IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| The heart of a continent : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
44 THE HEART OF A CONTINENT. [CHAP. III.
though it was so cold, I do not remember suffering very much from it. The air was generally still, and we had the advantage of starting from a warm house with something warm inside us, and at the end of our day's march, we again found a good warm room to go to. It was afterwards, on the Pamirs and in the Himalayas, that I really felt the cold, for there, instead of a warm room to start from, I only had
a small tent, and sometimes no tent at all, nor sufficient firewood for a fire, and the high altitudes, by causing breathlessness and bringing on weakness, added to my discomfort. Here in Manchuria, unless it happened to be windy—and then, of course, it was really trying — the cold affected us very little. The roads were frozen hard and the snow on them well beaten down by the heavy traffic, and we trundled .along a good thirty miles a day.
The traffic in this winter season was wonderful. I counted
in a single day's march over eight hundred carts, all heavily laden and drawn by teams of at least two and many of them nine animals, ponies or mules. A main road in Manchuria in the winter is a busy scene, and these strings of carts going along on the frosty morning, with the jingling bells on the teams, and the drivers shouting at their animals, were signs of life and animation which we had hardly expected to see after our first experience on the heavy, muddy roads in the summer. The inns were numerous and crowded, and as a string of carts passed by the inn, men would come running out, proclaiming the advantages of their particular hostelry, and trying to persuade the carters to come
in. Then, when the carts stopped, the inn men would bustle
about, fetching grain and fodder for the animals and food for the men, and there was as much bustle and activity as
in a market town in England. I remarked, too, how very
well the carters fed their animals. These Manchurian, or rather Mongolian, ponies and mules are never allowed any
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