The Island Where Time Stands Still (32 page)

His judgment of men had rarely been at fault, but he now felt that in Foo's case it had. Foo's having been on the spot only a few minutes before a snake had been found in his bed was one coincidence too many. Snakes always sought warm places in which to sleep and now that September had come the nights were beginning to get chilly; so it was just possible that the deadly visitor had found its own way under the coverings of the bunk; but the odds seemed all upon its having been deliberately secreted there.

For a long time Gregory puzzled unhappily over the affair, and he still could not hit upon any logical reason why Foo should want to kill him. Either theory, that he was Quong-Yü's agent or a Communist fanatic, might be correct, but
neither was really convincing; and to continue his attempts after all that Gregory had done for him displayed an ingratitude of such baseness that it was hardly conceivable. The only explanation seemed to be that, although he appeared to be perfectly sane, he was actually a madman.

In the morning Gregory said nothing to Kâo or A-lu-te of his having run into Foo on the sampan the previous night; for to have done so would have necessitated his having either to invent a reason given him by Foo for being on the sampan or disclose the fact that it was he who had enabled Foo to escape from the yacht. But, of course, they had both heard about the snake being found in Gregory's bunk; and, as soon as they had eaten, the three of them went ashore, with P'ei as guide, to the doctor's house to inquire after Che-khi.

They were distressed, but not surprised, to learn that he had died shortly after having been brought in. Kâo left enough money for him to be given a respectable burial, and in a chastened mood they enquired their way to the market to buy food for the day's journey.

Behind the screen of sampan masts, wharfs, and dwellings on stilts that fringed the waterfront, there were no squares or open spaces. The town was a warren of twisting lanes with the buildings on either side so close together that, even in midday, the sun could not penetrate to the garbage-littered cobbles. Men, women and children swarmed along them like locusts in a bean field. Most of them still wore old-fashioned blue cotton tunics and baggy trousers, and went bare-headed; but in the better part of the town quite a number of women had taken to skirts and blouses, and more of the men were wearing shoddy cloth suits with flat European style caps. Here and there a more elderly man was dressed like Kâo and Gregory, in a long padded coat, and a round woollen skull-cap surmounted with a pompom. Shouting children darted through the throng in all directions, some clad only in a rice sack with holes in it for arms and legs, others stark naked. The smell was indescribable; a mixture of garlic, ginger, cinnamon, sweat and still more unpleasant things, as old and young alike freely relieved
themselves in any odd corner whenever they felt so inclined.

The shops in the main bazaar were little more than cupboards; and although they were crammed with articles for sale the entire stock in most of them could have been bought for less than fifty pounds. Such was the poverty of the place that nothing seemed too worn or broken to be worth a few
cash
, and among a collection of junk on one old man's stall Gregory noticed carefully laid out a dozen rusty nails. About all the booths, however, there was one thing in common. Every one of them had prominently displayed posters bearing portraits of Mao and Chou En-lai. That was enough to show how strong the Communist hold had become upon the country; but the only other evidence of it they saw was two policemen clad in ill-fitting khaki jackets and with red stars on their peaked caps.

The purchase of the food did not take long, and by half-past nine they were back aboard the sampan, which soon afterwards set off up river. As they were leaving the town behind, they passed several boats with long poles protruding from their sides, upon each of which were perched several large birds. When Gregory enquired about them, Kâo told him that the birds were tame cormorants used by the boatmen for fishing. At a signal the birds dived noiselessly into the water and snapped up a fish, gulping it down into their pouches; but they were prevented from swallowing it by a leather strap round their throats, so the fisherman was afterwards able to make them disgorge their catch. Kâo went on to say that fish was the poor man's meat in China, so that at the season of the floods they even stocked their paddy-fields with them; and that it was also such a favourite food with the rich that over fifty varieties of carp alone had been bred, while of all kinds there were enough for anyone to eat a different sort every day for a year.

