Call to Adventure! by Aloha Baker

Author:Aloha Baker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

ON THE ROAD TO VLADIVOSTOK

OLGA LEFT us in Harbin, where a member of the European colony offered her a good position. I had enjoyed her companionship, over the long, tortuous plains of northeastern Manchuria which we had crossed by car, for Olga was charming. Good fortune was with us. General Sutton, who, after our first lecture at the European Club, had toted us bodily back to his home in Mukden to sample major hospitality. We secured rich loot in new films in Mukden, with types of Tartars, Mongols, Chinese and Manchus. We prowled over the city unhindered by officialdom, and stood at times on the wall to look down on one side at ancient collections of filth, houses of clay, narrow twisting alleys hollowed deep by a constant stream of camels and donkeys, sweating under too heavy loads; on the other side of the wall, controlled by Japanese, was a clean and modern town. The Mukden railway station belonging to Japan is built on a grand scale, making it the hub of a wheel, with the streets like spokes leading out from the center.

General Sutton gave us the freedom of his home.

“Stay here,” he said hospitably, so that was how, in the Sutton arsenal, I fired a trench mortar. The horrible little steel barrels on tripods, three- and six-inch, were being tested. I watched the soldiers trying out a new batch of shells, then they let me pick up one, shove it into the mouth of the barrel and jump back. There came an ear-shattering boom, the gun leaped in its emplacement, and the shell shrieked into the air. It was bound for a target a mile and three-quarters distant. Any one of these shells might have exploded in the barrel.

But in a month we were well on the way to Harbin. We slept in Chinese inns on the way, and we ate dozens of hard-boiled eggs of a doubtful youth. The cold was becoming intense when the sun did not shine, and we made hard going of many river fords. Once we boarded a ferry and small boys punted us to the further side. We ate eggs, the muddy water stank, and chunks of thin ice floated in it with gobs of filth and dead animals. Cap broke the shell of an egg and a boiled chicken popped to view. Cap was awfully sick, but the hunger-ridden eyes of our ferry lads begged for the boiled dreadfulness, so we bestowed largesse of all the eggs we had left.

Harbin was flourishing; gay little shops lined the muddy, cobbled, wide thoroughfare. The city seemed a bit of western Russia set down beside the Sungari River in China. Old Harbin remains China; new Harbin is like old Russia. At the south end of the main avenue a wooden church reared onion-shaped cupolas against the hard sky. Russian refugees, wrapped in rags and somber melancholy, obviously were being made to feel like intruders, but there was no place else for them to go.

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