. By Frances G. Knowles-Foster. With 12 Illustrations. 6s. net. EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE. By Alfred E. Zimmern. 5s. net. PAINTED WINDOWS. By "A Gentleman with a Duster." Second Edition. 5 s - net * MIDDLE AGE HEALTH AND FITNESS. By Edwin L. Ash, M.D. 5s. net. ABRAHAM LINCOLN. By Frank Ilsley Paradise. With a Frontispiece. 5s. net. THE LURE OF OLD LONDON. By Sophie Cole. With 9 Illustrations. 5s. net. SWITZERLAND IN SUMMER. ByWiLLand CarineCadby. With 32 Illustrations. 5s.net. SWITZERLAND IN WINTER. By Will and Carine Cadby. With 24 Illustrations. Fcap. 8vo. 4s. net. MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD BY DOROTHY DIX WITH SIXTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS MILLS & BOON, LIMITED 49 RUPERT STREET LONDON, W.l Published ig22 Printed in Great Britain ly Turnbull <5r» Shears, Edinburgh Copyright in the United States of America CONTENTS CHAPTER I. The Fire Mountain of Hawaii . II. Japan the Beautiful . III. The Japanese at Home IV. The Finest Temple in the East V. The Heart of Old Japan . VI. Odd Corners of the Flowery Kingdom VII. Farewell to Japan .... VIII. Quaint Little Korea IX. Manchuria, the Chinese Cold Storage X. Imperial Purple Peking XI. Glimpses of the New China XII. Hong-Kong. A City built in Shelves XIII. The City of Unbelievable Sights XIV. The Philippines, Uncle Sam's White Elephant 133 XV. Singapore, the Eastern Elysium XVI. Java, where the Tropics are Tamed XVII. Java, Colonized and Careworn . PAGE 9 21 33 44 53 62 71 80 89 98 107 116 125 141 149 157 XVIII. Burma, the Centre of Oriental Splendour 165 XIX. Calcutta, the English Heart of India 174 6 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD CHAPTER PAGE XX. The Ganges, India's Holy River . . 183 XXI. The Jewel Box of India .... 193 XXII. Dark Passages in India's History . . 202 XXIII. "Where there ain't no Ten Commandments" 211 XXIV. " A Great and Terrible Land " . . 220 XXV. A Land of Temples and Elephants . . 229 ILLUSTRATIONS Dorothy Dix ...... Frontispiece The Great Diabutsu at Kamakura . Facing page 30 Temple at Nikko ..... ,, 47 Korean Yan Ban ..... „ 80 Bound Foot of Chinese Woman . . ,, 123 Bridge between Shameen Island and Canton ,, 129 Philippinos at Home .... ,, 133 Fast Transportation, Manila ... „ 137 Calcutta, the English Heart of India . ,, 174 Site of the " Black Hole " of Calcutta „ 176 Ganges River, Benares . . . . ,, 189 The Taj Mahal and Reflection in Jumna River ,, 193 Saint's Tomb at Fatehpur Sikri . . ,, 199 Baillie Gate, Lucknow .... „ 204 Jain Temple, Calcutta . . . . ,, 222 Ceylon. Taming a Wild Elephant . ,, 235 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD CHAPTER I THE FIRE MOUNTAIN OF HAWAII My joy-ride around the world really began on a rainy Saturday afternoon in New York. It had been a ghastly day, and as I looked, for the hundredth time, across a sodden court at the fourteen rows of dull and staring windows in the opposite wall, that always made me think of the eyes in an idiot's face, I had a swift revulsion against it all, and I realized that I was sick of the great city, sick of my work, sickest of all of myself, and that there was no health in me. Then it was that the little Cherub Who Sits Up Aloft and Rules My Destiny whispered in my ear : " You have always intended to make a trip around the world. Go now. All your life you have heard the East a-callin'. Once you answered it, and you remember the fun you had. Go again, and do not stop with Japan. Go and listen to the tinkly temple bells of Mandalay, buy Mandarin coats in Embroidery Street in Pekin and amber in Korea. Watch the faithful come down to bathe in the Ganges, and see the brown dancing girls of Java. Go." " Fine idea," I responded; " but how is a lone lorn woman, such as I am, to invade the Orient by herself ? " " Your favourite tourist agency is advertising its first around the world tour since the great war," said the Cherub persuasively. " Good," said I, " I go." 10 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD And being a sudden lady, with so little mind it never takes me more than a quarter of a minute to make it up on any subject, I made a frantic raid on my closet for hat, and rubbers, and raincoat, and umbrella, and in ten minutes I was virtually on the first lap of my joy-ride around the world, for within the hour I had bought my ticket for the great adventure. Thereafter ensued a month of frantic struggle with the State Department over a passport, and with dress- makers while I tried to guess what sort of clothes I would need in every possible variety of climate and every known breed of hotels. Then the long flight across the continent to San Francisco, where our little party was to meet and set sail for the far parts of the earth. And then on a September morning, all blue and silver, the big steamer pulled out from her berth amidst a shower of confetti, and dropped through the Golden Gate, and we were off at last, and at liberty to give the once-over to the men and women whom chance had ordained to be our most intimate companions for the next ten months, and whom we were destined to know far better than we knew our own sisters and brothers, or the people we had lived next door to for the last thirty years. And let me say right here that I am strong for the small party in travelling. Travelling alone brings to one only the lonely desolation of the Wandering Jew. For two to travel means that they get so fed up on each other's society that they quarrel, and they tell you in the Far East that when a couple of friends, or a husband and wife, start out alone together to see the world, they hardly ever reach as far as Hong-Kong, or Singapore, on speaking terms with each other. But in a small party there is enough variety to give a change of companionship. Different personalities strike different notes and see things from different angles. There are intriguing life stories to hear on long and THE HOME OF THE UKELELE 11 tedious journeys, strange experiences to listen to on dark nights when the ship ploughs through soft southern seas ; and when you weary of nature you can always turn with unalloyed zest to the contemplation of the human nature of your fellow-travellers. Travel is like marriage. It brings out the best and the worst in people. You never really know anyone until you have taken a trip with him or her, and so I bear grateful tribute to the men and women whose unfailing kindness and generosity and friendliness to me, a stranger, made my joy-ride around the world the thing of unalloyed delight it was. The Hawaiian Islands are the first stopping-place out from San Francisco. They are the half-way house of the Pacific, where every ship that goes East or West stops for coal and water, and fresh vegetables, and fruit, and fish. Of course most vessels go direct to Honolulu, but the better way to invade the paradise of the Pacific is to go by way of Hilo, on the island of Hawaii — that is, if you like your impressions, as I do mine, sharp cut, vivid, with plenty of pep and punch in them. So, to get in its dynamic force all the mighty contrast between heaven and hell, between the soft beauty of the Hawaiian Islands as they are now, aeons of time after they have been stewed up by internal fires from the bottom of the sea, and the crude horror of what the world was while still in the throes of creation, one should begin by seeing the great volcano Kileaua, the largest active volcano in the world. It was in the early morning that our ship dropped anchor in the harbour at Hilo. Instantly we were surrounded by a fleet of outrider canoes, each manned by two or three bronze Kanakas, with the wreaths of flowers that they call leis around their necks, and bands of gay feathers about their hats. On the dock a band was playing the soft, sweet, haunting Hawaiian music ; people who had come to meet friends on the boat cried 12 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD out " Aloha " to them, and cast leis of fragrant plumeria blossoms over their heads ; and so through a scene that was soul-satisfying, it was so exactly what it should have been, we made our way to our automobiles for the eighteen mile ride up to the volcano. It is a wonderful ride. You leave the little city of Hilo, quietly and complacently doing business, with the tremor of earthquakes so commonplace that nobody notices them, and unafraid with the menace of death and destruction always in the air, and speed along through Chinese and Japanese coolie villages, where dainty-looking women in kimonos and obis, and trousers and jackets, turn to look at you, and brown-faced, red- cheeked children tuck their little hands in their sleeves and bow gravely. On and on you go through rice fields and sugar plantations and rows of coffee trees, and then you strike into the jungle. Here are great forests of koa trees, the Hawaiian mahogany, and huge tree ferns, and tangles of snake- like vines starred with great white blooms a foot long the shape of trumpet flowers, and air-fed orchids, and a thousand plants whose names you do not know. The engine of your little flivver is now panting like a one-lunger in Denver, for you are climbing the steep grade of the side of Mauna Loa, Hawaii's greatest mountain. Suddenly the tropical growth melts away. Everything has a curse upon it. The ferns and trees are yellow and sickly-looking, their leaves withered and blighted, for some gust of wind has drifted the poisonous breath of Pelee, the fire-goddess, across it, and that blasts every living thing it touches. A few miles farther and the trees stand stark and black and dead, and then we go through acres and acres of ashes. It is the abomination of desolation. A little farther on and you are in the midst of the lava field, great masses of twisted and contorted stuff that looks as if it had been cast forth in agony in the birth pangs of the world. WHERE THE EARTH STILL BOILS 13 And then you get out of your automobile, which has taken you to the very mouth of the pit, and look down upon the most dramatic, the most awe-inspiring, the most terrible and unforgettable scene on earth. It is the literal hell of the Bible. It is the lake of flames, the fire that burns for ever and is not quenched by many waters. Below you spreads the great sheet of molten matter, covered, for the most part, with a repulsive greyish-yellow scum, like a foul pond, but through this run ceaselessly ripples of flame, and as it breaks apart in a thousand places you see the seething, hideous fire beneath. At different places in the sea of fire are great geysers of flame that shoot up into the air fifty or a hundred feet and toss great boulders up and down in them as a rubber ball is played in a fountain, only to suck them down finally into the depths again. The air is filled with fumes of sulphur and brimstone that tear at your throat until you choke and gasp for breath, but the horror and the fascination of it all holds you speechless, with your conscience doing a lightning- review act of your past life, and your fears turning your feet to ice in spite of the hot lava upon which you are standing. Maybe, you reflect, the higher criticism isn't to be depended upon, and the Bible means what it says, and there is such a hell as this, after all. Apparently everybody else was resolving, as I was, to lead a better life, for there was a dead silence until I heard a man behind me say under his breath : " My God ! my father was a Scotch Presbyterian clergyman, and he preached hell-fire for fifty years with- out seeing this ! But the old boy had figured out a mighty accurate description of it. I'll tell the world he had ! " We went to a little hotel near the volcano for dinner. The hotel-keeper explained that his greatest difficulty was the lack of water, and when asked why he didn't dig a well, he said cheerfully, " Oh, if we go down as deep as seventy-five feet below the surface of the earth B 14 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD we either get boiling water or flames." Which seemed living too near to the judgment-day to be enticing to me. Back again at night we went to see Kileaua with all her spectacular fireworks turned on. The great lake red like a pool of blood, the sulphur flames shooting iridescent colours into the black velvet of the sky. It was hours before I could tear myself away. I said that I was coming back to stay until I had looked my full upon the terrible majesty of the great fire goddess Pelee, as the natives call the volcano. " If you stay until you are satisfied you will never leave," said a resident ; " once the volcano lays its spell upon people they cannot go. They stay on and on. Sometimes they go mad, and it draws them until they plunge into its depths." It is only a night's sail from Hilo to Honolulu, and the next morning we passed the frowning fortress of Diamond Head, and were throwing pennies from the deck of our steamer to the lithe brown boys who swam out from shore to meet us, and who dived for the coins as they fell into the water and pouched them in their cheeks. The Hawaiians are the real mermen and mermaidens. They almost live in the water, and to see one come in to shore on his surf board, standing erect while his frail craft, about the size and shape of a housewife's ironing board, leaps the white rollers on the Waikiki beach, is to behold a feat so marvellous that you almost doubt your own eyes. Honolulu — pronounce it with a long o in the first syllable — is the real melting-pot of our Eastern pos- sessions, for it is there that all of the peoples of the Orient mingle and are turned into more or less good black-and-tan Americans. There are sixty odd thousand people in the little city, only about ten thousand of whom are white, the balance being Hawaiians, Japanese, Chinese, Javanese, and Singalese, and all sorts of other eeses, and this popula- tion makes a place of singular charm and fascination, THE MELTING-POT OF RACES 15 unique among the cities of the earth, for all of the different peoples live and dress according to the custom of their own country. Thus in Honolulu you can come pretty near to finding everything the heart of man desires. It is the Orient without its squalor and dirt and disease. It is the tropics without their devastating heat, their miserable food, their loathsome insects and reptiles. It is America with its progress and its physical comforts, its fine hotels and smart society, and without its mad hustle and rush, and, above all, it is Honolulu itself with its pervading charm, with its winds that are soft as a baby's kiss, with its midnight skies that are like black velvet pinned with diamond stars, with the beat of its surf on coral reefs and the tinkle of the music of steel guitars that is never quite out of the air. There are not many stock sights to see in Honolulu. Probably the most interesting is the splendid bronze statue, standing in the principal street, of Kameha- meha, because it typifies all early Hawaiian history. Kamehameha was the George Washington of the islands. He conceived the idea of uniting all of the islands under one government, which he did by the effective process of invading each one with a well-trained army and conquering it. Oahu, the island on which Honolulu is situated, put up a fierce struggle, but it surrendered after its army had been driven back by Kamehameha's troops until they were literally pushed over the Pali, a cliff five hundred feet high. Kamehameha gave to his people their first stable government. He promoted agriculture, and punished crime, and was one of the men who would have been a great general and a great statesman in any age. Another interesting place to visit in Honolulu is the palace, now the government house, a big ornate frame building with the curse of the jig-saw age upon it, and curious round mirrors, set like plaques in the outside wall. But within there is a noble and beautiful staircase 16 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD of the koa wood, that is so hard that a nail cannot be driven into it, and that takes a most lovely satin polish, while on the walls are portraits of the kings and queens of the great monarchies of Europe sent as gifts to the sister monarchs of the Hawaiian Islands when Hawaii was a toy kingdom. They show you the upper chambers in which Queen Liliuokalini was imprisoned during the Revolution, and in this palace, where she had reigned in life, she was laid in state at her death, while the allis — the chiefs and chieftainesses of the old native aristocracy — stood guard over her, and wailed her according to the ancient custom. From here they followed her to the tomb, bearing torches of kukui nuts which they grounded, and extinguished, and flung before her tomb in token that the Hawaiian dynasty had gone out for ever. But the chief interest in any country is its people, and none are more intriguing than these big, gentle, good-natured, childlike members of a fast-vanishing race. The pure-bred Hawaiian will soon be as rare as the pure-bred North American Indian, for the Hawaiians are a fluid race which has mingled with the great tide of foreign peoples who have swept over their island and been engulfed by them. Of course the rich Hawaiians live as do the rich people anywhere. They have fine homes and motors, and send their children to the States and Europe to be educated, but in the country you may still see many glimpses of the old life. Here the people live in little thatched huts, and before the door you can see an old man or an old woman engaged in making poi, the native dish upon which the Hawaiians mainly subsist. This is made of the taro plant, a variety of the elephant ear that is the pride of the village front yard in America. The root of the taro is boiled until soft, and pounded on a board with a stone pestle until it is reduced to a pulp. It is then put in a calabash, a big gourd, and mixed with water, and allowed to WEARING 'EM HIGHER IN HAWAII 17 ferment for two or three days, when it is considered ready to eat. It smells and looks and tastes exactly like soured bill-stickers' paste, but it is the most nourishing and fattening article of food in the world. It is eaten by sticking your fingers into it, winding the mess around them and sucking it off, and is known as " one-finger poi " or " two-finger poi," according to the thickness and stickiness of it. A calabash of poi is always on tap in the Hawaiian household, and is partaken of from time to time by the members of the family as they get hungry ; and as it requires no dishes to serve it in, or dish-washing, or daily cooking, it reduces life to a state of simplicity that house- keepers of the West might well envy. So does the dress of the Hawaiian woman. It is called a holoku, and is a one-piece, Mother Hubbard-like garment, that is said to have originated from the night- gowns of the first missionaries who came to the islands. According to tradition, when the natives, clad only in smile of welcome and with a wreath of flowers about their necks, rowed out in their outrider canoes to the ship to welcome the strangers, the prim New England mis- sionary ladies were greatly shocked at the deshabille of the native women, and threw down their night-gowns to them for covering, and from these the Hawaiian women fashioned the costume of civilization which they still wear. Anyway, nothing could more become the Amazonian proportions of a Hawaiian woman than the holoku, with its simple straight lines, and it must be a blessed relief not to have to bother with changing styles and fashions, but just to be able to put on a clean nightie and stick a fresh flower in your hair, and be ready to go to work, or to a party, or a funeral. In remote parts of the country there still exists a custom that once was universal among all Hawaiians, and that was to swap babies with your friends and 18 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD relatives. When a child was born, the etiquette of the occasion demanded that it be wrapped in a piece of soft kapa cloth — cloth made from pounding the fibre of a certain tree into a pulp — and sent with your compli- ments to your best friend. And best friend retaliated by presenting you with her next olive branch. Thus in a family to which ten children were born, the parents would not raise a single one of their own, but would rear some twelve or fifteen children, each one of whom belonged to a different family by birth. Queen Liliuokalini was one of these gift babies, and thousands of prominent Hawaiians were reared in this manner, and still speak of their " sister cousins " or " brother friends," meaning the foster-relative with whom they were brought up. And everywhere, city and country, that you go in Hawaii there is music, so it is curious to learn that the missionaries found the Hawaiians almost tone-deaf. They used only four notes, used exclusively in guttural chants, but when they finally were taught to sing, it seemed to uncover a well of melody that rolled up from the throats, and found expression in the finger-tips of a whole people. But if you listen you will discover the influence of the missionaries on Hawaiian music. Almost every Hawaiian air is reminiscent of long-metre hymns. One of the interesting things I did in Honolulu was to attend a luau, or native feast. A huge pit had been dug and filled with stones heated red-hot, on which water was thrown, and in this steam was cooked pork and fish, each portion wrapped up in leaves of the aromatic ti plant. The meat thus cooked in its own juices was delicious. In addition, there was chicken stewed with fresh coconut, which made a heavenly combination, and poi of both the one-fingered and two-fingered variety, and great bowls of luscious pineapple that melted in your mouth and trickled all over your countenance. Dead ripe Hawaiian pineapple is a thing to be eaten with A FEAST FOR THE GODS 19 thankfulness on your knees and in the seclusion of your own bathroom. We sat on the ground and ate with our fingers, for only the classy Hawaiians ever use knives and forks. After- wards we were entertained by the most famous hula-hula dancers in Honolulu, four large fat ladies in grass mats, with phenomenal stomach and back muscles. They wriggled and contorted themselves to a tune- less tune, while a toothless old man rattled a gourd with pebbles in it, and chanted a melee, a tradition so old that it is forgotten by all save two or three minstrels who still wander about singing the songs of other days. And I saw one of the saddest and most heroic sights on earth — the going away of the lepers, and of those whose love is stronger than the fear of death, and who go to join their own in the leper colony, and bear them company on their dreary way to the grave. On one end of the beautiful island of Molokai the United States Government has established a sanatorium where those afflicted with this dread disease may have what help science can give them, and be isolated so that they will save their fellow-creatures from con- tamination. The lepers may have homes of their own, and their families may join chem if they wish, but those who once go must stay. They can never come back. No one knows better than the Hawaiians the horror of that death that one dies by inches. No one knows better than they, that if they go, they give themselves almost surely to this cruel fate, and yet every boat carries a number of men and women — mostly women — who go to cheer the last days of some one in whom they see not the leper, but the one who is dearer than life to them. The Hawaiian word of greeting and of farewell is " Aloha." It means love, luck, good fortune, every- thing of good-will that one human being can convey to 20 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD another. Lovers say it with kissing lips as they part. Friends call it gaily to each other. Strangers shout it to you on the roadside. The band plays it. And no matter how long you stay in Honolulu, the time comes all too soon to say it when you leave. " But you will come again," said the hospitable Honoluluans, as they hung leis about my neck, " if you throw your leis into the water of the harbour." CHAPTER II JAPAN THE BEAUTIFUL From San Francisco to Yokohama by way of Honolulu is twenty days' straight sailing, and unless one belongs among those unfortunates who cannot even see a white petticoat flapping on a clothes-line without being made seasick, it is a time of unalloyed joy and peace and rest. Two or three days out from San Francisco the weather grows mild as spring-time, and thereafter you sail through the " dark purple spheres of sapphire seas " of the poet, and your knotted nerves unkink themselves, and you sleep and eat like a baby, and find yourself wondering why you worried so over little troubles that you could come and drop overboard into the depths of the blue Pacific, and drown. It's a different experience from crossing the Atlantic, which seems indecently crowded compared with the vast stretches of the Pacific, where for days upon days at a time you do not see a single sail upon the horizon — nothing but the lapis lazuli water with the little white waves chasing each other like sheep in a blue meadow in the daytime, and the moon sending down its silver bridge to heaven by night. Not a bird, not a fish. Nothing but the vast solitude of the ocean and the softness and the warmth of the air, and the peace that passes all understanding enfolding you as in a healing garment. And the ship is different. None of the fuss and feathers and gilt and damask hangings of the big Atlantic liners. These boats are built for the tropics. Everything is plain and scrubbable. The cabins are 21 22 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD as bare as a nun's cell, but they are big and room}-, with beds instead of berths, and electric fans. The crew is Chinese, and the table stewards wear long blue cotton gowns at breakfast and tiffin (lunch) and white ones at dinner. My own steward was a seraphic little chap named Ah Sin, with an angelic expression and a missing front tooth, who almost wept in sympathy when he had to tell me that there was no pap-aya for breakfast because it was " gleen." " No can get this dy, p'laps can get to-morrow," he added cheeringly. In repeating an order he always said, " Can get one plice tea, one plice eggs, one plice lolls." Every Chinese servant is a " boy," no matter if he is ninety years old. They are insatiably curious, and ask you questions your own mother wouldn't venture to put to you. Especially are they desirous of knowing your age, and if you have any children, and if you are married, and if not, why not. One day my room steward stopped in the midst of wiping up the floor to ask me : " You Clistian ? " " Um, so-so," I replied. " Me Clistian," he responded. " Me Blaptist, much heap water." I then inquired of him if he knew a certain Ah Foo, who had been my room steward on this same boat on a previous trip. " Les," he replied. " Ah Foo, he long time run on boat. He save much money. Now he live in China, where he buy him many wives. All young, all pretty. I save my money and buy me pretty young wives like Ah Foo." And the people that you meet on the Pacific liners are different from those who make the Atlantic liners a ferry-boat between London and Paris and New York. For the most part these passengers are the modern soldiers of fortune, starting on great adventures in the name of commerce or science. One man I met was A CHRISTIAN OF PARTS 23 going out to study the bushmen of Australia, another to dig among the ruins of Ceylon, another to hunt the flu' microbe to its lair in Manchuria. A pink-cheeked little Dutchman bought wild animals all over the world, and told you stories about hair- breadth escapes from mad elephants and charging tigers that made your hair stand on end. Only a few months before his pal had stumbled on a river bank over what seemed to be a log, and in an instant the huge jaws of a crocodile had closed upon him and cut him in two, as a pair of shears would sever a string. I became great friends with this chap, who insisted on presenting me with a " yeetle yeopard " as a token of his affection. He said a little leopard was an ideal pet, but it seemed to me that it would rather crowd a two-by-four flat, so I declined with thanks. Another man was bringing out a great stock of goods — red calico, and glass beads, and phonographs with jazz records that he would unload at New Zealand, and put on board of his schooner, and then sail among the South Sea islands, where he would trade off his goods for vanilla bean, and copra, and pearls, and pearl shell to nearly naked chiefs, who would give him hot cham- pagne to drink out of coconut shells. And then there were the brides and grooms, brave young couples, who were starting out to begin their new lives together on the other side of the world, where they would introduce American safety razors, and American canned goods, and American steel, and American pickles, and heaven knows what, for Uncle Sam is reaching out a grasping hand after the trade of the Orient, and is sending his boys and their wives to go get it. And so you sail, and gossip, across the shining waters and through the pleasant days, and cross that mysterious 180th meridian where time begins, and where you lose a day going to the Far East and gain one coming back. And you listen politely while the chief officer tries to 24 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD explain the why of it, and give it up because you can't understand it unless you are a mathematical shark, and you just accept the fact that it was Friday one day and Sunday the next without further argument. And then, at last, perhaps you will be as lucky as I was, and in a golden morning get your first glimpse of Japan with Fuji Yama standing out in ineffable beauty in the rose-pink dawn. It is a thing of such surpassing loveliness it leaves you breathless with awe and wonder, and you no longer wonder that the beauty-loving Japanese worship it, and pay it the tribute of putting its likeness on everything they make. It is the fashion to sneer at Yokohama and say that it is not Japan, that it is uninteresting, a mere com- mercial port, but I think that the first glimpse of any new country gives you a certain thrill that you never quite feel again anywhere else. And anyway, anywhere, Japan is the most satis- factory country on earth to visit, because it is the one place that not only comes up to all your dreams of her, but pulls that Queen of Sheba stuff on you — the half that has never been told. Everything is there just as you expected to find it, only more so. The toy houses, the people who look like the figures on a fan, everything of beauty and wonder that you have ever imagined. And the scenery is right there always on top. You don't have to go hundreds of miles through ugliness to get a superb view as you do in most other countries, for every inch of Japan registers picturesqueness, as our cinema friends say. Moreover, you can see things in comfort, and on a full stomach, for the Imperial Railways of Japan are equal to our best American system, and the hotels, except for the butter, which invariably tastes as if Mrs Noah had carried it into the Ark with her, are excellent. Concerning these advantages of physical well-being we were to think with tears of regret, many a time and oft, later on, as we sat down to meals of stringy goat meat, THEY DON'T HAVE TAXIMETERS 25 and tried in vain to coil our more or less lithesome figures around the knots that were camouflaged as beds. So in Yokohama I got my first taste of Japan, and made acquaintance with the rickshaw, a grown-up-size baby buggy, in which you are pulled about by man- power. It is the ideal way to sight-see, because it is so intimate, and because you go so slowly, and because you can go poking in and out of little holes that you couldn't possibly get into with a horse and carriage, to say nothing of an automobile. The first time you get into a rickshaw you feel foolish, the second time you like it, and by the third time it has become an estab- lished habit. The only difficulty with me was that I never could get used to my horse turning round, from time to time, and entering into conversation with me. The rickshaw coolies come from the country, and are the strong boys of the rural districts. They strike a sort of a jog-trot that will take you five or six miles an hour, and this they can keep up for hours at a time. You pay about twenty cents an hour, with a little tip, and if you are at all generous — if you give a tip of as much as ten cents or a quarter to your rickshaw man, you belong to him and he will fight for you. One day I had been out on a twelve-mile rickshaw trip. When I got back to the hotel I wanted to go to a certain shop to see about some work I was having done, and thinking to spare the rickshaw boy who had pulled me so far, I called another one, and was proceeding placidly through the hotel garden, when I heard wild shrieks and shouts, and a maniac figure came toward me, leaping over miniature pools and dwarfed trees, and hurling the rickshaw man out of the shafts, seized them and placidly trotted off with me. It was the rickshaw boy who owned me, and he didn't propose to surrender his prey. The best way to see a city is, I think, to begin by getting a bird's-eye view of it, so I chartered a rickshaw 26 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD and we started out. First down the main shopping street, the Benten-dory, with its enchanting little shops filled with gold lacquer, and carved ivory, and damascene work, and flaming silks that fairly cried to be bought. Then down Theatre Street, through a forest of tall bamboo poles forty and fifty feet high, to which are lashed streamers of cloth on which are painted gay ideographs advertising the thrilling and blood-curdling moving pictures that are being shown in the little theatres that line the way. Then out into the residence part of the town, among the little houses with paper walls that always look like doll houses to foreigners. The streets are very narrow, and the houses jammed together, and as every shoji is thrown wide open you get a com- prehensive view of the daily life of the people as you go by. Here a woman is bathing a baby. There one is plastering her washing on a board set up against the house, and leaving it thus to dry in place of ironing it. Here another woman is getting dinner in a pot set over a charcoal brazier in the street. There a man is sawing a plank with a queer square saw that he draws to him instead of pushing it away from him, the while he holds the board steady with his toes. Ih another shop a tailor is sewing up the long seam of a kimono, and he has one end of it clutched between the big toe and the next toe, as we women pin the goods for a long seam to our knees. Evidently we Occidentals miss much in not making any use of our toes except to walk with. And in and out, everywhere, hundreds of children, gay as butterflies in their gaudy kimonos that look like wrecked rainbows, fluttered about almost as noiselessly as creatures of the air. For the wonder of the world is the way of Japanese children. They seem the happiest children imaginable, and the most beloved, and the best treated, for in all the months that I have spent in Japan I have never seen a child struck, or pulled about, or heard one crossly THE CHILDREN OF JAPAN 27 spoken to, yet no soldiers could be under more perfect discipline or yield more perfect obedience. Every Japanese child who is as much as seven years old has a younger child strapped on its back from the time it gets up till the time it goes to bed, except when it is in school or at work. Nothing could be more curious than to see little girls jumping the rope and little boys playing leap-frog with baby brother or sister calmly sleeping on their backs, its poor little head bobbing around as if it would fall off. Little boys even run to fires, despite the babies they carry around with them. Japanese children seem totally to lack the instinct for destruction that is the main characteristic of our offspring. In the bay of Yokohama there is some sort of a little pink barnacle, about the size of a silver dime, that fastens itself on anything cast into the water. The Japanese put into the water little twigs and sticks, and when these have become covered with the pinkish shells, they mat them together between bamboo poles, and make of them a fence that looks like a wall of mother- of-pearl. It is the most beautiful, the most ethereal, the fraillest structure that it is possible to imagine, and yet you see blocks and blocks of this fence along a public highway, on which thousands of little boys pass and play every day. And it isn't touched. Get that ? A small boy and a mother-of-pearl fence existing at one and the same time and the same place. I regard that as the chief est of all the marvels of Japan. I reflected that such a fence would last about three minutes in America con- temporaneously with the American boy, but being of an optimistic nature I probably exaggerated the time limit. Japanese children are the soul of courtesy. Wher- ever you meet a group of children they stop still, and throw up their skinny little arms above their heads and shout out : " Banzai ! O enjin-san ! " which means " Hurrah, honourable stranger, may you live ten 28 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD thousand years." And sometimes they begin reciting the alphabet, and call after you a, b, c, d, e, f to show that they are studying English, for English is taught in all the Japanese schools. Japanese children never cry. They never howl, or fight, or make any of the nerve-racking noises that causes everyone who has to live with American children to pray for deafness. We spend millions of dollars in sending missionaries to Japan to carry to it our theory of religion. It's about time for Japan to raise a few million yen to send missionaries to us to teach us how to raise children. There ought to be more reciprocity in this missionary business. The chief interest to foreigners, and especially to Americans, in Yokohama is the long shining stretch of water that gives into the harbour, and that is called Mississippi Bay, in honour of Commodore Perry's flag- ship. Here Commodore Perry anchored his fleet in 1853 when the Government of the United States sent him to knock with the mailed fist at the closed door of Japan, and demand that the Flowery Kingdom abandon its policy of isolation. The door was opened, and the greatest miracle of all history took place. For almost in a night Japan passed from the mediaeval ages to the forefront of the present. In the twinkling of an eye it changed its form of govern- ment, its habits and customs, and its whole outlook on life. And the Japanese did what no other people has ever been wise enough to do. They looked the whole world over with an appraising eye, and took what they con- sidered the best that each nation could give them. Thus they modelled their constitution and their army on that of Germany, then at the peak of its efficiency, and not run military-mad as it later was. They formed their navy upon England's, and took over bodily the American public school S3 r stem. Nor did Japan stop there. To-day she is still learning THE PROGRESS OF JAPAN 29 from others, still copying others, and in every country of the world you will find Japanese students, and mechanics, and business men, and scientists, busily engaged in gathering up the sum of the wisdom and experience of others to take back home, instead of going vaingloriously about, as travellers from other countries do, boasting of their own country's superiority and learning nothing from others. Patriotism is the real religion of Japan— it is the essence of Shintoism, which is the official faith ; and the love of country that is greater than national vanity is about the best that is in the shop, isn't it ? To realize what Japan has done in less than seventy years you must remember that in 1853 Japan was as feudal as England was in the time of Richard Cceur de Lion. A few great nobles owned the land, and the common people were virtually serfs. The Mikado was a mere figurehead, and the country was ruled first by one powerful family, then by another. It was death for any Japanese even to attempt to leave the country. Japan had no commerce with the outside world no ships except the little fishing boats that plied along the shore. No one had even ever heard of a railroad, or a telegraph, or dreamed of a postal system. There were no factories, except a few groups of individuals who phed their trade by hand. What Japan is to-day with her army, her navy, her postal system, her railroads and telegraphs, her scientists and schools, her far-reaching commerce, no one needs to be told. It is an achievement so tremendous that you don't wonder that the Japanese are a trifle cocky over it. We would feel that way ourselves if we had done it. A few miles below Yokohama is Kamakura, once the capital of Japan, under the Shogunate, and a splendid city of two million inhabitants, now sunken to a poor small fishing village, but always a Mecca for the devout and of interest to tourists because here is the great 30 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD Diabutsu, the greatest statue ever erected to the Lord Buddha. This colossal bronze is thirty-six feet high, and its eyes, four feet long, are of pure gold ; and of all the millions of images that have represented man's conception of the great teacher, it is by far the most beautiful. It is full of the majesty and the calm of a soul wrapped in meditation and clothed in peace — a soul that has passed into perfect knowledge, and that is beyond the reach of earthly cares and worries. For more than six hundred years this image of Buddha has sat there upon his lotus throne, in his face the wisdom that passes all human knowledge, while count- less generations of men and women have laid their sorrows at his feet ; while dynasties have risen and fallen ; a city has come and gone. Two tidal waves have washed temples away that have been built above his head, and still he dreams on, uncounting the efforts of man as if they are of no more account than the insects in the sands about him. Before the entrance to the shrine of the Diabutsu is this beautiful inscription : " Stranger, whosoever thou art, and whatsoever be thy creed, when thou entereth this sanctuary remember that thou treadeth upon ground hallowed by the worship of ages. This is the temple of Buddha, and the gate of the eternal, and should therefore be entered with reverence." From Kamakura we motored back to Yokohama along the Takaido. This is a road built from Tokyo to Kyoto centuries ago, and every inch of it is a part of the history and romance of Japan. For along this highway journeyed the Sons of Heaven in all the panoply of Church and State. Along here were borne the gold- lacquered sedans of great ladies and beautiful geishas. Along here came the Shoguns with their triumphal retinues, and splendid Daimios in gorgeous brocades, and two-sword Samuri in suits of mail. Along here came Hirosighe, the great artist, stopping THE GREAT DIABUTSU AT KAMAKURA DOROTHY DIX AT LEFT THE TEMPLE OF BUDDHA 31 to paint his fifty immortal pictures of the Takaido that have come down to us in the prints that adorn every collection, and make every print -lover green with envy. Along here have toiled, with bent backs, unnumbered generations of peasants, straining under their heavy loads. Not a foot of the way but has been fought over by the warring families of Shoguns in the feudal times ; not a foot of it that is not stained with blood, and wet with tears and sweat. And now we honk along it in an automobile at forty miles an hour, the while we commend our souls to God, for no prudent person cherishes more than a faint hope of ever returning alive from a Japanese motor trip. The roads are very narrow, and so crooked they make a corkscrew look straight. There are no sidewalks, and as the whole country is practically a continuous village in which everyone walks, and works, and plays in the street, it does not seem possible to avoid either being killed or committing murder every minute. Especially as everywhere there are myriads of chil- dren, who clatter to one side on their little wooden shoes only when you are grazing the sashes of their kimonos. Through all this congestion the Japanese chauffeurs clatter without slowing down or pausing as they turn corners on one wheel. And always they toot their horns incessantly, and you never can know how raucous and ear-splitting an auto horn can be until you hear it shrieking out death and destruction with a Japanese accent. But, barring the American devil wagon, the scenes along the Takaido have changed little since mediaeval days. There are the same giant cryptomeria trees shading the way, the same eternal green hills, the same glimpses of the blue sea, the same little patches of rice and millet, the same patient peasants toiling in the tiny fields. One might say there are the same smells, for in Japan they do not run their sewage 32 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD into the nearest river as we do. They gather it up carefully in buckets and spread it over the fields, where- fore you frequently have to admire the beauties of nature with a clothes-pin on your nose. But you forget the evil odours as you fly along the Takaido and watch the women threshing out grain with a flail, as they did hundreds of years ago, and men beating down posts by letting heavy timbers fall on them, human trip-hammers — and in the little mud- thatched houses birth and death and life go on, just as they did when the peasants looked up from their tasks to see gorgeous cavalcades of nobles ride by with flaunting banners instead of a bunch of American tourists joy-riding around the world. CHAPTER III THE JAPANESE AT HOME Eighteen miles from Yokohama is Tokyo, the capital of Japan, the seat of government having been removed there from Kyoto after the Revolution of '61, in which the Mikado's power was restored. Tokyo is the real city of magnificent distances. It is composed of little wooden houses, hardly any of them more than two storeys high, that spread over about one hundred and fifty square miles, so it is literally a Sabbath day's journey from one point of interest to another. Of course such a city is the predestined prey of flames, and every now and then there is a terrible fire, for the little frame houses with their paper walls burn like tinder, and acres of buildings are swept away in an hour. After the last great conflagration an attempt was made in the business section to erect modern fireproof Western buildings, which look uncouth in the midst of their airy, fairy Japanese neighbours, and draw attention to the curious fact that Japanese taste is perfect as long as it deals with native art, but when it ventures into foreign fields it runs amuck. Nothing, for instance, could be more beautiful or more harmonious than the arrangement of a Japanese house or hotel, but when they come to decorate a house in what they think is the foreign style, they bring together curtains and rugs and upholstery that swear at each other, and assemble a lot of junk furniture so ungraceful, so tawdry and ugly, that it sets your teeth on edge. The heart of the city, of course, contains the Govern- ment buildings, the Diet, the Army and Navy and Foreign departments, and so on, and not far off are the various 33 34 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD legations, each in its compound, the American Legation being the shabbiest of the lot, as usual. For unless our ambassadors have enough money of their own to rent a decent house, we certainly do force them to give an inspiring example of Republican simplicity of living. Hard by is the Emperor's palace, invisible from the street, but you may behold the enchanting garden in which it is situated, and the great grey walls that sur- round it, with their towers, with beautiful curved pagoda roofs at every corner, where watchers in feudal days kept a look-out for the enemy when this was a Shogun castle. At the foot of the walls is a wide canal spanned by drawbridges, and down the sides of the wall great branches of cryptomeria have been trained so that they dip their green loveliness into the water. In another part of the city is a modern palace, French in style, in which the Crown Prince lives, and you may often see the young lad driving about the city in a victoria drawn by four horses, accompanied by two or three grave and stolid elderly gentlemen, and looking very bored and as if being heir to the throne wasn't much fun, especially when a boy is in his teens. Curious, isn't it, when you come to think about it, that the idea of having a grand tombstone put over you when you are dead has always been a ruling passion with every people in every age ? The Japanese are much addicted to this post-mortem vanity, and the wonder-place of Tokyo is the Sheba temples, which were built as the mortuary shrines of the Tokugawa Shoguns. You approach the shrine through a gravelled courtyard where there are rows of bronze lanterns, and then you face a long low building that is a mass of intricate carving, of gold and lacquer and inlay, and a blaze of colour that dazzles and bewilders the eye, the beauty of the whole enhanced by its setting against a background of vivid green cryptomeria. About a mile from the Sheba temple is the Buddhist A STORY OF LOYALTY 35 temple of Sengakuji, where, on a little hill, lie the Forty-seven Ronins who are the heroes of innumerable Japanese plays and novels which have been built around the legend of their tragic fate. The story, in brief, is that of a certain Shogun who was ordered to arrange a court function. Being un- aware of the etiquette of the occasion, he asked a Daimio how to do it. The Daimio gave the desired instruction, for which he expected to be well paid, but the Shogun, thinking that to offer a great nobleman money for a friendly act would be an insult, made no return for the Daimio's services. The Daimio therefore taunted the Shogun with his penuriousness, and at last ordered him to put on his shoes. In wrath the Shogun drew his sword and struck the Daimio. To do this in a royal palace was an unforgiv- able crime, so the Shogun was given the privilege of committing hari-kari, which he did. After which his estates were confiscated, and his followers became Ronins, or wave-men, wanderers on the face of the earth. Forty-seven of them, led by Oishi Kuranosuke, vowed to avenge their master, and for several years stalked their prey, the grafting Daimio, but, knowing his danger, he kept himself so well guarded by soldiers they could never approach near enough to him to carry out their vengeance. At last, however, by pretending to have degenerated into drunken sots, they disarmed his suspicions. He thought they had abandoned their purpose, and relaxed his guard, whereupon they fell upon him and slew him. They cut off his head, washed it in a little well, which you may still see at the foot of the hill on which their tombs are, and placed it on their master's grave, after which the whole forty-seven committed suicide, for they knew that their death must pay for the death of the enemy. They are buried by their master, and for two 36 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD hundred and thirty-seven years the fires of incense, lit by the Japanese, who put loyalty above all other virtues, have never gone out before their tombs. It was twilight when we saw it, and the whole place was blue with the pale smoke of the little incense tapers, and the air heavy with perfumes from them. We also lit little bunches of sandalwood sticks before each grave, and paid to the forty-seven Ronins the tribute that every noble heart offers before unselfish devotion. Perhaps the difference between the Oriental and the Occidental point of view is never more vividly illustrated than in the way each looks at the taking of one's own life. To us the suicide is an object of horror and con- tempt. We look upon him as a coward, as one who had not the courage either to endure or to fight the battle of life. The Japanese see something noble in the throw- ing away of one's life for the sake of an ideal. Thus one of their popular heroes is the instructor of a young Prince who was inattentive to his studies and more concerned with pleasure than his duties. The teacher wrote a letter to the Prince in which he urged his pupil to take a more serious view of life, and to make his message more impressive, as soon as he had delivered it he killed himself. This is why the Japanese have turned the home of General Nogi into a shrine, and I found nothing more interesting in Tokyo than a visit to the house in which had lived the hero of the Russian war, and in which he died by his own hand. It is a plain little wooden house, for although General Nogi was a man of great wealth, the Japanese tradition inculcates simplicity of living in the officers of the army and navy. Here, loaded down with honours, the idol of his country dwelt with his old wife until the death of the late Emperor, and then, in order that his spirit might follow his Lord into the other world, and that his wife's spirit might follow his, both he and she committed suicide. THE SUICIDE OF NOGI 37 The preparations were made deliberately. First General Nogi sent for a lawyer and made his will, and he must have had much to bequeath, for his last testa- ment, written in the Japanese style on a single sheet of rolled paper, is about twenty feet long and a foot wide. Having made his will, he and his wife dressed them- selves in their funeral garments of pure white and had their photographs taken together. Then, kneeling on a white silken cloth in his own room, he committed hari-kari according to the way prescribed for a Samuri. He knelt upon the sleeves of his kimono so that in death he would fall forward and not backward, and then taking his short sword he stabbed himself deeply below the waist on the left-hand side, drew the weapon slowly across to the right side, and turning it in the wound gave a slight cut upward. In the next room — for a Japanese woman is not con- sidered even worthy to die in the same room with her husband — General Nogi's wife at the same moment committed suicide, likewise according to the ancient custom, by stabbing herself with a sharp thin dirk above the heart. The blood-stained clothes and weapons of both General Nogi and his wife, and his will, are carefully treasured in the military museum. When these two died feudal Japan passed away for ever. It is safe to say that no other Japanese will ever commit suicide so that his soul may follow his master's into the realms of shade, but none the less there is a constant procession of young men coming to offer their reverence to the spirit of General Nogi, and who kneel outside the window through which they can see the stain of his blood upon the floor. The last time I had seen Ueno Park it was pink with cherry blossoms. This time it shivered under the first blight of autumn, but nothing could make less wonderful the marvellous Imperial Museum which it enshrines, and where are gathered together the finest specimens of Japanese art — cloisonne, lacquer, damascene work, 38 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD fans, bronzes, carved ivory, kakomonos — both ancient and modern. And here you may see feudal Japan. There are cases and cases of Japanese armour, exquisitely inlaid with gold and silver, swords that are works of art, walls lined with ancient battle standards, and, most intriguing of all, groups of wax figures a la Madame Tussaud, illus- trating the life of the olden times. In one group a general, in gorgeous gold and crimson brocade with lacquered breast-plate inlaid with gold, is making a " pure feast " before he goes out to fight. Before him on a tray are rice and tea and a vegetable or two — nothing that has been killed — and no sake. At his back are his henchmen, in the weird costumes that were the fighting garb of that time. Another group shows a court circle : the Mikado as he still appears in his coronation robes to this very day ; a court lady in what seems to be fifty layers of kimonos ; nobles in their court dress, with trains six feet long, the men with their long hair done up into the most marvellous and grotesque coiffures. Another interesting exhibit is of ancient vehicles. Palanquins of lacquer and gold that it took thirty men to carry, and gold-lacquered sedan chairs lined with sumptuous brocades in which fine ladies were borne about, and a great room on wheels which constituted a Daimio's family limousine, which was pulled by twenty oxen, and had a speed limit of three miles an hour. In Tokyo there is an Imperial Theatre, which has regular seats like our theatres, and is much like the Grand Opera House in Paris, and at which there are women performers. But the theatre I most enjoyed was the middle-class one, where everybody leaves their geta — the little wooden things they call shoes — at the door, where they make a pile mountain high that fills the foreigner with wonder as to how anybody ever gets back his own. The main floor of this theatre was divided off into little chicken- DOES FOOD HELP ART ? 