As their journey progressed, Gregory was to be thankful for that, as fresh meat was not easy to obtain in the villages where they tied up for the night, and the quantity of tinned
goods they had been able to bring with them from the yacht was limited.

Their progress seemed maddeningly slow, as the sampan rarely covered more than thirty miles a day, and at times their irritation at its lethargic pace was increased by the motor breaking down or their running on to a mud bank. The monotony of the scenery added to the wearisomeness of the journey as there was rarely anything of interest to look at. Sometimes the river was as wide as a lake, with only a lane of rotting poles to mark the channel through the treacherous shallows; at others it became hardly more than a stream winding through a broad depression between distant slopes of higher ground which had been its banks in the days of its greatness. At times it dwindled to a useless trickle; but from point to point, by-passing these stretches, canals had been cut in a straight line to link up its navigable waters. Yet whatever the state of the river the scene beyond its banks remained much the same.

Despite the apparent bareness of the landscape, it was never deserted. Scores, and sometimes hundreds, of China's teeming millions who drew a meagre living from her soil were always to be seen. Some in flat straw hats tending their rice fields; others with a yard-square net suspended from four curved sticks attached to a pole, patiently dipping from the river bank for enough small fishes to make a meal; others again ploughing with lean cattle, or, as a family group, dragging the plough themselves. Occasionally a two or three-tiered pagoda could be seen on the horizon, or, nearer too, a circular thatched open-sided erection like a summer house, in the shade of which a bullock was moving slowly round and round, drawing water up to irrigate a field.

The waterway too never stretched emptily ahead. There was always another sampan in sight or a few crudely-made punts and rowing boats, many of the latter with owners who could not afford proper oars, so propelled themselves with two stout stakes to the ends of which they had tied short lengths of board from an old packing-case. And every mile
or so there was another village, each indistinguishable from the last, a festering sore under the still scorching autumn sun, with its quota of wrinkled crones grown old before their time, old men whose ribs stood out like curved bars under the taut yellow skin, cripples with sickeningly distorted limbs, and children whose eyes were crawling with flies.

For six days the sampan wound its way bewilderingly round a series of bends that led south, west and north, but actually made a great arc ending in a fairly straight course somewhat north of westward; and on their seventh day out from Antung-Ku they came to Su-chow, where they went ashore on another shopping expedition.

Like most Chinese cities it had suffered sadly from brutal bombings by the Japanese, who had brought more havoc there in a few days than the sackings of a hundred Chinese War Lords had done in fifty centuries. Most of its modern buildings and many of its ancient ones had been destroyed, and during the years of war and strife that followed there had not been the resources to rebuild them; but as a once-flourishing city of the ‘fu' rank it had a large railway station, and several good streets. Along them trams were running and lorries honked their way through hordes of cyclists and pedestrians, while occasionally a car, occupied by one or more khaki-clad officials was to be seen.

Here, in the city centre, there was ample evidence of the new regime. From nearly all the brick and concrete buildings fluttered the five-starred flag of the People's Republic; the big gold star in its centre representing the Communist Party, the four smaller ones the workers, peasants and—typical of the Chinese mentality but hardly in keeping with that of Karl Marx—the bourgeoisie and ‘patriotic' capitalists, respectively. Huge posters carrying propaganda slogans by the so-called ‘Liberators' occupied nine-tenths of the hoardings, and at nearly every street corner stood a khaki figure armed with a revolver. As the place seethed with life there was no great risk of the shopping party being singled out and asked to show their papers; but, all the same, they
made their purchase of a new supply of tinned goods, and got away from the main streets as soon as possible.

In the meaner parts of the city little evidence of bombing remained. The flimsy houses had burnt like tinder and wherever a shower of incendiaries had fallen whole districts had been consumed by roaring sheets of flame. The loss of life had been appalling, but rapid breeding had soon restored the numbers of the population; and as most of the houses had only paper-covered walls of bamboo or rice-straw, the devastated areas had resumed their age-old appearance within a few months.

