Art. 2.- WHITE WOLF' IN KANSU.*

VERY different is the outlook of one who is actually drifting amid tempests, from that of him who sits comfortably at home and reads about them connectedly and in composure. As one wanders on from frightened town to frightened town, encircled by rumours black and terrible from every quarter, life becomes a hand-tomouth affair, where the threatened evil of to-day is quite sufficient. One's horizon of information is bounded by a radius of fifty miles, and everything beyond is wrapped in a darkness that one has neither power nor leisure to illuminate. One sees history in the making from a small and personal angle; of the great events that go to make it outside, one gleans no hint as they happen, and the small things that help to compose the great become the daily anxieties and pivots of existence. Consequently, from a point so close at hand, details loom larger than the whole landscape viewed from afar; and one's chronicle of experiences, though wholly incomplete in knowledge, wholly local and self-centred, yet has an actuality, a growing force, beyond the reach of luckier people before whom the full tale of events lies fresh and hot-pressed on their breakfast-table every day. These may gather in the columns of the press a convenient bird's eye prospect of mankind from China to Peru; but the connected history they glean, with the daily addition of every rumour and proclamation throughout the Empire, can never have quite the savour of the local rumours and tragedies, on a knowledge of which one's life perpetually depends, till the forgotten outer world of kings and emperors and republics fades utterly away before the imminent problem of the White Wolf's proximity to oneself.

Long ere this, facts and fictions of recent China have been clearly set forth for every English reader; and Chinese news, which has not even faintly penetrated as yet to the Thibetan border, is stale and cold long since at English dinner-tables. Yet, in the vast panorama, many a detail may seem small that on the spot bulks

* This paper was written in Kansu last summer (Editor).

huge; and some very ghastly work has lately been doing in these far corners of Kansu, which probably, compressed into a few small lines at the bottom of a column, has quite eluded popular notice, or may have seemed as remote and meaningless and trifling as would the sack of Magdeburg to the monks of Taprobane. Yet here they have their weight; and the ten thousand rotting dead in the streets of Taochow lie heavier on the scale than the fate of the Dragon Throne itself.

We slipped out of Sian-fu just in time, scudding westward on the fringe of the advancing storm. The great Imperial city, foul with the dust of death, was all in a tumult of terror, seething in convulsion like a boiling pot. The Wolf was advancing; he was at hand; he was a ruthless bandit; he was a nice gentlemanly person whom Mission ladies expressed a wish to meet. The situation darkened; and the Mission ladies changed their views, when they heard the tales of Lao-ho-kou and Kint-ze-kwan. The troops were disaffected, their arms medieval, their leaders corrupt as they. And still the Wolf drew nearer; the City of the Peaceful West was a place of howling storm. In all probability we were the last Europeans to be allowed by the Yamen to leave the capital in any direction. For, in the increasing danger, all the ruffians of Shensi were agog for some haymaking of their own; and the shadow of grave peril lay even over the highway of the border. Permission to start was hardly wrung from the authorities, responsible as they were for our safety, and commendably anxious to assure it, on risk of their own heads. Wrung it was, however, in the end; and means of conveyance secured by diplomacy, our chartered mules being hidden in our yard till the moment of departure, lest the soldiers should commandeer them to their own use, as they certainly would, had they known the opportunity.

On a sunny afternoon we slipped out of Sian, leaving behind us an imminent sense of danger, and escaping gladly to a freer air, westward, at least, of the Wolf, and where the worst of the threatened perils were vague and shadowy. Our last news, as we left, was local; we learned that the mule-broker responsible for our caravan had been seized by the soldiers on our departure, and

summarily beheaded. And after this tale, we passed out into the dark night of utter newslessness; no sound or syllable ever since has reached us, either of Great China, or of the pale feigned storms of Europe that have so quaint an air of unreality when considered in this land of real life and death where we now circulate. For some weeks, indeed, all news of any kind ceased wholly; even local rumour slept or dozed; and we continued a mild career along roads that, in defiance of all warnings from the Yamen, seemed perfectly peaceful for our passing. Yet, even as we passed, there was a sensation on the road that this sunlit calm was but the lull of a brewing storm. An ominous quiet, indeed, it seemed, along this, the main artery of East and West, that carries all the northern trade between Asia and Europe, China, Russia and Thibet. Less august, though, is the roadway, than its importance; and many a stony upland lane of Westmoreland might sneer at this, one of the great highways of the world. Through flat and fertile lands it winds towards the West, through placid little villages, and walled towns comfortably asleep in snug hollow or open plain. But a sultriness lay over everything as we went; it seemed as if at any moment the crash of thunder might break the perilous calm. Watchers with anxious or evil faces lined the streets at our passing; no word was spoken anywhere of war; but every evening we were glad to have left a day and its cities behind us, to be yet one day nearer the Kansu border, beyond which I was assured that peace had her everlasting and inviolable home. Feng Hsiang was a point to be rapidly passed; here the Elder Brother League is strong, and rascality runs high. A slatternly city, with rows of streets half blind and dead, but thronged with dense mobs of sightseers, in whose eyes a heavy and greedy malignance brooded. And here, indeed, we heard that the ulcer was felt and known to be near breaking-point, and the resident Europeans had been warned to be on the watch for their lives. So we passed through and crossed the border, and came to Tsinchow, here leaving the Nanchow road, and striking away southward towards the arid valleys of the Black Water River.

