Chapter V: Northward From Saïgon

On a blazing Sunday late in January I was off at six on a little train that carried me, not uncomfortably, from daylight until dark, through a jungle country of few villages and no towns. Bienhoa, half an hour from the Cochinchina capital, has rubber plantations of some extent, the well spaced trees still small but already adorned with sap-gathering tin cans. Beyond, jungle and forest soon began again, endless jungle-forest, so that there are countless acres available for rubber, and before the century is over this form of exploitation will no doubt have reached vast proportions. The wilderness, broken only by little clearings for occasional stations, was so dry in this hot prelude to the rainy season that it had almost the autumn colors of the north. Most of the land was deadly flat, but there were low hills now and then, densely wooded and brushed, especially after little Cochinchina lay behind us and we entered the great coastal strip known as Annam.

For all the wilderness, a splendid road, with huge native trees well spaced on either side of it, followed the railway. Train and highway used the same bridges, which custom I found to be common throughout Indo-China. A horn manipulated by a loin-clothed coolie at either end warns the automobile driver whether or not it is best for him to proceed. For the bridges are only wide enough for one train or one vehicle at a time, and though the trains of Indo-China are not large, nothing short of a motor truck could dispute the right of way with them with any great prospect of success. There are of course no unprotected grade-crossings even in this faintly inhabited region, where an automobile a day is an event, and where there are few ox-carts and fewer pedestrians. As in France, the bridge and gate men govern themselves by the time-table rather than by the facts, though here it is a languid Annamese coolie instead of an old woman or a crippled war-relic who holds up traffic so much longer than necessary.

The government owned and operated railways of Indo-China, destined some day to be joined together in one system, are not yet continuous. The eight hundred miles just then in running order were broken up into three isolated jumps along the coast, not to mention the line from Hanoï up into China that has been leased for a term of years to private interests. All are of meter gauge, burn wood, and make very good speed, considering their difficulties, as was proved by this day’s feat of covering the more than 260 miles between Saïgon and Nhatrang—longest of the three sections, even without counting the branch from the Cochinchina capital to Mytho—in the twelve hours between equatorial dawn and darkness.

The French have evolved a curious type of train to fit the peculiar division of humanity in their Far-Eastern possession. The last car is divided into first-, second-, and third-class compartments. First-class accommodation consists of two crosswise seats facing each other in the center of the coach, and the second, with twice that capacity, differs mainly in the color of the leather upholstery. Third class, occupying half the car, has bare wooden seats of American arrangement. The rest of the train, unless it includes also a few freight-cars, is made up of fourth-class box-cars innocent of springs and with four rudimentary benches fore and aft the full length of them. Officials armed with government _réquisitions_, or passes, usually monopolize the first class, and even with their boxes and bags rarely fill it. Europeans with purchased tickets, an occasional Eurasian, and now and then a wealthy native, go second-class. Well-to-do natives, and the poorer French residents, endure the hard seats of the rest of the car, and only in the more populous regions do they fill them all. There are no color-lines, except that Caucasians are not allowed to travel fourth-class. This rendezvous of the Oriental masses is often packed to rush-hour proportions, and is so free from cramping rules that even rickshaws may be dragged in as baggage.

The half-dozen of these springless box-cars for every first-second-and-third-class coach is symbolical of the proportionate division of classes in the population of Indo-China. To the simple countryman who occupies the rough _wagons_ making up the bulk of the train, even the third-class compartment represents such luxury that he comes to gaze in awe and what may be envy at the _richard_ who can afford to ride there. Yet even in the deeply upholstered center of the last car, fares are not so high as on our own railways. There are no sleeping-cars, for the simple reason that the trains of Indo-China do not venture forth at night. The back end of the last fourth-class car is commonly taken up with a makeshift buffet-kitchen, in which the privileged occupants of the rear coach may partake of not particularly Parisian food, salted with such a jolting as may or may not be an aid to digestion.