39 runs about four feet square, or maybe five feet ; I'm weak on figures. Anyway, they were just big enough for four people to sit comfortably cross-legged on their mats, and in each space was a little hibachi, or fire-pot, with a handful of smouldering charcoal, on which simmered a teapot, and which furnished a light for the cigarettes and little pipes which both men and women smoke continuously. Many of the audience had brought their suppers along with them, and for those who hadn't, waiters brought large bowls containing rice, and raw and dried fish, and the pickled radishes that smell to heaven, and which the Japanese apparently consider the staff of life. This custom of eating your dinner while you watch a drama appealed powerfully to me. I've been to many a play where I have felt the need of strong and sustaining food to enable me to endure it. All along the walls, and hung from the galleries, were banners that recited the merits of the different actors, and that were gifts from their admirers. The stage setting was done by means of the revolving stage that we consider a new invention in stagecraft, but that the Japanese and Chinese have used for hundreds of years. But at the beginning of every new act the stage-manager, dressed in black, with a black hood and mask on, and so supposed to be invisible, came out and arranged the draperies and the positions of the actors, so that they would register exactly the thing they were supposed to get across to the audience. As in Japan there is practically no social intercourse between the sexes, and no courtship and love-making, they have no sentimental drama as we know it, and so their plays nearly always deal with historical incidents, or old legends. This particular play told about a woman who was the soul of a willow tree which had been growing for hundreds of years to become the main beam in the Thousand God Temple at Kyoto. But a young man, who belonged to the household of a 40 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD Daimio, had been accused by his " so unkind enemy " of having stolen from his lord, and was sent home in disgrace. Every day he mourned his misfortune under the willow tree, until its spirit fell in love with him, so that it sacrificed the honour of being the chief beam in the temple in order to help him. Therefore the gods turned the willow tree into a beautiful maiden, who married the young man and bore him a son, after which the " so unkind enemy " repented and confessed that he had maligned the young man. He was restored to his place, and the gods, considering that the devotion of the wife merited some reward, changed her back again to the willow tree. But when it was cut down the log was so heavy the coolies could not move it until her little son, then four years old, put his hand upon it, when the mother spirit stirred, and the tree moved of itself at the child's bidding to the temple. The interpreter who translated the play for me as it went along said that the young man never knew that he was married to a willow tree. All that he noticed was that " whenever anybody cut 'ood the woman was anguishined." The acting was all by men, and very good. The youth who took the part of the lady willow tree was particu- larly clever. He spoke in a high piercing falsetto voice supposed to be feminine. There was another innova- tion in the Japanese theatre that we might also adopt to advantage. On one side of the stage sat a man with two slap sticks which he brought together with a bang whenever he wished anything in the play emphasized. It enabled one to catch the points, which are so often invisible in our own plays. After the drama came an American moving picture, a typical vamp affair, and on either side of the stage sat a man who read with lightning-like rapidity an explanation of every scene, as they use no sub-titles as we do. HOW THE MIKADO LOOKS 41 The Japanese are crazy over moving pictures, and they particularly like American plays that have a lot of gun play and wild west scenes. Their greatest trouble is that there is so much kissing in American movies, and the Japanese consider that the spectacle of a man kissing a woman is a highly shocking one, and one not fit to be shown on the screen. Therefore the films have to be carefully censored, and one poor, overworked censor complained that in one week alone he had to cut out twenty thousand kisses, and he demanded, with tears in his eyes, to know whether Americans spent all their time kissing each other. The Mikado being, according to Japanese belief, a direct descendant of the Sun Goddess, and therefore semi-divine, lives in seclusion in his beautiful palace grounds, and is seldom seen even by his own people. Imagine, then, our thrill when our guide came rushing in, pop-eyed with excitement and in such haste that his kimono tails floated out behind him, to say that the Emperor was going down to Yokohama to review the navy, and that if we would hurry we might see his Augustness. We jumped up, leaving our eggs and bacon and marmalade untasted on our plates, and in five minutes were standing in the crowd that thronged the streets. The road leading from the Palace to the station was lined with soldiers, symphonies in brown, with their brown skins and khaki-coloured uniforms trimmed with scarlet, as good-looking chaps as you ever want to see. Presently there was the boom of a gun some- where in the Palace grounds. Then the thin, pene- trating call of bugles, and from out of his palace grounds, across the mediaeval drawbridge that spans the moat! came lancers with pennants flying, and then three carriages, in the front one of which sat a round-faced, jolly-looking little brown man, the Mikado, the Son of Heaven. I was not a yard from his carnage, and he looked me squarely in the eye and bestowed 42 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD a quite earthly grin upon me, which I returned with interest. But the Japanese themselves stood still, silent, and uncovered, with bowed heads, and every eye cast down until the Emperor had passed. One of the charming experiences I had in Tokyo was a luncheon at the house of a wealthy importer. He lived in a suburb, in a lovely house on a hillside that overlooked the bay. I entered the place through a gate in the 15-foot wall which the well-to-do Japanese build around their houses to ensure privacy, and found myself in one of the miniature gardens that are the wonder and joy of Japan and the despair of foreigners, for in a space no bigger than we take to set the ash bucket and the garbage can, they construct a beauty spot. Across miniature bridges a foot long, over streams of water two inches deep, and a forest of hundred-year- old pine trees that reached to my knees, I made my way to the little porch, where etiquette demanded that I pull off my shoes, so as not to tear the beautiful mat or scratch with my heels the polished floors. A bowing and smiling little Nason took off my boots, and led me up some stairs as steep as a ladder to the reception room, where the whole outer sojji, the paper wall, had been slid back, giving a full view of the bay and the neigh- bouring gardens. There our host received me, and, having been educated in America, and, therefore, holding advanced ideas, his wife was present. If he had been of old Japan neither his wife nor daughters would have appeared. The man spoke English, the wife never a word, but in spite of the barrier of language nothing could have exceeded the tact and grace with which she entertained. When lunch was served, a little table six inches high was put in front of each guest. Then on this was placed a lacquered tray containing the whole meal, all of which was served at one time. There was a little bowl of soup, THE JAPANESE IN HIS HOME 43 which looked and tasted like the water in a goldfish bowl, a plate containing a boiled fish, pink in colour, and cooked in such a way as to look as though it were swimming. Another bowl had bits of raw fish in it. Another had lily bulbs. Another had bits of chicken and bamboo shoots, and a vegetable that looks and tastes exactly like our asparagus, all stewed in soyer sauce. This dish was delicious. Of course there was a bowl of rice, and much tea and sake, which is rice brandy, that is served hot and that tastes like cooking sherry,' and which you need to drink with caution, for it isn't as innocent as it looks. And for dessert we had straw- berries with beautiful little sugared cakes made in the form of chrysanthemums. After luncheon a woman came in and played for us on the biwa, an elongated sort of guitar, and chanted one of the ancient legends of Japan. I don't know what it was about, except that it was about two hours too long, for all during the luncheon we were sitting on our feet, Japanese fashion, and if there's anything more agonizing than doing this in a straight front, good Lord deliver me. Afterwards I heard that the biwa player was a court musician, and that our host had treated us to what would be approximately a Geraldine Farrar or a Schumann-Heink performance, but when I take my music, after a full meal, I want a comfortable chair and something at my back to support me. CHAPTER IV THE FINEST TEMPLE IN THE EAST The Japanese have a proverb which says, " Do not use the word ' magnificent ' until you have seen Nikko," an adjuration with which I entirely agreed after having beheld the place that is the ultimate expression of what Japanese art and Nature can do when they aid and abet each other. And that is a beauty that makes the world gasp with awe and wonder. Nikko is what we would call the summer capital of Japan, because it is here that the Emperor and the court come in the hot months. But beyond that it is a place of pilgrimage to the devout, to artists, to his- torians and antiquarians, and to travellers, because here are the mortuary temples of the great Tokugawa family — the most costly and splendid monument that human egotism has ever reared to itself. Nikko is a little, straggling village set in the side of a mountain, where its tiny paper houses with their grey roofs, clinging to the steep walls, make you think of the nests of humming birds on the limb of a tree. There are a few crooked streets lined with shops, and a brawling mountain stream that roars over its stones, and that is crossed at several places by bridges on which the feet of the common herd may tread, and at one place by the Sacred Bridge, over which only the Mikado himself may pass. This is a beautiful structure of red lacquer, and marks the spot at which a miracle took place. For many, many years ago — away back in the eighth century — there was a holy man, Shodo Shonin by name, who, after having passed three years in prayer and medita- 44 THE MYTH OF THE SACRED BRIDGE 45 tion, dreamed of a great mountain, on the top of which lay a sword more than three feet long. Upon awakening he went in pursuit of it, and on his journey he came to a spot where he found his advance barred by a river which poured its torrent over huge rocks, and looked to be impassable. The saint fell upon his knees and prayed, whereupon there appeared upon the opposite bank a divine being of colossal size, dressed in blue and black robes, and having a string of skulls around his neck, and in his right hand two green and blue snakes. These snakes he flung across the waters, and they instantly turned into a bridge, over which the saint passed, whereupon both the snakes and the bridge instantly disappeared ; but Shodo Shonin built himself a little hut on the further side of the stream, and the remains of this hut are to be seen to this day in the grounds of the Kanaya Hotel. A later legend of the Sacred Bridge is that the only foreigner who has ever been invited to cross it was General Grant. This was the supreme honour that Japan conferred upon him when he made his famous trip around the world, but, with exquisite tact and understanding, the great soldier declined it on the ground that it might seem a desecration to those who held the bridge in awe as a symbol of a divine manifestation. But I will confess that what impressed me more than the beauty of the Sacred Bridge — and it is a thing of wondrous loveliness as it hangs over that mountain stream, like twin strings of rubies stretched above the diamonds of the sprayed water — or even its super- natural origin, was the fact that around and about it played scores of little boys, and not one set foot upon it, or attempted to walk its glittering length, or shin its shining posts. There was no gate to turn them back, no guard, nothing to keep them off except the Japanese child's idea of obedience, 46 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD which to me will always remain the chief marvel of the Flowery Kingdom. It would have taken the whole standing army of the United States to have kept the American small boy off that bridge if it had been anywhere in his vicinity. If you will refresh your memory of Japanese history, you will recall that for many centuries Japan was ruled by first one great feudal family and then another. The last of these, the one whose power really ended with the opening of the doors of the empire to foreigners, and the restoration to the Mikado of his temporal power, was the great Tokugawa Shogunate. This was established by Iyeyasu, who solidified the warring clans of Japan for the first time, and gave to his country a peace that lasted for more than two hundred and fifty years. When Iyeyasu was dying he ordered his grandson to build a shrine that should be a fitting mausoleum for him and his family, and in which their ashes might rest. This work was commenced by his grandson, Iemitsu, about 1615, who chose with unerring discrimination the little mountain-crowned valley at Nikko as the back- ground for the marvellous monument that he planned. In order that the shrine might be unimaginably rich and resplendent, and also that the Daimios might be kept too poor to raise armies and finance insurrections against him, the foxy Iemitsu levied contributions upon them in the shape of money and material — and he took about all the traffic would bear, one is inclined to judge, from the lavish expenditure, for every detail of the temple shows that money was poured forth like water. In this connection it is told that among the Daimios who were laid under contribution was one so poor that he had no money to give, but he offered in lieu of this to plant a row of cryptomeria trees leading to the temple. This was done, and now the least gift to the temple is the greatest, for this avenue of superb trees, many of them several feet in thickness and hundreds of feet BEAUTY TOO GREAT TO DESCRIBE 47 high, and with their boughs overlapping, form an avenue twenty miles long, making an approach of living, eternal green such as no other building in the world has. Iemitsu also summoned to his aid all the finest artists in Japan in every line — lacquer workers, damascene workers, carvers, painters, gold and silversmiths, all were impressed into service, and all gave their best because they knew that they were giving to immor- tality. The result was an architectural marvel. For set against a background of vivid green cryptomeria are a group of buildings that flash like jewels with their gold and crimson and myriads of colours, and are the very quintessence of Buddhistic art. No description of the temples of Nikko that would make them comprehensible to one who has not seen them is possible. Indeed, all that you carry away with you, after having seen them, is a never-to-be-forgotten memory of ineffable beauty and colour that leaves your senses drugged and doped, and an impression of patient labour that makes you ache in sympathy with the hands that toiled for so many years to produce this wondrous mass of beauty. There are gateways alone that are such masses of intricate carving that one might spend a month studying them, and still not have mastered the subtle symbolism of the motifs, where every leaf, and whorl, and every pose of a figure has some religious, or historic, or romantic significance. Everywhere there are millions of minute triumphs of genius, as when, for instance, a wood- carver utilized the grain of the wood to simulate the hair of a tiger, or when one panel of a gateway has the figures in it purposely carved upside down to avert the anger of the gods, lest seeing the perfection of the temple they should in jealous anger destroy it. Beyond the gates are the temple buildings them- selves, shimmering glories of colour, masses of carvings lacquered the colours of the flowers and the birds 48 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD they represent, and that have come to be such pinks, and blues, and faded rose and crimson as only Time can soften even great art into. The panels of one whole side of one room are given to the depicting of the mountain birds on the upper panels and water-fowl on the lower. Other rooms have walls of flowers, the same board being carved by lilies on the outside and roses on the inside. Within the buildings the beauty of the outside is repeated. Floors and walls of price- less lacquer so fine that two hundred and fifty years' use have not dimmed it. Ceilings where writhing dragons in gold rise out of clouds. Gold and silver and embroidered hangings everywhere. Colour, splendour, priests in gorgeous vestments, the smell of incense. You are bewildered, dazzled, transported across the centuries into feudal Japan until your aching feet bring you with a jolt back to the present and make you realize how hard even a lacquered floor is to a bare and unaccustomed foot. Then you leave the temple, and retrieve your shoes which you had left at the door, and climb up two hun- dred and five moss-grown stone steps to the top of the mountain where the great Shogun Iyeyasu's tomb is built. It is a splendid bronze affair, but it is said to cover only three hairs, for when the tomb was com- pleted that was all of the mortal remains of the mighty conqueror and law-giver that was left. A few miles further up the mountain from Nikko is Lake Chuzenji. It is a pretty little body of water, but the road to it is glorious, a marvellous panorama of streams, and mountain vistas, and tumbling water- falls and little valleys. I had seen it in the spring-time when it was a mist of pink and purple cherry blooms and azaleas. Now I saw it crimson and gold with an autumn foliage, and I know not which is the more beautiful, for around Nikko is the only place in Japan in which the autumn foliage is not a great disappoint- ment to anyone who is familiar with American autumns. WHERE SHOPPING IS A CEREMONY 49 The fall leaves made in the U.S.A. beat any other on earth. To my mind Nikko is one of the most fascinating places in all Japan in which to shop. Of course in Yokohama and Kobe, the great commercial cities, you can get the big things that Japan makes for export, but it's in little places like Nikko that you can pick up the odd, queer, intimate things that the Japanese make for themselves, and that are often heirlooms they have had in their families for centuries and that poverty has forced them to sell at last. Besides, in the big cities shopping is just a commercial transaction as it is at home. In the little towns it is an adventure, a ceremony, a rite. First you go wandering down the streets, and gravely return the bows of the polite shopkeepers who stand in their tiny doorways with their hands in their sleeves, and who bow with a loud hissing intake of their breath to show their respect. Presently you observe that some of the shops have strips of cloth hanging so thickly in front of them that it almost shuts them off from view. You wonder why, until you are told that these curtains are called " noren," and that they signify practically what the phrase " Hatmaker to His Majesty King George " or " Bootmaker to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales " does on a Bond Street shop window in London. It's a guarantee of respectability, and where you see " noren " in front the firm is an old, and established, and reliable one. Attracted by something you like you prepare to enter a shop. The first move is to sit down and take off your boots if it is a first-class shop, because the floors are covered with beautiful, fine, thick, heavy, padded mats that your heels will cut. Then you ascend a steep, ladder-like flight of steps to a room where you take your seat at a table. Innumerable tiny boxes are ranged around the room, but no goods are in sight. The 50 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD proprietor claps his hands and a servant appears bearing a tray on which are the inevitable teapot and tiny, handleless and saucerless cups, and a little dish of sweetish cakes. The merchant informs you that it is the custom of his country always to drink tea before doing business, and you, perforce, imbibe the cup that cheers but not inebriates, but which waterlogs you in the course of a day's shopping, where you go through the same per- formance at perhaps twenty or thirty different places. And Japanese tea, without sugar, is not a beverage to ravish the fancy of any save the most rabid teetotallers. Nor do Japanese cakes, which look and taste like a slab of slightly sweetened tombstone, appeal strongly to the appetite of foreigners. Having partaken of the tea and sweetmeat you begin to get down to business. The merchant commences by showing you his poorest and commonest wares. He is trying you out. He is getting a line on your taste and knowledge, and if you don't know the difference between bone and ivory, or new prints and old, and fine em- broideries and common ones, you never see his treasures at all. They remain hidden in the mysterious boxes that he never takes down. But if he finds that you are more or less of a con- noisseur, then he goes off to secret places and brings out his precious bits of pottery rolled in cotton batting and encased in silk bags, or the bits of ivory that have been polished by ceaseless handling for years and years, or the old pieces of brocade that were temple hangings, and that still smell of the incense from the altar. Having found what you want, you bargain for it. Some of the big shops are so Europeanized that they have fixed prices, but in almost all the little shops there is a sliding scale of prices, and what you pay depends on how good a trader you are. There is a Japanese superstition that unless the first customer THE EARLY BIRD CATCHES THE BARGAIN 51 buys, the day's sales will be poor, and so when you go shopping in Japan it pays to be the early bird. Often when you look at something in a store which you rather like, but do not buy, the incident is by no means closed. For when you come out of your room at the hotel to go down to dinner at night, you will find the shopkeeper squatting outside your door, with the article and several similar to it, which he has brought for your further inspection, and so he can tempt you at your leisure. All of these pleasures of shopping Nikko has in abundance, and among my pleasantest memories of the place are days of dawdling about the little stores, where I was offered the most wonderfully carved wooden boxes for only a few cents, and fur coats at the memory of whose price I shed bitter tears later on in New York ; and especially do I hold in poignant recollection one shop where it seemed to me that everything in the world I most wanted had been gathered together. You entered this shop through a wondrous garden of lily pools and little stunted trees, and came to a great grey building across which a maple tree flung a scarlet banner. Within there was a great room full of bronzes, and a wall lined with the " tsuba," the carved and gold and silver inlaid sword guards that used to be the chief treasures of the Samurai, the two- sword fighting men, and to begin collecting which — as, alas, I know only too well — is to go stark, staring mad. Also there are here innumerable " netuske," the tiny ivory figurines that the Japanese use for buttons to secure their tobacco pouches, and which also unwary foreigners begin collecting under the illusion that they are cheap, and which results in their cabling back home for money because they could not resist buying just one more " netuske " that was so humorous, or so quaint, or such a triumph of skill. Furthermore and likewise, as you sit in this wonder- 52 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD house on a cushion and sip tea, and look across the foaming little river, and the green valley, and then back again to where the merchant has spread out hundreds upon hundreds of kimonos, some of them more than a hundred years old, that are marvels of embroidery, and stencilling, and such crepe as we never see at home, and " obis " stiff with gold that were part of the dower of dead and gone Japanese ladies, and fans that are so frail that they might be the breath of the wind itself, and china that makes any housewife smash that commandment about covetousness to smithereens, and Oh, well, what's the use ? There isn't a thing that you don't feel that life will be cinders, ashes, and dust without having, and you do a lightning calculation about the size of your trunk, and what the customs duty would be at home, and summon up all your resolution, and beat it back to the hotel, and pray your gods that the merchant won't bring that grey and pink kimono up so that you will see it again. For well you know that if he does you are lost. When I first approached the shores of Japan the captain of the ship said : " When a woman goes to Japan, one of two things should happen to her. She should either have an unlimited letter of credit or a guardian." I'll tell the world she needs both. CHAPTER V THE HEART OF OLD JAPAN Kyoto is the very heart of old Japan. For a thousand years it was the capital of the Flowery Kingdom, and to enter its narrow, crooked streets, and to see its grim, grey palaces and castles, and its hoary temples, is to roll up the centuries and plunge back into feudal times. Here is the real Japan, almost untouched by modern progress. Here the people live, and move, and have their being, just as their august ancestors did for countless generations. And here are the little shops, and the little factories in which every worker is an artist, and in which they are still making lacquer, and damascene work, and cloisonne, and carving ivory, and fashioning satsuma ware, and other fine pottery, that are just as exquisite as any their forefathers made, and only need the mellowing touch of time to make them just as beautiful and valuable. There is so much to do and see in Kyoto that you hardly know where to begin, so — Place of Kings — I began with the royal palace, to enter whose sacred portals you have to be vouched for by your ambassador, and tell the story of your life to the police who guard the gate. This done, you enter an enormous, grey, one-storey building that covers an area of nearly twenty-six acres, and is the last of a succession of palaces which have rested upon the same spot since the eighth century. Here the emperors of Japan resided up to 1868, when the court was moved to Tokyo. But here is still the throne-room with the throne, an ebony chair inlaid 53 54 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD with mother-of-pearl. It is situated at the top of a flight of eighteen steps leading down into a court, the steps corresponding in number to the grades in which the officers of the government are divided, each of whom must stand on his own step, while the commoners, or " no step " people, overflow on the ground below. Tokyo is the official capital of Japan now, but to this old palace in Kyoto came the present Emperor to be crowned, and near here the late Emperor is buried. In her great moments Japan turns back to the city about which so much of her ancient history centres. The rooms of the royal palace are vast spaces, each as big as a public hall with us. The inner walls, or " fusuma," as they call the sliding panels that divide the interior, are dim and faded, the very ghost of a vanished splendour. There is no way of heating any of it, or letting in the light, except by opening the whole side of a room. There is no furniture. It is all as cold and comfortless and barren as a barn, and you shudder to think how frost-bitten even the Sons of Heaven must have been during the biting Japanese winters. The palace is surrounded by one of the most beautiful landscape gardens in the world. There are forests of tiny dwarf trees, and little artificial islands crowned with miniature temples, in the midst of tiny lakes ; fairy bridges span fairy streams ; trees trained into the fantastic forms that the Japanese adore are set against a background of cryptomeria, hundreds of years old, and the greenery shot with blood-red maples as with a flame. Here the life of the court went on for more than a thousand years, and it intrigues your imagination to picture the long procession that has trodden these garden paths. How many weary monarchs, whose titles were an empty dignity ; how many haughty Shoguns ; how many rich Daimios in silken splendour ; how many two-sworded Samurais in coats of mail ; how many painted ladies in layer upon layer of embroidered NIJO CASTLE 55 kimonos ; how much of ambition, and intrigue, and treachery and loyalty must have walked here ! However, far more resplendent than the emperor's palace is Nijo Castle near by, which was built by the mighty Shogun Iyeyasu as a court residence for him- self in 1601, and intended also to exhibit how much richer and more powerful a Shogun was than a mere Mikado. This castle is a fine example of the Japanese fortress, with its turrets, and iron-bound gates, and walls of enormous thickness, and better than anything else in Japan it visualizes to you the glory and incredible extravagance of feudal times, for it is a dream of golden glory. There are vast expanses of walls covered with thin sheets of beaten gold, so pure that they are scarcely tarnished after more than three centuries, and against this glorious background the greatest artists of their day painted their masterpieces. Above these golden, sliding panels which form the walls are other panels made of wood, the same piece of wood being carved on one side with flowers and the other with birds, lacquered in natural colours. Every bit of woodwork is covered with lacquer, or else polished finer than the finest furniture we know, and every pin that holds the building together — no nails were used — is covered with a carved metal escutcheon, gold encrusted and chased finely enough to use as a brooch. Surrounding the inner rooms of the castle is a wide gallery, with what is called a " nightingale floor " — that is, a floor with loose boards in it so arranged that it is impossible to tread upon it, no matter how lightly, without its giving a warning squeak. This was to protect the Shogun against enemies coming upon him unawares. Leading out of the audience chambers were also secret inner rooms, in which attendants sat with drawn swords, for the protection of their lord when he received his vassals. Assassination seems to have been the chief indoor sport of those days, and a nice restful time those in power must have had. 56 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD The untitled Japanese are not admitted into this castle. Kyoto has been the headquarters of Buddhism for centuries in Japan, and there are many beautiful old temples set in the midst of marvellous gardens. Among the newer ones of these is the Hygashi Hongwanji, which is very magnificent. One of the interesting things about it is that the timbers were all lifted into place by twenty-nine gigantic hawsers made of the hair of women, who gave their locks for this purpose. There are two very interesting excursions that one takes from Kyoto. One is shooting the rapids of the Hozu river, which makes shooting the rapids on the St Lawrence look like a flat-boat excursion on a mill- pond. The Hozu is a tempestuous mountain stream that boils, and eddies, and foams through a narrow, rocky channel, shut in between the precipitous walls of mountains that are blue and pink with azalea and cherry blossoms in spring, and crimson and green with maple and cedar in the fall, and always picturesque beyond description. The other excursion is to go to Lake Biwa, a fresh- water lake situated in the mountains above Kyoto, by either rickshaw or motor, and come back by boat through the tunnel which brings the water of the lake down to the city. I know of no more eerie, crawly, creepy excursion than this. For about an hour you are in pitch darkness in this watery tunnel, the cold, dripping water percolating down your spine as it falls from the roof of the tunnel, the black water beneath you, and no sound save the hoarse, guttural cries of the boatmen you meet coming up from the other end of the tunnel, pulling their heavy barges along by means of ropes fastened to the sides of the tunnel. One of my interesting experiences in Kyoto was in going to what we would call a finishing school for young ladies. This school is attended by the upper- class Japanese girls, and they are given a good classical BUILT WITH ROPES OF HAIR 57 education, and are also taught all the Japanese arts — weaving, embroidering, sewing, dyeing, cooking, both Japanese and foreign, flower arrangement, and so forth, but they are taught these things in a modern way, and they have a very elaborate chemical laboratory in connection with the domestic science department. One large hall was devoted to the teaching of etiquette, and especially to the tea ceremonial, in which it takes an endless knowledge of art, and his- tory, and ancient customs, and social precedents, and so on, to arrive at the obtaining of a tablespoonful of honourable tea. Another thing that was taught was how to hang and take down a picture gracefully. It seems that in Japan you do not hang a picture with a tack hammer, and a broom handle, and profanity, as we do it in America, but it is a ceremony important to learn because in a properly conducted Japanese home the picture — there is never but one in a room at one time — is changed twice a day. This is because a picture that is beautiful with the morning light upon it is not properly seen by evening light, so another must be substituted for it. The young ladies of this school asked me if I would speak to them. I asked them what they wanted me to talk about, and they replied, " Suffrage," to my surprise. I wanted to say something about " a maiden aunt," but the interpreter said there was no phrase for it as there was no such thing as an unmarried woman in Japan. Among the rank and file of women in Japan, how- ever, there has as yet been no uplift. Woman is still an inferior being, good only as a beast of burden in the lower walks of life, or to bear children, or be a play- thing for man. Nowhere in travelling through Japan do you see Japanese men treat their wives and daughters with any of the attention that we are accustomed to from our own men. In getting on the cars a man 58 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD never helps his wife, he never carries a bundle, and he always walks before her on the street and ignores her as much as you would a little dog that was trotting at your heels. The Japanese woman has her work cut out for her after she is married, as she is supposed to add to the population every year, but the life of the young girl whose parents are well-to-do is of incredible dullness from our standpoint. Generally she has had but a smattering of education, not enough to give her any resources in herself, even if any young girl ever has any resources in herself. At any rate, the Japanese maiden has no beaux, no parties, no dances, no athletics, no anything to put pep and ginger into her days. The wildest entertainment she ever knows is going to take tea with another girl. No courtship precedes the Japanese marriage. That is arranged by the families, but the young girls are now making a stand in Japan for a separate establishment of their own, and refusing to marry the husbands their families pick out unless their husband-to-be will agree to give them a home of their own and thus deliver them from the curse of their mothers-in-law who, up to now, have made their daughters-in-law nothing but the slaves of their tyrannies. Also the young girls are demanding to see a photograph of their prospective husbands, and there is as much dis- cussion of this bold and unwomanly attitude on the part of the Japanese girls as there used to be about women asking for the ballot in this country. In olden times when a Japanese woman married she blackened her teeth and shaved the top of her head in order to show that she for ever forswore at- tracting any other man. This custom has fallen into disuse in the cities, but in country places you still see hundreds of women with their hideous black mouths. The women of the peasant class lead the most MISS JAPAN REVOLTS 59 laborious lives, and have been so degraded by it that they look like stunted Shetland ponies. They are heavy-set, with enormous muscles and incredible strength. I saw a girl of sixteen walking along a road with a telephone post on her shoulder. You may see the women drawing heavy wagons, working up to their knees in the slime of the rice fields, pulling on the oars of a boat, coaling ships, and always on their backs is strapped the inevitable baby, for to their never-ending toil in field and factory they add incessant maternity. The class of women above these sisters to the ox run the innumerable little shops, and these are a gay and cheerful lot, who correspond to the shopkeeping women of Paris, and are just as alive and alert, and as keen on a bargain. Then come the Japanese ladies. In no country in the world is breeding more apparent than with the Japanese, and it is interesting to learn that the mark of race in Nippon is the slanted eye. The peasants have straight eyes, the aristocrats have eyes cut on the bias, and there is nothing according to the Japanese ideal of beauty quite as ugly as a straight eye except a straight eyebrow. The Japanese ladies have the most exquisite com- plexions, like old ivory; they dress beautifully and magnificently. Their demeanour is of marvellous gentleness and refinement, and they wear an expression the most beautiful, the most pathetic, and wistful and haunting that I have ever seen on a human face, for life for them is one long sacrifice to family and duty. Their subjection to their husbands is complete. A dutiful Japanese wife may not even go to bed until her husband returns home. She must stay up until he chooses to come back, in case he might want her to make him a cup of tea when he rolls in. Etiquette for a Japanese woman is most rigid, and consists mainly of things a perfect lady may not do. 60 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD For instance, a refined lady must never open her umbrella full. Only a man can do a bold and dashing thing like that. All she is permitted to do is to make a sort of little tent for her head. A man also uses a big fan, a lady a little one, and while a man wooes the air in big, bold strokes, a woman merely agitates her fan. No woman of Japan is more interesting or probably has more influence than the geisha girl. These girls are the daughters, for the most part, of very poor people, who provide for themselves and their children at the same time by apprenticing her to a teacher of geisha. The girl must be, to start with, of unusual beauty and brightness. She is taken when she is about seven years old, and from then on until she is fourteen or fifteen is instructed in the arts that are supposed to be alluring to men. The term geisha means " the accomplished one." She is taught to dance, to serve a meal aesthetically. She is trained in the art of repartee and story-telling, and to play upon musical instruments, and sing. No entertainment is considered complete without geisha girls to add to the joy of the festivities. When a man gives an entertainment, even if it is in his own house, his wife and daughters do not entertain the guests. Geisha are hired for that. They come dressed in beautiful and gorgeous kimonos, and pour the sake, and serve the food, which servants pass to them. They dance and sing for the guests, and joke and tease the men — familiarities which would be impossible to a Japanese lady. As near as we have any corresponding class to the geisha in this country, it is comprised in the show girls of our musical comedies. And I should imagine their morals to be about on the same plane. A man who had lived in Japan for thirty years told me that he asked an old woman, who herself had been a geisha girl in her young days, and who supplied geisha for THE GEISHA GIRLS 61 parties, if the geisha were generally immoral, to which the woman replied, " Not necessarily, but the geisha are poor, and the men have all the money, and the temptation is great." And everywhere and always on the Japanese woman's face is a smile, that strange, inscrutable smile that the Japanese wear, like one of their own gold embroidered veils, between you and their souls and through which you cannot see. A Japanese smiles in life and in death. He smiles when he's glad and when he's sad, and it is said that the true significance of it is that in his politeness he will not burden you with any pains or sorrows that belong to his miserable self. I saw that smile on the faces of the Japanese women everywhere : on the face of the girl bending under the telephone post — on the face of the shopkeeper — on the face of the great lady — and it seemed to me that in it was all the patience, all the fortitude, all the passion of womanhood, and beyond it all a wistfulness of eyes that were turned towards the new day, as if they hoped that the rising sun of Japan was bringing to them freedom, and liberty, and opportunity, as it already had to the women of the Western world. CHAPTER VI ODD CORNERS OF THE FLOWERY KINGDOM One of the most interesting places in Japan, and one little visited by the ordinary traveller, is the shrine of Ise, to which the Japanese turn as the Mohammedans to Mecca, or the faithful Catholics to Rome. This is a Shinto temple, and to it all good Japanese make a pilgrimage, if they can possibly do so. Here the Mikado, and the Court, and the heads of the Government come to worship. Here they came at the beginning of the Great War to ask for divine guid- ance, and there they came at the end to return thanks for victory. Here come ceaseless processions of school children, and artisans, and peasants from all over the country, many of them tottering old people who have spent the whole of the savings of their long, hard lives on this pious act, but who will go home happy and contented, to live on a handful of millet a day the balance of their existence, and to be venerated in their villages because they have approached so near to the holy of holies. Indeed, to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of Ise is regarded as more than a religious observance. It is believed to bring good luck, especially to carpenters and other craftsmen, and to ensure their ability to make a living. This faith in the luck of Ise is so generally entertained that school children run off and make the pilgrimage to it alone, begging their way, and any guide will tell you that he has personally known of dogs who have made the pilgrimage alone to the shrine, and then returned home. Shintoism is the original and official religion of Japan. 