The View From That Corner Of The Wall (To My Thinking) Is Beautiful,
The Flaming Red Pagoda With Its Many
Roofs; the singularly picturesque
ancient gray wall, all ups and downs, watch-towers, and strongholds,
the Tartar city below, with
The "flowery pagoda," the mosques, the
bright foliage of the banyan, and the feathery grace of the bamboo;
outside the wall the White-Cloud hills, and nearer ranges burrowed
everywhere for the dead, their red and pink and orange hues harmonized
by a thin blue veil, softening without obscuring, all lying in the
glory of the tropic winter noon-light without heat, color without
glare. Vanish all memories of grays and pale greens before this
vividness, this wealth of light and color! Color is at once music and
vitality, and after long deprivation I revel in it. This wall is a fine
old structure, about twenty feet wide and as many high, with a broad
pavement on which to walk, and a high platform on the outside, with a
battlement pierced for marksmen. It is hardly ever level for ten yards,
but follows the inequalities of the ground, and has picturesque towers
which occur frequently. It is everywhere draped with ferns, which do
not help to keep it in repair. The "Five-storied Pagoda" which flames
in red at one of its angles, is a striking feature in the view. As we
sat on stone seats by stone tables in what might be called its shadow,
under the cloudless heaven, with the pure Orientalism of the Tartar
city spread out at our feet, that unimaginable Orientalism which takes
one captive at once, and, like the first sight of a palm or a banana,
satisfies a longing of which one had not previously been conscious, a
mundane disappointment was severely felt. We had been, as the Americans
say, "exercising" for five hours in the bracing air, and I had long
been conscious of a craving for solid food which no Orientalism could
satisfy; and our dismay was great not only to find that the cook had
put up lunch for two when there were three hungry persons, but that the
chicken was so underdone that we could not eat it, and as we were not
starving enough to go and feed at a cat and dog or any other Chinese
restaurant, my hosts at least, who had not learned that bananas are
sustenance for men as well as "food for gods," were famished. As we ate
"clem pie" or "dined with Duke Humphrey," two water buffaloes, dark
gray ungainly forms, with little more hair than elephants, recurved
horns, and muzzles like deer, watched us closely, until a Tartar drove
them off. Such beasts, which stand in the water and plaster themselves
with mud like elephants, are the cows and draught oxen of China. Two
nice Chinese boys sat by us, and Mr. Smith practiced Chinese upon them,
till a man came out angrily and took them away, using many words, of
which we only understood "Barbarian Devils." The Cantonese are not
rude, however. A foreign lady can walk alone without being actually
molested, though as a rule Chinese women are not seen in the streets. I
have certainly seen half a million men, and not more than ninety women,
and those only of the poorest class. The middle and upper class women
never go out except in closed palanquins with screened windows, and are
nearly as much secluded as the women of India.
Passing through the Tartar city and some streets of aristocratic
dullness, inhabited by wealthy merchants, we spent some hours in the
mercantile quarter; which is practically one vast market or bazaar,
thronged with masculine humanity from morning till night. Eight feet is
the width of the widest street but one, and between the passers-by, the
loungers, the people standing at stalls eating, or drinking tea, and
the itinerant venders of goods, it is one long push. Then, as you are
elbowing your feeble self among the big men, who are made truly
monstrous by their many wadded garments of silk and brocade, you are
terrified by a loud yell, and being ignominiously hustled out of the
way, you become aware that the crowd has yielded place to a procession,
consisting of several men in red, followed by a handsome closed
palanquin, borne by four, six, or eight bearers in red liveries, in
which reclines a stout, magnificently dressed mandarin, utterly
oblivious of his inferiors, the representative of high caste feeling
all the world over, either reading or absorbed, never taking any notice
of the crowds and glitter which I find so fascinating. More men in red,
and then the crowd closes up again, to be again divided by a plebeian
chair like mine, or by pariahs running with a coffin fifteen feet long,
shaped like the trunk of a tree, or by coolies carrying burdens slung
on bamboo poles, uttering deafening cries, or by a marriage procession
with songs and music, or by a funeral procession with weeping and
wailing, succeeding each other incessantly. All the people in the
streets are shouting at the top of their voices, the chair and baggage
coolies are yelling, and to complete the bewildering din the beggars at
every corner are demanding charity by striking two gongs together.
Color riots in these narrow streets, with their high houses with
projecting upper stories, much carved and gilded, their deeply
projecting roofs or eaves tiled with shells cut into panes, which let
the light softly through, while a sky of deep bright blue fills up the
narrow slit between. Then in the shadow below, which is fitfully
lighted by the sunbeams, hanging from all the second stories at every
possible interval of height, each house having at least two, are the
richly painted boards of which I wrote before, from six to ten feet
long, some black, some heavily gilded, a few orange, but the majority
red and perfectly plain, except for the characters several inches long
down the middle of each, gold on the red and black, and black on the
gold and orange - these, with banners, festoons, and the bright blue
draperies which for a hundred days indicate mourning in a house, form
together a spectacle of street picturesqueness such as my eyes have
never before beheld.
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