From President to Prison/Chapter 10
COAL AND A CURSÈD LAKE
THROUGHOUT the next few days I inspected all the abandoned shafts and came to the conclusion that the mining had been carried on without any regular system and had consequently rendered impossible a proper utilization of the various seams, which had been ruined for practical development by wrongly placed galleries that were now crumbling in many spots. Besides this, the coal was young and very friable, pulverizing readily, a fact which greatly militated against its value for use in locomotives and also made it very difficult to transport economically. Consequently I eliminated these deposits from consideration and journeyed farther up the Sungari.
As we reached the mouth of the River Nonni, we turned up the stream and began fighting its current, working our way northwest. Carefully cultivated fields of kaoliang, millet and soya beans lined the banks of the Golden Nonni; and numerous villages of the greyish-brown fang-tzu, looking like irregular heaps of dried clay, were visible everywhere.
The captain of the steamer, who had in earlier years navigated the Nonni, informed me that we were approaching the mouth of the Tolo, an affluent coming in from the west. This smaller stream forms the northeastern boundary of the sparsely covered eastern extremity of the Gobi, the presence of whose wastes we had already had borne in upon us by such clouds of dust and sand that the skies and the sun were at times obscured by them, giving to everything a uniform, monotonous veil of yellow colouring. In places these drifting sands worked their way across the fields that bordered the river and stretched their fingers into the stream in the form of spits and shoals.
Near a village, where we had decided to stop, the captain moored his steamer against a high bank cut out by the current. As soon as we were tied up, I sent Rusoff out with some of the Chinese to hire a number of carts to take us along the bank of the Tolo, where I had been informed there existed considerable deposits of coal. We could not, however, find any transport in this village, so that Rusoff had to go off to the nearest town, Hsin Chao, from where he brought in with him seven great lumbering, screeching Manchurian farm-carts, which gave the impression of having been bereft of oil since the day they were built.
With this transport we started for the Tolo along a road across the fields that was unimaginably rutted and in places deep with the sands borne in on the western winds from the Gobi. It was already the end of September, and at dawn cold blasts often heralded the coming winter. There behind the almost black ranges of the Great Khingans the cold northwest winds of autumn were already playing madly at their game of sowing desert sands, while here on the eastern slope of the range the winter spoke as yet only in a whisper, warning of what was to come and cautioning man and beast to prepare.
Another of the inevitable warnings of the approaching cold came to us from those wingèd messengers, honking out the news that the northern swamps and rivulets were putting on their winter pelts and that it was time for all feathered creatures to be away to the south. As I watched again with never-tiring enthusiasm this migration of the birds, I looked with longing at the leather case in which my shotgun lay, impatiently waiting for the days of the autumn chase.
We pitched our camp in a little village near the point where the Tolo joins the Nonni. The rather high eastern spurs of the Great Khingans reached down nearly to the river bank, and out from the valleys and gullies between these mountain shoulders many little streams ran down into the Tolo, forming a whole network of waterways across a marshy plain that was overgrown with high grass, dotted everywhere with clumps of bushes coming up out of the bog.
Several times I crossed these bogs on my way to the mountains, where I found outcrops of coal in the steep slopes that was of so good a quality that I ordered prospecting work to be undertaken to determine the thickness and direction of the seams and the quantity available.
While Rusoff and Gorloff superintended these operations, I took advantage of the opportunity to visit the neighbouring country. Inasmuch as the pain in my leg prevented me from riding, I had to go about in a cart and usually took the captain of the steamer and a Cossack along with me as an escort. We visited the plain lying between the rivers Tolo and Chor, both affluents of the Nonni, and found that two low, almost bare, foothills of the Great Khingans reach down into it. Everywhere we came across wide expanses of kaoliang fields, dotted with rather prosperous-looking Chinese villages, set in circles of tall, old trees. We had often to cross brooks and small rivers, whose banks were overgrown in with thick scrub oak bushes and reeds, and in these we kicked out an extraordinary number of pheasants from right under our feet, being able only to stand and watch them run swiftly away, twisting in and out through the grass and bushes and almost flattened to the earth as they ran.
Finding they would not rise, we metamorphosed our Cossack into a hunting dog, sent him into the brush about two hundred yards ahead of us and had him come shouting down toward us. When the birds broke and discovered us, they flared straight up into the air and gave us easy targets. Sometimes for days we fed our men on this delicious game, thus giving them, with their fondness for meat and their inability to indulge this expensive taste, a tremendous treat. However, after some time we ourselves tired of this dainty and could no longer swallow what had become for us an insipid meat; and we consequently soon ceased hunting, as this is the least interesting of shooting, when the birds are so numerous.
Not far from the mouth of the Chor we found a lake of the same name, almost entirely overgrown with reeds and rushes and covered, in the slightly deeper parts, with a carpet of water-lilies and the leaves of small aquatic plants. One evening, when the ducks and geese were flighting, we made an observation here at this lake which astonished us and set us wondering what the explanation might be. When flocks of these birds, tired by the day's journey, circled over the lake with the evident intention of stopping there for the night, instead of settling, they began to utter their notes of warning and danger, as they swung down close over the water and swept up and away to make off toward the river. We were quite at a loss to understand the reason of the birds for consistently refusing to settle and were much interested and relieved, when we unexpectedly ran across the explanation of it in the little village on its shore, where we happened to be stopping.