62 OFFICIAL RELIGION OF JAPAN 63 The word " Shinto " means " the way of the gods," and it is the only religion among civilized people that has no written creed, because, as one of their early writers said, " It needed none, for the pure heart of the Japanese would teach them how to conduct themselves, and what was right and wrong." Shintoism is a worship of ancestors, and of country, and especially of the Emperor. It teaches purity of heart and body, and inculcates industry and the simple life. Its temples are plain and austere buildings which are approached through a " Torii," a peculiar gateway with a curved top to it. Passing under the Torii you reach the temple door, before which are hideous figures called the " Ni-o." If you have any special request to make of the gods you may write it on a piece of paper and chew it up into the sort of little wad that you knew as a child as a spit-ball, and this you throw at the Ni-o at the temple gate. If it sticks, your prayer will be answered. If not, you lose out. At an early date, however, Buddhism was introduced into Japan from China and Korea. With its pomp and splendour it made a powerful appeal to the beauty- loving Japanese, and it soon almost swallowed up Shintoism, because the astute Buddhist priest dis- covered that the various Shinto gods and their own gods were merely different incarnations of the same deity. In 1868, when the Mikado was restored to power, and the new era began in Japan, an effort was made to divorce the two religions, and Shintoism again became the official religion. Each religion, however, had borrowed so much from the other that it was as impossible to separate them as it would be to divide the soul from the body. Where one ends and the other begins, no one knows. The only difference the out- sider can see is that a Shinto temple is plain, and bare, and unornamented, and a Buddhist temple is a mass 64 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD of gilding, carving, and lacquer. As for the Japanese themselves, they seem to take no religious chances, for everyone whom I met had both a Shinto and a Buddhist altar in his house, and worshipped impartially at both. The temple of Ise is near Yamada, down near the inland sea, and to reach it you cross a little river whose banks are lined with cherry trees, and in whose waters hundreds of pilgrims are bathing to purify themselves. Then you go through a great park filled with giant camphor trees and huge cedars, and climb the steps that lead up to the shrine. When you arrive all that you can see, beyond the high fence that surrounds it, is a group of grey, unpainted wooden buildings, rather small, with queer, sharp roofs. Immediately before you is a plain, simple unpainted gateway before which hangs a white cotton sheet. That is all, and yet this cotton sheet is so sacred that when it was accidentally touched by the cane of the Japanese minister of education a few years ago he was slain by the son of a Shinto priest, and the murder was considered such a righteous act that the populace made the slayer a hero, and still make pilgrimages to his grave. Beyond this curtain, in one of the little grey houses, is the outer shrine, and beyond this another so holy that even the Emperor may not enter it ; and in the farther inner sanctuary is believed to be the sacred mirror and sword and jewel handed down by the very gods themselves. According to Japanese mythology, on one occasion the Sun Goddess was offended by her brother, Susa- No-O. Whereupon she took refuge in a cave, taking the light of day with her, and leaving the world in darkness. The other deities sought in vain to lure her forth, until, at last, someone fashioned a mirror which they hung upon a tree in front of the cave. Then they danced the Kagura, which is still per- BEHIND THE SACRED COTTON SHEET 65 formed as the temple dance, until they lured her forth to see what the noise was about, when, chancing to behold her reflection in the mirror, she was so pleased with her looks that she stayed to gaze, and never returned to her cave any more. To this happy ending of the affair, and the power of the mirror, we owe the fact that we still have the sun with us. Afterwards the wicked brother repented of his evil conduct and reformed, and became a sort of knight- errant, going about the world redressing wrong. Upon one occasion he slew a serpent that had de- voured the seven beautiful daughters of a worthy peasant and his wife and was about to feast upon the eighth daughter, and in the tail of this reptile was found the enchanted sword. It is this mirror and this sword that are believed to be enshrined at Ise. They are kept wrapped in brocaded bags, and as soon as a bag gets old and worn another is put on over it, and these are kept in a chest covered over with innumerable silken cloths. The Sun Goddess is reputed to have had a son named Jimmu. From him is descended the Mikado, and this is what gives to the ruling family of Japan their claim to divine origin. The temple of Ise dates back before the birth of Christ, and it is rebuilt every twenty years at enormous expense. There are two sites, equally holy, on one or the other of which the temple eternally stands. The wood of which the temple is erected is selected from the Emperor's forest, only perfect trees being used, and there is a great ceremonial at the felling of them. All the woodmen who cut the trees are dressed in white, and so are the carpenters, all of whom go through a purification ceremony, and live apart from the world, like priests, while they are at work on the building. Should a drop of blood fall on a timber it is instantly cast aside. When the 66 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD new temple is completed the sacred relics are carried into the sanctuary and every part of the old temple is burned. It costs nearly a million dollars to build the temple, even at the price of Japanese labour, which is content with a few cents a day. At Yamada we stayed at a queer little Japanese inn, where we slept on the floor on piles of thick quilts that they call " futons," which made a very comfortable bed. We contented ourselves, however, with a sketchy dry wash in an infinitesimal basin in the morning, instead of taking our ablutions, Japanese fashion, in the big boiling vat in the court- yard, where men and women see no impropriety in bathing together. There is nothing more curious than a Japanese bath-tub. It is an affair built of staves, as a general thing, and has a little furnace constructed in the end of it in which they build a charcoal fire. By the side of the tub is a grating on which you are supposed to stand, and give yourself a good scrubbing before you get into the tub. That is not a process for cleansing as it is with us, but is merely a luxury to be indulged in carefully, as the Japanese take their baths at a temperature that parboils the foreigner. The longer you stay in the tub the hotter the water gets with the little furnace going full blast, so you can but marvel at the prolonged ablutions of the natives. Another feature of interest in the Japanese hotels is the bowl of tooth-brushes outside the dining-room door, which the Japanese use as openly as many unsophisticated Americans use toothpicks. These tooth-brushes are made of wooden sticks, with ends that are frazzled out like mops, and after seeing how addicted to their use the Japanese are I could not understand why the mouth of every well-to-do Japanese glistens with gold teeth. Perhaps they regard them as ornaments, as our coloured friends BEDROOMS OF UNIQUE CHARM 67 do in the South. Anyway they make a grand show- ing, for the Japanese run to teeth. The Japanese hotels are built like the Japanese houses, with only paper walls, through which you have inspiring silhouettes of what those in the adjacent rooms are doing, and as you can hear every- thing that is said and done the whole length of your corridor, life becomes an interesting thing, in which there are no dull moments. When you arrive you are shown into your chamber, a bare room, spotlessly clean, with lovely, heavy, padded mats on the floor, and, by the way, space is measured by the mats. A room is a three-mat room, or a five-mat room, or a hundred-mat room. You must take off your shoes before you cross the threshold of the hotel, and you flop around thereafter with bags tied around your ankles, or else with felt slippers either too big or too little, that are for ever coming off. In your room there is no furniture whatever except two or three cushions, and no ornaments except that in the tokemono, a little recess raised two or three inches above the floor and which is the place of honour ; there is a single vase with a single flower in it, placed under a kakemono, one of the scroll pictures the Japanese love. In a few minutes after your arrival a smiling little maid, called a nason, will come with a hibachi, a bronze pot nearly full of ashes, but on which smoulder a few sticks of char- coal. She will put this down in the doorway, kneel down, and bow her head three times to the floor, and then augustly place it before you. This is equivalent to turning on the steam heat. It is the only heat you will get, or that the Japanese have, and when you consider that there is nothing between them and the outer world but a sheet of oiled paper that forms the wall, and that the Japanese winters are so cold and damp, you wonder that everybody doesn't freeze to death. 68 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD And this wonder is further intensified when you reflect that the Japanese have no good warm flannel underwear such as we have, no tight-fitting clothes at all, nothing but their kimonos, which are pictur- esque, but flappy and breezy. However, it is said that in cold weather they just put on one garment on top of the other, and the winters are known as a five-kimono winter or a seven-kimono winter, etc. Having brought you your heat, the nason retires and brings you tea in tiny cups without handles, and when night comes she brings in the great pile of quilts that form your bed and spreads them on the floor, with a great wadded kimono that you put on hind-part before to sleep in, and which must be great on a cold winter's night, providing you don't turn over, for it has no back piece. The only pillow is a little carved block of wood, which the women use so that their hair may not be disarranged, as they only comb it once or twice a week, owing to the time it takes to construct their elaborate coiffures. The country around Yamada is marvellously beautiful, an enchanting mingling of mountain and sea, and we had some wonderful motor rides around the seashore, from most of which we returned, it is true, on foot, a Japanese automobile being the most temperamental thing created, and it never having occurred apparently to a Japanese motor owner to invest in a spare tyre. On one of these drives we climbed a cliff on the top of which was a wonderful garden hung above the bay of Ise, a vast expanse of shining water, and feathery isles, and from which we could even catch a faint glimpse of the sacred mountain Fuji Yama. It is near here, too, where the culture pearls are raised. These pearls are real pearls, made by in- serting a tiny grain of sand in a pearl oyster, and about this sand the pearl forms. The only differ- VARIETIES OF THE LANGUAGE 69 ence between these and the finest natural pearls is that they are a little flattened on one side. The women do the diving, and fish up not only pearls but a kind of seaweed of which jelly is made. They can stay down under the water from three to four minutes at a time, and are so hardy that they go on diving even on the eve of child-birth, but they age quickly, and are almost repulsively ugly, with coarse, tanned skin and hair that is turned reddish from constant dipping in the sea water. At Yamada, being in the land of miracles and having made my offering at the temple and burnt incense before the proper shrines, and therefore having the right to expect help from on high, I undertook to learn a little colloquial Japanese. Vain hope. Nothing doing. After I had learned to say " ohio," which means " good-morning," and " arigato," thanks, and " sayonara," good-bye, I gave it up, for it takes not a little miracle, but a great, big, first- class one to enable one either to speak or under- stand a language that sometimes stumps even the people that are born to it. For instance, even when a Japanese is talking to another Japanese, he is eternally making sketchy little figures in the air with his hands. The reason of this is that while there is a definite written ideograph for everything, sometimes as many as fifty different things are called by the same spoken word, so when a Japanese wants to distinguish between them he will make the sign of the word in the air. In reality there are ever so many Japanese lan- guages. There is written Japanese, which consists of the Chinese ideographs. The Chinese and the Japanese write the same language and can communi- cate by writing when they cannot understand each other's speech. Then there is colloquial Japanese, of which there are five forms — the one in which you address your superiors, the one in which you address 70 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD your inferiors, the one in which you address your equals, the one in which you address servants, and the one that you use to coolies. Then there is the women's language used in con- versing with women, and which women use between themselves, and which is entirely different from the way they would talk to men, and there is com- mercial Japanese which is English. English terms are used for weights and measures, and all blue prints and specifications are in English. Another difficulty in learning and understanding Japanese is that there are no plurals and no genders, and so you have to guess at how many are meant, and of what sex, when they speak of people. It is so impossible for foreigners to learn Japanese, and Japan is so eager to become a great commercial power, and is so handicapped by her language, that there is much talk of adopting English as a general language, and preserving their own speech only for ceremonial and literary purposes. Even Japanese progress could hardly take so radical a step as that, but English is being taught in all the schools, and I could but notice in the two years since I had been there last what wonderful strides had been made in the speaking of it. CHAPTER VII FAREWELL TO JAPAN We motored through the rain to Miyanoshita. Up and up a road cut into the side of a mountain, as slick as glass, and with as many hairpin turns as there are twists in a corkscrew. The road is very narrow. Its outer edge skirts a deep precipice through whose depths flows a swift stream. At every inch of the way you meet hooded rickshaws, coolies with their great baskets slung on poles over their shoulders, long and unwieldy wagons drawn by men and women, and through it all your chauffeur dashes at breakneck speed, honking his horn, with the peculiar, weird death-cry that a Japanese automobile siren gives forth. It is a hair-raising experience, for it does not seem possible that you should reach the end of your journey alive, or without having left a trail of murder in your wake, but to your entreaties, and prayers, and com- mands to go slower, the driver returns a shrug of his shoulders and some unintelligible word that you take to mean that he doesn't understand English. And as I clung frantically to the side of the car, and my feet turned to lumps of ice, I recalled the experience of some friends of mine who had been recently motoring in Japan. They stopped at the top of a mountain pass to admire the scenery, and got out of the machine the better to see it. So did the driver. Almost instantly the car plunged over the precipice hundreds of feet below. The passengers who had had such a narrow escape from death shuddered with horror, but the chauffeur turned upon them with a beaming smile. " It does not matter," he said, " the car is insure." 71 72 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD I strongly advise anyone who is going to motor any- where in the Orient to get " insure " before they leave home, for when gasoline mingles with the Oriental blood it produces the demon chauffeur, who would make any of our speed maniacs get arrested for obstructing the traffic by slow driving ; and while an insurance policy may not save your life, there is nothing so handy with which to wipe away the tears of the widow and orphan as insurance money. But Miyanoshita is worth risking your life to reach. It is a fashionable summer and winter resort much frequented by Japanese of wealth and tourists, and English people from India, and Ceylon, and the Straits Settlements. There is a wonderful modern European hotel, set in the midst of a magnificent landscape garden, and the scenery is beautiful and picturesque, with serried rows upon rows of mountains, with here and there the smoke from a half-extinct volcano, and in the dim distance Fuji, rising in incomparable majesty. One day we climbed over the mountain pass to Lake Hakone, borne in chairs carried on the shoulders of coolies. These men have a pad upon their shoulders upon which rest the long bamboo poles that support the chair, and about every hundred yards or so the leader calls out a hoarse ejaculation that sounds like " Hooch," whereupon you find yourself deposited upon the ground with a dull, cold thud while the bearers shift their pads to the other shoulder. Moreover, as each of the men is of a different height, and they make no attempt to keep step, you find your- self bumped up and down, and sideways, and describing such gymnastic stunts that the timid, and those of weak nerves, generally get out and walk in preference. I liked it though. I always prefer to take my exercise by proxy. But every step of the way to Lake Hakone ravishes the eye. You climb the side of the mountain through A SHRINE FOR LITTLE CHILDREN 73 a great, solemn pine forest, over paths so steep that a goat could scarcely find footing. You dip down through little valleys that are masses of pink and purple cherry and azalea blooms in the spring, and scarlet with the maple in the fall, and where nestle the little grey paper houses of the peasants, and always about these are hosts of children, gay as butterflies in their bright-coloured kimonos, and smiling women clinking about in their wooden clogs. And in one place you come across a great shrine to Jizo, green stained with time, but with its hundreds of piles of little stones put there by the hands of the faithful, for Jizo is " the god who plays with little dead children," and he is one of the favourite gods among the Japanese, who so love children. According to the Japanese belief, when little children die their spirits go to the River of Dead Souls. There the evil god of the place sets them to piling up mounds of little stones, which the bad spirits knock down as soon as they are built. The tiny hands toil and toil in vain at their task, until finally the little souls be- come discouraged and run weeping to Jizo, who takes them up and hides them in his big sleeves. Therefore every time you put a pebble, with a prayer, before the shrine of Jizo you help the souls of the little dead children. There is no other altar you see so often in Japan as Jizo, and everywhere before it are the pathetic little piles of rocks. Close by this altar of Jizo a coolie woman, with a baby lashed on her back, was breaking rocks for the roadway, while another child, a little tot that just could walk, toddled backwards and forwards between her and the shrine, carrying tiny bits of stone which he put on the little piles while the woman smiled at him, and I wondered if some other baby of hers had gone to that River of Dead Souls from which his tiny brother was ransoming him. Still further up the mountain we came to the burnt- 74 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD out volcano called Big Hell, where sulphur is obtained, and where the air is still acrid with the fumes of brim- stone and the ground hot beneath your feet. Then on and on through a Torii gate of stone grey-green with lichen, then down a long avenue of cryptomeria trees that met above our heads, and so to the lake, across whose shining surface we could see Fuji rising like a goddess out of a mist of clouds. The road to Narra goes through the tea fields, and nothing else gives you such an idea of how over- populated Japan is than to see with what intensive cultivation every inch of soil is worked. Small as Japan is, only one-twelfth of its surface is arable, the balance being taken up by the volcanic mountain ranges. And on this her population of seventy millions must live, and this population is continually increasing at an alarming rate, for the birth-rate in Japan is terrific. The result is that every foot of ground is forced to yield its utmost, and you will find very often a few little tea plants, or a little patch of radishes, or some grain, growing in a little pocket of earth up on the side of a cliff so steep that it has to be reached by a ladder. And the Japanese are poor beyond belief. We sigh with sympathy when we think of the peasants living upon rice. Why, only the comparatively well- to-do among them can afford rice ! The balance of them live upon millet, and other coarse grains, and look upon a few dried fish as we do upon a banquet of terrapin and champagne. Yet they appear happy and contented, and Japan is the only country in which I have ever travelled, including my own, in which there are no beggars and in which you are never solicited for alms. Narra is an old and picturesque city that was at one time the capital of Japan. It is now interesting chiefly because it was the cradle of religion in Japan. A JAPANESE FACTORY TOWN 75 Here is the old temple of Kasuaga No Miya, a shabby old building that you reach by means of many steps that climb a long hill that is so shaded by great cedar trees that it is in a sort of perpetual green twilight, even at midday. The walk is bordered the whole way by hundreds of moss-grown lanterns, and the sacred deer belonging to the temple are so gentle that they come up and nuzzle your hand, begging for cakes. There are vast numbers of these deer, as it would be an unpardonable sacrilege for one to be killed, and there is no prettier sight than to see the little Japanese children sharing their frugal meals with them. Hosts of pilgrims come to worship at the shrine of Kasuaga No Miya, and we acquired merit, as Kim would say, by inviting a party of these to witness the temple dance at our expense. This was performed by two vestal virgins, very young girls, dressed in white and scarlet robes with fantastic ornaments on their heads, who went through various rhythmic steps and posturing, the significance of which we were too ignorant to understand. At Narra also is the largest statue of Buddha in the world. It is a hundred and fifty-six feet high and two hundred and ninety feet wide, but it is a hideous, gross conception of the great teacher that inspires no reverence as does the beautiful Kammakura bronze. A few miles out from Narra is a very ancient temple in which is said to be one of Buddha's teeth. Mark Twain estimated, judging from the pieces of the true cross he had seen in the churches in Europe, that there must have been as much lumber used in the cross as there is in an ordinary house. So I think from the number of Buddha's teeth that I saw in the Orient, that he must have been tusked like an elephant. Nagoya belongs to New Japan. It is a prosper- ous commercial city with miles of silk and cotton factories and potteries in which the stuff is made that foreigners want to buy, and that the Japanese 76 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD distinguish from what they use themselves by calling it " commercial." The Japanese are the most artistic people on earth, with the keenest sense of beauty. The humblest article that the poorest one of them uses in his daily life is sure to be pure in line, of exquisite simplicity and lovely colouring, and it must set their teeth on edge to have to make the atrocities that the Western world demands of them. They would no more use them themselves than a Japanese maiden would wear one of the embroidered and befurbelowed kimonos that we pay $75 for, and imagine to be the real thing. What she would wear would be some soft, neutral tinted crepe, stencilled in a design that made the wearing of that particular garment at that particular time as much de rigueur as sports clothes are with us at golf in the morning and a low-cut gown at dinner in the evening. And, by the way, a Japanese woman's chief vanity is her obis, or sashes. These often cost hundreds of dollars each, and a bride's trousseau is rated by her obis. She is a ten-obi bride, or a twenty-obi bride, and envied or pitied accordingly by her sisters. Nagoya may be said to be the connecting link between old and modern Japan, for while it is in the forefront of the modern commercial movement, it boasts also the most perfect specimen of the old feudal castle in Japan. It was erected in 1610, and stands on a massive foundation eighteen feet thick, the stones of which were all brought from a great distance by horse or hand power. The pagoda-like roofs of this castle are all covered with copper, and the top is sur- mounted by two huge dolphins of solid gold with silver eyes. I had come to Japan in the autumn principally to see the chrysanthemums, and I had been greatly dis- appointed by what I had seen. Everywhere pedlars had been hawking little pots of flowers about the streets, but thev were no better than the kind we raise in the TABLEAUX IN CHRYSANTHEMUMS 77 backyard at home, and nothing like the resplendent blooms, big as a baby's head, that grace our florists' windows. At Nagoya, however, I saw a chrysanthemum show that displayed the genius of the Japanese florist at its height. Here the individual flowers were no finer than those we have at home — perhaps there can be no finer flowers — but what the Japanese do with the chrysanthemum is not so much to make it of ele- phantine proportions as to make it do tricks. They teach it to do plain and fancy dancing, and roll over and play dead, and jump through the hoop, so to speak. One plant had been trained into the shape of an arbour, for instance, and on it were nine hundred blooms. Another, a red chtysanthemum, had been made into a good representation of the red lacquer bridge at Nikko, and the flowers were so close together that they seemed to make a solid pathway over which a fairy could walk. The strangest of them all, however, were figures representing scenes from Japanese legends. Even the whole stage setting for the pictures was made of different coloured chrysanthemums, arranged to re- present earth, water, mountains, stream, and so forth, and against this background were Shoguns in their robes of state, Samuri in armour, ladies in gorgeous kimonos, all made of growing plants, except the faces and hands, which were of wax. Afterwards I went to see a series of tableaux, in which the dramatis personce were these flower figures, and they registered whatever emotion they were in- tended to express as vividly as if they had been the figures in a moving picture. There was one play with a scene in which a father is stabbed to death by his enemy. Another scene in which the enemy is dis- covered by the man's son. Another in which the son swears vengeance. Then through various scenes the son pursues the assassin, aided by his faithful followers. 78 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD Finally the miscreant is overtaken and is killed by the son, and sheds red chrysanthemum blood. Imagine the innumerable poses required to tell this story, for in each one the figures were in different attitudes and wore different clothes. Each figure was made of wire, filled with dirt and then planted, through the interstices, with chrysanthemums dwarfed and shaded in colour until they made a perfect repre- sentation of the fabrics of rich brocade or gold en- crusted armour. How in the world do they keep the plants the same size, how do they bloom just exactly at the psychological moment, how shade their pinks and yellows and purples in the seed so that the harmony is complete ? As an amateur gardener who always gets sweet peas when she plants geraniums, I ask, " How do they do it ? " The trip from Kobe to Shimoneski through the inland sea is one of the wonders of the world. For a day and a night you voyage through a fairyland. Wondrous mountains rise on either hand, with here and there a little grey village, with a red Torii marking the entrance to a temple. Little islands, crowned with feathery palms, dot the placid sea, and when the moon comes up at night, and floods it all with silver, you do not wonder that the Japanese believe that the gods let down a bridge from heaven to one of these isles, and visit backwards and forwards between Paradise and a world that is scarcely less beautiful. And then from out of this wonderful sea rises Miyajama, the sacred island, a mass of emerald green from its waterline to the top of its highest cryptomeria. At its entrance harbour stands a great red lacquered Torii gate, and just beyond a huge grey temple before whose doors the sounds of the pilgrims, clapping their hands to attract the attention of the gods, is as ceaseless as the beat of the surf on the shore, for this is one of the holy spots of Japan and to it the pious flock. THE FAMOUS INLAND SEA 79 And because this sacred island belongs to the gods, who have the eternal years, there must be neither birth nor death on it. The sick are taken to the main- land that they may not die here, and to the mainland goes the expectant mother that her child may be born there. On the sacred island there is a little valley called the Maple Valley. It is very tiny, a mere gulch in the side of the steep, cone-shaped hill that forms the island, but down this valley tumbles a mountain stream, making a dozen cascades, and little still pools, as it goes. The cherry trees and azaleas line its course, and maple trees fling their red banners across it. Picturesque little houses have been built into the side of the mountain, or are perched on stilts above the water, and about their doors are miniature gardens full of dwarf trees, and stone lanterns in which at night burn flickering, eerie lights. All that Nature in her most generous mood can do to create beauty has been supplemented by the very quintessence of Japanese art, and the result is the loveliest spot in all the wide world. Bar none. I could have stayed and worshipped there for a thousand years, but the time had come to say " farewell " to Japan. Our tickets were taken, and that night we sailed from Shimoneski for the Hermit Kingdom of Korea, and as the big ship pulled out, I wafted a kiss back to the land that, for me, always spells enchantment. Japan, Sayonara. Likewise, and also, banzai ! CHAPTER VIII QUAINT LITTLE KOREA One's first view of Korea is something never to be forgotten, and leaves one wondering whether one is viewing a performance at the Hippodrome or a real people. Certainly nothing out of a comic opera was ever as grotesque and funny as is the national costume. The Yan Bans, or Gentlemen of the Aristocracy — they are traditionally supposed to be the descend- ants of the royal harem — wear white trousers that are exceedingly bouffant across the hips and taper down to skin-tight at the ankles, where they are bound about with a coloured ribbon, which makes a neat, not to say cheerful, finish. Over these trousers they wear a long coat, very much like a Mother Hubbard wrapper, that comes below the knees, and that is cut tight in the back and very full in front, and is held together with a sash that comes out from under the right armhole and the left lapel. This sash is tied in an up-and-down bow, with a stand-up loop and a long flowing end. The coat is made of pale-coloured silk, either Nile green, or shell pink, or baby blue, and a well-dressed gentleman has a rainbow selection of hues in his wardrobe. I asked the guide what they called these coats, and he replied, " Too-roo-magee." Or something that sounded like that. " How do you spell it ? " I further inquired. To which he replied, " Spell it like over- coat." This may, or may not, have been a Korean joke. Anyway, he appeared in different costumes three times a day, and was a vision in pale lavender in the morning, and a dream in pale green in the after- 80 KOREAN YAM HAN QUAINT LITTLE KOREA 81 noon, and a ravishment to the eye in pale pink in the evening on one day, while on other days he adorned himself with equal resplendence in still other shades and hues. As these garments have to be ripped apart to be laundered, and are then washed in cold water, and laid flat on the stones of the river and beaten with a kind of flail until they are smooth, and slick, and shiny like new silk, it is easy to see why polygamy flourishes in Korea. A man needs more than one wife to keep his clothes in order. This costume is topped off with a hat made of horse- hair. It is the shape of a stove-pipe, and about five inches in diameter and six in height, and as it is trans- parent it looks exactly like one of the tin fly-catchers in a country hotel. It is tied on the head with ribbons or a string of beads, and to behold a man in a Nile green coat with baby blue hat-strings mingling with a few scattered whiskers on his chin is the funniest sight on earth. Korean men wear long hair, which they do up in a top-knot that stands up on their heads, and which looks like a plug of navy tobacco. They set great store on their coiffures, and there is an imposing ceremony when a boy puts up his hair. It signalises his entrance into manhood. The men smoke a tiny pipe, no bigger than the end of your little finger, that holds a pinch of tobacco, but it has a stem two or three feet long. This is to show that they always have a servant to light their pipes, as it is something no one could do for himself. A Yan Ban also considers it exceedingly plebeian to touch money, and many men forty and fifty years old will boast that they have never soiled their fingers in their lives by touching a coin. Their menials have attended to that degrading duty. The sign of mourning is the wearing of an enormous tan-coloured hat, and you continually meet men who 82 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD are perambulating around looking as if they had stuck their heads in an old-fashioned clothes-basket. The women wear big baggy trousers, and such volu- minous petticoats that they look like circus tents, but they are even more sketchily attired above the belt-line than a grand opera audience. Women of position wear a vivid green silk coat made with sleeves, but instead of putting their arms in the sleeves they wear the coats over their heads and the sleeves flapping, much as a gossipy woman in a village sometimes throws her husband's coat over her head when she runs out to have a chat with the next-door neighbour over the back fence. This custom is said to indicate that women in Korea always keep themselves ready to answer when men call without taking time to put their arms in their sleeves. Nowhere in the Orient is the position of women more pitiful than in Korea. They do most of the hard labour, they are the despised slaves of men, and are hedged about with a thousand superstitions and traditions that take all the joy out of life for them. For instance, a girl is so disgraced if she even speaks to any man not of her own family before she is married that she not infrequently is either killed by her family, or kills herself rather than endure the shame. A girl has no choice in the selection of her husband, but must marry whomsoever her parents select. When she goes to her husband's home as a bride she must on no account speak to him. He will try to tease her, or to frighten her, or cajole her into being betrayed into speech, but well she knows that his family aie spying upon her and she will forfeit all their esteem if she does and lose caste. The longer she refrains from speaking, the better for her. A woman is of no importance until she bears a son, and as long as she lives her duty is to cook her husband's meals and carry them to him, then to serve WHERE OLD CUSTOMS PREVAIL 83 the eldest son, and after he has finished she may eat, not before. In some parts of Korea the women are much older than their husbands, a grown woman sometimes being married to a little boy. A Korean man told me he had seen a woman carry her boy husband in her arms across a muddy road. The Koreans are gross feeders, and are so stuffed from the time they are babies that a grown man can eat four pounds of rice a day. A Korean mother will give her baby all the rice it can hold sitting up, and then lay it flat on her lap and feed it some more, tapping its tummy with a spoon to see if it is full. As a result the Korean men are all paunchy, which certainly doesn't go with their straight-front costumes. The Korean houses are flat little affairs, with the queerest heating system imaginable. The wood is put into a sort of furnace on the outside of the house, and the smoke escapes through a chimney on the opposite wall. The hot air is conducted through pipes under the floors, on which the people sleep for warmth. The Koreans have no pity for the sufferings of dumb brutes, and their way of killing meat is so repulsive that Europeans never buy of Korean butchers, so I was told. Poultry is plucked alive, and you may hear the squawks of the unhappy fowls as you ride along the streets. A bullock has its throat cut and a wedge inserted in it, and is then beaten to death, a long and agonizing process, but the animal loses little blood. Dogs, a Korean titbit, are rendered un- conscious by being twirled in a noose before they are killed. Goats are pulled to and fro in a stream of water until they perish, as this is believed to take the strong taste out of goat meat, and so on. We landed at Fusan, in Korea, and spent the day going up to Seoul, on a train that made you think you had got back to home and mother, for it was a 84 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD standard gauge American railway with good, comfy American cars drawn by big, husky American engines. This railroad has been built by the Japanese, as has also been built the splendid, fine hotel, the best in the whole Orient, at Seoul. Seoul itself is a queer, rambling city of some three hundred thousand inhabitants, with wide streets and ugly architecture. The most interesting place in it is the old palace where the Korean kings ruled for so many years. The Japanese have pulled much of it down, " to kill out memory," the Koreans say bitterly. Part of that which was pulled down was the piivate apartments of the king, where he had three hundred and sixty-five sleeping rooms, one for each night, so that the assassins of whom he lived in perpetual dread might not know where to find him. Just beyond was the women's palace, in which Queen Bin, an intriguing lady who dabbled unwisely in politics and landed most of her male relatives in lucrative Government positions, was murdered by hired Japanese assassins in the employ of the Prince Parent, in one of the innumerable plots of the Koreans to overthrow the Government. The queen's body was so desecrated that only one little hand was found and identified by its rings. Then the palace was burned, and the king fled to the Russian embassy for protection. Another interesting place is the palace of Prince Li. It is a beautiful, rambling house, but with the most atrocious decorations in what is supposed to be the European manner. The throne-room is a medley of all the primary colours, violently swearing at each other. It is lit with enormous electric lights with yellow and red shades, and heated by twenty porcelain stoves. But the summer pavilion, with its lotus pond, is a thing of beauty. We were served tea in it on china with the royal crest, while we looked out across an enchanting scene of forest, and hill, and dale. The WHY JAPAN INTERVENED 85 prince gets an annuity of ten million yen — five million dollars — from Japan, and must live an ideal life after the Korean ideal of dolce far niente. They call Korea The Land of the Morning Calm. Believe me, it is also The Land of the Afternoon Do Nothing, for nobody, at any time of the day, appears to agitate themselves about anything. In all my life I never saw so many idle, shiftless, lazy, good-for-nothing-looking men as I saw everywhere in Korea. Of course the really interesting thing in Korea is the Japanese situation. That is what everybody thinks about, what everybody talks about, what the educated Koreans intrigue about, and the common people, who have more to eat, lighter taxes, and are less oppressed than they ever were, don't care a whoop about. The situation seems to be about this : Korea, through centuries of misrule and corrup- tion, had sunk into a state of decadence in which she was the plague spot of the East. She was under the suzerainty of China. Japan demanded that China reform the Korean Government. China refused, and the result was the Chinese- Japanese War. The Japanese won, and China agreed to recognize the independence of Korea. Then Russia stepped in, and, regardless of all treaty obligations, obtained con- trol of the military and financial systems of Korea, and obtained for herself valuable concessions which placed the resources of Korea at her disposal. It was one of these, the grant of timberlands on the Yalu River, which divides Korea and Manchuria, that pre- cipitated the Russian- Japanese War. Russia built forts and established garrisons, ostensibly to protect her timber interests, but in reality to open the way to the seizure of Korea. Japan protested to Korea, but the weak Government did nothing, and Russia laughed at Japan. Japan offered Russia a free hand in Manchuria pro- vided the safety and independence of Korea were 86 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD guaranteed, and when Russia refused this, war followed, and the result put an end to Russian dominance in Korea as effectually as the China- Japan war had to that of China ten years before. Japan then started in on a house-cleaning of Korea, but it found itself in the impossible position of trying to drag a bankrupt nation out of bankruptcy without full authority as to method, and so, after the murder of Queen Bin, it became convinced that the only way to deal with the situation was to annex Korea, which was done in 1910. The Koreans, who desire independence and ignore the fact that Korea has never been able to govern itself satisfactorily, are very bitter about this. " Oh, well," I said consolingly to one of them, " at the time Japan annexed you, you were between the devil and the deep blue sea. You were bound to be gobbled up by either Russia or Japan, and it was far better that Japan should have got you than Russia." " But as things turned out, if Russia had got us we would now be free, for there is no Russian government," replied the Korean. Can you beat that for logic ? Undoubtedly Japan has dealt with Korea with a heavy hand, but it must be remembered that Korea itself is a land where brutality has always ruled — where assassination has ever been the way of dealing with a situation, and torture a means of jurisprudence. A Korean complained to a gentleman in our party that the Japanese were going to abolish flogging in the police courts, and he gravely added that this was a great hardship on the poor, as they would much rather be beaten than go to jail. Pink tea methods don't work with a people like that. No excuse, however, can be offered for the Japanese having practically abolished free speech and a free press among the Koreans. Koreans may not hold any sort of public meeting without getting permission GRASPED BY THE MAILED FIST 87 from the Japanese authorities, and all their printed matter has to be vised before it is published. The Koreans' schools have a very inferior curriculum to the Japanese, and the Korean students are required to spend so much time studying the Japanese language that they have practically no time to learn anything else. The Koreans are also treated as an inferior race, no Korean boy being permitted to sit by a Japanese boy in school, and it is said that in the households of the wealthy Koreans they are forced to employ Japanese servants, who act as spies to the Government. Undoubtedly, also, the Japanese seize the best business opportunities for themselves, and the Koreans are being gradually driven out of their own country, but when you see how lazy and shiftless the Koreans are, and how industrious and thrifty the Japanese are, you view this more as the working out of an inevitable natural law than as a political move. As regards the persecution of Korean Christians by Japan, I was told by several missionaries that it was not because they were Christians, but because the Christian Koreans, being more progressive, independent, and advanced than the other Koreans, were naturally the leaders in the recent rebellion which Japan put down with a mailed fist. Also, undoubtedly, the missionaries are not as neutral politically as they should be. Let it not be forgotten that Japan chartered a hospital in Korea in which it is specifically stated that no director, doctor, or nurse shall be connected with it who is not a Christian. No country has ever done more for its subject people than Japan has done for Korea. She has given it a Government modelled on that of Japan, she has re- formed the judiciary, cleaned prisons, abolished trial by torture, instituted schools of law, medicine, and agriculture, built railroads, paved cities, and given them a pure water supply, planted millions upon millions of little trees on the mountains that Korea had stripped 88 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD of timber, dredged harbours, rid the country of thou- sands of parasitic Yan Bans who grafted on the public treasury, instituted more reforms in ten years than Korea had thought of in two thousand. There have been cruelty and oppression and wrongs a-plenty, but in the end Korea is better off with a hard master than no head at all. Japan before the war admired Germany and formed herself upon that militaristic model. She dealt with Korea as Germany did with her colonies. There is now a reaction against the German spirit, and there is every hope that the new Japanese Government is going to reform its policy towards Korea. Anyway, Japan is putting Korea again on the map, and the time will come when Korea will realize that she has been saved in spite of herself. CHAPTER IX MANCHURIA, THE CHINESE COLD STORAGE It is a twenty-hour trip from Seoul to Mukden. The earlier part of the journey is through the beauti- ful mountainous region of Korea, a country of hills and vales and silvery streams, with little villages of tiny mud-walled houses with enormous overhanging thatched roofs that make them look like a bunch of mushrooms half-hidden in the hollow of every valley, and with the mountains turning green again with the millions of pine trees that the Japanese have planted on them to take the place of the forests that the Koreans had ruthlessly slaughtered. From the car window you see a never-ending panorama that enchants your eye : stately Yan Bans in their pink, and blue, and green, and lavender silk Mother Hubbards, taking the air the while they puff on their two-foot pipes ; men in mourning wearing such great khaki-coloured hats that they are sub- merged in them ; women with their long green coats over their heads with the empty sleeves flapping in the wind ; myriads of half-naked children playing about ; tiny cows with such huge bundles of faggots and little pine branches lashed on their back that you can hardly see the animal at all ; little patches of rice fields, and acres and acres of ginseng growing under arbours over which matting is placed to protect it from the sun, for ginseng is the most valuable export of Korea. It is the favourite cure-all of the Orientals, and is so costly that they have a proverb which says, in effect, that there is no disease that ginseng will not care, but that it is better to die than 89 90 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD take it for you will never be through paying for the remedy. Then we came to the flat plains of Manchuria, a cold, grey country that was bleak with winter, and showed endless stretches of fields of stubble of corn- stalks. Manchuria is as big in area as Germany and France combined. It is enormously fertile, and has oil wells and coal fields, and looks exactly like North Dakota, except that the houses along the railroad track are made of mud instead of wood, and have either high walls of mud around their little yards, or else are fenced in with mats of woven corn-stalks to break the wind, which cuts like a knife as it comes across the endless plains. Everybody was dressed in thick, quilted, fur- lined garments, and at every station men with long guns offered for sale all sorts of game, venison, and pheasants, and quail and half a dozen kinds of birds whose names I did not know. In the dining-car we had a wonderful dinner of nine courses, perfectly cooked, with two or three different kinds of game on the menu, and that only cost sixty cents, but we ate it with teeth that chattered so with cold they could scarcely perform their office of mastica- tion, for the cars were practically unheated. A tiny stove in one corner of the corridor of a coach was supposed to make sufficient heat, though a good chromo of a fire would have given as much warmth, and at night we slept in our clothes, even in our boots, well knowing that if we ever got them off we would never be able to get them on again with our numb fingers. Sleeping on a Manchurian railroad is, however, an impossibility anyway, because at every station there is such an uproar — such yells, and shrieks, and wild outcries as make you think that a revolution has broken out and the Bolsheviki have got you, and your fears are not allayed when you look out the window and THE LAND OF FURS 91 see dozens of armed soldiers apparently holding the fort in the face of an overwhelming mob. It's only after you have spent the night with your head under your pillow, and the cold sweat of terror bedewing your marble brow, that you ascertain that your terrors have been for naught — that the uproar was nothing but the vendors of hot roasted chestnuts and tea crying their wares, and that the Government has a big standing army that it doesn't know what to do with, so it parks it out around the railroad stations. I have been told that in extreme northern regions the missionaries find it necessary to describe hell as a place of snow and sleet, where sinners sit around on blocks of ice and shiver through all eternity. They say that if they described it as a burning, sizzling lake of fire all the natives would want to go to it. I shall always think of Mukden as a cold hell, a place where the snow crunched under your feet, where the wind cut like daggers, where the cold pierced to the very marrow of your bones, where even the food in the hotel was clammy, and you shivered over a handful of fire, and there was no warmth in you. A strange, weird place is Mukden, consisting really of two cities, an old, walled city built centuries ago by fierce Tartar tribes, and a new city built outside this wall by the Japanese, who practically rule Manchuria as they openly do Korea. This new Japanese city is raw and ugly, made of brick houses two or three storeys high. It looks exactly like a boom town in our own West, except that the streets are thronged by huge men in long, wadded, fur-lined garments, and with dark, forbidding faces. These are the descendants of the wild Tartar tribes that overran China nearly three hundred years ago. Inside the old city walls the streets are very narrow, and are lined with little dark hovels of houses that are stores in front, and whose goods overflow into the filthy streets. Even the food does. There are many 92 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD fur stores with the most gorgeous pelts that fairly charm the money out of your pocket — soft sables, and gorgeous tiger skins and fox, and a little grey squirrel skin no bigger than your hand, that is as soft as down. Trappers from the far North are hawking these skins about from door to door, and you may buy at prices that makes you put your furrier at home into the head- liner class among profiteers. Before the meat shops hang long strings of wild turkeys, and pheasants with glorious plumage, and wild ducks, and rabbits, and deer, and all sorts of game. In fact, game is cheaper than beef. There are no sidewalks. Everyone walks in the narrow streets, and as they paddle in their felt-soled shoes through the icy lob-lolly of mud you don't wonder that Manchuria is the original home of the influenza germ. Men and women dress almost exactly alike, so that you marvel how they tell to which sex they belong. Everyone has on quilted clothes, fur-lined, and is fur-capped, and everyone is filthy-looking beyond belief. Their faces are begrimed with the dirt of ages. Apparently no one ever bathes from the day of their birth to the day of their death, and I don't blame them. I wouldn't do it either if I lived in Manchuria. Manchuria is named after the Manchu tribes which originally lived in tents and caves in this country. These wandering tribes of barbarians were conquered and formed into a confederation by Noorchachu. Later on they overran China, and Noorchachu's grandson seized the Chinese throne in 1644, an d inaugurated the Manchu dynasty that reigned in Pekin until it ended with the beginning of the Chinese Republic in 1912. The most interesting thing in Mukden is the tomb of this old Manchu chief, and we had a wild ride to it in a little carriage with galloping horses, across the snow, and through a Chinese graveyard full of little mounds. WHERE THE MANCHUS RULED 93 The tomb is built in a beautiful grove of old pine trees. It is surrounded by a high wall, dull pink in colour, with great bas-relief of dragons of green porcelain upon it. There are four wonderful gates of many stories, ornate affairs painted in blues, and yellows, and scarlet. Within the enclosure is a great walk, on either side of which are crude stone statues of horses, elephants, camels and other animals, like those at the approach to the Ming tombs. We climbed the wall, and looked down on the big hillock under which the old chieftain is buried ; but more interesting even than this ancient history was the irregular pile of earth that marked the line of the battle of Mukden, for here was fought the culminating battle in the Russo-Japanese War. Driving through the old city we stopped at the royal palace from which the Manchu chief started forth to conquest, and in which he died. It is untenanted now and falling into ruin, a bleak, cold barn of a place with no furniture in it except in the throne-room. There still stands the chair in which used to sit the Lord of Heaven and Earth, who had the power of life and death over millions, and for the small sum of twenty- five cents the official who was showing us about kindly turned his head while I reposed in it, and tried to imagine how it would seem to be a potentate, with humble courtiers kow-towing before me. In their day the Manchus were the greatest little looters in the world, and there was a time when this old palace was a treasure-house of peach blow china, and hawthorn vases, and pottery of the Ming dynasty, and carved jade, and lacquer, and all that was fine and beautiful of the arts of the Orient, but these have all now been sent to Pekin to the museum, and the palace is empty of all save the pigeons that flutter through the barren rooms and nest in the place which was once the abode of kings. From Mukden we went to Tientsin, at which we 94 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD arrived in a half-congealed state after a night and a day in a cold-storage sleeper. Tientsin is a prosperous, hustling, commercial city with many handsome foreign concessions, for in every Chinese city a place is specially set apart in which foreigners may live, and where each is supposed to be under the government of his own country. I confess, however, that my chief joy in Tientsin was the fact that the hotel was steam-heated, and I never expect to see anything again as beautiful or appealing as the steam radiator with which I made intimate contact, and from which I had to be pried loose even to go on to Pekin. As the winter season was setting in, and every day bitter weather was expected, we were advised to go at once to see the Great Wall of China if we wanted to see it at all. " And when you go," added our advisers, " put on all the clothes you have got, and all you can borrow, and then some." Which we did, and still it was not enough. In the cold grey dawn of a winter's morning we tumbled out of our warm beds at the Hotel des Wagon Lits, swallowed a cup of scalding tea and what little breakfast one could choke down at that ungodly hour, were tucked in our rickshaws, and fared forth on the great adventure that probably everybody has dreamed of taking ever since they were school children. Early as it was the streets were already full — coolies going to their work, barbers shaving their customers at their little open-air shops in full public view, hosts of people eating at little cook-shops, long trains of camels starting out laden with goods to be carried across the mountains into far-off places. At the railroad station, after much bustle and con- fusion we got our places in the car, and started on our eighty-six-mile ride straight up into the mountain over a road that is a marvel of engineering, and is almost the only one in China that was built by the Chinese themselves without any foreign help. A GLIMPSE OF THE GREAT WALL 95 The scenery was beautiful and interesting, for the Chinese not only built the Great Wall to keep out the horde of barbarians from the North, but each city built a separate wall behind which to defend itself from its neighbours. On the way to the Great Wall you pass numbers of these lesser walls, so that the whole country is divided into a sort of irregular chess-board. About noon we arrived at a little wayside station near which is thought to be the best view of the wall. The station is a little one-room affair, a concrete box, that felt as if it had a temperature of about a million degrees below zero. There was no possible way of making any fire, so in this blasting cold we ate our cold lunch before starting up to the wall. At this place there is a little, narrow mountain pass that is the only connecting doorway for hundreds of miles between Mongolia and China. The road looks like the bed of a mountain torrent, it is so covered by great boulders of rock, and, threading the almost imperceptible path along it, donkey trains and camel trains were making their toilsome way, as they have done for thousands upon thousands of years. With icy feet that clumped as we walked we followed this path, flattening ourselves from time to time against the walls of granite to let a caravan go by, and shiver- ing more and more as we climbed higher and higher, and the wind swept with an icier blast across the snow-covered Mongolian plains. Then suddenly we came out on a little open space, and the wall burst upon our view with all its breath- taking majesty. Over hills and valleys, following every sweep of the contour of the ground, as far as the eye could reach it bent, and turned, in sinuous lines like some great, grey, prehistoric serpent. It was fifteen hundred miles long, and in some places, where it spans great valleys, as much as four thousand feet above sea level, and it is wide enough to drive an automobile on. Every few hundred yards there is a 96 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD great stone block tower that was a guardhouse in which the soldiers lived, and from whose top they kept ceaseless watch, and these were so skilfully arranged that there was no foot of the wall that it was possible to approach unseen. The wall is built of cut stone and brick and is still in pretty good repair, although it was built three hundred years before Christ. Talk about modern engineering feats ! They pale into insignificance before this when you remember the transportation situation in those times, and that not only had every bit of material of which the wall is constructed to be brought hither by hand power, or on donkeys or camels, but that in these barren wastes and mountains even the food for the myriads of work- men had to be fetched from the plains below. My souvenir of Manchuria, that I brought away with me, was a genuine, bona fide influenza microbe. I re- turned from the Great Wall of China with a raging fever, and for the next ten days my one friend in the world was Ah Loo, my Chinese room-boy. Ah Loo was sympathy itself, and he particularly grieved because I could not eat, and would himself go down to the dining-room and fetch me up trays of food, one dish of which was invariably grilled chestnuts. When I refused even this delicacy he would shake his head and say : " Poor Missy. Missy not eat. Velly good chow. Velly good for Missy. When China- man get sick, Chinaman send for doctor ; doctor say more sick, more eat. Chinaman get well. Foreigner get sick. Foreigner say the more sick, the no eat. Foreigner die." The one thing in China that fills every foreigner, and especially every woman who is a housekeeper, with a burning, consuming envy is the Chinese servant. You get a good boy and your earthly troubles are ended. He looks after you as if you were a baby. He cherishes you like a lover. He spoils you like a maiden THE PEARLS OF GREAT PRICE 97 aunt. He apparently never sleeps or gets tired. He knows no moods and tenses. All that he asks is to go away once a year and worship at the shrines of his ancestors, and when he does he leaves a forty-seventh cousin in his place who knows your every peculiarity as if he had raised you, and ministers to them. Of course they say that the head Chinese boy has his rake-off on everything that is bought in the family, and that he will let no one have dealings with the master and mistress who does not come across with his kumshaw, but petty graft is characteristic of all servants everywhere, and it is nothing to weigh in the scales against the efficient devotion that pads one's days with ease, and makes one's life a grand, sweet song in which one does not have to worry about what one is going to have for dinner, or how it will be cooked. Believe me, if any man wants to get the woman vote, all he has got to do is to promise to import about a million thoroughly trained Chinese servants. They are the pearls of great price. CHAPTER X IMPERIAL PURPLE PEKIN Imperial Purple Pekin ! The Forbidden City ! Is there any other city in the world about which centres so much of history and romance, so much that intrigues the imagination and fires the fancy ? I think not, and I never expect to have just such another soul-satisfying thrill as I experienced when I climbed down out of the railroad coach at last, and stood staring up at the high wall that shuts in the wondrous old Tartar city that for centuries upon centuries has been the capital of China. 