All through the hotter hours the train twisted and squirmed its way among jungle-clad hillocks, the shades drawn, electric fans whirling. Farther north were sandy half-arid patches; then, two hundred miles or more above Saïgon, hills appeared and grew to be almost mountains, fairly well wooded and thick with underbrush. At length the forest gave way to scattered-bush land, resembling parts of Texas, untilled, perhaps because it is too arid for cultivation. There were almost no inhabitants, at least in sight. Here and there huddled half a dozen miserable time-blackened and dilapidated huts made of palm-leaves; now and then a garden-patch with a plastered house of dull-red tile roof, and outhouses suggesting plentiful servants, testified to the presence of some isolated French official or railway man. Perhaps there are towns along the edge of the sea not far away, since fishing and farming are the principal Annamese occupations.

From Phanrang near the sea a branch railway that degenerates into a motor-bus carries passengers with time to spare up to the plateau of Langbian. For high up in the distant mountains to the left toward which the sun was descending is Dalat, an expensive hotel and hill-station which the European residents of southern Indo-China call their Darjeeling. All this mountainous region back of the narrow strip of rice-growing coast-land is inhabited by Moï, “savages” who wear breech-clouts and look at life accordingly. There are several undomesticated tribes scattered throughout Indo-China, some of them dangerous even to the white man who claims to rule over it. Many parts of the hinterland are unexplored by the self-styled rulers, and portions of it are impossible without a wild-man guide, who may not consent to lend his assistance. Queer claims are those of the Caucasian and Japanese races of ruling over this or that country when they only control the modernized edges of it.

These Moï in their loin-cloths, most savage of the wild tribes of Indo-China and looking not unlike our Indians, hold some clusters of mountains where it is still not entirely safe to go. Some have renegade Annamese leaders; one tribe lives in trees, in which it builds little houses, out of wholesome respect for tigers. The visitor to the Moï is expected to announce his arrival and friendly intentions by beating on a drum set up at the entrance to every village, as we knock at a door. If his visit is agreeable, a man bearing rice comes out to escort him, and if he is prepared to give salt in return, he is made welcome. Though they have little or no intercourse with the rest of the world, the Moï suffered greatly from the recent epidemic of “flu,” and fevers and smallpox have often ravaged them. The average Moï woman has ten children, of whom only one or two reaches maturity. Thus the estimated three hundred thousand Moï are constantly decreasing. It is curious how many savage tribes have less success in raising their young than do most wild animals. Perhaps it is nature’s way of keeping down an intermediate creation.

The Moï language, with no tones in the Chinese sense, sounds almost European. At the age of puberty boys and girls alike undergo the formality of having their teeth filed down to the gums. With some kind relative sitting on the chest of the sufferer, lying on his back with his head between the legs of a primitive vise, and with a wooden bit forced into his mouth, a medicine-man breaks off the teeth with stones and hacks and chips them away. It is their idea of making themselves beautiful, and the boy or girl who has not undergone this punishment is not considered marriageable or otherwise of adult status. After a day of this frightful work the operator leaves his victim covered with blood, his gums in ribbons, his lips like hashed beefsteak, and incapable for a fortnight of eating anything but liquids. Nor is this all, for the patient is then given a stone with which to continue the beautifying process himself, when he has a moment to spare, until not a sign of tooth remains above the level of the gums. Among some of the tribes the lower teeth are given a saw shape, so that the open mouth suggests that of an aged shark that has lost its upper plate.

Dalat is the chief hunting-ground for tigers in Indo-China. So well are these hunts organized by the French that the brave hunter bags his beast as safely as royalty does. There is a French colonial official whose chief duty it is to oblige those who wish to boast that they have killed a tiger. One orders a tiger by telegraph—tiger _à la carte_, so to speak; the official sends out coolies to lay a bait that has reached just the right degree of olfactory attraction to the great cats, and in due season the bold hunter lays one low without the slightest risk. Thus Indo-China is full of successful tiger-hunters, without a scar to show for it. The Annamese down on the coastal plain live in such dread of the tiger that they never mention their greatest four-footed enemy except by the respectful title of Ong Kop (Lord Tiger), and in the woods your coolie will make a clawing sign rather than speak openly of the fearsome beast. Children have been carried off by tigers within a mile or two of the Annamese capital. Yet the Moï hunt them with primitive weapons that are hardly more effective than a sharpened pole. “Moï,” by the way, is simply the Annamese pronunciation of the Chinese character “man,” meaning barbarian, a term much used by these two races to designate the despised peoples who have not the honor of being of the same blood as they.