While passing down one street they had to stand aside to let a funeral procession go by. It was preceded by men carrying gaudy banners of all shapes and sizes; then came the score of professional mourners in white, bearing, by long poles on their shoulders, a lacquered and gilded casket as large as a small room, with a sacred crane on top to fly away with the dead man's soul; and lastly, among the crowd of wailing people who followed it, were two youths almost buried under stacks of imitation paper money, which would be burnt so that the deceased might be rich in heaven.

As A-lu-te wished to see more of the city, but was already tired because she had not walked any distance for so long, they hired a sedan-chair for her, and continued their explorations. The result was disappointing, for it was almost impossible to tell one section from another. One human ant-heap merged imperceptibly into the next. In every narrow bazaar the merchants were haggling with their customers over little cups of tea, or doing complicated sums on beads of a generations-old abacus. Blind beggars tapped their way along, poor wretches grovelled on the ground displaying their revolting sores as they whined for alms, and human scarecrows patiently turned over the contents of the dustbins, hoping to come upon some edible morsel, or a broken crock that they might piece together and sell.

Now and then a soothsayer called to them from his booth to come and have their fortunes told; or a usurer, with hundreds of copper
cash
strung on strings dangling from his
neck, and great wads of People's Republic dollar bills—which could be bought by the thousand for a £1 note—eyed them speculatively. In nearly every place where alleys intersected and the buildings were more than twenty feet apart a juggler, conjurer or pair of acrobats was performing; and the poor but generous crowd laughing or amazed at their antics, gave their mites willingly to support these free-lance entertainers. Vendors carrying trays of sweet-meats, little cakes or roast peanuts pushed their way hither and thither, crying their wares; and occasionally, followed by a servant, a lady passed, wearing a jewel made from gleaming kingfisher feathers in her hair.

This, Gregory felt, with the benighted villages, the paddy fields, and the teeming life on the great rivers, was China as it had existed for five thousand years; and it seemed that the Communists had done no more than scratch the surface of it.

That afternoon they continued on their way. Five days later they reached the town of Lan-yi, where the old bed of the river meets its parent stream. Next morning they passed north of the city of Kai-feng, but as it lay a few miles from the bank they saw nothing of it except the waterfront through which most of its commerce passed. A veritable forest of sampan masts hid the shore, and hundreds of small boats plied their way to and fro. On many of them whole families lived and died, having no other home. Their children learned to swim before they could even walk, and scores of them splashed round the sampan shouting for
cash
to be thrown into the water so that they might dive for the little coins.

Now that they were truly on the mighty Yellow River, it was far broader, so that at times its banks almost disappeared in the distance; but in many places it was still very shallow; and on several occasions they had to engage a score of sweating coolies to drag the boat with tow ropes through the turgid yellow waters of low rapids.

Another eight days and they at last reached Tung-kwan, where their water journey ended; so Kâo paid Mai-lee-long
off, adding a very generous tip to the amount on his promising to keep his own mouth, and those of his crew, shut about the place at which he had picked up his passengers.

During the past week the paddy fields had been left behind and the villages gradually grown more infrequent. The country had become more undulating with ranges of hills in the distance, and the rich black earth had given way to brown dusty soil. In the town, too although it was obviously a product of the same civilisation, they saw marked differences as soon as they landed.

There were the same poverty-stricken Chinese families living twelve in a single unfurnished room, old men smoking three-foot-long pipes, itinerant musicians with flutes and guitars, children with rickets or bald patches on their heads where the hair had fallen out, and coolies carrying huge burdens by means of shoulder poles: but the tempo of the town was slower than of those further east. It had suffered little damage in the wars and its streets were wider. Down them, with slowly swaying humps, clopped strings of laden camels, and shaggy-haired ponies with big panniers at their sides. Here, there were very few Chinese wearing European dress, whereas among the passers-by there was quite a number of yellow-robed Buddhist priests and fur-clad Mongolians.