9 The station is outside of the city, for at the time that the railroad was built the old regime was in force, and it was unthinkable that such an invention of foreign devils should enter the city itself, so we passed through a great gateway and on foot made our way through the crowded streets to the hotel, which was only a short distance away. The Hotel des Wagon Lits is so called because there are no other beds in the world so hard and bumpy as it has except the alleged beds in sleeping-cars. This does not greatly matter, however, because the life that goes on in this queer old hostelry is so fascinating that you can't afford the time to waste in sleeping, anyway. It is an old barn of a place, with enormous corridors, or lounges, opening out of each other, around the walls of which are innumerable little merchants with their packs of embroideries, and furs, and jewels, and ivories, and cloisonne, all the wonderful wares that Chinese skill can produce. And through these corridors flow the most cos- IMPERIAL PURPLE PEKIN 99 mopolitan crowd imaginable. Diplomats from every country under the sun, officers in glittering uniforms, Chinese mandarins in silken robes, commercial travellers from everywhere, millionaires arranging great con- cessions with the Government, adventurers, soldiers of fortune, beautiful women in resplendent evening gowns — everybody from everywhere. And in these corridors the history of China has been made and unmade for Heaven knows how long, and is still in the making, and there is no story so strange that you may not hear it here, told by the very lips of the men who took part in the great adventure. And while you sit in the lounge and gossip, and drink your pre-dinner cocktail or after-dinner coffee, the little merchants come as stealthily and silently as temptation itself and lay before you on the table a bit of green jade, or the length of old brocade, or the embroidered Mandarin coat that you have looked at, and they fall and fall in price until you fall for it, and buy it. The hotel is in the legation quarter, a portion of the city set apart for foreigners, and surrounded by an enormous and almost impregnable wall. Here are the embassies of all the foreign nations, and before each the soldiers of its own nation stand guard. Here during the Boxer uprising all foreigners took refuge, and withstood a siege that lasted for months, and here on the outer wall the English have put up the grim legend, " Lest We Forget," as a reminder to both foreigners and Chinese. The legation quarter is asphalted and clean, but the minute you pass through its outer gates you are in the real Pekin, and I think nobody can ever forget their first impression of a Pekin street scene. There is a crush of rickshaws — there are fifty thousand of them in the city — which scatter like a flock of scared chickens as an occasional honking automobile passes them by. There are two-wheeled 100 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD Pekin carts made exactly as they have been made for the last two thousand years, with bright blue hoods and yellow wheels studded with great nail heads, drawn by shaggy ponies and weighted down by a couple of people sitting on the poles. There are heavily laden donkey trains, and stately camels moving slowly off on their long journey through the Mongolian deserts. There are grandees in shabby victorias with half a dozen outriders on long-haired ponies. Everywhere are hordes of people, eating, working, chattering, being shaved in the open street. Men go by with heavy loads on their back. Fashionable young men pass, gorgeously attired, dandling a bird- cage on their fingers as our young swells lead a bulldog on a leash. Here come women hobbling along on their pathetic, bound feet. There are Manchu ladies in rickshaws with head-dresses two feet high, and everybody is wrapped up in furs and padded garments as a protection against the biting cold. Through this fascinating kaleidoscope of humanity we made our way slowly to the Temple of Heaven, one of the great sights of Pekin, and one of the most beautiful structures in which man has ever expressed the soul's aspiration towards God. On the way we passed the place where the German Government, after the Boxer uprising, forced the Chinese Government to build a great arch in memory of Baron von Kettler, who had been murdered during the insurrection, and on which were emblazoned a list of the baron's virtues as an official expression of regret for his death. The first thing the Chinese Government did after it entered into the Great War was to haul down this arch and chip off the inscription, and set it up in a park where it states in large, bold letters that it commemorates " The Triumph of Right over Might." The Temple of Heaven is situated in the centre of a great park three and a half miles around. It is en- closed in a high wall roofed with tiles of imperial blue, CEREMONIES AT THE ALTAR OF HEAVEN 101 and filled with gnarled old cedar and cypress trees. You walk through this and come first to the beautiful pavilion called the Temple of Abstinence. Beyond this is the Altar of Heaven, the most sacred spot in China. It is a great unroofed structure consisting of three circular terraces made of marble, each bordered with a balustrade of marble exquisitely carved in a representation of the dragon ascending to the clouds, the marble still as white as snow though the suns, and rains, and snows of five hundred years have beaten upon it. The terrace is laid in marble stones in nine concentric circles. There are nine steps leading to each level, and every stone is arranged in multiples of the number nine, the mystic number of good luck to the Chinese. In the centre of the top terrace is one stone which is supposed to be the centre of the universe. I had the great good fortune to meet Yuan Shai Yi, once Court Chamberlain in the old Manchu days and the only person now living who ever officiated at the ceremonial which took place at the Altar of Heaven, and he described it to me. " On the eve of the eighteenth of January," he said, " the entire court, headed by the Emperor, would repair to the Temple of Heaven. Everybody would be dressed in their most magnificent costumes, and with its flying banners the procession was one of in- conceivable magnificence, but the occasion was con- sidered so solemn that every house along the way was closed and every human being removed from the streets. When we reached the Temple of Heaven the glittering company spread over the grounds and camped there for the night, but the Emperor spent the night in fasting and prayer in the Temple of Abstinence. " Just before dawn the Emperor repaired to the Altar of Heaven. There was no light except that from three great bronze lanterns that typified Heaven, 102 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD the Earth, and Humanity. The air was heavy with the smoke of incense that went up from the huge braziers. Already the priests were offering up the five different kinds of sacrificial animals, whose bodies were being burned in the green tile furnaces. A band played weird, soft Chinese music. " The Emperor ascended the white steps alone, myself and two others following behind. He knelt upon the central stone that represented the centre of the universe and took upon himself the sins of his people, and prayed that the gods would punish him. instead of them, for their misdoings. Then he went to each of the eighty- one altars that had been erected to his ancestors, and made libations three times, and prostrated him- self nine times before each one. It is a ceremony so exhausting that none but a strong man could endure it in that biting cold, but it was dramatic and thrilling beyond all telling, as the sun came up and the sky turned into a blue arch above the white carved marble. " The Emperor was dressed from head to foot in grey fox fur, while the balance of us wore sable, but even then we almost perished of the cold." Close to the Altar of Heaven is the Temple of Heaven, where the Emperor went to pray at the New Year. It is as beautiful as a dream, and curiously enough it has been wired for electricity, for it was used by the convention that framed the constitution of the Republic of China. Such is the whirligig of history. Not far away is the Temple of Agriculture, where the Emperor, in the midst of his glittering court, went to plough the first furrow in the spring to start the farming throughout China. About it are numerous altars to the gods of the winds, and the sun, and the rain, who hold the farmers' fate in their hands. The place is now used as barracks for soldiers, but the Altar of Heaven and the Temple of Heaven are TEMPLES FOR ALL TASTES 103 unused. Nobody goes there now to pray, or to offer sacrifices, for there is no longer an Emperor who is the Son of Heaven. Another interesting temple is the Llama Temple, the headquarters of Buddhism in China, and where the living Buddha from Lhassa sometimes comes to visit. It is a weird old building, filled with yellow robed priests, with many images which foreigners are seldom permitted to see, and which are so lewd that even the Chinese, who Heaven knows are no purists, require to be draped. It is a common thing for the Chinese to give their little boys to the priesthood, and we saw a hundred or two little iogues who winked at us and grimaced, and fought among themselves while they pulled their yellow shawls about their shoulders and chanted the " O Mani Patne Hona," which hangs like an echo about every Buddhist temple, and is said to mean, " How beautiful is the fragrance of the lotus flower." Not wishing to show any more preference in religious matters than the Chinese themselves, who are gor- geously liberal in their beliefs, we then went to the Temple of Confucius, which is a splendid red lacquered building with nothing in it but the mortuary tablet of the great sage who gave to his countrymen the system of ethics on which millions of them have modelled their lives. Before the tablet was a mat worn into tatters by the knees of the devout. " So many come to chin chin Jossman," explained the guide. Leading to the temple were lines of tablets erected by various emperors to Confucius, and in a neigh- bouring temple were two hundred great slabs of stone on which were engraved the first three books of Confucius, lest fire might some time destroy the printed word. Of course the one place in Pekin that piques the curiosity of the traveller more than anything else is 104 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD the Forbidden City, in which, until the revolution, no foreign foot might enter. There is still a little of it that is forbidden, a tiny corner where the present Manchu Emperor, a half-grown boy, who is little better than a state prisoner, is caged up with a few members of his family. For the rest, you may wander through the narrow streets among the yellow-roofed palaces, and look your fill upon the places where so many strange and weird events have taken place. About eleven miles to the west of Pekin is the marvellous summer palace where the old dowager empress spent most of her time, and where she spent, on building in a lake a pavilion in the shape of a carved marble boat, the money that the Government had appropriated for arming and equipping the Chinese navy : it was because of this that the Japanese navy whipped the Chinese navy so easily in the war between the two countries. The summer palace with its fairy bridges and its carved marble arcades is a vision of beauty, but it is fast falling into decay, and you wonder that the Chinese have not wit to preserve it as a show place, even if they have no cause to remember with grati- tude the she-devil who sat so long on the dragon throne and barred the country so successfully from progress. Around the summer palace hang half-starved men. These were the eunuchs, the men who were the actors, the scribes, the courtiers of the old empress' household, and who found their occupation gone with the passing of royalty. They and the ladies in waiting to the empress have literally lived by selling off their ward- robes, and it is from these sources, and from the nobility impoverished by the republic, that come the beautiful brocaded and embroidered garments and strings of beads that are so fascinating to buy in China now, and whose supply will soon be exhausted. A CONTRAST OF OLD AND NEW 105 Pekin is the great place in China to buy rare and beautiful stuffs, for the best of everything was naturally brought to the capital. Here you find the priceless porcelain for which China has been famous for ages, marvellous silks, and bronzes, and ivories, and jewels, everything that the heart of woman desires ; and shopping becomes all the more alluring when you go down Embroidery Street to buy embroideries and Jade Street to look for jade. For the very streets are named for the wares they purvey. We were lucky enough to escape any but a very slight dust storm, but everyone told us about them. It seems that just suddenly, perhaps, on a sunshiny day, it will be noticed that the air is getting a bit hazy. Presently the darkness increases. No cloud is to be seen, but a dull haze of dark brown fills the air and dust begins settling down quietly from above, or, if a wind has arisen, comes in swirls so that you can scarcely see your hand before you. This dust is of a darkish red hue, unlike any soil for many miles around Pekin. No one knows where it comes from, or why, but it blinds and chokes everyone in the streets and comes in through every crevice of the windows and doors of the house, so that foreigners have at least one room with double windows to which they retire during a dust storm. There are two things in Pekin that fill every American with pride. One is the splendid university, built with money which America refused to take as her part of the indemnity money assessed by foreign nations against China for the Boxer outrages. The other nations took theirs, but America used hers to build this great school and to establish a fund on the income of which fifty young Chinese students are sent to America to be educated every year. The other thing to which we point with pride is the magnificent group of buildings that the Rockefeller Foundation is erecting. These will house a great 106 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD medical school, a hospital, a training school for nurses, and a laboratory for research into Oriental diseases, and will be an untold benefaction not only to China but to humanity at large, for it's a little bunch of germs now that makes the whole world kin. And it is because of these things that the very name America is a word to conjure with in China. CHAPTER XI GLIMPSES OF THE NEW CHINA Everywhere most of our troubles are money troubles, but nowhere is the money question such a vexation to the spirit as it is in China. There every city issues its own currency, which is not legal tender in any other city. Pekin money is not good in Shanghai, and Shanghai dollars will not pass in Hong-Kong, and the Canton merchant refuses your Hong-Kong pelf, and you are for ever running to the money-changers, who charge you a big discount for turning the currency of one city into that of another. Worse still, there is " big money " and " little money," both of which you must have, and this is a sort of financial joke that you never quite understand. For you can take a dollar, which is " big money," and get it changed into " little money," and have a dollar and fif- teen or a dollar and twenty cents. If you buy a paper, or a package of cigarettes, or some small article that you can pay for with the exact amount in " little money," the merchant will take it, but if you buy an article costing, say, $1.25 or Si. 50, he will not take back in part payment the "little money" he has just given you. Nowhere is there so much counterfeit money as in China, and in no other place is counterfeiting so skil- fully done. Lead dollars that look exactly like the real thing are as plentiful as blackberries in summer, and in addition there are other dollars in which the silver has been dug out from the insides and the outer surface carefully restored, so you have to be careful to deal only with reputable money-changers, who put 107 108 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD a black stamp or else nick every dollar they give you. This is their "chop," and is a guarantee that their money is the real thing. Originally the medium of exchange in China was long strings of copper cash and lumps of silver, but as the idea of carrying around five or ten pounds of silver as spending money did not appeal to foreigners the Mexican dollar was introduced as a medium of exchange. In the good old days before the war, when the happy traveller from America took a hundred dollars of Uncle Sam's gold to a money changer he came away with anywhere from two hundred to two hundred and twenty Mexican dollars, and could go out and buy embroideries, and jades, and other objects of " bigotry and virtue," as Mrs Partington used to say. Alas, the wartime rise in silver had changed all this, and for our good American hundred dollars in gold we only got from ninety to ninety-three dollars Mex. The banks seemed to have no settled rate of discount. One would give one thing, another another, and so we found it not only advantageous but amusing to go shopping for money and hunt down the bargains in exchange. We left Pekin on a cold, grey, dismal morning for Shanghai, going by way of Nankin. In such weather it is a nightmare of a trip, because almost the whole of it is made through one vast cemetery, a land of graves that stretches to the far horizon, and through which you travel hour after hour. The Chinese bury their dead above ground, on their own land, wherever it is possible. The result is that the whole country is an enormous cemetery and that the dead are crowding the living off the earth. Chinese coffins are made of wood, four inches thick, and are huge affairs. These are placed on the ground and left uncovered for a year, so that the spirit may not be hindered as it comes and goes, for the Chinese believe that the soul abides in the body for a twelvemonth THROUGH THE LAND OF THE DEAD 109 after death. The second year a straw mat is placed over the coffin. The third year it is heaped with dirt until a little mound is formed above it, or else a cement hut is built over it. No matter how poorly a Chinese may have lived he must have a fine funeral. No matter in what a hovel he may have dwelt he must have a "lucky" tomb. So when a Chinese man dies his family consult the priest, who casts his horoscope and takes the currents of the earth and air, and goes through a long process of divination by which he arrives at a knowledge of the precise spot in which the dead man should be buried in order to secure the repose of his own soul, and to bring wealth, and happiness, and health to his sur- viving family. Of course this is a very potent source of graft, as the priests stand in with the real estate speculators, and sometimes a rich man is made to pay as much as $150,000 for a plot ten by fifteen feet on which to erect a " lucky " ancestral tomb. No price, however, is too high to pay to be pro- tected from " hants," and there are literally millions of acres of ground in China devoted to graves that should be given over to agriculture. So through this vast cemetery we travelled for a day and a night and half another day. Far as the eye could reach on either side there were just graves, big mounds, newly built ; little mounds so old that they had worn down until they were no bigger than a potato-hill. There is no rain in China in the winter, and there was not a sprig of green anywhere, just the dry, brown graves whose dust the wind blew about until it filled the air, and made the whole scene seem the end of all humanity — dust to dust and ashes to ashes. Every now and then we could see a funeral cortege wending its way among the graves to make a new grave, and here a blare of the weird funeral music. Sometimes it would be a humble funeral, with just the heavy casket carried by coolies, and with a few mourners H 110 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD following. Often it would be a sumptuous affair that must have cost thousands of dollars. There would be a blaring band, the musicians beating on drums ; there would be a gorgeous red lacquered coffin covered with a scarlet and gold embroidered cloth and borne by twenty men ; there would be set funeral pieces so big it took two men to pack them slung on poles ; there would be coolies bearing tables on which reposed the funeral baked meats, luscious-looking roast pigs, and glazed ducks, and all the tit-bits dear to the Chinese palate ; there would be the bereaved family and friends, and hired mourners, and papier mdche effigies mounted on wheels of all the people that had served the deceased in life — his various servants, his barber, his gardener, his cook, and so on, all whom he would need in the spirit world. Truly the Chinese leave life with a grand splurge, and after you behold a Chinese funeral de luxe you don't wonder that they want to be taken home to be buried. A funeral elsewhere is a poor and piffling thing of which no corpse could be justly proud. At Pukow we reached the Yangz-e-Kiang River, the mighty stream which cuts China in two, and is a wide, sullen, low-banked yellow river that looks exactly like the Mississippi does in Louisiana. We were ferried across in a scow without a roof, in a pouring rain, and wet and bedraggled reached the old city of Nankin, which is chiefly interesting for its porcelain tower, and for the Ming tombs which are a few miles away. Only a few hours farther on is Shanghai, the Paris of the Orient, a great, prosperous commercial city. It has a squalid native section of narrow, dark, dirty streets, with close-built little houses that look like rabbit-warrens, and are packed full, layer upon layer, of humanity ; and a fine foreign section with wide streets, and splendid shops, and big hotels, where everybody dresses for dinner and nobody dines before half-past eight, and where a Hawaiian band plays jazz TANG SHAO YI 111 music, and where there are more vamp-looking women with long green jade earrings than you ever saw in all your life, outside the movies. There are not many places of special interest in Shanghai. You go, of course, to the Mandarin Tea House, built in a little artificial lake with broken bridges, that is said to be the model from which the willow pattern plate was taken. You drive along the Bubbling Well road where Fashion takes its airing in the late afternoon, and you buy silks, and amber, and Shanghai rings made of pure gold and that you can make big or little to suit any finger, and then you spend your time just wandering around the streets, glutting your appetite for strange sights, and sounds, and experiences. In Shanghai I had the great good fortune of spending a morning with Tang Shao Yi, who was a court chamber- lain in the old Manchu dynasty, but who was one of the leaders of the revolution, and the first Premier under Yuan Shi K'ai, and is now head of the Southern Peace Delegation. Dr Tang lives in a handsome house and is said to have the finest collection of curios in China, and he received me in a room full of books and wonderful old blue porcelain. He is a tall, handsome man with a mobile, expressive face, and eyes that twinkle behind big tortoise-rimmed glasses. He had on a long robe of pale grey brocade, lined with robin's egg blue and soft brown fur, and looked like one's ideal of an old Chinese grandee. His English was absolutely perfect, and he was the most fascinating talker to whom I have ever listened. Dr Tang is a great believer in the new China and that the republican form of government has come to stay. " We in China are the real democrats, for we literally believe all men to be born free and equal, and that the only thing that counts is personal ability," he said. " My cook's son and my son go up before the same board of examiners if they desire a place in the Government. If my cook's son is the better man 112 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD he passes, and my son fails and my cook's son may achieve any honour. There are no great fortunes in China, and there would be no actual want if the people would stay in their own environment in the country, for there we have the patriarchal form of government and the head of each village must look out for the welfare of all in it. In China the head of every family must provide for the other members and care for the weaklings." I also had the honour of having tea with Dr Sun Yat Sen, the man who made China a republic, and who was its first president. He is a dark, heavy-browed, iron- jawed man with force in every look and movement. He impresses you as almost a fanatic about China, and his great work now is to save her from herself, because while China has a republican form of government it is really militaristic in fact. According to Dr Sen, Japan has complete control of the Pekin Government, and was attempting to solidify all China under its domain during the war. By bribery and corruption it had virtual control of Northern China, and was fast getting control of Southern China when Dr Sen started up another little revolution and blocked it. Considering how little interest the school boys and girls of our own country take in politics, and how our politicians would scoff at their opinion if they did venture to express a view on any subject, the most amazing thing in China is that a body of school children are about the most potent influence in the whole country, and that China is really depending on these children to work out its salvation when they are a few years older. This organization is called the Students' Union, and it is made up of both boys and girls, though of course the boys are enormously in the majority, as educational opportunities are still very meagre for girls in China. But the girls seem to be the flaming spirit of it in spite of their being in the minority. My first contact with CHINA'S YOUTHFUL POLITICIANS 113 this was in Pekin, where I saw a long procession of youths with banners suddenly break apart and form into two lines down through which passed a score of girls who were greeted with loud cheers. This, I was told, was a body of the Students' Union making a demonstration against some governmental measure and saluting the girl leaders. Imagine cheering women in China ! In Shanghai I was told the story of the Children's Revolution which had just taken place, and which, I think, is one of the most remarkable chapters in all history. It seems that there were three high officials of the Government who had suddenly become very rich, and who were accused of having been bribed by the Japanese. The Students' Union demanded that these men, whom they called traitors, should be deposed and punished. The Government refused to notice their protest, so a delegation went to the house of one of the accused men to ask him where he got his money. In the hallway of his home they found some high Japanese officials, whereupon the students saw red and proceeded to wreck the house, and the officials fled in terror. For this three hundred students were thrown into prison, and as a protest the students all over the country went on strike. In Shanghai twenty thousand boys and girls met on the athletic field, elected leaders, and passed re- solutions pledging themselves not to return to their studies until the obnoxious officials were deposed. They then called a general strike of all activities. They went from merchant to merchant asking them to close their stores, and so generally was this done that business was practically suspended. One by one the guilds and organizations joined in. Even the chief of the robber band came and pledged that no robberies would be committed during the strike, and it was solemnly printed in the newspapers that nothing would be stolen as long as the strike lasted. Even the Sing 114 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD Song Girls went on strike. The paralysis of business was so complete that when the railroad men presently joined up the Government gave in and the three traitors were removed from office. During the strike the boycott against Japanese goods was put into effect in a singularly simple manner. Groups of ten were formed who pledged themselves not to use Japanese goods, and these ten each went forth and organized other tens. A curious feature of the strike was that young girls, belonging to the most aristocratic families, went out on the street as soap- box orators — girls who ten years ago would never have been permitted to go out on the streets alone, or to have been seen by a stranger. They went down into the slums of Shanghai — and none are lower — and the men and women swarmed out to hear them, and listened with the greatest respect while they explained the danger their country was in from Japan, and then when the girls asked for pledges that they would not use Japanese goods thousands of them came forward and signed their names on yellow joss papers, and lighted them with joss sticks, and held them aloft until their oaths had ascended to Heaven, which made the pledge unbreakable. This entire revolution was engineered by boys and girls under twenty, and when they had accomplished their purpose they went back to their studies, saying : " We are the hope of China. On us everything depends. We can do nothing unless we are educated, therefore we will go back to our studies with redoubled ardour and make up for the time we have lost." The Students' Union does not desire to change the form of government. It only demands that all treaties be published, and the people given a say-so in all acts of the Government. The main object is just to wake China up and make her realize she must save herself. I talked with a number of the girls who were the CASTING ASIDE OLD TRADITIONS 115 ringleaders of this movement, and their teachers, American women, told me that they had never seen girls with such keen minds, and that they were simply flames of patriotism. Their one thought was for their country. Surely China's long sleep is over when its babes have wakened up. CHAPTER XII HONG-KONG, A CITY BUILT IN SHELVES We reached Hong-Kong about nine o'clock at night and it was like sailing into fairyland. The harbour is one of the most beautiful in the world, and is crowded with the shipping of all the seven seas. From the deck of our boat we could see the low- lying old Chinese city of Kalloon across the bay, and shadowy islands in the dim distance, while all around us loomed the mysterious masses of other boats from far ports, and right before us gleamed the city, a scintillating mass of lights rising, tier above tier, like the galleries in a theatre. Of course Hong-Kong isn't really a city at all. It is an island, one of England's far-flung possessions, and its capital city is named Victoria, after the late great queen. But nobody ever calls the city by its name. Hong-Kong, the world over, means the great port, not the island. The city rises abruptly from the water's edge in a series of shelves. On the lower one, along the Bund, are the business houses of the better sort and the great shipping offices. Then come the hotels, and the shops for selling silks, and china, and curios. On the middle shelf the Chinese are crowded like subway passengers in a rush hour, and on the top shelf live the English. These various shelves are connected by flights of steps, and roads that double backwards and forwards like a corkscrew in order to make the grade, and one house is so directly above another that the favourite view is looking down one's neighbour's chimney. The latitude of Hong-Kong is almost exactly that of New 116 A BIT OF ENGLAND AT CHINA'S EDGE 117 Orleans. There is the same semi-tropical growth, and many of the foreign residents, who have amassed great fortunes in trade, live in veritable palaces set in the midst of palms and roses. The top of the mountain to whose side the city clings is called The Peak, and is reached by an incline railroad so steep that it makes you hold your breath. At the summit of The Peak are located a fine hotel and many beautiful residences. The view is magnificent, sweep- ing the city, and the bay dotted with islands, and the myriads of ships from the far places of the earth that are ceaselessly coming and going. The first flavour of Hong-Kong is purely British. You feel that you are back in dear old London when you meet at every turn lanky Englishmen with monocles in their eyes, and buUdogs on leashes, and women with blouses that bulge in the back, and flat-heeled shoes, and wearing that unconcerned look about how they look that nothing but the grace of God, or being born in England, can give a woman. Then you plunge into the Chinese city and see the Chinese, thousands upon thousands, and hundreds of thousands of them, and you begin to realize that the foreign part of the city is just a fringe on the native part, and you come face to face with the insoluble mystery of race — of how, wherever he is, the white man somehow dominates the situation. In Hong-Kong there are a great many highly educated and wealthy Chinese, and I had the great good fortune to be entertained in the homes of some of these. The Chinese have the social genius. The Japanese, so far as my experience goes, at least, are poor con- versationalists, and are not what we slangily call "good mixers." They are solemn, and serious, and ponderous, and have no "small talk" — anyway none that they seem willing, or able, to hand out to a foreign woman, but the Chinese are socially adept. They are so simple, so unaffected, so cordial, so 118 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD adaptable, and they are simply scintillating as con- versationalists. I never heard wittier table talk, any that was quicker in the give and take, than I heard at two or three dinners that I attended in China, and I have been lucky enough to know intimately many of the men and women who are famed after-dinner speakers of America. And what wonderful English they use, these educated Chinese who are graduates of Oxford, and Cambridge, and Harvard, and Yale, and Princeton, and Vassar and Bryn Mawr. Not the trace of an accent. Every word well chosen, the drippings from a vocabulary apparently as inexhaustible as the Century Dictionary, and that makes you suddenly decide to take up the study of the English language when you get home. One of the most interesting of these dinners was given in honour of a young man whose engagement was about to be announced. The dinner itself was purely Chinese, and consisted of about twenty-one courses, but the hostess apologized for the scanty spread. She said it was an impromptu affair, got up on the spur of the moment in order that we, the four foreign guests, might be present. Otherwise she would have had a full meal, I gathered. The Chinese use chairs and a table-cloth just as we do, and on the table there were flowers, and sweetmeats, and little bowls of nuts, and dishes of water-melon seed, of which the Chinese are inordinately fond, and which the old ladies munch continually, though a foreigner never masters the art of cracking them so as to get the tiny kernel out of them. The dinner began with four little dishes of cold meat — cold chicken, shrimps, ham, and sausage. After that, in serving every course two dishes containing the different courses were placed in the middle of the table, and from these everybody helped themselves with their own chop-sticks. You took only a little at a time, only a mouthful, and kept repeating. Every now and A CHINESE WEDDING PARTY 119 then the host would pick you out a tit-bit with his own chop-sticks and put it on your plate. This was an especial compliment. There seemed to be no regular arrangement of courses. We had soup two or three different times during the meal, also fish two or three different times. Then stewed partridge, stewed duck, and so on. We had the traditional Chinese delicacies, bird's nest soup which tasted exactly like our tapioca soup and is very good, and stewed shark's fin which is very expensive, and is as repulsive to our taste as our cherished terrapin is to most foreigners. We had twenty-year-old eggs which are a dark green in colour and have passed through so many chemical changes that they have become odourless, and I think would be delicious if you could forget what they are. My dinner partner was a famous Chinese physician, and he assured me that they were the best digester in the world and more potent than many soda mints. The last course was rice, a nice big bowlful of it, and we were already as stuffed as a Strasbourg goose, but not to eat this is a deadly insult, equivalent to telling your hostess that her dinner has been an abomination, with nothing fit for human consumption, so we shut our eyes and gulped it down. The young man who was about to become engaged was a civil engineer, a graduate of an American university. He was, therefore, an advanced Chinaman, and although his marriage had been arranged by his mother and the mother of the young girl he was to marry, he was acquainted with her, and had, in reality, selected her himself. This is very unusual, as ordinarily marriages are arranged entirely between the parents, and the young people never meet until after they are tied fast and tight. The family explained to us the etiquette of a betrothal. After the matter is arranged the mother of the young man sends to the mother of the bride little sweet cakes. 120 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD Sometimes as many as five thousand dollars' worth are sent, though part of this gift may be sent in whisky or wine if the girl's mother so suggests. The bride's mother then distributes the little cakes, or the liquors, among her friends, to whom this peculiar gift conveys the tidings of her daughter's engagement. The bride's mother in return sends to the bride- groom's mother as many fried cakes as she has received sweet cakes, and these are in turn distributed among the bridegroom's friends as an announcement that he is to be married. The bride's mother must send exactly as many cakes as she received, and when the bride's mother asks much it is an indication that she is going to give the girl a very handsome dowry. As soon as the marriage is arranged the man sends to the girl presents of silks and embroideries and clothing. She sends to their future home furniture, linen, bedding, and household utensils. On the wedding day she is carried to the bridegroom's house in a closed sedan chair that looks like a Christmas tree. It is a pagoda-shaped affair, covered with gold and silver ornaments, and blue and red flowers made of kingfisher feathers, and is a gorgeousness to behold. If the wedding is a smart affair there is a band of musicians, and a long procession of friends and relatives. When the bride arrives at the gate, or the door of her new home, the bridegroom comes to meet her and unlatches the portal and leads her in. Then he re- moves her veil and sees her for the first time. They worship together before the tablets of his ancestors, and she serves his parents with tea. The next day they go to the temple and make offerings, and that night they give a great feast to their friends, often at some tea-house, where their names are put up in electric fights over the door like the names of actors over a theatre. When the bride arrives at her husband's home after they have sacrificed to his ancestors they kow-tow WOMEN GET THE BEST OF DIVORCE 121 to each other. Superstition has it that the one who kneels first will be the one who is bossed, and so each tries to jockey the other into doing it until some one from behind forces the bride's head down. After the couple have been married three days the wife goes back to visit her parents, and the husband must send with her many roast pigs as a present to his in-laws. This custom originated in the buying of wives, when the man agreed to pay for his wife if he found her virtuous. Otherwise he returned her home. Divorce is common in China, and men do not have it altogether their own way. A woman who does not get along with her husband may leave him and go back to her parents, and he can neither force her to return nor divorce her for it. He can only divorce her for unfaithfulness. In China a man may have one legal wife, and as many concubines as he can afford to support. The Number One wife is the one selected for him by his parents, and is of the lady class. The concubines he picks out for himself, and they may be of low caste, but the children of the concubine are all accredited to the lady wife and call her " Mother," while they call their own mother " Aunt." A woman who has no children often forces her husband to take a con- cubine so that she may have sons to honour her, and worship at her tomb when she is dead. There is much discussion in China about the effects of the concubine system upon national life. Some hold that concubinage is largely responsible for the lethargy of the men in high positions, that it paralyses energy, and drugs ambition to sleep. Others defend it. Speak- ing of it, one of the greatest Chinese statesmen said to me : " Concubinage simply means that a man accepts responsibility for his acts. The concubine has a re- spectable place in society, as the mistress has not. She 122 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD shares with the first wife in her husband's estate and may not be thrown out when a man tires of her, as a mistress so often is. Her children are legitimate and share equally with the children of the first wife in their father's property. " I recognize that the modern thought of China is against concubinage, especially among the European- ized young people, but I doubt that China will be as healthy and moral when it adopts the Western idea on the subject as it is now." " But," I inquired, " how do you solve the eternal problem of jealousy involved in the one man, and the two, or three, or more women ? " "Hundreds of years of training in that line of thought have made the women accept it all as a matter of course, and coincide happily in the arrangement, so there is no friction in a Chinese household, where a man's wife and his concubines live together in peace and affection," he replied. Later on I learnt that this eminent statesman, and eloquent defender of the concubine system, had married as his second wife, his first wife having died, a brilliant young woman, the graduate of an American college, and that she made it a condition of marrying him that he should send his many concubines away to an estate he owned far in the country. So evidently it takes more than a few hundreds of years of thought along any line to eliminate jealousy from a woman's system, and make her willing to share her husband with other women. Speaking of Chinese marriage customs reminds me of an amusing story that I was told, and that aptly illustrates the merging of old China into the new. In China a man often has two legal fathers, his own father and a foster-father, for it is customary for a childless man to adopt some boy relative so that he may have a son to worship before his tablets. Both of these fathers have the right to arrange a marriage for their " TO PLEASE THE MEN " 123 mutual son. In the case in question, both of these fathers did so, and they picked out different ladies. The two new wives-to-be started out for the man's house, assuming, of course, that the first to arrive would be the one to get the prize. One went in an automobile, the other in the regulation bridal chair. Naturally the lady of the auto won out, but the other lady contested her claim to the man in the court, and the court sustained her, ruling that an automobile was subservient of ancient Chinese usages and customs, and no fit and proper way for a bride to journey to her husband's home. So the chair triumphed, and presumably they lived happily ever after. In Hong-Kong, as everywhere else in China, you see thousands upon thousands of women hobbling around on their poor little stunted feet. There is a general impression that foot-binding is no longer practised in China. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is only the most advanced people, and those who have been brought much in contact with foreigners, who let their daughters' feet grow. I had an Ayah, a maid, who stumped around on little three-inch feet, and I made her pull off her shoes and show me the queer, distorted lumps of flesh that served her as feet. You can imagine nothing so horrible. The toes had been bent back until they had atrophied into mere strings of flesh with practically no nails. The heel was gone. The foot was just a little ball, misshapen, with a gash through the bottom where the flesh had been folded back on itself. She told me that they commenced binding the feet of the little girls when they are mere babies, and that the pain is so terrible that the children cry incessantly, so that they put the little girls out in outhouses at night to sleep in order that their wails may not keep the balance of the family awake. When a mother can no longer bear the sight of her little girl's torture she pulls the bandages still tighter so as to stop the 124 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD circulation and numb the feet into insensibilitjr. It is very common for little girls' toes to fall off. " Why do you bind your girls' feet and torture them so ? " I asked. " So that they make good marriages," replied the woman. " Chinamen like women with little feet. No marry girl with big feet. So we make girls' feet little, no matter how it hurts." To please the man. To find favour in the sight of man. It's the age-old explanation of all of woman's folly in dress. CHAPTER XIII THE CITY OF UNBELIEVABLE SIGHTS When we said that we were going from Hong-Kong to Canton by boat we were advised to make the trip by day, because there would be so much less danger from pirates than if we went by night. At this we laughed merrily, with the sophisticated air of those who have outgrown a childish fear of bogeys, but we soon found out that the danger from pirates is a very real one along the China coast, and that the yellow incarnations of Captain Kidd and his bold buccaneers especially make the waters in and around Canton their happy hunting-ground. We got our first inkling that pirates were something more than romantic legend when we boarded the steamer at the dock in Hong-Kong, and found that a high iron fence separated the decks on which were the white passengers from the native passengers, and saw steel gates shut off the companionways. This was done to prevent any pirates, who might be among the native passengers and in league with the river pirates, from seizing the boat and turning it over to their confederates. The pilot-house and engines were also protected by an iron fence. Huge Sikhs, armed to the teeth, patrolled the decks, and in the saloon were stacks of loaded rifles with which the passengers were sup- posed to defend themselves in case of attack. It is estimated that there are forty thousand pirates who live in the river and bayous about Canton. The Government deals mercilessly with them when they are caught, but nothing seems to stop their depredations. Sometimes the river will be peaceful for weeks, and T 125 126 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD then a gang of pirates will sweep down on a boat and loot and murder in the most horrible fashion. Not long before we made the trip, in the silence of the night the pirates had suddenly swarmed out of the dark- ness, seized a boat and set it afire, with a terrible loss of life ensuing. So the trip to Canton is full of thrills, because you never know whether you are going to encounter the pirates or not. Our little journey was as destitute of danger as walking around the block in your home town. For the first hour or two we made our way among the palm-crowned little islands of Hong-Kong bay and then turned into Pearl River, which looked much like the lower Mississippi, with low-lying banks, and plantations of rice, and orange trees, and banana plants. On the way we passed Whampao, where, in the old days, the famous clipper tea ships used to start on their race to Boston with the first tea of the season, making such profits for their owners that sometimes a single trip would make a man rich for life. It was these old New England sea captains who took home the Canton china and willow pattern plates for which collectors now pay fabulous sums to their descendants. As you get closer to Canton the boats begin to get thicker and thicker in the river, until when you reach the city you find the water as jammed with them as Fifth Avenue is with motors at five o'clock in the afternoon. Here lives the famous river population of Canton, estimated at nearly two hundred thousand souls. The boats are little sampans, queer little beetle- shaped affairs, with a corrugated roof that they can slip over the hold when it rains. In these boats generations of people have been born and lived, and died, knowing no other home, and scarcely putting a foot on earth except to load and unload their queer little craft. The river people are a folk apart. They are, for the most part, the descendants of pirates, and escaped convicts, THE CITY OF HORRORS 127 and other outcasts — and they look it — and it is only since the revolution that they are permitted to marry with the people on land. As you go by you may see their life going on on their boats. They are loading and unloading freight, the women are patching their clothes or washing them, nursing their babies, and cooking their food, just as if they were in their kitchens anywhere else. To the stern of almost every boat is secured a coop in the water in which unhappy ducks and geese are swimming about, and up aft there is sure to be a little string of rats drying in the sun. Little children are lashed to the mast to keep them from falling overboard, and bigger children play around the deck, while boys of seven or eight steer the boat that their mothers and grandmothers pole in and out of the foul canals that intersect the city. These water-women of Canton are said to be the prize viragoes of the world, and with their hard, weather- beaten faces, and unkempt hair and clothes, they cer- tainly look like Furies. When the boat landed at the dock we had a terror- stricken moment in which we thought that the pirates had got us — there were such yells, and shrieks, such a struggling mob, so many men and boys who hurled them- selves against our iron barricade on the boat, wildly gesticulating and shouting unintelligible things to us. It proved, however, that these were only legalized banditti, the chair-bearers, who were saying, in effect : " Taxi ? This way, sir. " In Canton, however, you do not trust yourself to coolies of whom you know nothing, so pretty soon we found the chairs that had been sent to us from the hotel, and, each borne on the shoulders of four stalwart men, we were taken across the bridge to the island of Shameen, which is the concession in which all foreigners live in Canton. Canton is the City of Unbelievable Sights. It is horrible and fascinating. It is something whose very 128 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD memory makes you shudder, and yet it draws you back, and back, and you never feel that you are satisfied with what you have seen. You want to go once more and look, and look, and look again, and yet again, upon those strange, winding streets, and that sea of yellow faces which you can no more grasp in its entirety than you can grasp life itself. I shall always be glad that my first view of Canton was late in the afternoon, because it is just at dusk that the city is at its weirdest and most appalling. The streets of Canton are very narrow — often not more than six or eight feet wide — and are covered with slabs of stone worn into hollows by millions of shuffling feet. The open sewer runs under this pavement, and through the interstices between the blocks of granite arises a stench that is bad in winter, and unendurable to foreigners in summer. On either side the houses are three and four storeys high, and across the street are hung a forest of wooden signs that shut out the light, even at midday. Against the walls of the houses crouch beggars, and people selling their little wares from baskets. Every- where are food shops, and tiny restaurants with people standing in the street eating. In one place I saw a board fastened to a wall by a hinge, and on this slept an old woman. A piece of sacking was drawn over her for warmth, for the night was cold. Her little basket sat undisturbed by her side, and she rested as much at peace there in the open street as a fine lady in her silken boudoir. Between these shut-in walls, that make every street a narrow canyon, a ceaseless tide of humanity rushes and roars with strange cries and shouts. All is deafening noise, endless confusion. And if a foreigner were set down in the midst of one of these streets alone, he could no more find his way out of the city than he could out of a jungle in the heart of darkest Africa. It was just growing dark as we plunged into this maelstrom. We were in chairs borne shoulder high on A REFUGE FOR FOREIGNERS 129 the backs of coolies, for no European can make his way in a Chinese crowd on foot. Over our heads creaked the gilded wooden signs. All about us was the dense packed mass of people with curious, staring, yellow faces. Our chairs were necessarily separated from each other by the crowd, and the bearers kept up a ceaseless chant, a sort of sing-song, calling to each other. Now and then we crowded up against the wall to let another chair pass — a big, fat Mandarin in gorgeous brocades — a thin scholar with enormous horn-rimmed glass — once for a bridal procession — a gay palanquin covered with blue and red ornaments. It grew darker and darker. There were no street lights, only a flare now and then from a shop door. The cries of the coolies grew louder and louder, and weirder and weirder. The crowd thickened. You wondered what would happen to you if your chair-bearers would suddenly put you down and disappear, and leave you alone in the midst of that surging yellow sea of humanity. And the flesh crawled on your bones, and nothing else ever looked as good to you as the bridge that went over from this City of Dreadful Night to the peaceful little island of Shameen. Shameen is separated from the city by a deep canal, and no Chinese are allowed to put foot on it unless they are in the employ of foreign residents. Only a bridge that is guarded day and night connects it with Canton, but it seemed to me that even this and the barbed wire entanglements along the sea wall were no more a pro- tection than a silken thread would be if ever the pirates who infest the canal, or the hordes of gangsters in the city be} r ond, ever turned against the foreigners, or desired their possessions. Canton is the most important commercial city in China. Here are manufactured the most wonderful silks and porcelains, here are the finest workers in jade, and ivories, and carved teakwood furniture, and each craft keeps to itself. There are whole streets in which 130 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD there is nothing but furniture ; other streets devoted to porcelains, still others in which there is nothing but jewellery, which makes it exceedingly handy for the shopper, but in Canton there is so much want, and consequently so many thieves, that all the stores that carry valuable stocks do business behind iron bars as heavy as we use for jails. You go to a shop door, knock on it. The porter swings open the steel doors and lets you in, and locks the door behind you. You are shown into an inner room, often across a court open to the sky, and in which are flowers in pots, and birds in fancy cages. Then you are seated at a table and the goods brought to you, and when you have made your purchase the iron doors are unlocked to let you out. One of the most gruesome sights of Canton is a mortuary temple where the bodies of the rich are placed when they die until the priest can decide on a lucky place for them to be buried. This house consisted of a long series of gorgeous stalls, in each of which reposed a sumptuous coffin, either carved, or lacquered, or covered by an embroidered cloth. All was open to the air, and yet the odour did not incline you to linger on the spot, although it was midwinter. The length of time it takes a priest to decide on an appropriate spot in which a corpse may be buried depends upon the amount of money out of which the family can be mulcted. In the meantime it costs a thousand dollars a year for the deceased to reside at the mortuary house and have the proper offerings and prayers made daily. At present the oldest boarder has been there only about ten years, but there was a viceroy's wife who was kept there thirty-two years, until the police forced the priest to decide on a grave for her. Another interesting place in Canton is the temple of the Chen family, who must be the Smiths of China, as there are a hundred thousand of them in the Canton district alone. This is a sumptuous building, with an RELIGION OF SMALL INTEREST 131 altar on which are the tablets of the dead and gone Chens, which the live Chens come to worship once a year, when they have a great feast and a family party. The temple is not used at any other time. Indeed, the thing that struck me most in China was that it seemed to be a country without a religion. Every- where the temples were falling into ruins, and no one seemed to come to worship. At no time can you go into a temple in Japan without seeing numbers of the devout worshipping, and everywhere are hordes of pilgrims journeying to the sacred shrines, but the Chinese temples are empty and deserted, and you get the impression that the Chinese have broken away from the old faiths and have nothing to take their place. Perhaps this is Christianity's opportunity in spite of the fact that the number of Christians in China has diminished in the last few years. Numbers of mission- aries told me that just before the war there was a great impulse towards Christianity. Many of the leading men of China had become convinced that the Western world had some quality, some uplift, some spiritual force that they lacked, and they had decided that this must be the Christian religion, and had about made up their minds to embrace it themselves, and urge its adoption by the nation. Then came the war, and the Chinese, who are the real pacifists and have a genuine horror of war, were appalled. " We must have been mistaken," they said, "in what we thought of Christianity, because the Christian nations are doing more barbarous things to each other than the heathen have ever done. So per- haps we had better stick to the teachings of Confucius." The war put back Christianity a hundred years in China, say these people who are familiar with the situa- tion, but the time will come when China will realize that the war was fought for Right against Might, and then they believe that the great nation will turn towards Christianity almost en masse. 132 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD The great drawback to China's progress is superstition. The average Chinaman spends his life in propitiating his Feng Shui (Fong Shwee), which he depicts in art as a sort of a bat-like creature. If you will look at your Chinese embroideries, or cloisonne, or pottery, you will be sure almost to find a representation of this queer little creature on it. As near as a foreigner can grasp the idea, your Feng Shui is the spirit of luck, and it is a mighty touchy luck that is easily riled, so you have to go warily to keep from rubbing its fur the wrong way. When a Chinaman has three successive misadven- tures — as, say, when some one he loves dies, and he catches a bad cold, and a bargain he was hoping to make falls through — he knows at once that he has offended his Feng Shui and rushes off to the priest, who casts his horoscope, and makes various and sundry passes over him, and then tells him what he must do to please his Feng Shui, and as by this time things have changed, anyway, he attributes it all to having got back on good terms with his divinity. Another interesting superstition is, that if you disguise a boy so that he looks like a girl the Evil Spirits will pass him by, the Chinese not being able to imagine a girl's being of sufficient importance to interest even a malicious devil. In spite of their superstition, however, the lasting impression that the Chinese make upon you is of a great people with a great intellect and a great heart. No one can travel in China and see the relics of the civilization it had, when we were living in caves and gnawing on bones, without realizing that it is a nation that is bound to come back. It is a great giant that grew weary hold- ing aloft the torch of literature and art, and it fell asleep, and now it is waking up. And on what it does, when it is thoroughly aroused and throws off its lethargy, depends the future of the whole world. CHAPTER XIV THE PHILIPPINES, UNCLE SAM'S WHITE ELEPHANT Do you remember during the Spanish- American War — I speak now to men only, as no woman is old enough to remember that far back — how Mr Dooley tickled our funny-bone when he said that he had just found out that the Philippines were islands instead of canned goods ? Then the philosopher of Archey Road went on to describe this our newest possessions to Hinnissy : " They are eight thousand iv thim islinds, with a popylation iv wan hunderd millyon naked savages. How can I take thim in ? An' yet 'twud break me heart to think iv givin' people I never see, or heerd tell iv, back to other people I don't know. An', if I don't take thim, Schwartzmeister down th' sthreet, that has half me thrade already, will grab thim sure. " I've been r-readin' about th' counthry. 'Tis over beyant ye'er left shoulder, whin ye're facin' east. It's near Chiny, an' it's not so near ! an', if a man was to bore a well through fr'm Goshen, Indianny, he might sthrike it, an' thin agin he might not. It's a poverty- sthricken counthry, full iv goold, an' precious stones, where th' people can pick dinner off th' threes, an' ar're starvin' because they have no step-ladders. Th' in- habitants is mostly naygurs, an' Chinnymen — peaceful, industhrus, an' law-abidin', but savage an' blood- thirsty in their methods. They wear no clothes except what they have on, an' each woman has five husbands an' each man has five wives. Th' r-rest goes into th' discard, th' same as here. " Th' women ar-re beautiful, with languishin' black eyes, an' they smoke see-gars, but ar-re hurried an' 133 134 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD incomplete in their dhress. I see a pitcher iv wan th' other day with nawthin' on her but a basket of cocoa- nuts an' a hoop-skirt. " I larned all this fr'm th' papers, an I know 'tis sthraight. An' yet, Hinnissy, I dinnaw what to do about th' Philippeens. It ain't that I'm afraid iv not doin' th' r-right thing in th' end. Some mornin' I'll wake up, an' know jus' what to do, an' that I'll do. But 'tis th' annoyance in th' mane time." A good many years have elapsed since the Spanish- American War, and a great many billions of dollars have flowed from Uncle Sam's pocket into the Philippines since Mr Dooley penned his humorous description of the islands and their political situation, and yet it is still true in the main. We have put trousers on a few thousand naked savages, and taught a lot of children how to read, and intro- duced the movies, and spent money like water cleaning up cities, and establishing sanitation for those who don 't desire to be antiseptic, and conducted the greatest pink tea colonization scheme ever tried out in the world, and the Philippines are still the Philippines, and we still don 't know whether to hold on or let go. It was just two days before Christmas when I sailed into Manila harbour, where Admiral Dewey had pru- dently cut the cable before he started out to fight the battle on his own. It was a lovely scene, with grim forts lining the shore, and spectral wireless stations reaching their phantom arms to heaven, ready to send their winged messages across space ; with aeroplanes flying like gigantic birds above our heads, and the waters gay with little boats decked out like Christmas trees in holly and mistletoe, and starred with great red poinsettas. And from almost every little boat drifted soft, weird Hawaiian music. And from every flagpole the blessed Stars and Stripes rippled in the breeze. Coming to Manila seemed like getting home for Christmas, and after the long months in Japan, and A TROPICAL CHRISTMAS 135 China, and Korea, the thought of a real American hotel, with a real American turkey with stuffing and cran- berries for Christmas dinner, without the Oriental inter- pretation thereof, made our mouths fairly water with longing. But, alas, we were doomed to a blighting and bitter disappointment. Just because it was Christmas all the forlorn and home- sick Americans who were teaching in God-forsaken little Philippine villages, and raising bananas, and pineapples, and sugar on plantations, where they never saw a white face for months together, had brought their wives, and come in to mingle with their kind, and swap home news and have some real food, and shake a foot in the dance, and wear evening clothes once more, and the hotels, in consequence, were filled to overflowing, so that you couldn't get another person in them with a shoehorn. Therefore we had to stay on our boat, which was docked amidst a myriad of other boats, all engaged in the pleasing occupation of taking on or putting off freight, so the nights were filled with the rattle of winches, and the panting of donkey engines, and the hoarse shouts of longshoremen, and the air was a mingling of the perfume of rancid coconut oil, and fish, and onions, all of which, combined with the temperature of midsummer heat, made a Christmas gift that none of us desired to have repeated. Manila is a picturesque old city that is very interesting and Spanish-looking, with its crumbling old walls covered with flowering vines and its old houses with overhanging balconies that almost meet across the narrow streets. The windows to these balconies are made of thin shells instead of glass, that often have a lovely opalescent shade, almost like pearl. The most interesting historical sights are a few old cathedrals with faded old pictures and dim old altars. I went to early mass at one of these on Christmas morn- ing and watched the people come in, the women with lace 136 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD mantillas over their heads, most of the men barefooted, all of them slim, dark, Indian-looking. It gripped you by the throat to think of the generation after genera- tion of priests who had given their lives labouring in the wilderness for just this handful of converts. Afterwards we went Christmas shopping, but so Americanized is Manila that the shops had no more char- acter than they have at home. Any street in Manila might be any street in an American small town so far as the wares offered for sale are concerned, except that you can buy pineapple cloth, a lovely, thin, gauzy fabric woven of the fibre of the pineapple plant. The people were, of course, picturesque, and the men seemed to have solved the problem of a hot-weather toilette that is at once cool and practicable. They had on white cotton trousers, very loose and baggy, and over this a jacket, cut exactly like a pyjama coat, made of pineapple gauze of some gay colour. On their heads were big, soft Panama hats, and their feet were bare. The Philippino women wear long, trailing, circular skirts, which they wrap around them and pin up to walking length. The skirts are lifted on one side so as to show fluffy lace petticoats, and their slim brown feet stuck into heelless slippers. They wear no stockings. With this skirt, which among the wealthy is made of rich brocaded silk, they wear a bodice called a " camisa." It is cut low in the neck, with huge short sleeves elabo- rately embroidered, and about the neck is a folded hand- kerchief — what our grandmothers used to call a tucker. The bodice is made of pineapple tissue of pink, or blue, or cerise, every kind of lovely bright colour, and is most becoming to the tiny, brown, Philippino ladies. All the women smoke great, long, brown cigars. Everyone in Manila who hasn't an automobile goes about in a queer little two-wheeled cart, into which you get by executing a death-defying leap over the wheel, and a mad climb over the driver's seat, the while WHERE CLOTHES ARE A MATTER OF FORM 137 the driver holds a wicker mud-shield over the wheel to protect your clothes. The minute you get out of one of these little carts the driver falls sound asleep, and when you wish to resume your ride you have to punch him awake again. All the lower class Philippinos appear to have a chronic case of sleeping-sickness. They are never awake except when they are eating, which they do intermittently all day long, instead of having two or three meals and getting the business over. I had an amusing experience with the insatiable Philippino appetite. I had chartered one of these little carts for a ride on Christmas morning. After I had been out about an hour, every now and then the driver would turn to me and say something, to which I would calmly respond, " Drive on," as I had no idea what he was talking about and no disposition to cut short my sightseeing. The mumbling and grumbling grew apace. Finally the man stopped his horse and turned to me in an almost threatening manner, and at last I stopped an American, who looked as if he belonged in Manila, and asked him if he would find out what was the matter with the driver. The man did so, and after listening to the driver 's com- plaints, said : " The fellow says that he's hungry. He wants some more breakfast. He hasn't eaten for an hour." And then the American explained that the Philippinos eat food that has very little nourishment in it, and that they eat very often. We had a charming ride far into the country, stopping at one place at a quaint old church that has in it an organ made entirely of bamboo. All of the pipes are of reeds, and this curious instrument, which gives forth a peculiarly sweet and birdlike music, was con- structed over a hundred years ago by a priest, a dead and forgotten mechanical and musical genius. The most interesting thing in Manila is the Bilbid Prison, where the United States is working out the greatest system of prison reform in the world. This is 138 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD made the more effective from the fact that it is no disgrace among the Philippinos, as it is with us, to have served a term in jail. Hence it is easier for the Philippino to come back than it is for those of a more sophisticated civilization. The average Philippino is ignorant, indolent, un- disciplined, and physically undeveloped. This makes him take to the easiest way of getting a living, or revenging a wrong, as naturally as a duck takes to water. And here is where the prison gets in its work. It can force into the way of righteousness those who have no natural inclination towards the straight and narrow way. In the Bilbid Prison there are more than three thousand prisoners, who are being taught thirty-five different trades, by which they can earn an honest living when they get out. Among these trades are the making of that marvellously beautiful willow furniture that adorns the sun-rooms of the lucky. The prisoners are disciplined. They are given exercises, and good food, and built up in body. They are given moral instruction, and when they leave prison they are fifty per cent, better men in every way than when they entered it. In addition, the prison has two penal colonies, to which certain prisoners are sent. They are given land, farming implements, a work animal, and helped to get a new start in life. When the men desire it, their families are sent to them after one year, and after a man has worked out his sentence, he is given land and part of the money he has earned and which has been saved for him. If he has planted coconuts, bananas, or cacao, he is given half of the valuation of his improvements. The percentage of men thus saved for society, or rather made for society, is enormous. Of course many Philippinos are clamouring for Philippino independence — the politicians because they want the swag, the common and ignorant people because WHERE CLOTHES ARE A MATTER OF FORM 139 they have been led to believe that independence will give them surcease from all labour and make them rich. And, as a matter of fact, the Philippinos don't love us, nor are they grateful to us. They were happier under Spanish rule, and found it more congenial than they ever will ours. American hustle will for ever be a thorn in the side of those who wish to bask unmolested under a tropic sun, who have no desire whatever to be elevated, and to whom the very word " progress " is anathema. Why one should labour six days a week when one can make enough money in one to buy sufficient food on which to subsist ; why one should wear clothes when one is more comfortable in a loin-cloth or nothing at all ; why one should look out for the future when the future will take care of itself if you let it alone, are among the things that the Philippinos can never under- stand. Nor can they understand why the Americans force them to vex themselves with such matters, and they sigh for the good old Spanish days when nobody worried them about altering their mode of living or thinking. True, the Americans have made roads, and built waterworks, and docks, and a sea wall, and established hospitals, but the Philippinos are about as grateful for them as the average slack poor-family is to some energetic philanthropist who gives them jobs that they don't want. Under the Jones Law nearly all of the functions of government in the island have passed into native hands, and all Americans who live in the Philippines will tell you that already there has been a slowing down in every department. The splendid roads on which millions were spent are falling into disrepair. Manila is no longer Spotless Town, as it was under American rule, for a Philippino street -cleaner, who always thought in his secret soul that being particular about taking up garbage was a silly, American peculiarity anyway, turns a lax eye upon the housewife who is fast lapsing into 140 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD her old way of dumping the kitchen refuse into the street. I am no politician, but to me it seems that it will be the crime of crimes for the United States to withdraw from the Philippines. Our little brown brother needs us as much now as he ever needed us. He needs to be guided, steadied, shown the way, and he needs to be protected from himself and the world. It is a pity that the Congressmen and Senators who have to deal with this great question can't go and see what the ten million natives are really like — how ignorant and childish they are, what savages they are — instead of judging the whole people by the handful of educated Philippinos they have seen in Washington. If they did, they would use sense instead of sentimentalism in dealing with the subject, and it would save a lot of trouble hereafter. " Some morning," says Mr Dooley, " we'll wake up an' know jus' what to do, and then we'll do it. We'll do the r-right thing in th' end, Hinnissy." God send he's a prophet. CHAPTER XV SINGAPORE, THE EASTERN ELYSIUM A little emerald island rising out of a sapphire sea — that's Singapore. It is the very paradise of the tropics, with everything of lush vegetation and slumbrous summer seas, and bright-winged birds, and eternal warmth and sunshine that you have ever dreamed of over a radiator on a cold winter's day when the ther- mometer was hovering around zero. And on this evergreen isle is built the city of Singa- pore, which is very English as to the English part, and excessively Malay as to the Malay part. The English part is a city of wide streets, with houses set in gardens full of splendid tropical flowers, with fine hotels, and cricket greens, and good shops full of English wares that are duplicates of the shops in any provincial town " back home," except that cream-coloured Eurasian girls stand behind the counters instead of rosy-cheeked English lassies. Wherever the English go, they carry England with them. Whether in Hong-Kong, or Singapore, or Cal- cutta, or Ceylon, they have their tennis and cricket, their afternoon tea, and they dress for dinner every night just as religiously as they would at home. And, by the way, let no one waste any sympathy on these exiles, either English or American, who are carry- ing our commerce into far places. As a rule they live ten times as luxurious and interesting lives as they would at home. Being white, they are the lords of the earth, to whom the yellow races accord the place in the sun. They not only make more money, but their money goes farther than it would in their native land. k "I 142 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD Servants cost almost nothing, and so they are waited upon hand and foot. There is every kind of sport, from tiddlywinks to big game hunting, and there is the incessant round of parties that results from a small community's setting out deliberately to amuse itself. And the women ! Forty men to one of them. An Elysium for females ! For where women are so scarce, men cease to be critical, and any woman who has a strand of hair on her head, and a tooth of her own in her mouth, and hasn't a rheumatic knee, is a belle. Why, I saw, at the tea dances at the hotel, fat, frumpy, middle-aged women, who waddled as they walked, who had to cut their dances into slivers to go around with handsome chaps, young enough to be their sons. Of course the climate is trying, and everyone com- plains a lot about the heat, and they tell you that the women and children have to go away every five years, but even a good excuse for a nice trip is not an insupport- able affliction. They say, however, that people who have lived in the Orient for ten years are ruined for life anywhere. While they are in the Orient they have a feeling of being rather stranded and on the outside of things, and are always longing to get back to God's country. And when they do get back to God's country, they are perfectly miserable because they miss the differ- ence they have had in the East, and they have been so spoiled by Oriental servants that they simply cannot fend for themselves. The Malay part of Singapore is a network of little streets lined with small houses, jammed against each other, and through these flow a never-ending stream of Japanese, and Javanese, and Chinese, and Singalese, and Malays of every breed and colour. Here will come a Tamil from Southern India, black as ink, with nothing on save a scarlet loin-cloth. He is driving a pair of milk-white bullocks, whose horns have been painted a vivid blue. Then will come a rich SHOPPING FOR WILD ANIMALS 143 Chinese lady in a limousine, with her jacket pinned together with half a dozen splendid diamond sunbursts. Then a Malay woman in a magenta sarong — the strip of cloth that men and women alike wear as a skirt in so many parts of the far East. Then groups of coolies, naked to the waist, and skimpily clad below. Then men by the hundreds dressed in a sort of draped pair of trouserettes, and wearing every possible variety of turban. And through the crowd, threading their quiet way, dominating them all, tall, lean Englishmen in immaculate white from head to foot. Singapore is a great shipping port, and the little canals that nose into the city are chock-a-block with small boats that penetrate into the little rivers and bayous of the Straits Settlements, and trade all sorts of foreign stuffs for crude rubber, and copra, and rice, and wild animals, and birds, and any other truck the natives may have to sell. This makes Singapore a nice place in which to purchase a pet python, or a few tigers, or small matters of that sort, if you happen to fancy them. I have spoken before of a young man, chance met on a steamer, whose business it was to buy wild animals, and one of my interesting experiences in Singapore was going shopping with him for tigers, and snakes, and birds. We went to scores of stores, in which it seemed to me there were millions of birds of such wonderful colours that it made me believe the old story that, when the great dress- maker, Worth, seeks a new combination of colours, he goes into his aviary and sees what hues the Lord put together when he made birds. Then we went to other scores of stores where tigers, newly-caught, clawed at the bars of the boxes in which they were confined, and sleek leopards looked bloody murder out of their stealthy eyes, and where little naked children crawled around among cages in which were all sorts of fierce, untamed jungle beasts. At last, being awearied, I reposed myself upon a large and rather 144 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD flimsy-looking box, whose top was just laid on, not fastened on securely. " Where is that wonderful twenty-foot python that you were telling me about ? " I inquired casually. " In the box you're sitting on," calmly responded the young man. " If you'll get up, I'll show it to you." I got up. He didn't have to insist on it a second time. I broke the high jump record for my age and class, for I am a true daughter of Eve, whom the sight of a fishing worm throws into a panic, and when I saw that great, glittering monster come, fold after fold, out of the box on which I had so innocently reposed, I almost expired of horror. Singapore is in the heart of a great rubber-producing district, and we arose at six o'clock one morning and motored out to see a plantation at work, for not even a tree works in the middle of the day in the tropics. I had always thought of a rubber tree as being sort of an understudy to a Christmas tree — a huge tree with great, spreading branches, from which depended goloshes, and rubber nipples, and baby pacifiers, and automobile tyres. This was an error of mortal mind. Rubber trees are slim little trees, planted in straight lines at a distance of forty feet each way, and the ground under them is kept as clean and bare as the palm of your hand. They tap them by cutting a little triangle each year, that goes a fourth of the way around the tree, and from this exudes a milky substance that is caught in a little glass re- ceptacle placed at the base of the triangle. Every day this triangle is cut a tiny bit deeper with a knife as sharp as a razor, so that it merely freshens the wound in the bark of the tree. The sap is gathered up and carried to the factories, where an acid is poured over it that coagulates it. It is then pressed into sheets and smoked until it looks like leather, after which it is baled and sent to Europe and America for further refining and manufacture. WATCHING THE RUBBER TREES WORK 145 A rubber tree gives milk all the year round, and as it requires to be neither fed nor watered, it beats a cow as a revenue-maker. Indeed, it is said in Singapore that a native who has half a dozen rubber trees, a coconut tree and a bunch of bananas, has passed into a million- aire state in which he has no financial cares whatever. He and his family are rich for ever. Singapore is separated from the Malay States by a narrow arm of the sea, and just across the bay lives the Sultan of J&hore in his rambling old palace. The Sultan of J^hore used to be a gay and democratic rounder in whose eyes any foreigner found favour who could com- pound a new and heady beverage. Of late years, however, he has become a model citizen, eschews the flowing bowl, and has turned his attention to rubber- raising with such effect that he has redeemed his erstwhile mortgaged estates, and is now enormously rich. The Malay States have their own individual govern- ments, but England exercises a sort of benevolent pro- tectorate over them, and not only keeps other countries from molesting them, but curbs the Oriental tempera- ment when it gets a little too temperamental. It chanced that while I was in Singapore a new governor- general of the Straits Settlements arrived from England to take office, and the native princes and potentates came flocking in to do him honour. At Raffles Hotel, where I was staying, there were three Sultans with their suites, and right across the hall from me was the Sultan of Solonger. He was a slim young fellow, with very classical features, and an expression of the greatest pride and hauteur, and he wore a gorgeous green and gold brocade coat and trousers, with a gold-handled and jewelled krisss (the native short sword) in his sash. On the front of his fez was a diamond and emerald ornament the size of a butter-plate with an upstanding pompom of jewels. With him were his Prime Minister in crimson brocade, 146 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD and in his train his purse-bearer, and sword-bearer, and Heaven knows what other menials. The last day I was in Singapore happened to be the Hindu New Year, and a great celebration was held at the Thaipersan Chetty Temple. The Chettys are the money-lending caste, and are said to be the only people in the world shrewd enough to hold a hand in trading with the Chinese. They are very rich. So their cele- bration is proportionately gorgeous, and at the temple huge cauldrons of rice, holding a barrel each, are cooked and given away to all pilgrims. Around the temple was a great mass of humanity, all dressed in their best and most gorgeous clothes. The Chettys are Tamils, and are black as jet. They have straight features, marvellous eyes, and are very handsome. The men wear their long, ink-black hair either flowing down their backs or else done up in a waterfall held by an elaborate tortoise-shell comb. They dress in a sarong of some gay colour, and carry a scarf which they fling over one shoulder. Sometimes the men wear a gorgeous gold chain about their ample midst. The women are clothed in silk scarfs and sarongs of the brightest hue, and wear loads of jewellery. Often an ear will have so many earrings along its rim that it is simply encrusted with jewels. Nose rings are another favourite form of ornamentation ; they are the exact duplicates of the garnet breast-pins our mothers used to wear, and are worn screwed in each nostril. The women had on dozens of anklets and bracelets, so that they clinked as they walked. The little children had on nothing but a flexible silver chain from which depended an ornament with a charm in it. This was hung around their fat little tummies, and served at once for clothing and to keep off the evil spirits. Around the temple swarmed thousands of such gorge- ously attired people. Everybody was laughing, chatting, buying sweetmeats and sherbets made by shaving a piece of ice, and pouring either pink or blue syrup over it. WATCHING THE RUBBER TREES WORK 147 Most of the men had newly painted caste marks on their foreheads — three white bars, or a round dot of red just in the middle between the eyebrows. Some were smeared all over their bodies with grey ashes made from the dung of the sacred cow, but all indicated that they had just performed their sacred duties. Every now and then there would be the roll of drums, and a wailing chant, and then a crowd would come into view, surrounding some one who was seeking to acquire merit by self-torture. These men were naked except for loin-cloths. On their shoulders they bore a heavy semi-circular yoke-like device called a " kebadi " that was covered with flowers and had bunches of peacock feathers at each corner. In the fanatics' arms and legs so many flat-headed silver pins had been stuck that they appeared to have scales, like a fish. Through their tongues and nostrils great iron skewers had been thrust, and they walked on boards lashed to their feet that were filled with spikes two inches long, so that at every step they left a trail of blood behind them. Two of these men had enormous hooks thrust through the muscles of their backs and shoulders, and from these hooks hung little brass jars with milk in them, and the devout believe that this milk will boil if the penitent is fervent enough in his faith. These men were enduring untold agony. They tottered as they walked, and every now and then they would fall down, but their friends picked them up and set them on their feet again, and sang and danced about them, and cheered them on, until at last, buoyed up by the fanaticism that is the strongest force in the world, they staggered to the altar and fell fainting before it. At night there was a wonderful procession, the temple gods being carried through the streets, led by a solid silver car on which was the image of the deity of Subramanian. Beautiful and fascinating is Singapore, whether you 148 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD view it from its narrow, thronged streets with its kaleido- scopic pictures of all the peoples of the East in their native garb ; or from its harbours, where the ships from all the seas of all the world come to trade ; or from the canals, with their little boats that go forth into the jungles where the foot of white man has never trod ; or from the foreign section, with its prim, English gardens, and muffins and tea ; or from the miles and miles and miles of wonderful, smooth roads that now skirt the sea, and now plunge into the jungle, where the monkeys leap from tree to tree, and often a huge python crawls slowly across the road before you. The tropics have a fascination all their own. They would be irresistible except that the hum of the mos- quito, like the trail of the serpent, is over it all. At the first dinner-party I went to in Singapore a servant handed me a white pillow-case-looking affair. I had no idea what it was for, and I waited for my hostess' lead. She proceeded calmly to slip her feet into it and draw the strings about her knees. It was to protect her feet and ankles from the mosquitoes, and she said that later in the season mosquito bags were just as much provided for guests as napkins, unless one furnished each guest with a lamp, which was set before his or her feet as they sat on the veranda or at the table. For mosquitoes prefer darkness to light. And at that, the mosquitoes in Singapore are no worse than they are in many parts of America, so I pass this tip on to my fellow-countrymen and women. CHAPTER XVI JAVA, WHERE THE TROPICS ARE TAMED Java is the tropics stewed in a Hollandaise sauce flavoured with Oriental spice. In my mind I had always pictured Java as a wild jungle with monkeys screaming from the trees, and elephants crashing through the primeval wilds, and boa- constrictors crossing your path, and the dusky natives basking in the sunshine as they whiled away the idle hours twanging upon their light guitars. In reality it is about as wild as a Long Island truck farm. Every inch is under intensive cultivation, not a weed growing even on the roadside. The only wild animal I saw was a white rabbit in the hotel garden, and the only snake I beheld was confined in a glass case in a little museum, while as for the natives, about the only instruments they ever get a chance to perform on are the hoe and the spade. The efficient Hollanders are said to be the only people who have ever been able to make a Malay work. They have surely done that in Java. The natives are prac- tically enslaved, but the results are marvellous, and it raises an interesting question in ethics and economics. Left to themselves the Javanese would be perfectly happy, living in huts made of reeds, and subsisting on the fruits of the earth that the Lord dropped into their mouths, and they would contribute nothing to the well-being of the outside world. Goaded to labour by the Dutch, they produce on their marvellously fertile island an immense percentage of the foodstuffs that go to nourish the hungry of other lands. It leaves you wondering if sometimes might isn't right, after all. 149 150 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD We entered Java by way of Batavia, which has the temperature and humidity of a Turkish bath steam- room. It is an ugly, ragged city, the foreign part of which is built of concrete box houses and the native part of bamboo huts. Never was there a place of so little privacy. The natives live and have their being in the open streets. The Dutch eat, and drink, and sleep on their wide verandas, where they appear in a scantiness of costume we are accustomed to associate only with a trip to the bathroom. There is something very curious about the way that hot weather breaks down the morale of people every- where and makes them do things and wear things they would never dream of doing or wearing in the winter-time, so you can imagine how negligee everybody gets to be in a place where it is eternal summer. We stayed at a hotel built on the bank of a canal, and it must have covered acres of ground, for it con- sisted of a series of little bungalows, each with its tiny veranda. The rooms had stone floors, and beds seven feet wide with no other covering but a sheet spread over the mattress, not a shred to put over you, but each bed had in it a long bolster affair that was called a Dutch wife. You are supposed to gain coolness through the sweltering tropic nights by elevating your feet or your arms on this, so as to make a passage for the air to circulate under you. On the little veranda in front of each room was a big chair with extension pieces to the arms, which pulled out to make a rest for the legs of the men as they took their after-dinner siesta. Here also was a wicker couch for the women, and a little table, and here at six o'clock in the morning servants placed your early breakfast of fruit and toast, and a jug of hot milk and a vinegar cruet filled with stone-cold coffee. Everybody gets up at the crack of dawn in Java and goes about their business or pleasure in the few com- paratively cool hours of the day. At tiffin I made A TOWN LIKE A TURKISH BATH 151 acquaintance with the noblest institution of Java, if not, indeed, in the whole realm of eats. It is called the " rice table," and it is a thing to be approached only with awe and reverence and a certain foolhardy courage. The matter of it is like this : A soup plate of enormous capacity is brought and set before you, and you fill it with rice from a vat that a husky servitor bears from table to table. After him comes a procession of waiters, each bearing a dish containing a different variety of food. One will have bits of steak ; another, chicken ; another, fried eggs ; another, pickled eggs ; another, sausage ; another, bits of fish ; another, shrimp ; another, salmi ; another, fried bananas. You take some out of each dish and put it upon your rice. Then comes a waiter with an enormous tray on which are condiments — chutney, ground pepper, grated coconut, walnut pickles, minced onion, and dozens of other things whose very appear- ance I did not recognize. You besprinkle the mound of food in your soup plate with these. Last of all comes a waiter, bearing a soup tureen full of curry mixture. You souse this all over your rice and condiments, and commend your soul to God, and go to it. I found the mixture perfectly delicious, but it is very rich, and nourishing to the last degree, and Heaven help the figure of any lady who partakes of it as her daily diet ! You understand why the Dutch fraus in Java look like beer barrels on skids, and also why they have eschewed corsets and adopted the native dress, which consists of a long strip of cloth wound around you in place of a skirt, and a loose jacket for a waist. You couldn't possibly reconcile the " rice table " with a straight front. After you have partaken of that you need room, and plenty of it. After tiffin everyone staggers to one's own room, puts on a negligee and repairs to the little veranda in front to do the snake business until about four o'clock. The men have on their pyjamas, the women their 152 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD kimonos. Nobody has on any stockings, and you are in full public view. I never saw so many knotted and gnarled feet in my life, nor so many in need of the earnest attention of a chiropodist. This