Heavy clouds, and one gust of rain, as from the swiftly passing nozzle of a celestial hose, swept over the train late in the afternoon, though in Saïgon rain is unknown at that season. Near Tourcham real mountain ranges climbed down to the edge of the plain and crowded the railway so close to the sea that we caught several glimpses of it, and of waterways beautiful at high tide. The name of this all but isolated station is taken from the great Cham tower that stands on a hillock near it. The Cham were an ancient people, of Hindu civilization also, who occupied this coastal strip many centuries ago, long before the Khmer swept down into the peninsula, and they left behind them gray stone towers that stand forth weirdly in the wilderness of to-day. Mammoth rocks heaped themselves up into half-jungled hills as we raced onward between low mountains—the coastal group on one hand and the forerunners of the great Annamese chain inland on the other. Toward sunset the arid landscape grew green again, some paddy-fields and scattered villages appeared; then the region as far as the eye could see turned frankly to rice culture, though with cattle grazing now in long brown stubble. But this fertility did not last, even where there was evidence of plenty of rain recently; in its place came bush, primitive unpeopled jungle, trees in white flower shrouded with vines, kapok trees shedding their vegetable cotton, flatlands, or at most low hills. Patches of Indian corn and tobacco flashed by, clusters of miserable wattled mud huts with old straw or palm-leaf roofs that looked like beggars’ caps, but there were no people at all compared to almost any part of China.

Nhatrang had a booming beach and a constant sea-breeze, and seemed spacious and pleasant, a trifle cooler than Saïgon. But this I take partly on faith, for I never saw it by daylight. Thick tropical night had fallen when the train came to the end of its rails, and almost before I knew it I had been whisked into the stopping-place provided for Europeans. This was a cross between a government _sala_ and a public inn, exactly what a French establishment in the tropics run by a slippered Alsatian who had completely forgotten his native land, except for its German accent, would naturally be. It seemed that I, the only European to whom Nhatrang was to play host that night, had broken a fixed rule of travel in these parts. Of two Annamese youths who had boarded the train some miles away to drum up passengers for two rival motor-buses, I had come to terms with the least respectable, whereas all Europeans hitherto had patronized the official mail-bus belonging to vested interests. But the terms were favorable accordingly, and as between outsiders and vested interests my sympathies are inclined to radicalism.

I was called at three, and we were off again in the bootleg autobus that had clinched our agreement by carrying me from station to inn the evening before. It was still dark when we crossed a broad estuary or river by a _bac_ and struck off into what seemed to be mountains. A _bac_, as all diligent students of French know, is a ferry, but the genus that abounds in Indo-China is worthy a name of its own. How many times during my gasoline-propelled travels throughout the colony my eyes fell upon that capital T on its back like a helpless turtle, which meant one more river to cross by the precarious Annamese method, I refuse even to try to guess. As a special concession I might admit that there are at least a thousand bridges in Indo-China that have never been built, some of which I fear never will be. One is rolling serenely along a smooth French highway, swathed in that delight which comes from swift comfortable motion, so long as it is uninterrupted, when “Brrgrrum!”—another sign-board with the overturned T. The vehicle slithers down a steep and probably slimy bank, all but sinks a collection of ancient planks criminally put together, and stops just in time to keep from sliding off the farther end of them. If it is daytime, two or three or half a dozen Annamese of either sex and any age have been aroused from their siesta by the overworked horn and the compact of automobile and their disjointed sleeping place, which they begin forthwith to pole or gondolier across the fluid interruption to traffic. If it is night, profanity and slapping on the part of the chauffeur and his assistants may also be necessary to metamorphose the several huddled sacks about the intrepid raft into living beings and to move them to indulge in similar exertions. Sometimes, if the expanse of water is not too great, there is a rope or chain from shore to shore. The boatmen use chain-handles weighted at the end with a block of wood by means of which they wrap themselves easily about the transfluvial cable as it is dragged up from the slimy bottom. But whatever the method of propulsion, the craft is sure to run aground or meet some other form of delaying mishap before the crossing is completed, and to creak and groan and rend itself in a way to assure the inexperienced that his trip is about to end at the bottom of that particular strip of water. Nothing is more adaptable than the human spirit, however, and within a week a _bac_ meant no more to me than entering the ring does to a bull-fighter.

