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Updated: May 29, 2025
They found Seoul, the capital, beautifully placed in a valley surrounded by hills, a city of royal palaces and one-storied, mud-walled houses, roofed with thatch a city guarded by great walls. Statesmen and nobles and generals, always surrounded by numerous retinues in glorious attire, ambled through the narrow streets in dignified procession.
They are of fine physique, tall and robust, and are said to belong to the Polynesian type, probably having come over from the Fiji Islands, or some of the Pacific group, in their canoes. When first discovered they lived in villages or "Pahs," comprising a number of small circular huts, with a larger one for the Chief, mud-walled and thatched with grass or flax.
Much more in the same strain Stafford wrote to his mother; who, in reply to these letters, "besought him to consider well what he was about, before he suffered himself to begin falling desperately in love with this Rose or Rosamond Gray, or any Irishwoman whatsoever; who, having been bred in a mud-walled cabin, could never be expected to turn out at the long run equal to a true-born Englishwoman, bred in a slated house."
The bone-dry, hot-weather wind had shriveled up verdure and ambition together. But in the mud-walled cottages, where men were wont to doze through the long, hot days, there were murmurings and restless movement. Men lay on thong-strung beds, and talked instead of dreaming, and the women listened and said nothing which is the reverse of custom.
I shall not soon forget the picture of one little group whom I found squatted around a missionary's knees in a little mud-walled yard just before I left Khera Kalan that afternoon. Not far away was a Hindu temple; not far away, too, the historic Grand Trunk Road which leads through Khyber Pass into the strange land of Afghanistan.
Cold as this was we decided that it was safer to endure it and risk frost-biting every night than to build one of the mud-walled and mud-covered holes that so many, lived in. These were much warmer than lying out on the frozen ground, but we believed that they were very unhealthy, and that no one lived long who inhabited them.
At Alexander's Well, an ancient cistern built from marble blocks and filled with crystal-clear water, we paused to refill our boiling radiator, and paused again, a few miles farther on, at the wretched, mud-walled village which, according to local tradition, is the birthplace of the man who made himself master of three continents, changed the face of the world, and died at thirty-three.
From there also it set out next day in battle array, ready to encounter the Khalifa's full strength. In the clear atmosphere of the early morning and in the late afternoon when the bewildering mirage and dancing haze had vanished, from any knoll could be seen the large village of Kerreri. There the Mahdists had built a strong mud-walled fort by the bank of the Nile.
The village houses, low, mud-walled, and thatch-roofed, were seen this season at their best. Gay flowers grew around. Melons and pumpkins, weighted with fruit, ran over the walls. Nearly every roof displayed a patch of vivid scarlet, for the chilies had just been gathered, and were spread out on the housetops to dry.
At his father's death, he had but 100l. in ready money, and he was obliged to go into a poor mud-walled cabin, facing the door of which there was a green pool of stagnant water; and before the window, of one pane, a dunghill that, reaching to the thatch of the roof, shut out the light, and filled the house with the most noisome smell.
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