siesta hour is sacred. Absolutely. And woe to him who violates it. Everywhere notices are put up on the walls requesting guests not to talk between the hours of two and four, and saying that " dogs will not be permitted to bark nor children to cry." If you speak above a whisper, a long, sibilant hiss, like a snake's, runs the rounds of the verandas. Once I heard a baby give one wail, and no more. It was cut short. Probably its mother strangled it to death rather than have it commit the blasphemy of dis- turbing people who were snoozing off the " rice table." And they tell, with bated breath, of the horrible fate that befell a rash young American, who foolishly imagined that he could violate a holy institution and get away with it. It seems that this bold youth had a typewriter, and he undertook to pick off some letters during the siesta hour. The management sent him a polite message requesting him to desist, and telling him that it was not permitted to make any noise be- tween two and four o'clock. The young American replied that he was sorry, but the mail boat was leaving the next day and he had important business letters that he must get off, and he clicked merrily on. About two clicks more. That was all. The pro- prietor, followed by his menials, arrived on the scene, and before he knew what had happened the young American, and his typewriter, and his bags and baggage, were out in the street together, and the door behind him was locked. And it's no joke to be thrown out of a hotel that is the only one in several hundred miles. During the siesta hour you may ring the bell off and no servant will answer, for they, too, slumber and sleep, but promptly at four o'clock your room BRILLIANT COLOUR IN BUITENZORG 153 coolie reappears with tea and toast, and jam, and little cakes, after which you have your bath, and dress, and ride in a little wagon, built like a dogcart, with seats fore and aft, and drawn by little ponies not much bigger than sheep, and so light in weight that a fat person who sits on the back seat will often lift the pony into the air until another heavy-weight gets into the front seat and balances the vehicle. Dutch society in Batavia is said to be quite smart. It runs to musicals at which the ladies appear in the latest finery from Amsterdam and pecks of jewellery. There is a little social intercourse, however, between the English and Americans and the Dutch, for the Dutch have made a curious social ruling. They will do business in the English language, but they refuse to use it socially, and they say that if the English and Americans desire to mingle socially with them they must learn to speak Dutch. The Dutch are not crazy about foreigners coming to trade in their preserve, anyway. A few hours' ride from Batavia is Buitenzorg, the Java Simla, the beautiful mountain resort where all Batavia goes to get a breath of fresh air when it can endure the stifling heat of the sea-coast no longer. There is a fine road to it, and as we motored up it was fascinating to watch the native life. I was especially intrigued by the little boys who sat cross-legged on buffaloes while they tended their herds of cows, or goats, or watched fields of grain to scare away 'the crows. Nor did I ever weary of remarking the groups of women engaged in the national pastime of cootie- hunting. This was engaged in without shame or camouflage, and wherever two or three women had gathered together by the wayside, or in front of a door, instead of crochet- ing or teaching each other a new embroidery stitch they had parted each other's long, black hair and were looking into each other's heads to see what they might discover there, and always they wore a most interested 154 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD and pleased expression. Evidently cootie-hunting has thrills and excitements of which we more sophisticated people little wot. Just to see the people walking along the road was to watch a brilliant procession, for both men and women had on sarongs that were every possible hue and com- bination of hues. Moreover, every few miles there was a passer, or market, that was a splash of colour against the green of the fields and trees. Here, squatted by the roadside, women dressed in gay sarongs were selling their gayer wares. There were great piles of scarlet peppers, and baskets of rambutans, a kind of fruit that looks like yellow and crimson chestnut burrs, except that the spikes are as soft as silk, and that within is a long, white kernel that tastes like solidified lemonade. There were heaps of mangusteens that are purplish red without and snow- white within, and that are the most delicious fruit on earth, a combination of sweet and sour that has no counterpart this side of the ambrosia of the gods. Here also were quantities of jack fruit, big, green, water- melon-looking affairs that are a variety of coarse melon, and here were big prickly duriens, the favourite fruit of the natives, that smell like a cross between a skunk and an onion, with a dash of asafcetida thrown in for good measure, but that are said to be delicious when eaten with a gas mask on. And here for sale also were great bowls of grated coconut, and rice put up in little cases made of plaited bamboo, that would be boiled in the case, and small bottles of crude attar of roses, and aromatic gums and spices wrapped up in leaves, and all sorts of native sweetmeats which look better than they taste. And speaking of things to eat, one comes with tears to the subject of Java coffee, for, alas, there is no such thing any more as real Java coffee. The once famous and delectable coffee grown in this country is a tradition of the past, a mere trade-mark for an inferior article. THE HEAVEN OF BOTANISTS 155 About twenty years ago a curious blight descended upon the Java coffee trees and killed them out, root and branch, and the coffee now raised in Java is a much coarser variety that was imported from Africa. The method of making coffee in Java is precisely that employed in making drip coffee in New Orleans, except that the Javanese make a cold filtration instead of a hot one, as is done in New Orleans. Your coffee in Java is brought you cold in a small glass bottle with a pitcher of hot milk, and you compound yourself a mild, lukewarm beverage that is a pale image of your rosy dream of what genuine Java coffee should be. As I have said, Buitenzorg is a hill resort, a little town of pretty summer homes, and with an excellent hotel that is beautifully situated on a ravine that over- looks a valley through which flows a swift little stream. On the other side of the river is a native village, and it was very amusing to watch life go on in the open over there — women cooking in little pots suspended over a fire, and washing their clothes in the river, which they did by the simple process of taking a garment and pounding it against the stones until they loosened the dirt, or wore it into shreds. In the river also they took their baths and washed the children, and by its side they made their toilettes — a simple process for themselves — of winding a gay sarong around their hips and putting on a jacket that they fastened with big ornamental pins. The children's toilette was even simpler, for they were considered sufficiently clad with nothing on but a necklace and an anklet, and so they only needed to be rinsed off in the river and set on the bank to dry. Buitenzorg has the finest botanical garden in the world, and botanists come to it from everywhere to study its wonderful flora. In it are all the varieties of spice trees — cinnamon, clove, allspice, nutmeg, pepper and so on, and all sorts of grotesque trees — Nature's little jokes, such as the sausage tree, which 156 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD seems to bear imported frankfurters, and the bread- fruit tree, and the banyan tree whose limbs grow down to the earth, and Heaven knows what other marvels. Its orchids are unrivalled, and nothing could be more wonderful than the little valley devoted to these fairies of the air which bloom in a million fantastic forms. A Javanese gardener spent hours showing me his rarest ones, the most beautiful of which was one that they called the Holy Ghost Flower, and that con- tains a perfectly formed white dove in its heart, and after I had oh-ed and ah-ed over each marvel he would say, " Mell it," and I had another sensation, the most ravishing perfume. There were also great lakes filled with pond lilies, the pads as big as a tea-tray, and forests of gigantic feathery bamboo, and ferns as big as trees, and rows upon rows of rare palms — even a few sickly roses that love not the tropics. But Buitenzorg is all that Dutch skill can accomplish, aided by Nature and two rains a day, and a climate that is a forcing-house for all growing things. It was almost dusk when we left the enchanted gardens of Buitenzorg behind us and started back down the long trail to Batavia. For a long time we drove through the tropic scene in silence, lace-like bamboos on either side, great, flower-laden trees above our heads, the heavy odour from a myriad of unseen blooms making the night fragrant. Finally my woman friend at my side broke the silence. " When I get home the first thing I am going to do is to yank that measly, sickly-looking little palm I've been nursing for five years out of its pot and throw it into the garbage can," she said. " Same here," I responded. CHAPTER XVII JAVA, COLONIZED AND CAREWORN The railroad trains in Java do not run at night. When dusk comes of an afternoon they stop wherever they may happen to be, and the next morning at seven resume their interrupted journey. So, at the appointed hour, of a steamy morning we took our places in one of these slow-moving vehicles for Garoet, a beautiful little resort up in the mountains, where the atmosphere was cool and full of oxygen, and you could breathe without gasping for air like a dying fish, as you do in Batavia. For sheer beauty of scenery there is probably no other trip in the world equal to that through central Java. In the first few hours of it you exhaust your whole supply of adjectives of wonder, and admiration, and delight, and after that you sit dumb, marvelling in silence as the panorama unrolls itself before you. The country is of inexhaustible fertility. They raise two or three crops a year on the land, and it is so care- fully cultivated that you scarcely see a weed. We went through endless fields of rice, and sugar cane, and Indian corn and tea and coffee, and sweet potatoes, and peanuts, and tapioca, and cocoa, and indigo, and tobacco, and coconut orchards, and clove orchards, and pepper orchards, and goodness knows what else. I never imagined that any one country could grow so many different varieties of foodstuffs. Then, as we began climbing the mountains, the scenery grew even more picturesque. We crept on trestles over lush little valleys above the tops of the tallest coconut palms. We crossed silvery rivers, we L 157 158 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD had splendid vistas of towering cliffs over which water- falls tumbled like silver ribbons, and always curling around the mountain tops, or hanging like a veil from their sides, were pennons of smoke from volcanoes that are still burning. And from the trees of the forest hung rare orchids, and other strange blooms, and through their branches flitted bright-winged birds. Garoet is the kind of a place in which you would like to sit down in a comfortable chair and do nothing but breathe, and that is the way we mostly passed our time there, we were so exhausted by the heat on the sea-shore. However, one drive we took will always live in my memory. We went out to a beautiful lake on whose bank were a score of little brown children, dressed in their birthday suits, and nothing more. Not even a necklace ; but each child had in its hand a bunch of flowers which he or she offered for sale, kneeling before us, but saying never a word. There was one little Eve, exquisitely beautiful, but without even a fig-leaf on her, who knelt at my feet with a white camellia clasped in her hands as if in prayer, which I bought "off of her," as they say on the East Side in New York, thus leaving her absolutely nude. Other children played wonderfully on some queer, rude, harp-like musical instruments that were made of different lengths and sizes of bamboo hung loosely into frames, and which they manipulated by shaking. It made a queer, haunting melody to which the children danced. The Javanese are born musicians, like the Hawaiians, and their music has a rhythm to it that is pleas- ing to European ears, unlike that of the Japanese and Chinese, which always sounded to me like a cat having an epileptic fit on a back fence. As you drive through their little bamboo villages at night you hear the faint, plaintive notes of their little reed WHEN ENTERTAINMENT IS AGONY 159 instruments, and see groups gathered about some old man who is acting out some ancient legend by means of manipulating marionettes. This is the " Little Theatre " idea in its ultimate expression. Out of buffalo hide the Javanese make peculiarly hideous and grotesque marionettes that are painted vivid colours. These represent different char- acters, and are worked by means of strings, so that their shadows are thrown on a cloth, and it is by the action of these shadows that the audience follows the drama. The Javanese are famous for their acrobatic dancing, and at night we saw what was said to be a fine exhibi- tion of it. It began by two wooden-faced women advancing with slow, measured steps into the centre of the room, the while they waved their arms in weird motions. Then they bent themselves backward until their heads touched the floor, then they tied themselves into bow-knots, and slip-knots, and apparently dis- jointed every bone, and went through every known variety of contortion. This was accompanied by ear- piercing sounds supposed to be songs which they emitted. After a bit a man on the side lines came out and joined the ladies, then another man, and they backed, and filed, and writhed before each other. Then they retreated, and other men took a turn. More joined in from time to time, until at last there were sixteen men and the two women going through what appeared to be dying agonies, while the music grew louder and louder, and jazzier and jazzier, until we fled from it to save our ear-drums. The dance was said to be interpretative, but what it interpreted I do not know any more than I know why, when the barefooted lady on the Metropolitan stage gives three jumps to the right and wiggles her big toe at the base viol, it means springtime and bloom- ing flowers and the joy of love, and when she gives four leaps to the left and shakes a wicked foot at the snare drum, it means winter and death, and that her trust- 160 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD ing heart has been foully deceived by a miscreant. The inner meanings of interpretative dancing are hidden from me, but when it comes to writhing to music, the Javanese have got all the other writhers I have ever seen beaten to a standstill. The most interesting thing in Java — one of the most interesting things in the whole world, for that matter — is Baraboedoer, the great Buddhist temple that is the strangest romance of all religious architecture. This temple is situated about twenty miles from the little town of Djocja, from whence you reach it by carriage or automobile. This great temple, which makes the Pyramids of Egypt sink into insignificance by comparison, was built centuries and centuries before the coming of Christ, under the direction of Buddhist missionaries who brought with them to Java a pinch of the ashes of Buddha in a vase, and who erected this mountain of marvellously carved stone as a shrine for it. They built first an artificial plain one hundred and fifty feet high, and on this they erected a building two thousand feet around, consisting of six massive terraces. Along each terrace is a gallery with a series of arches, each holding a figure of Buddha differing from the other images only in the pose of the hands. The upper terrace was surmounted by a tower in which was an unfinished Buddha, which was supposed to represent his final absorption into Nirvana and his breaking with the circle of life. The walls of each of these galleries are carved, every inch of them, with marvellous bas-reliefs that tell the story of the birth and life of Buddha in his various in- carnations. There is the story of Buddha when he was a fish, when he was a deer, when he was an elephant, when he was a rich man, when a poor man, for he knew every phase of life, animal and human, and so could understand and be compassionate with all. Here is the story of the Kuru-Deer, who taught men THE TEMPLE THAT WAS BURIED ALIVE 161 to be merciful to dumb animals, and the story of the wonderful fish that illustrated the power of truth, and the story of the rich Brahmin who acquired merit by going into the jungle and living on leaves boiled in water, and the story of the elephant who bore the ring about his foot with such patience that at last it fell off of itself, and thousands upon thousands of the other stories that teach the wisdom and goodness of the Bodhisavatta. It is the picture bible of the Buddhists, the finest temple that was ever reared to Buddha, and as you wander down its miles and miles of sculptured galleries you marvel more and more at the wonder of it. How could it have been built more than eleven centuries ago by a people who have now forgotten every ancient art they ever practised ? How could such a structure have ever been reared in the heart of the jungle in a day when there were no means of transportation as there are now ? How did they even assemble the materials of which it was built ? Where get the artisans ? From whence came the artists who carved its endless walls into things of imperishable beauty ? What architectural genius designed it ? None know. WTien the Mohammedans conquered Java and overran it they imposed their religion upon the Javanese. They destroyed the Buddhist temples and mutilated all of their statues, because it is contrary to the Mohammedan religion to make any sort of an image. The priests of Baraboedoer heard what their con- querors were doing to their co-religionists, and to save their beautiful temple they covered it over with earth and planted trees upon it. Tradition says that at the last they literally dug themselves in, and that when the final earth was thrown upon the temple a large number of the priests were shut within it and perished there. In that hot, moist climate the jungle in an incredibly short time closed in about the temple. Trees, and vines, and flowers grew an impenetrable thicket above it, and 162 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD for six hundred years it was lost. It was utterly for- gotten and its name not so much as mentioned. From 1811 to 1816 the fortunes of war made Java a British possession, and Sir Stamford Raffles was in charge of the administration of the island. Through some old papers that came into his possession he got track of the lost temple, and started to work clearing the jungle and removing the earth from it, and when it was done the structure was found to be almost as perfect as when it was built. It had been hermetically preserved to be the eighth wonder of the world. Almost in the shadow of the great temple we saw men and women making the batik work for which Java is famous, and which we are imitating in our near-batik way at home. The basis of most of the real batik work is a very fine, smoothly woven cotton. This is boiled in oil and dried, and then reboiled four times. Then it is stretched tight on a frame and the pattern drawn. The worker has beeswax in a little vessel under which burns a spirit lamp that keeps it liquid, and this beeswax is applied to every particle of the cloth except the parts in which a certain shade is to be dyed. Every time a new hue is put in the beeswax must be removed. Then the new colour is dyed in. This process of re- moving the beeswax and putting it in a different place is repeated for every colour and shade of colour. It is an endless process, as you will realize when you think how many different colours, some of them mere lines, go to the making of an elaborate pattern, and you do not wonder that just an ordinary batik sarong — a straight piece of cloth two and a half yards long by about a yard and a quarter wide — costs from thirty dollars up. The Javanese also get beautiful effects in what they call tied- work. They take silk cloth, pinch it up and tie it with thread, making little bumps, and dye this, somehow making a pattern of wonderful shades. This work makes lovely, crinkly scarfs. THE SULTAN'S BED OVER A BROOK 163 At Djocja we went to the palace of the Sultan of Djocja. He lives in great state with his large and interesting family, for he has thirty-six wives, eighty- six children, and two hundred and fifty grandchildren, and he is only eighty-six years old at that. Not far away is the water palace which was used as the summer palace of the Sultan in olden days. It is now a ruin, but in its time, before it was shelled by the Dutch some three hundred years ago, it must have been a sumptuous spot. It consists of a collec- tion of stucco houses with walls three feet thick to keep out the heat, built along the banks of a babbling brook. There are still magnificent gardens, and a great swimming pool which connects with what was the Sultan's bedroom. This was a cave-like apartment built across the little stream, and you can see the great stone four-post bed under which the water flows. It must have been charming to be lulled to sleep by the singing of the little stream, provided, of course, one had no fear of the twinges of rheumatism or the other ailments incident to sleeping in damp spots, for green moss and mould were everywhere. In native Java the emblem of rank is the umbrella, and we were much impressed by the sight of one of the grandees of the Sultan's household out taking a stroll, while an attendant held over his head a yellow umbrella with a handle that must have been ten feet long. Of course it is impossible for any traveller, who only spends a few weeks in a country, to speak with authority about its social conditions, but the Javanese people struck me as being utterly hopeless and forlorn and crushed. I never heard a single laugh nor saw a native smile while I was on the island. Even the children played joylessly and noiselessly. It is said that among the natives of the lower order morality is an un- known thing. Men and women alike take mates as they fancy, and their relations with each other are as untrammelled as among animals. 164 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD The Dutch Government encourages intermarriages between Hollanders and natives, and the half-breeds are not ostracized in the best society, as are the Eurasians in India. The memory of Java that I shall always have with me is that of the patient, bent natives toiling in super- cultivated fields ; the strange orderliness of a tropic jungle that has been tamed and forced to produce useful foodstuffs instead of a useless riot of flowers and palms ; and superimposed upon that, a picture of rich, fat Dutchmen and their bejewelled wives in rich, fat cars rolling past thin, weary-looking little brown men and women, a vision of people forced to toil who were born to sleep in the sun. Rum thing, colonization and civilization. Very, very rummy. Perhaps it's all for the good of the world. We need Java sugar, and Java coffee, and rubber, and rice, and indigo, and cocoa, and all the other things that the efficient Dutch force the indolent Malay to grow for us on their beauteous isle. But if I ever have to be colonized I don't want the Germans or the Dutch to do the job. CHAPTER XVIII BURMA, THE CENTRE OF ORIENTAL SPLENDOUR " The Indian Ocean sets and smiles, So blooming calm, so blooming blue ; There's not a wave for miles and miles Except the ripple of the screw." It is across this sea of glass, so smooth that not even the most pessimistic victim of mat de mer can find a qualm of sea-sickness in his entire system, that you glide from Singapore to Rangoon. It is a heavenly, restful trip in which the days slip by while you watch the " flying fishes play and the dawn comes up like thunder out of China 'crost the bay." On the way we stopped at Penang, which is one of the most important ports of the Straits Settlements, and had a delightful ride through its coconut palm groves, finishing up with a visit to a unique Chinese temple that is a little gem of architecture, wrought out in red and gold lacquer and carving, and set on the side of a hill. The temple consists of innumerable shrines, each open to the day, rising tier above tier, with wonderful flower gardens, and pools in which are sacred fish interspersed between them. You climb by means of tortuous steps from one of these shrines to the other until you come to the top one, from which you look across a valley that is a sea of waving coconut palms that reaches to the blue waters of Bengal Bay. It must be easy for the monks who pass their tranquil lives amidst such beauty to believe in all the gods even of their vast pantheon. You go up the Irrawaddy River to reach Rangoon, 165 166 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD as you go up the Mississippi to reach New Orleans. It is an ugly, muddy stream with low-lying banks covered with tropical verdure, and on almost every little rise of ground is a tiny pagoda with its fragile little bells that every breath of wind sways and sets ringing. And it is these temple bells that echo around the world, and voice the call of the East that brings back almost all who have ever once lived in it. The Burmese are greatly given to building these pagodas, since they constitute a sort of guarantee ticket to the realms of the blest for anybody who erects one. Therefore when a Burmese makes what we would call a " killing," he first erects a pagoda. Then he proceeds to blow in the balance of his pile on having a good time. Having the pagoda to his credit he feels that he has carte blanche to commit as many sins as he likes. This reverence for the pagoda finds its ultimate expression in the Shwi Dagon Pagoda, the chief jewel of Rangoon, and the holiest spot in all Indo-China to the Buddhists, because it contains an authenticated tooth and eight hairs of Gautema Buddha, and is believed to have also relics of the three Buddhas who preceded him. The present pagoda, or rather its skeleton, was built six hundred years before Christ on the site of Heaven-knows-how-much older shrines, for the spot is one whose holiness goes back to the dimmest tradition. The Shwi Dagon stands on a high hill, part natural and part artificial. The shrine is topped by a tower- ing gold shaft, surrounded by a forest of smaller, slenderer golden shafts, each ending in a golden "ti" or umbrella, from which hang innumerable gold and silver jewelled bells that the wind rings incessantly. The whole effect is one of indescribable lightness, rich- ness and beauty, set to a sort of eerie, fairy music. The central pagoda is covered with solid gold leaf, WHEN A TEMPLE IS MORE THAN A TEMPLE 167 and its " ti " or umbrella is set with diamonds, and sapphires, and rubies, but the umbrella is raised so high above the heads of the people that its splendour cannot be seen by human eyes. The smaller pagodas that cluster about the feet of the large one are masses of lacquer, of gold and silver, of coloured glass pillars wreathed about with crystal flowers in natural colours ; of damascene, and pietra dura work ; of every art the cunning craftsmen of the East know how to fashion so superlatively. Each pagoda has its fretwork roof, its golden spire, its tinkling gold and silver bells, and guarding the pagodas are tall shafts on the top of which are effigies of the mythological bird of Burma, or grotesque images of the " nats," the evil spirits which the Burmese fear, and intermingled with these are posts from which float long cloth streamers. We were lucky enough to reach the Shwi Dagon Pagoda just at sunset. You enter the building at the street level and begin what seems an endless climb up a broad stairwa}^, made in some places of sun-dried brick, in others of stone, but all worn slick by the bare feet of the millions of the devout who have climbed these steps to lay their sorrows and heart- aches at the feet of their gods, or to pray the Com- passionate One for mercy in their need. These stairs are not only an approach to the temple, they are a bazaar, a gossiping place, a restaurant, even a lodging place for the pilgrims who flock here from all over India, and Ceylon, and Korea, and Burma. The ends of every step are little shops. Almost every other one is a flower stall, for the Buddhists use great quantities of flowers in their religious rites, so here are great tubs of red and white roses, sheaves of pink, and yellow, and mauve cannas, baskets of frail cosmos, mounds of the yellow frangipani that they call the temple flower. Then come fruit stalls, 168 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD and little restaurants where women squat among their cook-pots over charcoal braziers, and concoct greasy messes over which toilworn pilgrims smack their lips. The vendors of betels are doing a thriving business to customers who look critically on while their cud is being prepared — a damp green betel leaf is taken from a box in which it is kept moist with water. It is about the size and shape of a smallish grape leaf. It is first smeared over with lime made from burnt shells, then powdered cinnamon and cloves and all- spice are sprinkled over it, with a pinch of tobacco. Then a little crushed betel nut is added, after which the edges of the leaf are carefully folded over until the " chaw " is about an inch square. It is then handed over to the buyer, who parks it in one cheek and goes away perfectly happy. Apparently every man, woman, and child in the Orient chews betel — for even the babies cry for it. It turns the lips as red as a chorus girl's are painted, and blackens the teeth, and those who chew it ex- pectorate what appears to be their heart's blood, but it is said to have a fascinating flavour and to be far more stimulating than the strongest of navy plug. The next step brings you to a silk merchant, his piles of gay sarongs making gorgeous patches of colour in the semi-dark. Then you come to the merchants of small wares, who have everything to sell from a baby pacifier to a temple gong. Then tobacco stalls with long, white cheroots ; then the places where they sell gold leaf in sheets, precisely like those from which your dentist shears a bit when he fills a tooth. By buying this gold leaf and giving it for the encasing of the temple roof in gold you acquire much merit. Most of the merchants are women, and each one is smoking a " whacking white cheroot," while her naked babies tumble over her feet, and take their SOLVING THE DRESS PROBLEMS 169 nourishment as informally as a puppy does, while its mother is too much engaged in driving a good trade even to notice that lunch is being served in the dining-car. Those who worry over how women will take care of their children when mother enters the gainful pursuits need only consider the Burmese babies for an answer. And all the time up and down these long stairs flows a procession that looks as if a rainbow had come down from the sky and was carpeting the way, for nothing could exceed the gaiety of the appearance of the Burmese. Men and women dress much alike. They wear a skirt made by wrapping around them a single width of silk that covers them from waist to heel and that is of some vivid hue. On their bodies they wear white jackets pinned up in front with jewelled pins. In their hair the women wear flowers. Around their heads the men wear a scarf made of thin, gauzy silk tissue that is tied in a windmill bow. It is exactly the same sort of head ornament that girls used to wear to parties six or seven years ago and that was facetiously described as a headache band. Both men and women are very handsome, with regular features, bronze skin, and great melting black eyes. Then come the Indians, of whom there are many in Burma. The women are wrapped from head to foot in gorgeous silks and wear pounds of jewellery; dozens of bracelets that cover half their arms ; anklets that jingle as they walk ; rings by the score on both hands and feet ; scores of necklaces ; nose rings, some six inches across ; some great bars of gold that hang over their mouths. They are gorgeous beyond descrip- tion, and they looked like a million dollars as they clanked along. The Indian men have on either just a loin-cloth, or else queer, draped trousers of white, with one leg looking like a B.V.D. as it ended above the knee, while the other leg came down to the heel. 170 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD And in and out among the throng came yellow- robed priests by the dozen, making high lights even in that brilliant crowd, and, as a foil to it all, squatting on their haunches on the far edge of the steps, are the beggars — the lame, and the halt, and the blind. Lepers, hideous beyond words, beating on their gongs and beseeching the generous for alms. At last, stopping to buy flowers, to throw an anna into the distorted hands of a beggar, to purchase one of the little three-cornered temple gongs, I reached the top of the steps and stood dazed, looking out upon the gorgeous spectacle. From the midst of a marble- paved terrace sprung the great golden pagoda that the descending sun bathed in refulgent splendour. The winds stirred the myriads of tiny bells into elfin music. The great shrine was open to the day, and within it burned thousands of candles on altars that were heaped with flowers, and behind which priests in yellow robes chanted in sing-song tone. The back- ground was a mingling of gold, and crimson lacquer, and embroidered banners, and peacock feathers. There was a ceaseless beat of wings as white doves flew in and out through the arches of the building. Before the temple on the marble pavement knelt a multitude of men and women in their gay dresses, with bunches of flowers held between their upright hands as they prayed, and as they rose from their knees they cast these flowers before the altar. It was a scene that made you drunk with colour. The sunset on the golden pagoda, the gold and jewelled images draped in splendid vestments, the floating banners on every pillar, the peacock feather fans, the flicker- ing candles, the banks of flowers, the worshippers dressed in every colour of the spectrum. The Burmese are a jolty, happy-go-lucky people, very fond of fun and very much opposed to steady labour. It is the one country in the Orient where woman has her innings, and is even said to have man SOLVING THE DRESS PROBLEMS 171 under her thumb. The Burmese women carry on most of the business, and are very alert and keen in running their little shops. They are not veiled, and have much more freedom in picking out their hus- bands than any other women of the East. Like all Oriental women they marry very young, and when a Burmese woman's children are born she has to go through an ordeal that ages her from ten to fifteen years. After the birth of the baby she is rubbed all over with turmeric, and a huge fire is built as near as possible to the room in which she lies. All the heavy covering in the family is piled on her, hot rocks are put about her, and she is dosed with a boil- ing-hot mixture compounded by the midwife and called green medicine. Imagine the agony of this in a country where it is so hot, anyway, that the mercury is sizzling in its tube. But this boiling process is kept up for seven days, and then the victim is given a crude Turkish bath and is supposed to have sweated out all the humours in her system. One of the interesting places we went to in Rangoon was a monastery, where hundreds of yellow-robed priests live in a state of such sanctification that they do not even have a female animal on the place, and where they carry a large fan so they can hold it before their faces to avoid seeing any woman who happens to cross their line of vision. This monastery was a school for boys, and we saw them patiently transcribing the holy books with a stylus on thin sheets of palm leaf, which are gilded along the edges and tied with cord. This was a primary school, and it and its likes impart what little educa- tion the ordinary people get. In Burma every man must seive at some time as a Hpoongyee, or priest, and wear the yellow robe. Formerly it was the rule that every boy should devote two years to the priesthood, but now it has become a mere formality, and a week's attendance at a temple 172 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD suffices for the layman. The donning of the yellow robe is an important ceremony in a Burmese boy's life and marks his entrance into manhood. When the time arrives for him to do it the lad dresses him- self in his best clothes, and with a band of music and a company of friends goes through the streets inviting his friends to the ceremony. His family provides a feast, the yellow robe he is to put on, the begging bowl, and the little filter which monks use to filter their water so they may not inadvertently swallow animal life. After the company has assembled, and the feast is eaten, the boy kneels and has his long hair cut and his face shaved. Then he retires and puts on his yellow robe and takes his seat over among the monks. The next morning he goes forth with his begging bowl and stops at every house in a certain route that has been assigned him. The people who live along the way rush out and put money and food into his bowl. The Hpoongyees never ask for alms, and never thank the giver. It is supposed to be a privilege to give to a holy man, for thereby one acquires merit. The Burmese much admire tattooing. Every boy's legs and hips are so thoroughly tattooed that trousers become a superfluity. The operation is very painful, so that opium is often given to enable the victim to endure it. While it is healing it itches fearfully, but to scratch ruins the design, so the lad must grin and endure it. The boring of a girl's ears is her induction to maturity. This also is a great ceremony. A great feast is made, and the professional ear-borer performs the operation to the accompaniment of charms and witchcraft. Before the hole heals a larger needle is inserted, and this is increased in size until an opening a half-inch across is made and the ear dragged down until the lobe hangs on the shoulder. The Burmese believe that the soul takes the form THE BURMESE DEBUTANTE 173 of a butterfly, and leaves us while we sleep, and that the story of its roaming is the stuff of which our dreams are made. They will never waken a sleeper for fear his butterfly may not be able to get back quickly enough to its habitation. It is never any good to order a Burmese servant to awaken you. He will tiptoe in the room and pray for something to happen to disturb your slumbers, but he himself will not take the responsibility of rous- ing you, for if your butterfly failed to make connection you would either die or go crazy. M CHAPTER XIX CALCUTTA, THE ENGLISH HEART OF INDIA The Hugli River, which is one of the mouths of Mother Ganges, is just as horrid as its name sounds. It is a sullen, treacherous stream, a graveyard for ships that it sucks down into its quicksands, and so, with a native pilot to guide us and every officer and sailor standing at his post, we crept cautiously between its bars up to Calcutta. A beautiful city ! A wonderful city, with splendid drives, and lovely parks, and handsome business houses, the high note of its magnificence struck by the viceroy's palace, an exquisite structure in white marble set in the midst of a great green lawn. Calcutta is no longer the capital of India, the seat of govern- ment having been removed to Delhi, but in spite of that it is still, and will always be, the English heart of India. We stayed at the Grand Hotel, which is Europeanized to the extent of having real bath-tubs and running water, and, after months of imperfect ablutioning in a bird-dish in your room, or by pouring water over yourself with a tin dipper out of a tank, you compre- hend how dipping in the Ganges, or any stream where you can get wet all over, came to be regarded as a holy rite in India and a means of eternal salvation. Indian hotels are curious places, and the queerest thing about them is the servant problem. Everybody in India has a native servant, or two, or three of them, who are called " bearers," and they are perpetually on duty. By day they squat on their haunches in the door of their master's or mistress' room, in case the 174 THE MARATHON OF MEAL-GETTING 175 sahib or memsahib should chance to drop a handkerchief and want it picked up. At night the bearers roll themselves up, head and all, in a dirty quilt, and sleep on the stone floor across their employer's door, and you can imagine nothing more ghastly than to come home late and walk down a dimly- lighted corridor to your room past a double row of what look like sheeted corpses. Getting a meal in an Indian hotel is simply an endur- ance contest between you and the six or seven waiters who are assigned to your table. You sit down, and a long, emaciated killdee, wearing a white linen Prince Albert coat, a gay belt eight inches wide, and an elabo- rate white turban, comes and gazes at you with an expression of melancholy wonder in his soft brown eyes. You can see that he is sadly speculating about what you can possibly be doing, or desire, and how you happen to be in the dining-room, anyway. Apparently no inkling as to your real purpose having to do with food ever crosses his heathen mind. You order your meal with a deathless optimism that much experience never dims, and he salaams, his hand to his forehead, and retires. You wait, and wait, and wait. After a lapse of time long enough to prepare a ten-course banquet, another white-robed minion, twin brother to the first under- taker, arrives, and gazes tearfully at you, and you repeat your order, and he goes and does not return. Again you wait, and wait, and wait. Then No. 3 shows up. He gives you the once-over and appears more depressed than his predecessors. He likewise departs. Once more you wait, and wait, and wait. Becoming desperate you summon the head waiter, who is called the butler, and lay your grievances before him. He becomes wildly excited, and goes forth and returns with the three miscreants, on whom he appears to be heaping burning curses. You order again, for the 176 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD fourth time, and after another endless wait one of the grave-diggers straggles in with the one thing on the menu you did not order, and that you hate, and loathe, but which you eat in desperation of getting anything else. As for having a whole meal properly assembled — bread, and butter, and drink, and meat and vegetables — at one and the same time, the thing is utterly impos- sible. They bring your bread after you have finished your caje noir, and you never get your potatoes until after you have devoured the last bite of meat. I lost ten pounds, and my hopes of Heaven, trying to get my tea with my breakfast instead of afterwards. But I never succeeded in getting it. Everything is served in courses. You have to begin with soup and go on to nuts, and if you try to skip you wreck the whole system and have to go back and start with the soup over again. No Indian can do anything alone. Twelve men came to deliver my trunk. They argued for five minutes about where to place it, and just as I thought murder was about to be done, two of them right-ended it in the spot I had designated at first. But all wanted tips. The only time an Indian really becomes alive is when he is demanding a " prisint." " Backsheesh " is the first word that he lisps in infancy, and the last murmur that flutters across his lips in death. He is avid for money, with the desperate greed of the poor whose stomachs are always clamouring for food. Of course the place to which all foreigners want to go first is the Black Hole of Calcutta, where a hundred and twenty-six English people perished in one night during the Mutiny, so closely were they packed in a foul little room, and where one of the few survivors kept himself alive by sucking his own perspiration out of his shirt sleeve. The spot where the Black Hole was located is now mostly incorporated in a handsome new post office, o U < < > w THE BLACK HOLE OF CALCUTTA 177 and a tablet and a little railed-in space alone mark the place of the tragedy. Another place of interest in Calcutta is the Hindu temple to Kali. Kali was Shiva's wife, and she is the goddess of vengeance, who had to be propitiated and to whom a daily sacrifice of a human being was made until the English came to rule in India and forced the Hindus to use a goat instead. When we reached the temple the sacrifice had just been offered and the ground was red with blood. Ghoulish- looking women were cutting up the little heads of kids, and the whole place simply swarmed with loathsome green flies. We were not, of course, permitted to profane the sacred spot by entering the temple, but we v/ere told that for two rupees the priest would open a door through which we could see the image of Kali. We paid, and the door was opened, and I was straining my eyes to try to get a glimpse of the hideous black statue on which was encrusted so much human blood, when suddenly I felt a curious, moist, rough sensation in my hand and arm. In a second all that I had ever heard of snakes, and thugs, and fanatical priests seek- ing foreign victims, and every other horror of India, flashed through my frightened consciousness. I was fully paralysed with fear, which was not allayed when I looked around to behold the sacred temple bull lick- ing me. These animals are permitted to roam at will and devour what they like, and in such reverence are they held that the poorest merchant will let one of them eat up all of his little stock of vegetables without daring to drive him away. Calcutta contains one of the most wonderful museums in the world. It is filled with specimens of Indian art and antiquity, and has many relics from the tomb of Buddha which are the most authentic religious relics in the world. One of the queer things in the museum is a board on 178 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD which are twenty pounds of metal taken from the stomach of a crocodile which had, apparently, an especial appetite for dainty female flesh, as among the undigested surplus are dozens of the anklets and bracelets and nose- rings worn by women. We left Calcutta at night for Darjeeling, and had our first experience of Indian sleeping-cars, which are a great improvement on American ones. Each sleeper has two compartments to a car. Each compartment has a couch along each wall, and two wooden shelves that let down and do duty as upper berths. The com- partments are almost as roomy as a Harlem flat, and have a table, a comfortable willow chair that can be moved about, and a camp chair, and each has its bathroom. There is also an electric fan in each compartment, and if you do not have to sleep on the upper shelf they are the perfection of comfort in travelling. In India everyone carries his own bedding, so each of us had a big bag with a wadded quilt, called a razzia, which was spread down over the couch at night, two blankets, two sheets, two pillow-cases, and a pillow, which were packed in a bag like a mail sack, and which were cared for by our native servants. By morning we had arrived at Kurseong, only nine- teen miles from the border of Tibet, and we found a different-looking race of people. In Calcutta we had seen the brown Bengali, thin to emaciation, with deep, sunken, wistful eyes, and straight features. Here were a people who showed their kinship to the Chinese, and were big, and fierce, and flat-nosed, and yellow like the Mongolians. The women were walking jewellery stores. They were loaded down with necklaces of coral, and turquoise, and amber beads, and wore rows upon rows of silver rupees strung so they overlapped each other. They had on so many bracelets and anklets that they clattered like a hardware store when they walked. THE BLACK HOLE OF CALCUTTA 179 One young woman, wrapped in a red and gold sari, was evidently the family savings bank, for she was not only adorned with dozens of necklaces and bracelets and anklets, but had so many rings on her toes, with so many little bells, and such gorgeous plates over each toe-nail, that her feet from the instep down were hidden. At Siliguri we took a little narrow-gauge railroad for the balance of the way to Darjeeling. It is the most absurd little road in the world, for sometimes you go forward, and sometimes you go back, and two men sit on the front of the funny little engine and pour sand out of a funnel on the rails on the bad bends. But wheezing, and snorting, and gasping for breath, some- how the little toy train climbs up a thousand feet every hour. Now you are on the brink of a precipice that makes you dizzy to look down. Now you are running through dusty and dried-up jungles, with monkeys chattering at you from the trees. Now you go through miles and miles of terraced mountain sides planted in tea, but always you go up, and up, and on, and on towards the great impenetrable wall of mountains that shuts off India on the north from the balance of the world. When we arrived at Darjeeling we were set upon by coolie women who do the portering. They were under- sized, stumpy-looking females, but they had incredible strength, and shouldered a trunk and marched off with it as easily as I did my wrist-bag. A man who is the principal of the boys' school at Darjeeling told me that he had a small upright piano shipped to him, and that one of these women slung it on her back and, alone and unaided, carried it three-quarters of a mile up a steep hill to his house. She only charged ten annas for the job, but being a liberal soul he gave her a rupee, which is about forty-five cents in our money. These women have many husbands. Probably no one 180 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD man would dare tackle such Amazons without the support of his brother men. On Sunday the market was very gay, crowded with the hill women who had come down to trade. They had carried down their babies in baskets on their backs, and were gorgeously dressed with earrings six and eight inches long, and queer head-dresses in the shape of a heart covered with dark red cloth and sewn with gold and turquoise beads. The pious wore a silver casket the size of a soap-dish suspended around their necks by two-inch wide silver chains. In this casket were charms and prayers. The women also brought things to sell, which were spread on the ground on cloths — egg plants no bigger than an egg, tomatoes the size of your thumb, piles of onions, and stacks of red peppers, little cheeses with sage in them, and some sort of a queer, whitish-looking drink that was so potent that after a few nips at the bottle the drinker would be inspired to get up and execute outlandish dances. Darjeeling is a city of about thirty-five thousand inhabitants. It is built in a gash in the mountains on either side of the great Ran jit River, and every street in it is a spiral ladder that takes your breath and tor- tures the muscles of your legs to climb. The scenery is the most superb that ever mortal eye rested upon, for every view sweeps the valley and takes in the whole section of the Himalayan mountain range, of which Mount Kin- kinchunja is the chief peak. No words can describe the majesty of these great glaciers, that take on a new and added wonder as every cloud sweeps across their eternal snows, and every different light of sun and moon strikes it into another phase of beauty. Six miles from Darjeeling, and fifteen hundred feet higher up, is a knoll called Tiger Hill, from which the best view of this marvel of nature may be obtained, and thither we went to see the sun rise. We were awakened at three o'clock in the morning, " LET THERE BE LIGHT " 181 and in that darkest hour before the dawn I set forth in a kind of litter called a " dandy," that was carried by five coolies. So steep is the road that it takes two hours to make the journey. At first it was pitch black, so that I could not even see my bearers. Then came a dim light, and I shuddered at the brinks of precipices along which we made our way. Then more light, with glimpses of lovely mountain views. Then the twilight just before day, and we reached the summit of Tiger Hill, where a big bonfire had been lighted, and hot coffee made, and we thawed out a little, for the thin air of that great height was bitterly cold. In the semi-dark we waited for the dawn. Before us lay the great Himalaya mountains, rising more than twenty-eight thousand feet high, in a dark mass that seemed to reach the very sky and shut us away from the balance of the world. Then came a little, wan, pale fight, and we could see the valley swimming in mist like a grey sea, and across it Kinkinchunja taking shape, white and ghostlike, clothed in eternal snow. Another breathless moment of waiting and the sun, a golden ball rimmed with green, came up like thunder over the horizon, and the great sweep of snow-clad mountains blushed a pink, that turned to crimson, and gold, and saffron, and flooded the world with a beauty so ineffable and sublime it brought the sting of tears to your eyes and made you want to go down on your knees, for you saw God in his Holy Temple. It was the miracle of creation when God said : " Let there be light," and there was fight. And then you turned to the left, and far, far away, a hundred and twenty miles as the crow flies, towered a single, snow-white wedge in lonely grandeur above all else. It was Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world, the highest measured elevation on earth. All that day I sat at my window at the hotel watching the great panorama of the Himalayan mountains, but 182 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD towards night clouds rolled in. There was a sunset of such colour and glory as dazzled my vision, and then Kinkinchunja veiled his august face, nor did we see it again, though we waited three more days for just one glimpse. But I had seen the greatest sight on earth. That memory was mine for ever. CHAPTER XX THE GANGES, INDIA'S HOLY RIVER The ruling passion of the Indian is travel. The rail- road makes an extremely low rate, only a third of a cent a mile for native passengers, with the result that every train is packed like the subway express in New York in the rush hour. Family ties are very strong among the Indians, and they visit backwards and forwards among their forty- seventh cousins. Mostly, however, they go on pil- grimages, for to bathe in certain streams washes away one's sins, and to drink of certain wells is equivalent to being vaccinated against the smallpox, or being inoculated with the 'flu serum. And, anyway, they just naturally like to gad about, and so when an Indian manages to accumulate a few annas he spends them riding on the " ter-rain." And he gets the worth of his money in thrill and excitement, and long-drawn-out pleasure. He doesn't buy his ticket beforehand, and saunter down to the station at the last moment, and board the train as it is moving out. Not much. Having oodles of time that is not money, he goes to the station hours before the train is scheduled to depart, and spends the intervening time in blissful gossip with other passengers. At night the floors of the stations are literally covered with natives asleep, or squatting in groups, eating and smoking. You will often see a whole family — father, mother, and children — asleep together on the station floor, quite as much at home in a rail- road station as they would be elsewhere, for they 183 184 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD have no beds anywhere, and are accustomed to making their toilettes in public. Finally, when the train does arrive, there are such shrieks and cries, such noise and confusion as would seem to indicate that another mutiny is taking place, but it is only the natives fighting their way into their railroad carriages, and pulling, and hauling, and pushing to get themselves and their bundles stowed away. After the train gets under way the more adventurous among them begin to try to find a more comfortable place in which to ride, and at night they sneak back, under cover of darkness, and attempt to get into the first-class carriages. This makes night travel exciting enough for Europeans, for at almost every station you are roused from your sleep by a stealthy brown hand trying to raise the shutters of your compart- ment. It is so hot that it is impossible to keep the windows locked, and more than once men climbed into our compartments, and we had to chase them out. The natives, however, are as timid as rabbits, and they fled before the shake of a dressing-gown and a good loud American yell of " get out of here!" The thing in India that no foreigner ever under- stands is the sacred law of caste, and when you find out that the Brahmin, the highest caste of all, is sub- divided into more than four hundred varieties of caste, your brain reels, and you give up trying to comprehend it. All that your simple Occidental mind can take in is that caste is the most sacred thing on earth in India, and that its laws are immutable. It settles beyond all argument what a man may be, and do, and eat, and wear, and to break its laws is to commit a sin that can only be purged out with great penances and much expense. The reply that our servants made to us continually when we asked them to do WHERE " CASTE " ORIGINATED 185 certain things was, " Very sorry, your leddyship, but it is against my caste. I cannot do it." And although they had the scantiest of food — servants in India feed themselves — they refused to take fruit, or candy, or any parts of our lunch. We were infidels, and therefore it would defile them to eat our food, which had not been properly cooked by a person of their own caste. It is caste that necessitates the innumerable servants required in an Indian household. A man and his wife, living alone, cannot get along on less than eleven or twelve, for it is against the caste of the man who buys the food for a household to bring it home from the market. It is against the caste of the cook to wash the pots. The man who makes your beds will demean his caste by sweeping the floor, and so on. If a high-caste Hindu is eating he must throw away his food, no matter how hungry he is, if the shadow of a low-caste man falls upon it. It defiles a high- caste man to touch a low-caste man, and it amused me no little to watch how this matter was arranged in the taking up of railway fares at the little stations. The ticket chopper, as we would say, stood at the entrance to the track. When a high-caste man came along he would salaam with his hands to his forehead, and then hold out his hand for the money, which the princeling dropped into it from a great distance. When a man of his own caste came along the money would be passed from hand to hand, but when a low-caste man came by he dropped his fare on the ground, and the ticket taker stooped and picked it up after he had gone. When the railroads were built in India everyone wondered how the caste problem would be solved, since it was defiling for a high-caste man to touch a low-caste man, and all castes had to be herded in together in the third-class carriages. 