I traveled first class, at two thirds what the same privilege would have cost me in the regular conveyance of the _poste coloniale_. That is, I sat wedged into a corner of the front seat with the driver. His assistant, having yielded his usual place to me for whatever reward may have been promised him by his chief, rode for two days on the running-board, one bare foot hooked over the front door or one skinny hand clutching a support of the baggage-laden roof. It was a place convenient for his duties anyway, for these consisted in catching sight of the next kilometer-post in order to compute the fare of each new passenger, clambering along the side of the car like a chipmunk on a wall to collect it, slapping or booting with a bare toe pedestrians who did not speedily give the vehicle the widest possible berth, and watering the radiator wherever time and water were to be had, as if it were some jungle beast perpetually dying of tropical thirst. Behind me rode an average of fourteen Annamese, with a few babies usually thrown in. These second-class passengers enjoyed the privilege of being less likely than I to catapult through the wind-shield at one of the sudden stops that were always imminent; but no doubt the honor of my position, and the lesser likelihood of being sprayed with betel-juice by some garrulous fellow-passenger, made my double fare worth while.

The chauffeur, like his understudy, was dressed in tropical French fashion, as was proper to his honorable calling, a soft felt hat crushed down over his head, his shirt-collar wide open, after the latest fashion of European beaches. Once he abandons the comfortable and pleasing garb of his own people, the Annamese jumps to the most ultra-modern mode of his rulers. Until I had met others of his clan who seemed to have learned the chauffeur trade in a tailor-shop, I considered this driver the last word in perpetual homicidal intention; looking back upon him from the vantage-ground of uninjured escape from Indo-China, I grant him perfection among Annamese wielders of the steering-wheel. For one thing he wore shoes, which is by no means common among his brake- and clutch-stepping compatriots, and the little French he tortured when there was no visible way out of it was at times within reach of an attentive understanding, in itself a rare virtue. His chief amusement was the crushing of dogs, those thin yellow dogs that are almost as numerous in Annamese villages as children and pigs. It was a kindness to the gaunt curs perhaps, but I never reached the point of taking great pleasure in seeing one of them disappear beneath us with one short helpless yelp. When he could not find enough of these pitiful animals within reach, he brushed against frightened _nha-qués_, the leisurely peasants of Annam, in order to see how far they could remove themselves in a single jump. Not a few of them made the records of mere athletes seem the performances of babes in arms.

To be the driver of an automobile is to the Annamese more than a trade, it is a title. The first chauffeur of the _Résidence Supérieure_ at the capital of Annam wears the dragon decoration of his emperor, and other chauffeurs passing through Hué go to his garage to kowtow before him. The ease with which Orientals adapt themselves to our inventions is one of the wonders of the East. One would suppose that a people quite incapable of understanding, much less inventing, such a mechanical contrivance as the automobile would stand in awe of it, and of those who had contrived it. Not at all; on the contrary they take it as calmly as they do the growths of nature, as they do the miracles with which they credit their demons and invisible spirits, showing the same rage or surprise if it does not respond to their senseless chastisement as at their gaunt sore-backed domestic animals refusing to work under their heartless lashings.

