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Their pale intellectual faces, and their gleaming black eyes burning with hidden fires, marked them out distinctly from the farmers and artisans and coolies, with their coarser, heavier features, who moved along side by side with them.
Gough went with the party, Oldham remaining in command of the post, which was garrisoned with the maimed, the halt, and the blind in other words, with men suffering from frostbite and snow blindness, of whom there were some twenty-six of the former and thirty of the latter; those men of the Kashmir troops who were fit to march being sent back across the pass as escort to the coolies.
"Are you the man who rallied the coolies and held the line?" he asked shortly. Kan Wong stiffened with a dignity to which he now felt he had a right. "Me fight," he said quietly "me fight, coolie fight, too. Me belong Dlagon's blood. One time my people fighting men; long time I wait." "You'll wait no longer," said the officer.
We know that the Ghetto at Rome, which forms the most filthy part of the Eternal City, was entirely spared when the rest of the place was decimated by cholera; but Canton generally is far dirtier than the Roman Ghetto. As we found it almost impossible to traverse the streets of Canton on foot, we were carried, each person, in a palanquin, upon the shoulders of four coolies.
Amid much apparent confusion and tremendous chattering, a sort of rough ramp was engineered up the slip, and presently the horseless landau appeared borne in triumph by a mob of coolies superintended by our priceless Sabz Ali.
Think of pulling a person at the rate of five or six miles an hour in the sun of a hundred and twenty or thirty with your head exposed. Most of the coolies who work in the sun have nothing on their heads. It's either survival of the fittest or inheritance of acquired characteristics. Their adaptation to every kind of physical discomfort is certainly one of the wonders of the world.
Nevertheless, the fire blazed royally, and we ate up all the old hen and called for more, and prepared to make a night of it until, about ten o'clock, our bearer Sabz Ali appeared, with a train of coolies carrying our bedding and the other contents of the derelict carriage.
Our coolies had been directed to a quarter of the city called Shiba, and here at length we find ourselves, and are shortly set down before one of the grandest buddhist temples in Japan. How peacefully the great building reposes in its dark casket of solemn fir trees! To reach the main entrance, we traverse a broad pathway lined with praying lanterns on either hand.
Shortly after, the widow was astonished to see an army of coolies marching in procession towards her door, all, like the slaves of Aladdin, heavily laden; and she was not awakened from her surprise till the master of the ceremonies had placed the following letter in her hands: "Madam, With this you will receive seventeen fall-grown tigers, which I have had the honour of shooting for you.
It was then with some such feelings as these that I landed at Chemulpo. Hundreds of coolies running along the shore, with loads of grain on their backs, to be shipped by the Higo-Maru, had no compunction in knocking you down if you were in their way, and a crowd of curious native loafers, always ready to be entertained by any new arrival, followed you en masse wherever you went.
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