186 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD A priest settled the matter by a happy inspiration. He announced that steam is one of the thousand and eight different incarnations of Vishnu, and, therefore, when one rode on the steam cars one was in the presence of a god where all caste is obliterated. Hence when a high-caste Brahmin is about to travel he washes his caste mark from his brow, and takes off his sacred white thread, and rubs elbows with outcast street sweepers and grave-diggers without defilement while he is on the train, but the journey over, he resumes his white thread and caste mark and once more becomes a superior being. We arrived at Benares, the holy city of India, about ten o'clock of a burning, sizzling morning, and were driven through streets that were almost axle- deep in dust, to a dusty compound in which is situated the very worst hotel in all the world. Bar none. It is a long, low, rambling building, flush with the ground, with unswept floors, and such rotten food that we fell back upon our malted milk bottles for sustenance, and I'll say that malted milk is a slim diet on which to sight-see. It was impossible to close either doors or windows on account of the heat, and at night jackals howled around the compound, and by day a snake-charmer, with a large python coiled about his neck, and a bag of assorted reptiles, including a few cobras and other venomous beasts, squatted without my door. But, somehow, it all seemed to strike the note of this weird city that is like no other city on earth, for it is the embodiment, as is no other place, of the super- stition and fanaticism of heathendom. If you were well fed and comfortable you could not get the " feel " of Benares and its hordes of pilgrims any more than you could get the spirit of Paris WHERE "CASTE" ORIGINATED 187 if you were shabby and lacked the price of the smart restaurants. Benares is the holy city of India. To it comes, at some time during his life, every Hindu who can possibly raise the price. A man will take the last anna he possesses and make the pilgrimage to Benares, happy and content to starve out his few remaining years. All over India you see women with shaven heads. These are widows who have begged their way to Benares, and who have papers signed by the priests of different temples at which they have worshipped, attesting the fact, and who have thereby removed from themselves some of the curse of widowhood. To die at Benares assures one of a passport to heaven. Therefore, many wealthy rajahs, and even merchants who have accumulated fortunes, come to Benares and build themselves houses in which to pass the latter end of their lives, so that death may catch them in the right spot. To die with your feet in the Ganges is to pass immediately into the abode of the blessed, so the sick are often borne in litters through the streets to the river and have their end thereby frequently hastened. The city is thirteen miles around, and to make the pilgrimage of its circumference by measuring one's length on the ground, like a measuring worm, is an act by which one acquires great merit. You may see hundreds of pilgrims going through this ordeal any day, and they appear to be combining piety and pleasure, for at night they gather together in picnic groups, and chatter like magpies, while the devout come forth, and feed them with bowls of rice, and platters heaped with the greasy food the Indians love. There are hundreds upon hundreds of temples and sacred wells in Benares, and the temples are crowded with worshippers morning, noon and night. One of 188 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD the most interesting of these temples is the Monkey Temple, so called because of the enormous number of monkeys that live in and around it. By accident we stumbled on a pretty scene there. Some woman of wealth and social standing, judging by the gorgeousness of the saris, and the amount of jewellery she and her friends had on, was making the hair offering. This was in fulfilment of a vow she had made that if the gods would send her a son she would present his hair when he was ten years old to the temple. Accordingly, accompanied by her relatives and female friends, she had brought the lad, who was an exceed- ingly handsome boy, to the temple to have his hair cut. The assemblage looked like a gorgeous bouquet in their splendid silks as they squatted in the court- yard, the boy in their midst. The barber came in and soaped the boy's head pre- paratory to shaving it. Then came a halt. He was holding the women up for money. He demanded two hundred rupees to go on with his job. The mother protested, pleaded, argued, threatened. We couldn't understand a word that she said, but the language of the stung is unmistakable the world over. It is a universal volapuk. At last, with many gougings down into the secret folds of feminine apparel, the sum was made up and the barber proceeded. So did we, stopping only to smile as a monkey reached down and snatched a bead necklace from a child and then angrily threw away the beads as it discovered the glassware was not edible. In and out of the narrow, filthy streets, foul with rank odours, we went to the Golden Temple, and the Cow Temple where the sacred cow is worshipped, and where fat bulls flattened us against the walls as they shouldered their way through the crowds, and to sacred well after sacred well where the people throw THE PRICE OF A HAIRCUT 189 offerings into the water, and then drink the vile liquid that has been polluted by the decaying sacrifices of thousands of other previous worshippers. That any- one should survive after drinking a single drop of this contaminated fluid proves the well to be indeed possessed of miraculous power. Then on to the bazaars — streets full of the shining brass ware for which Benares is famous ; then to the silk bazaars, where you may buy kincobs, a gauze- like fabric that is like spun sunshine, and such brocades as make a woman's soul — heathen or Christian — sing for joy. At five o'clock in the morning we went down to the Ganges to see the most wonderful sight in all the world — forty thousand people at the highest pitch of fanaticism performing the most sacred rite of their religion. At Benares the Ganges is a broad, yellow stream, with a high bluff on one side and a low-lying bank on the other. The river is a holy stream the whole of its length, but the seven miles on which Benares is situated is, for some reason, of peculiar sacredness, and the whole of this space on the bluff side is lined with palaces, and mosques, and temples, and rest- houses that have been built for pilgrims, and that rise from the water's edge and tower almost as high as New York skyscrapers. Many of these buildings are very old, and their faded pinks and greenish-grey walls make a wonderful background for the great religious drama that is enacted every morning at their feet. For even before the sun rises the multitude begins to gather in order that they may greet the day with their orisons. Beggars and pilgrims and holy men in rags, men and women clad in silken robes all the colours of the spectrum, come down the " ghats," as the wide steps that lead to the river are called, all bearing in their hands little brass jars. 190 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD They stop for an instant on the river's bank, holding out their arms in invocation to the sun as it rises above the horizon ; then they wade into the stream. Some immerse themselves seven times ; some seven times seven times. Some stand waist deep in the river and let the water trickle through their fingers. Some dip the water up in their brass jars and pour it over themselves. Some sit in the Buddha attitude on the edge of the river, letting the water wash over them. All drink deep of the water, notwithstanding a sewer may be emptying at their feet the filth of the city, and that the unmentionable refuse of the burning ghat may be floating by them. All are rapt, oblivious of the world, alone with their souls and their gods in that multitude. They speak to no one, notice no one, for if they break the thread of their devotion and utter one word in the wrong place in their mantrans, or prayers, they must go back to the start and do it all over again, and as this takes hours it is a serious matter. Backwards and forwards past this strange scene we rowed in a boat, as little noticed by the devotees as if we had been invisible. We saw the palaces wicked maharajahs had built in which to spend their last days, and wipe out a lifetime of evil by dying in Benares. We saw the fine rest-houses for pilgrims by building which rich men acquired merit. We saw the Temple of the Tirthankers where Kim's Llama, in Kipling's story, stayed when he rested in his journeyings in search of his river of healing. We saw ornate temples that European women are not allowed to enter because of the gross sensuality of the carvings and pictures and statues within. We saw men and women come down to the river and bathe and then go to the yellow-robed priests under the umbrellas and have their foreheads painted with the white bars of Siva and the curved marks of WHERE FAITH PREVENTS INFECTION 191 Vishnu. We saw a naked man, thin as a skeleton, painted white with ashes until he looked like a corpse, stand high on a tower with his face to the sun, and hour after hour, in a voice that echoed up and down the river, scream the name of his god. We saw the charred head of a corpse from the burn- ing ghat wash up against our boat, and the boatman callously pushed it away with his pole, and we watched it float down the stream, where two vultures fought over it. And we saw the burning ghat where the bodies of the dead are brought as soon as life is extinct. They are lashed to two bamboo poles that make a crude litter. A red cloth is put over the women and a white one over the men, and chains of marigold blossoms are wound around them. The bearers place the body on the steps so that the waters of the Ganges may wash over it. Then wood is corded up, about three layers of it, and the body is placed upon it. More wood is put upon it. Then the eldest son walks seven times around the bier reciting prayers and sprinkling a little water from the Ganges on it. Then he obtains the sacred fire from the priest and fires the pyre. Not to have a son to light your funeral pyre is the greatest misfortune that can happen to an Indian. When the body has been consumed and the wood burned down to ash the son departs, throwing water out of a brass jar over his shoulder to " make the love and forget," the guide said. The rich were burned with sandalwood, and then the air was heavy with perfume. At night we went back and saw the moon rise over the river and turn it to silver, and touch the palaces and temples into unearthly beauty. On his tower the skeleton-like fanatic still cried aloud to his god, and the fires of the burning ghat rose high and fierce against the blackness of the sky. And down by the river's brink, where the dead had 192 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD been burned, women with hands like talons pawed over the ashes looking for bits of jewellery — the armlets, the anklets, and rings that might have survived the flames when the women were burned who were for ever done with all the vanities of earth. CHAPTER XXI THE JEWEL-BOX OF INDIA God was good to me. It was granted me to see the Taj Mahal for the first time at midnight with a full tropic moon shining down upon it. It was past bedtime when the slow little train finally- crawled into Agra, and landed us at the shrine at which so many passionate pilgrims come to worship. We were travel-worn and weary, and dirty beyond belief ; nevertheless four of us who had an imperishable romance in our hearts set forth at once in quest of the vision that had lured us half around the world. Imagine us, then, scurrying as fast as the little Indian ponies could take us through the dark and silent city. Half of the population lay on the ground asleep before its doorways. Pariah dogs ran out, snapped at our wheels, and howled aloud to the moon. Presently we pulled up in a great empty courtyard, where the caravans used to camp in olden times when the pilgrims came to worship at the mosque. All was still, and silent, and dark. The heavy doorways were shut in the splendid gateway, but the sound of wheels brought out a ghostly old man with a long beard, who was wrapped in a white sheet, and who bore in his hand a lantern of pierced iron that was a yard long. He opened a little doorway in the big door and we passed through, and the Taj Mahal, the most perfect piece of architecture that the hands of man have ever wrought, burst upon our enraptured gaze. Straight before us rose the tomb of the little Indian queen, a fairy structure of marble and jewels, and between us and it lay a little artificial lake in which it was mirrored 193 194 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD in shimmering silver. On either side of the tomb, across marble paved courts, rose two great red sandstone buildings, one a mosque and the other a rest-house, to balance it and emphasize every line of its white beauty, and all of this was set in a great garden full of tropic trees and flowers, where the air is always heavy with perfume. For I know not how long we threaded our way through the paths of the dusky garden to different places from which we got a new view — now from the little platform across the tiny lake, now from a clump of trees near the mosque, now from the parapet along the river's brink — for the Taj is built on a bluff overlook- ing the Jumna — now from the platform by the rest-house, where the moon caught the jewels on the dome and made them flash like a queen's diadem, and then, at last, we found ourselves on the terrace, in a silence no one broke, even for an ejaculation of wonder: we sat and gazed, and gazed, at this masterpiece of the builder's art until we were drunk with its beauty. And we wondered over the story of this woman, whose husband so loved her and so mourned her that he built for her this sepulchre which has been the marvel of the ages, and which is the most splendid monument ever reared to a human love. Many centuries ago, in the time of the great Mogul, Akbar, a Persian adventurer named Mirza Ghiyas Beg, came to the court of Akbar seeking his fortune. He was so poor that when, on the way, a daughter was born to him he left the child to perish by the road- side rather than burden himself with another mouth to feed. The mother wept so inconsolably, however, for her lost babe that, moved by her grief, he went back to fetch the little girl, and he was only just in time, for as he reached the babe a huge serpent was already coiling about it. Well it was for Mirza Ghiyas Beg that he succoured the child, for, little as he dreamed it, she held the for- THE LOVE STORY OF A PRINCESS 195 tunes of the family in her little pink palm. For she grew up to be a woman of such wonderful beauty and charm that the king's son, Jahangir, fell in love with her and married her, and she advanced her father and brother to positions of great power, and married her niece, Mumtaz-I-Mahal, to Shah Jahan, her step-son. Shah Jahan had made a marriage of state before he married Mumtaz-I-Mahal, but his match with her was a love match, and from the day of their marriage to the day of her death she held his heart in her little henna-dyed hands. She had inherited her aunt's brilliant mind and wonderful executive ability, as well as her beauty, and she was her husband's friend and counsellor and guide. She died when she was thirty- nine, dying in camp when her last babe was born, for she was Shah Jahan's inseparable companion even when he went to war. When Mumtaz-I-Mahal knew that she was dying she made Shah Jahan promise that he would build for her a tomb that would immortalize their love, and out of this promise and his grief over her loss flowered the Taj Mahal. It took twenty thousand men seventeen years to build it, and the cost was so great, and the taxes levied on the people so heavy, that revolt after revolt took place, and these were put down with such a heavy hand that the public roads were lined with the bodies of the men who had been executed, and whose rotting corpses were nailed up in public places as warnings of the fate of those who rebelled. No words can ever describe the beauty of the Taj Mahal, or give any idea of its splendour. Everyone is familiar with the picture of the beautiful white marble dome, rising like a bubble from a great plat- form at whose four corners stand slender minarets, themselves ending in smaller white domes. But no picture and no printed word can give any 196 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD idea of the wondrous beauty of the great doorway, inlaid with texts from the Koran in black marble, or the great windows filled with pierced marble carved in a lace-like design, and banded all the way around with garlands of flowers made of jewels. Nor can any picture or word tell you of the loveliness of the dados that line the inner walls, on which are carved flowers in low relief, so delicate and fine they look like ghost flowers, and which are surmounted by bands of flowers inlaid in semi-precious stones, jade and jasper, and sapphire, and coral, and moss agate, and cornelian, and agate, and lapis lazuli, sometimes as many as forty different varieties of stones going to make up a single flower. Just under the dome are the tombs of Mumtaz-I- Mahal and Shah Jahan. They are surrounded by a screen of carved marble bordered with this same pietra dura work made of jewels, and the tombs themselves are covered with this costly inlay, that of Mumtaz-I- Mahal being especially exquisite. On one side of it are inlaid the ninety-nine glorious names of Allah, which constitute the soul's passport to heaven, and over the balance of it are sprawled the flowers that symbolized the woman he loved to Shah Jahan. There are lilies for her purity, passion flowers for their love, lotus blooms for the peace of death into which she had passed, and in and out among them all twine the jasmine flower, in memory of the jasmine tower in which they had lived their happy life together. When Lord Curzon was viceroy of India he did a great work in restoring and protecting India's famous ruins. He too, like Shah Jahan, was a great lover, and when his wife, who was Mary Leiter, a Chicago woman, and to whom he was greatly devoted, died, he asked that he might be permitted to place a lamp to her memory above the tomb of Mumtaz-I-Mahal. This permission was granted, and every night this lantern of love burns in memory of the little Indian queen and the American girl. WHERE JEWELS ARE SYMBOLS 197 Akbar and his grandson, Shah Jahan, were both great builders, but Akbar's medium was red sand- stone while Shah Jahan's was white marble. The great red sandstone fort that Akbar built at Agra is still so perfect that the English use it as a barracks, and super-groomed Tommies stand guard at the gate through which you enter to visit the white mosque and palace that Shah Jahan erected more than three hundred years ago, and which still stand, things of flawless beauty. The palace is like an Arabian Night's dream come true. For here are all the splendours and wonders of the Orient of which you have dreamed, but which you never really believed could possibly exist, and which you still view with an eye that doubts the truth of what it beholds. The palace is as intact as a modern house would be from which the tenants had just moved, and you have no more trouble in visual- izing the life that went on there hundreds of years ago than you have in picturing the way the people lived in a recently- vacated apartment. You come first to the great court where Shah Jahan held audience, sitting on a little jewelled balcony, on either side of which were gratings from behind which the ladies of the harem could look on. In this open court sat the courtiers, and before the judgment- seat anyone with a grievance might come, exactly as they could to Haroun-al-Raschid. They even show you the post that held a silken rope that led to the street, so that the humblest might pull it and ring a bell that would reach the king's ears and gain him admittance, and on one occasion, so the legend goes, an overladen donkey chewing on the end of the rope rang the bell. He was gravely brought before the king, who, observing the weight he bore, gave orders that only so many pounds of burden should be put upon a dumb beast's back thereafter. From the audience chamber you go along vaulted 198 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD halls, past the great tank in which fish were kept, and where the king and courtiers amused themselves in angling, past another great court in which were held titanic combats between wild elephants and tigers and unicorns, and so come to the women's apartments. Here the walls are of carved marble inlaid with bands of flowers made of precious stones. Here is a little tiny mosque where the women came to pray that Allah would grant them souls or, perhaps, to ask to bear sons so that they might find favour in their lords' eyes. Here was a great grape garden built hundreds of feet up in the air. Here are baths in rooms whose walls are made of little insets of mirrors so that they gleam like a cave of diamonds. Here are subterranean chambers where one could find coolness even on the hottest summer day. Here are the zenana prisons where fierce Nubian women stood guard over the ladies of the harem who broke its iron discipline, and here is a deep, dark well in which, tradition says, many a dark-eyed beauty, sewn up in a sack, has been dropped into the waters of the Jumna River flowing beneath. And here is the zenana bazaar wherein it was death for a man to set foot, for here the ladies of the harem came to shop with unveiled faces from the women merchants who brought for their inspection kincobs, and silks, and embroideries, and jewels, and soft rugs, and all the trinketry that women love. And here, the jewel of the whole palace, was the Jasmine Tower where Shah Jahan and Mumtaz-I- Mahal lived, and that was so called because the walls are covered with an inlay of jasmine flowers made of jewels. Here in the walls of marble are pockets only big enough for a woman's slender hand to go, in which she kept her jewels, the first wall safes on record. Here are floors of marble through which running water flowed over gold and silver inlay to temper the heat. Here are fountains that spout rose water, and the rings THE FAMOUS JASMINE TOWER 199 in the walls from which were hung silk embroidered awnings. And from the tower you may see the very sights to-day along the river road that Mumtaz-I-Mahal and Shah Jahan looked down upon — the caravans of camels, the trains of laden donkeys, the slow, lumbering bullock carts, the men on gaily-caparisoned Arabian horses, the women going down to the river for water with their brass jars on their heads. So little does life change in India. * Not far out from Agra is Fatehpur Sikri, which Akbar built and which is one of the most curious deserted cities in the world. It is constructed of almost imperishable sandstone, and has a vast area of buildings still in fairly good preservation — a million times better protection against the weather, it would seem, than the average Indian dwelling-place. Yet in them no human creature lives, which is an amazing thing in this over-populated country. According to the story, for a long time Akbar had no legal son, at which he grieved greatly. Hearing that at Fatehpur Sikri there was a holy man who worked miracles, Akbar thrice journeyed to him, asking that he would petition the gods to send him a son. Twice the holy man refused, declaring he had nothing to do with such mundane matters, but at last the saint's son, an infant of six months, offered to give his life in order that the great king might realize his desire. The saint then relented and told Akbar that he would beseech the gods to send him a son, but that he must send his wife to dwell in the saint's household. This was done, and a son was born, and in gratitude Akbar caused to be built this splendid city, but it proved to be so unhealthy that seventeen years later it was abandoned, and to-day only the bats inhabit it. When the saint died Akbar erected to his memory a tomb of the most exquisite beauty, a little gem of pierced marble and sandalwood, and gold and silver inlay. 200 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD For himself, Akbar erected a pavilion which he called the House of Dreams, it is four square, and open to all the winds that blow. From it leads a subterranean passage to the houses of his four wives, for each of whom he built a house in the style of her own people. He had a liberal taste both in wives and religion, and he had a Mohammedan wife, a Christian wife, a Hindu wife, and a Turkish wife. One of these little houses is so beautiful that it has been said of it, "if it were not the most minute of palaces it is the most gigantic of jewel-cases." Akbar was the Teddy Roosevelt of his day, an athlete who tired out his courtiers and generals by his activities, and who was interested in every movement and dabbled in every art. In a day of great religious fanaticism he not only extended protection to all religious creeds, but tried to institute a new religion by taking the best of all the different creeds and combining them into one. One of the most interesting buildings still left standing at Fatehpur Sikri is the Diwan-I-Khas, or private hall, which consists of a big room in the midst of which is a central pillar, crowned by an immense capital, radiat- ing from which to the four corners are four stone cause- ways enclosed by open balustrades. In the centre sat the emperor, whilst the four corners were occupied by different sects with whom he thrashed out theological questions. In front of his judgment-seat is a great stone to which was tethered the mad elephant which trampled to death all who were found guilty. They got swift action in those days. At Fatehpur Sikri there is a great pavement laid out in squares like a backgammon board. Here Akbar and his courtiers played with gaily-dressed nautch girls for living pieces, who moved as they were directed. The winner got the girls. Akbar probably was a good player, as his harem was reputed to have had twenty- five hundred women in it. WHIMS OF A DESPOT 201 One of Akbar's pleasing habits was to carry about with him a box of sweetmeats, in one end of which were poisoned candies, and in the other good. Of course no guest who was asked to take a bit of candy dared refuse, and he never knew for an hour or so whether he had been signally honoured or doomed to death. In the end Akbar guessed wrong himself, and by mistake ate a poisoned sweetmeat destined for his dearest foe, and so perished. The mausoleum of Akbar at Sikandra, also situated near Agra, is very beautiful. It is in the midst of a great garden, and is a beautiful structure of red sand- stone inlaid with white marble. All around the terrace on which the cenotaph of the Greatest Mogul of them all rests are screens of wonderful, carved marble, and at the foot of the tomb is a little white marble pillar two and a half feet high which, according to tradition, was once covered with gold, and on it for many years the Koh-i-nur rested. Usually a light is kept burning at the head of a tomb, but instead of this the great diamond was put there in its stead, a light that could never go out nor fail. CHAPTER XXII DARK PASSAGES IN INDIA'S HISTORY The great mutiny in India, when the natives arose and wiped out whole communities of English as if they had been so many flies, and when native soldiers turned against their officers the guns they had been trained to use, took place in '57, but the horror of its memory and the dread of its repetition still lie like the ghost of an impalpable fear over the land. Everywhere you sense the tension of those who live in the midst of an ever-present danger, and who thank God every night of their lives that one more day has gone by without the sword that is suspended over their heads by a single hair having fallen. Always in India there are mutterings and murmurings of discontent. Always there are firebrands trying to stir up the passions of four hundred million densely- ignorant and fanatically-superstitious people. Always there are reactionaries like Ghandi who cry " India for the Indians," and who want to sweep away all modern progress and go back to the old times when human sacrifices were offered to Kali in the temples, and widows were burnt on their husband's funeral pyres, and black cow dung was given as medicine. And in the midst of this turmoil are just a handful of sane, cool Englishmen, sitting on the throttle-valve and calmly waiting for something to blow up. And never turning a hair while they wait, though they breathe a sigh of relief, and take another peg, whenever another festival or New Year's celebration is safely over, and the crowds that had gathered to observe it have dispersed and gone home. 202 OUT OF THE RUINS OF REVOLUTION 203 The chief thing in an Indian's life is his religion. He is, as a general thing, either a Hindu or a Moham- medan, and these two sects entertain for each other the same feeling that existed between the Protestants and the Catholics in the time of Bloody Mary. There are also numbers of petty native states with cherished feuds that they would like to settle with their enemies. It is England's iron hand in a velvet glove that holds all of these warring elements steady and makes them keep the peace, and if England's power over India were removed to-day the whole place would go to pot to-morrow. A dozen little kings would start warlets. Religious fanatics would burn each other at the stake, and the schools, the commerce, the manufactories, the culture, the sanitation— everything that we lump under the name of modern progress— would be swept away. That is why many of even the most radical Indian reformers do not wish England to relinquish India entirely. They want England to protect them, but give them the same privileges of self-government that Australia and Canada have, although out of a population of over four hundred million less than fourteen million can read or write. In a word, they want England to hold the bag and give them the contents, which is a bit thick, as the English say. Nations are even less grateful than individuals, and India has no appreciation of all she owes to England. So there is always that sense of coming storm in the air, and nowhere do you get it more clearly than at Lucknow and Cawnpore, which were the scenes of the bloodiest horrors of the mutiny of '57. Lucknow is a fine city with beautiful, wide streets, well paved and clean, and with that atmosphere of law and order that England stamps wherever she rules. We drove through lovely parks and a splendid botanical garden to the palace of the King of Oudh, a great sprawling structure set in the midst of a 204 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD beautiful garden, but chiefly remarkable for the number of chandeliers it contains. In a single room there were dozens of them, hung as closely as they could be set on the ceiling, and all of ornate-coloured glass and gilt. Beneath them was a silver throne and a silver sofa, a queer mixture of the splendid and tawdry. It was the long-continued misrule of the kings of Oudh which finally compelled the British to take over the kingdom of Oudh, which was one of the principal causes that led to the mutiny of '57, and which was precipitated by the accident of the native troops having been given bullets smeared with grease made of cow fat. Of course the most interesting thing in Lucknow is the Residency, where all the English took refuge during the mutiny. There were two thousand souls in all housed in this one building — a thousand and five men, the balance women and children — and for five months this little force held sixty thousand natives at bay, a feat of dogged heroism that is only paralleled by the English during the last Great War, when the " contemptible little army " barred the way of the whole German force at Ypres. It was a fiercely hot summer, that of the mutiny, with a plague of flies,* and every day the little company was thinned by disease as well as by the fire of the enemy. The women and children were put into a subterranean chamber, where there was no light except what filtered in through the chinks of a barri- caded window, and in a little cuddy hole of this cellar a Scotswoman, Jessie Brown, dreamed that she heard the skirl of the bagpipes playing " The Campbells are Coming " ; and lo, a day or so later Sir Colin Campbell did come with his Highlanders, bringing the prayed- for relief. The Residency is now only a beautiful ruin, but because its brave defenders kept their flag flying in the face of such odds a special order of the British OUT OF THE RUINS OF REVOLUTION 205 Government was granted giving to it the right to keep its flag flying in perpetuity. So night and day the Union Jack flutters from the top of the broken tower of the Residency, the only flag in England's far-flung dominion that is never furled. Cawnpore is only another chapter, written in blood, of the story of the mutiny. Here the English, finding themselves hopelessly outnumbered, accepted Nana Sahib's offer of an armistice and his pledge to let them depart in safety. The survivors, numbering four hundred and fifty, embarked on boats in the river, when they were instantly fired upon. The thatch of the boat took fire, and while the flames raged, sepoys sprang into the river and butchered women and children. Presently orders came from Nana Sahib to kill no more women and children, and a hundred and fifty, who were still alive, were taken to the native quarters and confined in a dark pen of a room. Later on these were all slaughtered. The walls were stained with blood as high as a woman's breast, and the bodies, the dead and the merely wounded, were flung into a well together. And it is of these things that the English think when they look upon the beautiful white marble statue that has been erected as a memorial above the well in which the martyrs of civilization in the East have long since turned to dust. The ghat leading down to the Ganges, where the massacre took place, was originally a burning ghat. It is enclosed on three sides with i wall in which are wide windows. Here, in olden times, the widows used to watch the funeral pyres of their husbands, and at a certain period of the burning they would leap into the flames and be consumed themselves. This was considered a most becoming and meritorious act on the part of a wife whose husband had died, and all over India you see monuments erected to the women who perished in this way. At one place we o 206 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD saw a monument to the seven wives of a rajah who, holding hands and singing, together marched into the flames and sat down upon their husband's funeral pyre. The English stopped this custom, greatly to the regret of all concerned, even the women, and every- where the natives spoke sadly of the good old days when women showed the proper devotion to their departed spouses. When India gets Home Rule doubt- less they will reinstate this pleasing custom. An interesting story is told of one of the last cases of the suttee. An English officer, in charge of a certain district, determined to stop the practice, and he gave orders that no woman would be permitted to burn herself upon her husband's funeral pyre. Soon afterwards a very rich and powerful rajah died, and his widow sent her sons to ask permission of the officer to follow her husband in death. The officer refused. Again and again the woman sent to him, urging and praying him to let her follow the custom of her caste and race, and saying that now that her husband was dead she had no life anyway. The officer still refused, and the woman went down to the burning ghat, where she broke her bangles and put on the sackcloth of an outcast. Again she sent to the officer, saying that now she had broken with her caste and could no longer return to her home, and that she was a beggar and had no place in the world. He replied that the English Government would provide her with a home and rank greater than she had enjoyed before. She re- fused and, going out into the river, sat down on a rock with head uncovered in the baking sun, where she sat for a day and a night without food or drink. Finally the officer, becoming convinced that nothing could turn the woman from her purpose, agreed that she might burn herself on her husband's funeral pyre if her sons would sign a paper agreeing to aid in OUT OF THE RUINS OF REVOLUTION 207 stopping the custom. They did so, and, tottering with weakness, but with her face lit by a radiant smile, the woman ascended the funeral pyre and was burned alive, no moan or sign of pain escaping from her. Delhi, like Agra, is one of the wonder cities of India, and which of the two you think the more marvellous depends upon which one you see first, for both bear the stamp of the magic hand of Shah Jahan, the master builder. The palace that he built at Delhi, like the one he built at Agra, is a marvel of carved marble, of gold inlay, of pietra dura work, of colour and splendour that ravish your eye, but it lacks the splendid setting on a high bluff that the palace at Agra has. Evidently, however, Shah Jahan regarded the palace at Delhi as his greatest architectural achievement, for after lavishing upon it all the ornamentation which the fertile Oriental fancy could conceive and unlimited wealth command, he inscribed upon the walls, " If on earth there is a Paradise, it is this, Oh it is this, Oh it is this." In the audience-room of this palace was the famous peacock throne, which represented two peacocks with outspread tails made of diamonds, and rubies, and sapphires, and according to tradition the eye of one of the birds was the Koh-i-nur, and its body a single emerald, or more probably a wondrous piece of jade. When the Persians looted this palace they took away the peacock throne and broke it up and dispersed the jewels. One of the most marvellous features of the Delhi palace is its bath, which consists of suites of rooms with sunken baths whose rims are inlaid with precious stones, and whose couches for massage are of carved marble. Near Delhi is the Kutab Minar, an immense fluted red sandstone tower built by the first Pathan emperor 208 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD to celebrate his success. It is said to be the most beautiful tower in the world, and to spring from the earth with an incomparable power and grace that has never been equalled. The whole country round Delhi is one vast sepulchre, for on this site six different cities have arisen and perished, and wherever you look tottering walls and forlorn and neglected tombs mark ruined palaces and the last resting-places of the great whose very names are now forgotten. Delhi seems never to have " just growed " like most cities. Every time some individual went to work and built a complete Delhi — lock, stock, and barrel — to his own notion. The English are now engaged on that task. Several years ago, when they moved the capital there from Calcutta, they built a fine viceregal lodge and practically a new city. It proved un- healthy, and they have abandoned that, and are now constructing a seventh Delhi that is being built practically on the ruins of the great, original city, and it is being built as a whole town, just as Gary, Indiana, or any other American boom town was. Nothing in Delhi is more diverting than the mer- chants, who fight over you as dogs do over a bone. Delhi is the place where they have the loveliest em- broideries, the most beautiful shawls, the most alluring rugs that I saw in India. And it is the centre of the jewel trade. During the war there had been no travel and the English had bought sparingly, and the mer- chants were hungry for customers, so they fell upon us tooth and nail. As we alighted from our carriages at the hotel our hands were filled with cards, and oily and per- suasive voices entreated, " Please, memsahib, come my shop. I poor man. I got ten children." " Please, your honour, come my shop. You can make foot walk there, it so near." " Please, your leddyship, that man he lie. He cheat. He no got good Bokaras. FORTUNES IN JEWELS 209 I honest man. You buy me." Then the cards we already had were snatched out of our hands and torn to pieces, and others substituted. The most interesting of these merchants were the jewel dealers, whose trade was indicated by the little caps they wore. They would knock at our room doors, and, no matter how much we said " Stay out," in they came, and kneeling down on the floor they would thrust their hands into their baggy garments and pull out dirty rags, and old sardine cans, and cigarette boxes, and biscuit tins, in which, wrapped in cotton, were jewels worth a king's ransom. Out of such receptacles they would often take fifty or a hundred thousand dollars' worth of jewels. There would be a handful of pearls, great tallow drop emeralds, rubies superimposed upon rubies until they got the blood-red colour they love, sapphires, barbaric ornaments, everything to set a woman crazy with longing. One of the things for which Delhi is famous is its jewelled jade — jade carved in a design and inset with precious stones. I desired a piece of this, and looked at some in a little shop, but you never buy at once when you trade with an Indian. He asks you so much. You offer half. He declares that he cannot take an anna less, because his price is his honour. You say you don't care very much for the article, anyway, and start off. He follows you, protesting that he is a poor man, and that you are his mother, and his father, and the protector of the poor, and that he will take a little less. You relent a trifle but still stand firm, and in the end you compromise and buy. So when I came out of the store without buying, I was set upon by another bandit who assured me that the proprietor of the store was a robber, but that he himself was an honest man, and that in his store I would find just what I wanted. I asked him how far his shop was and he said three minutes' walk. I 210 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD bade him get up beside my driver and show the way, and after three-quarters of an hour's ride up the Chandi Chook, the main shopping thoroughfare, we arrived at his place. He did not have what I desired, but he found out what I wanted and he said, " Come back next day." Instead, the next day I motored fourteen miles out in the country to the tomb of Hummunum, the father of Akbar. Suddenly, out of a dark recess in the wall, a skinny brown arm shot out at me and a triumphant voice exclaimed, " Your leddyship, I got jade. See here. Buy me, I poor man." It was my jeweller. He had trailed me fourteen miles on a bicycle in all that heat, and I felt that such salesmanship was not to be resisted. I bought. CHAPTER XXIII "where there ain't no ten commandments" Jaipur is situated in Rajputana, one of the largest and most powerful of the native Indian states, and is a city practically untouched by any foreign in- fluence. Only one white man, the English Resident, lives in the place, and his sole duty consists in merely being in evidence, as a gentle reminder to the natives that Britain still rules the waves, and is doing business at the same old stunt on land, and that while she isn't nosey about other folks' business, still there is a certain amount of foolishness that she won't put up with even in a maharajah. The Maharajah of Jaipur, however, is a fine and enlightened prince who causes no trouble. He is im- mensely rich, and he lives in an ornate palace with lovely gardens about it, and he has five wives, and two hundred concubines, and hundreds of horses, and all the other elegances and conveniences of life. When an Indian leaves India he loses caste, and it costs much money and purification to get reinstated, yet at the time of the coronation of King George, the Maharajah of Jaipur attended the ceremonies. He chartered a ship so that he and his suite might not be contaminated by association with aliens, and he took with him scores of chests of food, and enough Ganges water to last them until they got home, and these chests and casks are stored in an outhouse in the palace grounds so they may be in readiness