It came in the course of a legend which the old Manchu, in whose house we were lodging, related to us, as he was handling and examining our arms. As the captain translated it to me, the old man's story ran about as follows:
"It was long, long ago—so long that even my grandfather did not remember it—that a terrible famine raged in China. Thousands upon thousands of people died in towns and villages, and it was only here between the Chor and the Tolo that Death did not levy his inexorable toll. This was because of our lake. In the spring and autumn immense flocks of ducks, geese, swans and other migrating birds came here to feed. They arrived in the spring from the south and the southwest, in the autumn down the valley of the Nonni and southeastward against the current of the Sungari; and they always stopped on our lake for a long period of rest and feeding, for then fish and nutritious water-plants were plentiful.
"In those days Buddha was reverently worshipped in our countryside. As you know, the Buddhist faith does not allow the use of the flesh of birds and fish. During the famine years a Chinese merchant from the south arrived here and, seeing the quantity of birds and fish and scoffing at the precepts of our faith, persuaded the people to make use of these ample supplies of food to protect them from the scourge of hunger. Following his advice, the people made a great net, larger than any ever seen on the Sungari, and also set many cunning traps for the birds. With the fish and game they thus took, our forefathers sustained themselves through the years of hunger and the lake region really did not suffer. But, when the famine was a thing of the past, a Lama monk, robed in yellow, came here from behind the ranges of the Great Khingans. He walked around the lake, entered each house, then returned to the shore, cut thin poles and stuck them in the earth at seven paces apart until he had entirely encircled the water, putting on each one of the rods a bit of red cloth with a holy phrase written upon it. When the lake had thus been surrounded with this portentous circle, the Lama summoned all the people together and spoke to them as follows:
"'The great teacher, Buddha Sakya-muni, did not desire your death and looked in silence on your crime. However, as evidence of his displeasure at your departure from his precepts, he has ordained that the fish shall no longer multiply in your lake, nor shall any flock of migrating birds ever come down again to its surface.'
"Since that day there have never been any fish in the Lake of Chor. They sometimes have come in from the river but have immediately turned back or perished in the cursèd water. It is the same with the birds. Ducks, geese and swans often circle for hours on end above Chor, but none of them, even the most tired or the wounded birds, ever venture to touch the water with their breasts, on account of the poisonous vapours which the Lama caused to rise from it."
Such was the tale of the old Manchu, and he lived in calm and undisturbing ignorance of the fact that it was not the curse of the yellow Lama that kept the lake free of fowl but that the birds, with the help of their keen, intuitive sense of danger, detected in the strong fumes of the lake the warning that it was no proper place for them to rest or feed. Of course, with the story-loving Oriental, it builds a better tale to have these riders of the air pass down from generation to generation the command of Great Buddha to forsake for ever this forbidden pool; but it seems crudely necessary to give our credence to the more scientific, though much less attractive, theory that the poisonous vapours mentioned by the Manchu are the result of the slow death of the lake through the putrefying activity of several species of bacteria, which, as they multiply, kill or frighten away all animal life.
Whatever the explanation, we shared in the realization of the fact and could not find any game around the shores of the lake, though we did pick up some unusual shooting experience along the marshy banks of the River Tolo about six miles from our prospecting work. It was one Saturday night that we first went there. We left our cart with the Chinese driver on the edge of the marsh, where the thick oak bushes began, and, taking with us a large kettle, cups, tea, salt, sugar and hard bread, penetrated into the high grass and reeds. Though it was still an hour to the dawn, we already heard the thrilling trumpeting of the geese, as we took our stands along the marsh, making our blinds among the bushes and waiting for the sun, which seemed so loath to appear.
Though the birds flew high that morning and gave us poor sport, I had the satisfaction of making an unusual double on a lone pair of big geese that came sweeping right over the waving tops of the grass and flared a wonderful target, which both the captain and I missed with all four cartridges. In disgust I reloaded and chased the birds across the stream with two shots that brought them down.
On the evening flight we had even worse treatment at the hands of Diana, for the Khingans joined the goddess of the hunt and poured down upon us a sudden freshet that drove us from our blinds and sent us wandering the whole night through over the flooded plain in a deluge of rain. In our search for the Chinese carter with our food, we entirely lost ourselves and began moving in the fatal circles that proved our want of compasses.
The captain waxed more profane with each hour of the night, while the Cossack at one time sighed so piteously that my heart grew sad for him.
"What ails you?" I asked with some concern, for I thought he must be in pain.
"I put my sugar in my pocket. It has melted and now I am sticky all over."
"Damn it!" shouted the captain. "This is the limit! Comfits made of Cossacks!"
In spite of all our fatigue we roared with laughter.
Somehow we dragged the night through and at dawn, more dead than alive, we finally discovered our cart and the genial old driver with a kettle of tea swinging over a sputtering fire, ready to welcome and revive us.
An hour later, after we had dried our clothes somewhat, we were once more in our cart on our way back to the village where we had our working headquarters. On arriving, I found I could not get down without assistance and that my right leg and swollen joint could not be moved without giving me excruciating pain. For about a week I had to remain on my back in the dirty Chinese fang-tzu, doctoring myself for the indiscretions committed. Meantime the prospecting work turned out favourably, and I estimated that the ground under exploration had four seams of coal, each of about six feet in thickness, and that the area of the deposit was sufficiently large to justify exploitation. As the aim of my exploration trip was thus accomplished, it only remained for the technical division of the Railway Administration or of the General Staff to continue the work, and my part as adviser was at an end.