Thanks perhaps to French discipline, or because the Annamese are by nature a more quiet leisurely race, my companion on the front seat was not so wild as the average Chinese chauffeur. Yet on the whole it was no great pleasure to ride beside this solemn little brown man in his misplaced near-European clothes. Though it was always passable, the road was in places atrociously surfaced, for all the road-gangs along the way. Especially among the mountains that often came down to the edge of the sea it is no joke even for such famous road-builders as the French to keep up a highway in a land of tropical rainy seasons. An autobus of the same bootleg line, lying upside down in a creek where a bridge had broken down a week before under its thundering impact, did not give me that reassurance of complete safety at his high speed which the fellow himself seemed to have. It was bad enough to see one of the mangy yellow mongrels that slink about every Annamese hut disappear under our wheels every hour or two. I could comfort myself that these at least should be glad to be so suddenly put out of their lifelong misery. But in the course of the morning the nerveless Asiatic at the wheel succeeded in running over a handsome foreign hunting-dog loping along beside its shotgun-armed French master on a bicycle. Perhaps he did not deliberately overtake the animal—unsuspecting, because of the kindly European atmosphere it lived in, any such treachery as the orphaned mongrels of Annam are constantly on the lookout for—but he could at any rate easily have avoided it. The Annamese passengers, gazing back at the writhing corpse in the dust as we sped away, seemed to look upon such incidents as one of the pleasures of travel, due them in consideration of the high fare on these strange foreign vehicles. One had the feeling that they grinned and chattered and nudged one another not so much because of a certain more or less natural antipathy toward the race to which this particular dog was attached as out of sheer Oriental joy at beholding suffering. On the tanned mask of the driver’s face there was just the hint of two conflicting emotions; one the satisfaction of having added another dog, better than the average, to his score; the other a possibility of vengeance on the part of the Frenchman kneeling in the dust beside his dying pet, that transferred itself into a more deafening roar and breakneck speed than ever.

That autobus trip from Nhatrang to Tourane was through much prettier scenery than the one by train the day before. For one thing the highway runs much closer to the coast than does the railway. Outcroppings of the great Annamese chain came down to the edge of the China Sea every little while, especially during the first day’s stage from Nhatrang to Quinhon, and our road wound and twisted, buckled and climbed, over high rocky spurs, along the sheer edge of breath-taking slopes, up and down between sea-level and several thousand feet above it, often with hair-pin turns high up along precipitous cliffs on the very edge of the densely blue ocean. It opened many magnificent vistas, of weird indentations, bold headlands, charming little beaches, now and again an unbelievably blue bay thickly speckled with the sails of tiny boats dancing in the whitecaps as to Pan’s pipes, yet seeming to have no fear. They were mere cockle-shells, these sea-going canoes of the Annamese fishermen, made of bamboo splints tightly woven together and covered with pitch. Scores of them, baking bottom up in the sun on raised frameworks and gleaming under a new coating as with varnish, lay along the road through Annam. Sometimes the road itself was made of bamboo splints, woven together into great mat-like strips six feet or more wide and in some places half a mile long. These carried the heavy autobus across deep sand, at either end of leaky _bacs_, in which it would otherwise have floundered almost as quickly as in the water itself.

Deeply green wet jungle surrounded us much of the time, cactus stretching out spiny arms toward us. Blinding white salt marshes contrasted with a road in places so red that the saliva of a nation of betel-chewers did not spot it. Striking peaks of the coastal group alternated with tame stretches of dusty highway down at sea-level, gusts of rain from mountains of black clouds with blazing tropical sunshine. Wherever mountains and foot-hills receded enough to leave a suggestion of plain, however narrow, rice-fields filled every level space. The young rice of the first crop of the year was deeply flooded now, peasants plowing thigh-deep in it behind ponderous water-buffaloes that seemed to be in their element wading in slime. Some men and more women were clawing in the mud up to their biceps; others paddled about the fields in the light canoes of woven bamboo. Stones were so rare in some sections of this ancient route that the well-sweeps used for irrigation were weighted at the short end with balls of mud and straw. Along the road there was no more suggestion of fences than in China itself, but the smaller foot-hills were here and there cut up into green fields by thin lines of greener bushes.