should he ever desire to travel again. The city of Jaipur is a rose-coloured dream. The houses are all covered with pink stucco that is faded 211 212 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD to the most ravishing hue, and every house has innumerable little latticed balconies through which you catch glimpses of veiled women. The streets are kaleidoscopic visions of colour with the women in their gay skirts and head sheets, and the men in their gaudy turbans. And the sights you see ! Caravans of camels. Purdah bullock carts, in which ladies of high degree ride with heavy curtains shutting them in despite the hot weather. Horsemen on prancing Arabian steeds with gay saddle cloths. A man leading a great spotted leopard on a leash. An elephant bear- ing a little boy bridegroom dressed in embroidered clothes and followed by a long procession that gained recruits as it went along, going to the wedding. Everywhere women with clanking anklets and bracelets, carrying baskets piled high with cow dung. Potters at their wheels, and men and women weaving in the doorways, while monkeys swing from house to house along the pink balconies. And the bazaars full of the wonderful print cloths and the brass ware and enamel ware for which Jaipur is famous. Nowhere else in the world do they do such etching on brass as in Jaipur, or make the fiery red enamel that is as beautiful as jewellery, and costs as much as pearls almost. We drove part of the way out to Amber, the old capital of Jaipur, and went the balance of the way on elephants. My elephant had a rheumatic knee, and every time he put his foot down he flinched with a jolt that dislocated every bone in my body. But, barring that, it was an interesting ride along a lovely road bordered by trees full of grey, long-tailed apes, and peacocks that preened themselves, and strutted as if pleased with our admiration. The palace at Amber is another illustration of the almost unbelievable lavishness and splendour in which the old Indian kings lived. It is built of w r hite marble, QUEER CUSTOMS AND QUEERER CLOTHES 213 with alabaster pillars carved in low relief in flowers, and with doors of sandalwood inlaid with ivory. There are lovely pierced marble screens all around the zenana, and a secret garden where the pomegranate blooms were scattered and little oranges hung on the trees. Like the palace at Delhi, this palace also had artificial waterfalls to cool the air, and a conduit of running water through the women's palace. Below the palace was what must have once been a wonderful garden in the midst of an artificial lake. This has fallen into ruins, but although the forts and the palace at Amber were built nine hundred years ago they are practically intact. From Jaipur we crawled across the desert to Udaipur, the train averaging not quite twelve miles an hour. The trip was through the bleakest, hottest, sandiest country imaginable, with only here and there a spot under cultivation, and every living thing was choked with dust. The few trees were grey with it, the people's mouths were bound up against it, the air was full of it. Here and there we would see a man herding sheep or goats. Now and then a lone figure on a camel, or a caravan of camels, would be silhouetted against the cloudless blue of the sky. Every few miles we would pass a little village made of mud-walled huts, about which innumerable naked babies would be playing in the sun. Hard by would be a well or two, from which the water would be drawn by bullocks in great bags made of bullock skin, and dozens of women in saris would be gossiping by the well, with their water- jars on their hips or their heads. It was too hot to sleep, and through the long nights it was interesting to watch the natives asleep on the ground by their doors, or calmly slumbering by the side of the railroad track, wrapped up, head and all, in their white sheets, 214 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD and it was still more interesting to watch them wake up for the day. A Hindu may not drink water that has been drawn by a person of the wrong caste, or that has even been looked upon by a low-caste person, so every man, woman, and child carries a little brass drinking bowl that is full of water. They carry this in their hand all day, and they sleep with it beside them at night. Therefore, when a Hindu wakes up he seizes his little brass jug and repairs to the nearest tank or river to bathe. He takes off the white cloth of which his nether garments are constructed, and which is called a dhote, and washes this at the same time that he takes his bath. He then stands perfectly nude on the bank, and waves his dhote in the air until it dries, which it does in a few minutes in that fierce heat, then he winds it about himself, drapes his turban afresh, and is ready for the day as soon as he has refilled his little brass bowl. The turbans, by the way, are fearfully and wonderfully made. They are constructed of a strip seventy feet long, and how in the world anyone ever has the skill to twine this into the intricate folds that they do, without the use of pin or thread or needle, or any ad- ventitious aid to hold them in place, is as much of a mystery as how the women of Central Asia keep their skirts on. Every caste and subdivision of its caste has its own iron-bound laws about how its turbans shall be folded, and to break one of these is an un- pardonable sin, so the more you think of it the more the mystery grows. So does it about the Indian women's skirts. In Rajputana the women wear a skirt that is yards and yards around the bottom, and cut into innumer- able little gores that come to nothing at the top. It is like the skirt that the old serpentine dancers used some twenty years ago, in Loie Fuller's time. These skirts are worn coming across the waist-line in the THE LIFE OF THE INDIAN WOMAN 215 back, but in front they dip down into a V that leaves the whole abdomen exposed. They seemed to me to be hung on nothing but faith, for an Indian woman has no more hips than a snake, and why her little petty doesn't drop off at every step I don't know. With this skirt a woman wears a little short bodice that ends just at the bust line, and a head sheet that comes partly over her face. Always they wear the veil, of course, for in India it is perfectly modest for a woman to expose any part of her person except her face. One of the most vivid pictures that stands out in my mind is that of a slim young girl, standing by a little mud hut with a baby on her hip. Both she and the baby were stark naked, but she had a veil over her head, and she looked at us with the perfect air of one who has observed all the proprieties. Of course travellers do not see the upper-class Indian women. These live behind the veil. They are purdah, and when they travel they go not only veiled, but in carriages that are marked " Purdah." You often see a palanquin on the streets with the shutters closed and a heavy cloth thrown over it, and this is the con- veyance of some aristocratic lady. It seems that she would smother to death in that fierce heat, but apparently she doesn't. You also see women who are so swathed in white garments that they look like bundles of cloth. They have on a heavy white linen sheet over everything else, that has slits that they can see through, and these slits are worked with a lattice-like thread. These are the Mohammedan servant women. The life of an Indian lady is that of a canary in a cage with a blanket hung over it, but so far from re- senting this she is very proud of it, and boasts of it, and pities the European memsahib whose husband thinks so little of her he doesn't even turn the key on her and lock her up. 216 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD The ordinary Indian woman does the little work there is to be done about a home in which there is no furniture, and practically nothing to cook. And she bears children, and gathers up the cow dung which she makes into cakes, and dries against the walls of the mud hut in which she lives, and which furnishes the only fuel she knows. To me the pathos and the degradation of woman in India was epitomized by the sight of women rushing out into the road and grabbing up the cow dung and patting it into cakes with their bare hands. It is the thing they cook with, and get heat from, necessary to their lives, but horrible and revolting all the same to a foreigner. Udaipur is a marvellous and picturesque Indian city that belongs to the seventeenth century rather than to the twentieth, and here you may see the native life that has never changed. Udaipur is the capital of the state of Mewar, the greatest of the four original Rajput states, and its ruler boasts the bluest blue native blood in India, and is called Maharana, which makes him one peg higher than a Maharajah. He is absolute lord over a vast section of country and millions of people, and has an income of six million dollars a year. He is very conservative, and absolutely opposed to all progress, and will not depart from the customs of his forefathers. Although he possesses that thing of priceless value in India, water, he refuses to instil irrigation on his bleak, bare acres because his forefathers did not irrigate. His mountains contain wonderful mines of marble, and stone, and semi-precious stones, but he refuses to let them be quarried because his fore- fathers did not work them, and it was only by force that the British Government got his consent to allow the railroad to be built to Udaipur, where it ends with a big strong gate across the end of the track just out- side the city limits. CUT GLASS AND OIL CANS 217 The Maharana lives in an enormous mediaeval palace built on a bluff above a beautiful lake. We entered the courtyard through an enormous gate of bronze with spikes in it, mute witness of the days when elephants were used as battering-rams. Beyond this was another gate called the " weighing gate," in which the Maharanas, when starting forth on a pilgrimage, used to be weighed in a scale first against gold, and then against silver, which were given to the priests and distributed to the poor. Then we came into a great courtyard in which ten elephants were swaying at their posts for " the honour of the palace " ; men were leading Arabian horses round, gentling them ; groups of men squatting on their haunches and pulling on their water pipes were gathered around story-tellers ; veiled women in grey saris, and with clinking armlets and anklets, passed and re-passed with their brass water jars on their heads ; a white sacred bull shouldered his way about and stole sugar-cane from the elephants ; thousands of pigeons whirred overhead. You might have been whisked back centuries, so much was the scene just what it has been for hundreds of years. The old part of the palace has some lovely balconies overlooking the lake, but what intrigued us most was the new part, as showing what Oriental taste can do when it gets seduced by Western influence. The new part of the palace has been erected for the young prince. Here he lives in the daytime, but, the guide said, " He sleeps his head in the old part." It is approached through a lovely garden, and has a wide white marble veranda, upon which stood six Singer sewing machines upon which tailors were plying their trade. It is the Singer sewing machine and the Standard Oil five-gallon tin that make the whole world kin, and the East and West one. You can't imagine what life could have been in the Orient before the beneficent introduction of the Standard Oil can. 218 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD They cover houses with it, they cook in it, they carry water in it, they use it as a flower-jar in white marble pavilions carved in lace-like fineness. It truly makes glad the waste places of the earth. The rooms in the palace are of noble proportions, with an enchanting view across the green lake, but they were furnished entirely in cut glass, and our amazed vision never got beyond that. A reception- room had chairs of cut glass with purple velvet cushions and a table of cut glass. A dining-room had a huge table with cut glass legs and a bevelled glass mirror. Fancy having to see yourself chew ! A bed- room had a cut glass bed, a four-poster with blue velvet mattress and pink velvet pillows, and in every room there were dozens of hideous cut glass chandeliers in violent colours. Some cut glass salesman must have made a killing at Udaipur. In other rooms there were all sorts of mechanical toys, such as we give children at Christmas, and a pianola, and a small moving picture machine, and it gave you a pang of pity to think how dull life must be even for these august personages, who count their income in lakhs of rupees, but live as solitary as Robinson Crusoe on his desert island. And it gave you another pang of pity to think of all they might do for their people and that they don't do. No need of their trying to divert themselves by making the wheels of toy trains go round if they would only press the button, and make the wheels of progress go round. Later on, as we were returning from a ride in the twilight, a bedecked individual, with the sword of authority in his hand, came running towards us and told us that we must get out of the road and dis- mount from our carriages and stand, because the Maha- rana was going to pass. He had been to see his wild boars fed. Presently there came grooms leading two horses, one white, the other black, both with gorgeously CUT GLASS AND OIL CANS 219 embroidered cloths over their saddles, and with shirred petunia velvet covering the stirrup leathers, for it is a defilement for a Hindu to touch leather. These horses were new mounts for His Gorgeousness and were brought that he might choose between them. Then there was a clatter of hoofs, and a stalwart, grizzled man with grey whiskers parted in the middle, with a white turban on his head, and wearing an English shooting jacket and draped white dhote, hove into sight. Four runners kept to his bridle rein, and behind him galloped a dozen horsemen, some with swords, some with lances, some with long, antiquated guns. It was the great Maharana and his bodyguard. The Presence halted his horse, sprang off as nimbly as a boy despite his sixty-three years, gave a grand wave of his hand towards the white stallion, which was instantly brought to him, mounted, and was off in another cloud of dust. Udaipur will live longest in my memory for that picture of feudal life. The castle on the crags, with its elephants, and the grizzled old man who will have no modern progress because his forefathers had none of it. That picture, and another of a holy man, who sat by the wall of the lake on a bed of spikes, with an umbrella over his head, and a pillow at his back. Such are the inconsistencies of life ! CHAPTER XXIV "A GREAT AND TERRIBLE LAND " " This is a great and terrible land," said Kim's Red Llama as he wandered up and down through India in search of his River of Healing. And " a great and terrible land " we repeated over and over again to ourselves as we zigzagged back and forth across the desert and the plains. " A great and a terrible land," with its vast spaces of burning sand, its blighting heat, its blinding dust ; its millions upon millions of people ceaselessly moving around like so many ants ; its poverty that makes a strip of cloth do for clothes and a handful of beans for food ; its ruins, its splendid memorials of forgotten art ; its ignorance, its superstition, its filth ; its flash of brass, and gold, and purple, and crimson. Truly India is a great and a terrible place, but it makes all the rest of the world seem drab and colourless beside it. We spent much time in native India. We went down to Gwalior, whose ruler is one of the most en- lightened rajahs in India, and who has an American agricultural expert teaching his people how to use American machinery in farming. He was so gracious that he put at our disposal two of the largest elephants I have ever seen, and on them we made the trip to the top of the mountain on which is situated the ruins of a famous old, mediaeval, red sandstone fort and palace. We went to Ajmere, where there are the ruins of another fairy palace built by Shah Jahan. Here we were lucky enough to hit upon a festival, and found 220 PALACES AND LEPERS 221 ourselves in the midst of crowds of gaily-dressed natives so dense that our carriages could not get through, so we had to get out and walk. Around the temple the throng was particularly great, and on either side of the street were ranged rows of lepers who had come in from the surrounding country to beg. They were horrible wrecks of humanity, half-eaten up by the loathsome disease, but the natives seemed to feel none of the repulsion towards them that we do. There was one poor creature who had all over his body what, at a distance, looked to be a sort of cuirass studded with bronze nail-heads. I had my hand full of small coins and I threw one to this man. He moved to pick it up, and instantly the whole of what I had thought was a metal-encrusted jacket moved, and I saw that he was covered with flies. The other lepers, scenting backsheesh, started after me, and I emptied my purse and fled. Never any- where in India is it safe to give an anna to a beggar unless you have some way of retreat handy. You will be mobbed. Even as you drive through the streets men, women, and children catch on to the back of the vehicle and run after you shouting, " Prisint, Pro- tector of the Poor, give me a prisint." From Ajmere we went to Mount Abu, a hill station after the manner of Simla, where the air was cool and full of ozone, and that seemed an earthly Paradise after the heat, and dust, and breathlessness of the plains below. Mount Abu is in Rajputana and be- longs to a native prince, but the English have long had it leased, and use it as a place for schools, and sanatoriums for sick soldiers. For many years the lease specified that no cow was to be brought on the grounds, no beef shipped in, and no leather articles, not even shoes, used. It is curious that the cow ques- tion should be one of the vital political questions in India, but it is. One of the greatest obstacles to p 222 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD India's obtaining universal suffrage is that the cow is an object of worship with the Hindu, and that its flesh may not be eaten or its hide used, and as the majority of Indians are Hindus, if a popular vote were taken, beef and all articles made of leather would undoubtedly be as much prohibited, as alcohol is in America. Mount Abu is famous for its scenery, and for its Jain temples, which are the most beautiful and have the finest carvings in India. These are so elaborate that they leave you gasping with wonder that any human being could ever have conceived them all or any hand have had the patience to execute them. Every inch of the ceilings, the walls, and the beams is of white marble carved into lace-like fineness with figures that tell the story of Buddha's many incarnations. Whether the Jains incline more to Buddhism or Hinduism, or have a distinct creed of their own, no one seems to know exactly. At any rate they are very strict about taking animal life, and follow Gautama's teaching, " Slay not at all, lest thou stay the meanest thing upon its upward way." The Jains cover their mouths with a white cloth so they may not breathe in a mosquito, and they never eat after dark lest they might inadvertently swallow a fly, which is an ever-present danger to any- one in India. It is said that they do not even kill the vermin on them, and that a Jain will hire some one to lie on his bed for a few hours before he retires to it, in hopes the cooties will have eaten their fill and he be left in peace. A Jain mother will even carefully pick up the centi- pede that has stung her child to death and remove it to a place of safety. The aversion that the Indians everywhere have to taking life is responsible for the enormous number of deaths that occur from snake- bites. They simply will not kill a reptile that may THE TOWERS OF SILENCE 223 be a near relative, for all they know, working out his karma. We had an interesting and strenuous day at Ahma- dabad, famous for its marvellously carved doorways and the tracery windows in its old temples, under which huddled together goats, and sacred cows, and naked children and half-naked men and women, and where all was confusion, and dirt, and heat insupportable. Then we came to Bombay, sitting like a bride of the sea on its little green island. A splendid city is Bombay, rich and powerful, with the ships of all the world dropping their tribute at her feet. As every- where in India where England rules, there is cleanliness, and order, and prosperity, so here are wide paved streets, and fine drives, up-to-date shops, magnificent public buildings. Among the most prosperous citizens of Bombay are the Parsees, a people who originally came from Persia. They are of a high order of intelligence, and appear to have much more energy and business faculty than the Hindus, in consequence whereof many of them acquire fortunes, and in Bombay there are whole streets of palaces in which they live. The Parsees have a most curious and terrible way of disposing of their dead. They are followers of Zoroaster, and believe that none of the elements should be defiled by a dead body. Therefore they can neither bury their dead in the earth, nor burn them with fire, nor sink them in the sea, so they give a corpse to the vultures to be devoured. On a high hill, overlooking the sea on one side and the city of Bombay on the other, they have built what they call the Towers of Silence, in the midst of a beautiful garden. These towers are great con- crete structures, about the size and shape of a gas tank. The outer wall has but one opening in it, a doorway that gives on the steps that lead to the top. 224 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD The roof slopes to a well in the centre, and has three gratings that extend around it : the outer one is for the bodies of men, the middle one for the bodies of women, the smaller one for children. There are three of these Towers of Silence in the garden. To one of them is brought the bodies of the Parsees who die in the full odour of sanctity in their beds, untouched by any but the hands of their own caste. To the second tower is brought the bodies of those who are killed in accidents or die in hospitals, and whose bodies have been denied by being touched by infidels. The third tower belongs to the family who erected the Towers of Silence. When a Parsee dies he lies in state several hours in his own home, where funeral services are held. Then he is borne by his family to the Tower of Silence and to a certain spot in the garden, where the cortege halts, and the corpse, covered with a white cloth, is put down on the earth. Then a dog is brought, the cover turned back from the dead face, and the dog is bade to look upon it. If it does, all is well with the dead and his soul is supposed to be purified by the dog's glance. If the dog refuses to look at the dead, then the man's family depart in tears, for the soul of the dead is thereby shown to be unholy. This superstition about the purifying effect of a dog's eyes is so hoary that nobody knows how it originated or what it signifies. After the dog ceremony is over the family leaves, and men of an outcast caste take up the body and bear it through the little door and up the steps to the top of the tower, where they strip off the cloth from it and leave it nude upon the grating. Instantly there is a whirring of wings that is like the sound of a mighty wind, and the thousands of vultures that have been roosting in the trees, and on the coping of the tower, swoop down upon the corpse, and in less than four hours pick it bare to the bones. The hot Indian sun THE TOWERS OF SILENCE 225 chars the bones in a fortnight, so they become brittle as glass, and the attendants in the Towers of Silence break them up and throw them into the central well, where the rains of the monsoon wash them away through filters of charcoal and sand, so that the water returns to the earth unpolluted. No foreigners are permitted in the garden of the Towers of Silence while a funeral is going on, but the sight of those great grey towers rimmed with cultures, waiting for their hideous food, was the most horrible and appalling spectacle I have ever seen. It takes two nights and a day and a half to cross India from Bombay to Madras. It was a trip that was like an excursion through Purgatory, with all the furnaces stoked up to capacity, but there was never a minute of it that was dull, because we were in the midst of the strange, fascinating native life. At every station was the pandemonium of crowds getting on and off. Men with goat-skins full of water came and filled the reservoir in our compartments. Women with naked babies on their hips stared curiously at the white memsahibs, and then made a cross on the ground and spat upon it if we complimented the child, for to praise a child angers the gods. At the little wayside halts we flung peanuts to the monkeys which clambered up on the windows of the car to get them. And once we saw a great religious procession, in which a thousand men hauled a great Car of Juggernaut, and thousands of other men and women danced about it, and waved their arms, and sang, and threw flowers before it. In olden times fanatics flung themselves and their children under the wheels, but the English permit nothing now but the humble billy-goat to be so sacrificed. But the car was black with the grease and dried blood of martyrs. From Madras we left for a tour of the great temples of Southern India. There are no hotels for Europeans 226 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD at any of these places and so we had to live in our cars, which grew as hot as ovens under the fierce sun that beat down on them as they were parked on the side tracks, and we ate at the little railroad station restaurants, where the food was always the same and always atrocious. There was always the same bitter, lukewarm tea, the same sour bread, the same stringy goat chops, the same little dab of rancid white butter made from buffalo cow-milk, the same little green sprouted potatoes, the same brown, rough rice, the same bread pudding, and nothing else. The hotels in India are notoriously the worst in the world, but the railroad eating-houses pass belief, they are so bad. In fact, it is not possible for them to have good food, for where there is no cold storage in a hot country there can be no decent meats. There are no green vegetables, and no foreigner who does not wish to chance cholera dares to take a mouthful of any uncooked food, or fruit, or even of water. You drink tepid soda until you swell up like a balloon, and you get to the place where your mind runs so con- tinually on the thoughts of real food that you lose interest in antiquities and works of art. At Tanjore there is a marvellous temple, but even more interesting was the great library in the palace of what was once the residence of the Maharajah of Tanjore. There were shelves of manuscripts tied up in faded old brocades, and thousands of volumes written in Sanskrit with a stylus on palm leaves. At one table sat two withered old pundits, in huge tortoise-shell rimmed glasses, naked from their waists up. One was reading from a palm-leaf book a medical disquisition on leprosy that was written three hundred years ago, and the other was copying it on parchment because the palm-leaf book was getting so old and brittle it was falling to pieces. The librarian said that scientists came from all over the world to study these manuscripts, and found in them the germs of A STOREHOUSE OF ANCIENT LORE 227 many ideas that are exploited as discoveries of modern science. I asked what this medical authority said about leprosy. He replied that it said that leprosy was hereditary but not contagious. So I had my doubts about the Rockefeller Institute sitting at the feet of this ancient Indian Gamaliel, or robbing the palm-leaf books in their research work. It reminded one of the fact, however, that the India- for-Indians radicals declare that India has in her literature all that she needs for information, and more than modern progress can give her, and they demand that along with the up-to-date scientific medical schools and hospitals there shall be equally well-endowed Indian ones, where the ancient Indian school of medi- cine, which lays particular emphasis on charms, and sacred cow dung, and such remedies, shall be taught. An English doctor told me that one of the explana- tions offered for the sadness of the people of India is that out of every five children who are born three die. He said that one of the things that accounted for the terrific infant mortality is that a child is not supposed to have a soul until a goat has been sacri- ficed for it. Consequently when a baby is born it is laid on the floor, and no attention paid to it, while the father goes out to get a goat. With a poor man this is about as much of an undertaking as it would be with us to go out and borrow a thousand dollars, so often by the time the sacrifice is ready there is no occasion for it — the child has perished. Better, also, than the temple at Tanjore do I remember a wedding ceremony that I witnessed there with a little, pale, haggard-eyed, over-wrought, nervous-looking boy sitting, flower-crowned, amidst his elders at the long-drawn-out marriage ceremony, which continues for four or five days. For child marriage still persists in India. A girl is married between the ages of seven and nine, if not younger, though she does not go to live with her 228 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD husband until she is between eleven and twelve. After the marriage ceremony she goes back to her parents, but thereafter she is done with childish things. She must wear the veil and remain in the house with the older women. Generally an Indian woman's first child is born by the time she is thirteen, and she is an old woman by the time she is twenty-five. If her husband dies even before she goes to live with him she can never marry again. Piteous as is the lot of all women, from the highest to the lowest, in India, the great national tragedy is the widow. When a woman's husband dies she be- comes an outcast. Life for her is finished, and so great and terrible are her sufferings that one wonders if, after all, the suttee had not its justification, and one ceases to wonder that widows plunged into the flames of their husband's funeral pyres and ended their misery in a moment's agony rather than drag out a life of torture. CHAPTER XXV A LAND OF TEMPLES AND ELEPHANTS Southern India in April is a fiery furnace in which the sun beats pitilessly down upon the earth all day, and the earth gives back the heat all night. White people dare not go abroad in the middle of the day, hence all our sight-seeing had to be done very early in the morning and in the late afternoon. So about five o'clock in the morning there would be a knocking on the slatted windows of our cars, in which we had stewed in our own juices all night, and a white-draped and beturbaned waiter from the station restaurant would come bearing our " Chota Hazri " — or early breakfast — lukewarm, bitter tea, sour bread scarified in a few places and tasting of the smoke of the manure fire over which an attempt had been made to toast it, accompanied by a dab of axle-grease masquerading as butter. After an heroic effort to swallow a little of the nauseous mess we would enter our rickety carriages and scurry across the awakening cities. Men would be getting up from charpoys — a bed frame laced across with strings — on which they had slept, or arising from the ground, which had been their only couch, and unwinding their white sheets from over their heads ; sleepy-eyed children would be tumbling out of the doorways ; pious women would be purifying their houses for the day by rubbing cow dung over the doorsteps and putting the caste mark of their creed on their house lintels. Every few blocks there would be a public fountain at which women in gay-coloured saris would be gossiping while they 229 230 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD waited their turn to fill their shining brass water jars ; now and then we would meet a temple elephant with painted face and gorgeous trappings going down to the river to fill the golden lotah on his back with water with which to wash the gods ; and everywhere thousands upon thousands of black faces — for the Tamils of Southern India are a jet-black people — stared after us in stolid indifference, with the peculiar lack of all animation or interest that is the characteristic of the Indians. It was in such a dawn that we journeyed across the old city of Trichinopoli to see the famous rock temple which is literally quarried out of a solid granite cliff. We climbed up two hundred and ninety steps, worn slick as glass by the feet of the faithful. At every landing there were great rooms, the walls of which were covered with carvings of Siva, and his wife, Pavarti, and his elephant-headed son, Ganesha, and in every room priests were teaching little boys, or great meetings were being held. At one landing there was a door leading out to a little shelf from which we obtained a wonderful view of the city. Still another flight up and there was a tiny pocket handkerchief garden that the priests had made, and still above this, on the very peak of the rock, was an altar to which one had to pull oneself with ropes, the road was so steep, yet the rock was covered with worshippers risking their lives to pray at the top. Some years ago there was a terrible accident here in which thousands of people were killed. A pilgrim lost his footing and slid down the face of the rock, carrying others with him and precipitating a panic in which a whole mob was dashed to death. Three miles from the rock temple at Trichinopoli is the Temple of Vishnu, which is the largest temple in Southern India, and has fifteen gopuras, or towers, over its gateways, which are marvels of SOME FAMOUS TEMPLES 231 architecture. In this temple three thousand Brahmin priests live. In its courtyard we saw five huge elephants with their foreheads marked with the yellow and black tridents of Vishnu, who raised their trunks and their forefeet and saluted as we went by, and who picked up the tiniest coins that we threw in the dust to them. We passed through long bazaars in which all sorts of trinketry were being sold, and where Indian women knelt before jewellers, and had new bracelets soldered on their arms so tightly they could never come off unless they were filed off. We saw the famous hall of the Horse Columns, where single columns of granite were carved from top to bottom, and we saw from a distance the golden altar, but we were not suffered to approach near enough to contaminate it by getting a good view. This temple is famous for its jewels. It has millions upon millions of dollars' worth of gold and silver vessels, and literally bushels of diamonds, and pearls, and emeralds, which are used upon occasion to bedeck the hideous images when they are transferred from one part of the temple to another, or paraded through the streets, or when there is some especial festival. Strangers are permitted to see these by paying fifteen dollars, which is supposed to be a compensation for the trouble of washing them after they have been touched by the hands of infidels. The temple at Madura has even more wonderful gopuras than the one at Trichinopoli. Over every gateway is a veritable skyscraper, the four gopuras in the outer wall being nine storeys high, carved from top to bottom with rows of gods and goddesses, and elephants, and horses, and Heaven knows what else, all gilded and coloured until they dazzle the eye and bewilder the imagination. Within this temple is a sacred tank, where we saw thousands of people coming to bathe and purify themselves, and everywhere were 232 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD the fat Brahmin priests, naked from the waist up, with only the sacred white thread over their brown shoulders, who scowled at us, and looked as if it would give them infinite pleasure to run the Car of Jugger- naut over us. And everywhere before the altars there were hordes of the pious praying and making offer- ings, especially before the grim, hideous statue of Kali, the goddess of vengeance who must always be propitiated, and to whom human sacrifices used to be offered and whom now they smear over with white butter until she looks as if she had on a liver pad. Madura was almost the last place we were to see in India, and I was glad that it ended a wonderful ex- perience at its highest note. For Madura is the India of the Indians, the India as it was thousands of years ago, and I shall never think of it without seeing the little, flat, white houses dominated by the great carved gopuras of its splendid temples ; without feeling again the devastating heat ; without beholding the women with their babies on their hips ; the naked children playing in the sun ; the thin, black men with only a loin-cloth on ; the multitudes of people that seemed to be aimlessly moving about ; the processions of the devout worshipping before unclean altars. I shall never think of it without hearing the clank of bangles, and smelling the pungent fragrance of frangipani, and getting the thrill and the feel of India — that great and terrible land which takes all one's bodily strength to endure, and which lives for ever in one's memory as an Arabian Night's dream. According to the Hindu mythology the monkeys built a bridge for Rama to cross to Ceylon. Modern engineers haven't quite equalled the monkey feat yet, but they have built a bridge so far out into the channel that separates India and Ceylon that it is only a few hours' boat ride across. I think that when God got through creating the COLOMBO— HALF-WAY HOME 233 rest of the world He took all the odds and ends of beauty that He had left — the coral strands, and colourful seas, and rolling surfs ; the most verdant foliage and most gorgeous flowers ; the most dimpling vales, and silvery streams, and lace-like waterfalls — and made the islands. Certainly Bermuda, and the Hawaiian Islands, and Japan, and Java, and Ceylon are the beauty spots of earth, and Ceylon surpasses them all because it is the wildest, with its loveliness least tamed by the hand of man. I stayed a month in Ceylon, but I did little beyond sitting on the wide, wind-swept galleries of the Galle Face Hotel at Colombo, and inviting my soul. I was too tired, for one thing, to do more than simply exist. And, for another, the strange, weird sights of India had made all other sight-seeing, for the time being, flat and tasteless. It was enough to watch the Singalese driving by in their little carts to which are attached tiny black bulls that trot as fast as ponies and that are bred for speed, and to smile at the queer costume of the waiters in the hotel, for the men wear sarongs draped around them like skirts and their long hair is done up on the top of their head, where it is con- fined by an elaborate tortoise-shell comb. These combs are great badges of honour, for they show that their wearers have never carried burdens on their heads like coolies. Colombo is a sort of half-way house around the world at which all the ships of the seven seas stop, and so the hotel was crowded by the English from Southern India, as well as Ceylon, who had come to get passage for home. Among them were many pale, worn women, and thin, yellow-faced children, and I had many glimpses of the great tragedy of Anglo-Indian life which forces every woman who has children to choose between them and her husband. 234 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD They told me, these haggard-eyed mothers, that little children throve wonderfully in India. Up to the time they were six or seven years old they were unusually precocious in mind and body, but after that a blight fell upon them and they became weedy, and sickly, and feeble, and either died or grew up into unwholesome, neurotic men and women, unless they were sent away. They suffered also a sort of mental and moral de- cadence, and acquired a queer clipped pronunciation, the pronunciation of the Eurasian, which is anathema to the English, and they assimilated a knowledge and a vocabulary that made their mothers' blood run cold to hear. The Indian ayah becomes perfectly devoted to her white charges and feels the affection for them that the old, black Southern Mammy felt for her " white chillen." Indeed, all Indians love children and are good to them, but there are probably no other people in the world so profane and indecent in their speech as the Indians. On the smallest provocation they burst out into invective that begins with a man's re- motest ancestor, and comes down to his mother and father, scandalizing the whole line, and as it is im- possible to prevent children from acquiring this picturesque line of conversation from their bearers and nurses, it becomes imperative to send them away from where they can hear it. Then comes the mother's Gethsemane. The children, little things that need a mother's love and care more than they ever will again, must be left in forlorn schools, or with relatives who do not want them, or else the woman must abandon her husband, in a land where there is great temptation and few moral restraints. We made a beautiful motor trip from Colombo up to Kandi, the old capital of Ceylon. It was through the very heart of the tropics, a winding COOL AT LAST ! 235 road that went through jungles full of wonderful flowering trees, past lovely waterfalls that sprayed us as we went by, and all the way a little river kept pace with us, and in it, from time to time, we saw mahouts washing their elephants with great scrubbing-brushes. For Ceylon is still the land of the elephant, and on this very road we travelled great bands of wild elephants frequently come out of the forests and block travel. When they do, the traveller simply has to turn back, because it is extremely unhealthy to argue the right of way with the Lord of the Forest. Kandi is chiefly remarkable for its great Buddhist temple. This was the last place that Buddha stopped at before he went to Mount Abu, and you may still see his footprint in the rock. It is about eight feet long. At this temple also is a tooth of Buddha that is seven inches long, so one may infer that the Great Teacher was something of a man in size. Although Buddhism originated in India, and from there its tenets spread all over the Eastern world, the faith has almost perished there. There are very few Buddhists left in India, where nearly everyone is either Hindu or Mohammedan. Ceylon is now the home of Buddhism, and its altars, heaped with flowers, seemed unutterably pure and clean, and its temples holy, after the obscene carvings and lewd symbols of the Hindu temples. We drove across the mountains through the tea- gardens, where hundreds of gaily-dressed coolie women, plucking the tiny leaves, made brilliant bits of colour amidst the green, and where elephants draw- ing great loads of the green tea to the factories lumbered to one side of the road to let us pass. Up and up we went, the tea-gardens rising terrace above terrace with us, until we reached the top of the mountain, six thousand feet above the sea level. Here was a famous hill station whose name was spelt Newa Elyra, 236 MY JOY-RIDE ROUND THE WORLD and pronounced Newralia, and here we got cool for the first time in three months, and here we had good food, and here, when we left, we encountered the greatest array of servants to be tipped that we had met anywhere. When you leave any Indian hotel a mob with out- stretched hands stands before your door demanding " prisints." At New Elyra we had tipped everyone in sight, and were in our motors starting off with a " Thank God that is over ! " when we were stopped by wild cries, and a flying figure came after us shrieking, " Backsheesh, memsahib, backsheesh." " And what did you do ? " we inquired. " I peel potato," cried our unknown benefactor. Then back to Colombo and pleasant days at the hotel with rides in the late afternoon out to tea at a little inn literally situated on the " India's coral strand " of the old missionary hymn, and to wandering through the bazaars where there were the most in- triguing basket work, and teakwood elephants, and handmade lace to be had for a song. And spending ravishing days in the jewel shops. For Colombo is one of the great jewel markets of the world. Not far off its coasts are wonderful pearl fisheries, and its mountains produce marvellous blue sapphires, and star sapphires, and rubies, and emeralds, and moonstones, and black opals, that you may turn over by the handful and make your selection from, and nothing saves you from coming home bedecked like a maharajah except having spent all your money before you got there. Then came a day when the good ship The City of Benares, which goes from Calcutta direct to Boston with only a stop at Colombo, and one other stop to coal, sailed into port, and I took my many bundles and my battered trunk and installed myself in the little cubicle that I was to inhabit for the next thirty- four days. COOL AT LAST ! 237 We stopped only once, at a barren rock near Aden, where we took coal from a collier, then we sailed through the Suez Canal, past the fort where the English have piles and piles, and miles and miles of the supplies left over from the war, past Suez, through the Medi- terranean, by frowning Gibraltar, all without pause, until at last we swung into the dock at Boston, and my long joy-ride was over. A Selection from the CATALOGUE OF NEW AND FORTHCOMING BOOKS PUBLISHED BV MILLS & BOON, LTD. 49 RUPERT STREET, LONDON, W.l (Close to Piccadilly Circus Tube Station). Telephone : 929 Regent. Telegrams : " Mlllsator, Piccy, London." Cablegrams : " Millsator, London." NOTE. — The approximate published prices Jot the forthcoming books are given. It may be necessary to alter these before publication. IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT The Pacific Triangle By SYDNEY GREENBIE Author of "JAPAN, REAL AND IMAGINARY " Demy 8vo. 1 8s. net. The Problems of the Pacific, presented freshly, humanly, by one who, in his own remarkable experiences on the many shores of the Pacific Ocean, has had a special opportunity to understand matters which are becoming more and more pressing in the foreign relations of the United States, and to illustrate them with fresh facts, without bias of propaganda. The author writes with authority, is a keen observer, painstaking, and highly informing. There can be no question that " The Pacific Triangle " wuJ be one of the most widely read books of the year. SECOND EDITION REVISED The Problem of Nervous Breakdown By EDWIN L. ASH, M.D., B.S., M.R.G.S. Demy 8vo. 1 Oft. 6d. net. Times. — " A commonsense book on a subject which is of universal interest. Mr. Ash writes quite simply so that any reader can follow him." Prescriber. — " An exhaustive study of nervous people — old and young — and he describes their clinical conditions with a degree of accuracy rarely to be met with. His book is an exceptionally good one, and deserves to be carefully studied by every physician. From MILLS & BOON'S LIST My Joy Ride Round the World By DOROTHY DIX With 16 Illustrations from Photographs. Demy 8vo. 8s. 6d. net. Everyone is interested in the quaint peoples of the East, their domestic customs, their ways of making love, etc., etc. In " My Joy Ride Round the World," Dorothy Dix gives us in vivid word pictures her experiences of travel in some of the most unusual places of the globe. She does not deal with tiresome figures and wearisome descriptions, but is always fresh and con- tinually discovering some new thing. The result is a most fascinating and entertaining book. Motor Yachting for Women By FRANCES G. KNOWLES-FOSTER With 12 Illustrations. Crown Svo. 6s. net. A practical volume dealing fully with Motor Yachting from the woman's point of view, with valuable tips and aids to this fascinating pastime. The book is founded upon personal knowledge, and is written for women by a woman of vast experience. A REMARKABLE BOOK Europe in Convalescence By ALFRED E. ZIMMERN Some time Professor of International Politics at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Crown Svo. 5s. net. Three years have passed since the last guns were fired in the Great War. Four of the five Peace Treaties which were to be negotiated have been signed and ratified by the European belligerents, and are in process of execution, whilst the fifth — that with Turkey — is now but little concerned with European territories. The psychological consequences of war-strain, the hot fit of nationalism followed by a cold fit of parochialism and indifference, are slowly but surely passing away, and the economic reaction, the sudden boom followed as suddenly last year by precipitous depression, is entering into a chronic stage. With the disappearance of these ephemeral phenomena, the permanent changes wrought during the last seven 3 ? ears in the life of the Continent are becoming more manifest. It is, therefore, perhaps at last possible to attempt a general survey of Europe as she has been left by the greatest convulsion in her history, and to estimate, if necessarily in very summary fashion, what will be the main forces in her development during the protracted period of convalescence upon which it is to be hoped that she has entered. THE BOOK WITH A CLUE Painted Windows A STUDY IN RELIGIOUS PERSONALITY By "A GENTLEMAN WITH A DUSTER" 8 to. 5s. net. What " The Daily Telegraph "said of his " The Glass of Fashion " can be said with confidence of this new volume by " A Gentleman With a Duster " : " It is a book which is certain of a huge popular success. . . . And the wider its circulation, the better for the race. For he has said what needed saying, and has said it honestly and well." 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W. Barnes Dean Inge General Bramwell Booth Father Knox Dr. W. E. Orchard Dr. L. P. Jacks Bishop William Temple Bishop Hensley Henson Dr. W. B. Selbie Miss Maude Royden Archbishop Randall Davidson But, giving the clue to a unifying principle in his Introduction, the author leads up, through the portraits, to a Conclusion which show; how Christianity is hkely to play a great, even a triumphant part, in a new and creative epoch of human evolution which, he suggests, the race is now fast approaching. He thinks that the modern intellect has exhausted materialism and is being driven forward, by physical science itself, to a great era of spiritual adventure. K In this Conclusion he summarises the most recent verdicts of physical science and psychology, shows how these verdicts vindicate the thesis of transcen- dental philosophy, and proves an identity of meaning between the thesis of transcendental philosophy and the plain teaching of Christ It is a constructive book, a hopeful book, destroying only what cumbers the ground. ' The Publishers confidently believe that "Painted Windows" will be welcomed by the mass of the thinking public. From MILLS & BOON'S LIST By the Author of " Mental Self-Help." Middle Age Health and Fitness By EDWIN L. ASH, M.D., B.S., M.R.C.S. Crown Svo. 5s. net. Why fear Middle Age ? For the majority it should be the time of success, the age of fruition, the period of accomplishment. At forty a man is in the prime of life, whilst at fifty he is still well within the season of vitality and splendid endeavour. For woman Middle Age brings some ill-health certainly, but that should only be in passing, and for her the years past forty need have no terrors. Girlhood and youth lack many sweet gifts brought by the Fairy of Middle Age ; experience brings contentment, and added powers of enjoy- ment. In society, in sport, as in her friendships and in her home, the woman of foi ty-nve may still be a queen and yet look forward to a long and happy reign. But good looks and nerve, athletic success and social charm are certainly more ;