The air at once was changed. In place of brewing sedition and brigandage the land was full of calm.

Frank Mahomedans and kindly simple Chinese peasants occupied the fields and towns in peace. There was no thought of danger from within or without. The Wolf was very far away now; he would never want or dare to trouble Kansu. And thus, with divers adventures by the way, we saw many men and many cities, and at last, blocking the vault of Heaven, the vast white wall of Thibet. And now, if before we lacked information, we plunged here into the deepest abysses of silence. Our own affairs soon occupied us completely, and not a whisper arrived of even the little places we had left but a few days since. Yet the change from China to Thibet was not one from stress to peace.

My name, in Chinese character, is Law-and-OrderGreat-Lord. I and my name alike are complete strangers to this borderland; and Law and Order are unfortunately things with which the inhabitants deserve to be drilled into a salubrious intimacy. All along the dividing line of China and Thibet, there stretches a series of independent or semi-independent principalities. The rulers of these often live far away, and in no case are in a position to exercise any effective authority, oppressed as they are between the claims of China on one hand and those of the monks on the other. The result of this is that the border is a lawless no-man's-land, where the monks have everything their own way, deriding the temporal powers of their lords, and owning but the most shadowy allegiance to the vast and vague pontificate of Lhasa. In many places, accordingly, they are, for the most part, an evil crew, intolerant, autocratic and uncultivated, ruling the peasants with a rod of iron, and with all the harshness of masters elevated from the class they govern, seeing that a son of every family is claimed for monastic orders. At the same time, it is not from missionaries, nor from travellers fed entirely from missionary sources, that a fair appreciation of Lamaism can reasonably be expected. No professor of one faith, however candid in intention, can possibly be really ingenuous and impartial in his criticism of another; a Buddhist evangelist would find unexpected and unpalatable things to say of Roman monasticism or Orthodox Iconodules. In one respect, especially, English condemnation of Lamaism seems unfair. Worshipping as we do, above all, material success

in this world, the capacity for slaughter, and that merciless Moloch, Efficiency, we fall foul of Lamaist monasticism in Mongolia because emollit mores, nec sinit esse feros,' reclaiming a wild and bloodthirsty people into a meekness and mildness that we ourselves despise as enthusiastically as our Gospels praise it. And yet, when we meet the same monasticism producing exactly the contrary effects in Thibet, and hardening a hard mountain race into yet further courage, audacity and fire, we have no better word than 'obstinate fanaticism' for our angry verdict on a frame of temper that may not suit our own purposes so well as the contemptible meekness or lethargy of the Mongolian.

For my own part, deploring altogether the wide divergence of Mahayana Buddhism in all its branches from the pure traditions of the South, I could yet wish that Mongolian effects were more evident in Thibetan Lamaism. While China just behind us was in agonies we never guessed, we ourselves found our hands sufficiently full in fending off the unfriendliness of the monks. On our arrival at a border village, subject in name to the far-off Prince of Jo-ni (Choni in the maps) we were confronted with an initial difficulty in obtaining lodgment. The men of the village-tall, handsome, burly figures in Isabella-coloured homespun-met us with hostile looks; and their wives were even more overt in their enmity, preventing their husbands from returning any civil answer, wherever one might seem inclined. Finally, however, we secured a house, and were promptly invaded by a deputation of monks from the abbey on the promontory. They came, headed by the Business Manager or Almoner or Chancellor, filled with curiosity and unfriendly questions. It came out that we had already nearly occasioned a grave scandal in the community. For our road, winding over the shoulder of the hill, had suddenly, just as it came in sight of the village, offered us two alternatives, between a low road, convenient and smooth across the cornfields, straight to the houses, and another steep and stony, toiling upwards, right round the encircling slopes, and so down. I, never noting a barrier of brushwood in my path, was at once for taking the obviously easy road; and an instant eruption of dismal howls from the village taught me nothing, for my innocence took none