With an hour’s hot halt for refreshments for man, woman, and gasoline-consuming beast at a village boasting a tolerable Annamese imitation of a French restaurant, we rode on through scorching midday into the slightly cooler afternoon, ending the first day’s stage with sunshine enough left to photograph pretty Quinhon. In the last few miles big rice-plains had opened out; we had bisected a scattered town of some size; files of coolies had increased until the road became an almost continual procession of them. Quinhon is beautifully situated on a spit of sand and earth projected out into a bay surrounded by mountainous shores. Thus there are both mountains and sea on all sides of it, except where the road enters the one long street of the native town, merging beyond into shaded drives and foreign houses in garden-groves, none of them a hundred yards from either beach. The French suppress somewhat more successfully than the English-speaking races the tendency to insist on erecting in the tropics dwellings exactly like those at home, and the houses they build in Indo-China are not entirely unfitted to the climate.

The ruling race monopolizes this tongue of sandy land running out into the densely blue, very deep harbor surrounded by high hills, where one small ocean steamer, flying the British flag, now rode at anchor. The native town is little more than two unbroken lines of shops, and between them and the French residences stood a whitewashed market building of modern lines, even at this late hour half filled and all but surrounded by squatting women in the woven palm-leaf hats of parasol shape that are the most prominent feature of every Annamese market. They sold all manner of native foodstuffs, fish from the sea, long rolls of dark-brown sugar wrapped in leaves, arec-nuts and the betel-leaves and lime that go with them, recalling the Indian women of the Andes selling cocoa-leaves and similar ingredients of an analogous mild vice. Though French paper piastres, fractional silver, and big copper sous are the ordinary Indo-Chinese medium of exchange, in the markets the masses still use _sapèques_, as the French call Chinese “cash.”

It was at Quinhon that I saw for the first time in Indo-China, though by no means the last, prisoners wearing the _cangue_ once so common and now so rare in China. Instead of the great planks of Manchu—and Puritan—days, however, these contrivances about offending necks were a very light frame of wood, as if the French, though unable to do away entirely with an old Annamese custom left over from the centuries of Chinese rule, had insisted on softening this form of punishment. Native justice prescribes leg-irons too, and sentences men to hard labor even for not paying taxes, but French rule seems to temper Asiatic cruelty by wrapping bands of cloth about the ankles so that irons shall not chafe the skin. Most of the convicts also had an iron band about the waist, and this was connected with the leg-irons by two chains that clanked constantly with the prisoner’s short steps. Yet the fellows could even climb cocoanut-trees in these, and they did not seem to have any difficulty in getting permission from the soldier guards to step into a shop and buy cigarettes or the makings of the betel-nut cuds with which the black teeth of both prisoners and guards driveled. The men who thus dropped behind soon caught up again with their fellows, pushing and pulling two-wheeled carts of sanitary purposes and drawing loads of broken stone.

For all its French colony, the people here gaped at a foreigner almost as much as in China—though perhaps it was merely because I was out in the sun and on foot at such an hour. They gathered to watch me write wherever I drew out my note-book and gaped open-mouthed at my antics with the camera that few of them seemed to recognize, but with more respect, or fear, than Chinese crowds show under similar circumstances, remaining quietly at some distance, like well trained children. Frenchmen, even women and children, began to appear when the sun neared the horizon, strolling under the trees and along the edges of the blue bay out on their breeze-cooled sandspit. At the more or less French hotel where Europeans passing through Quinhon spend the night I was joined that evening by the only man of my own tongue I met between Saïgon and Tourane. He was thin and lanky with long tropical living, but filled with Scotch humor, and announced himself the chief engineer of the steamer in the harbor. He did not seem to believe my tale that I had come all the way from Saïgon by land, much less that I hoped to go clear on into China without taking to the sea, though he had sailed into this and all the other little ports along the coast of Annam half his life, during which his chief pleasures were a meal and a “berth” ashore now and then.