What the Traveller Saw (17 page)

‘
Vous êtes blancs
,’ one of them said, frankly surprised, to which all we could think of to answer was ‘
Oui
’.

A bit further on, at Lafond, there was a market swarming with people and animals on the bank of the Rivière de l’Artibonite. Further up that river was the Hôpital Schweitzer, run by an American doctor, Mellon, who had done much good here in a country where there were only six doctors to every 100,000 persons. Ahead, the road now ran through the great plain of Artibonite, a brilliant green sea of rice paddy, to distant mountains which were a deep blue. By now it had collapsed utterly and we had to zig-zag constantly to avoid huge potholes, one of which contained a fully grown pig.

Occasionally, we passed a village, or a
lacou
of
cailles
, which was less than a village, being the huts of a man with several common-law wives, with fires burning outside under rickety thatched lean-tos. Polygamy was common. In such places 85 per cent of Haitians lived out their brief lives (the expectation of life was around forty years).

We reached the mountains and the road improved. It passed through a grim region in which the
cailles
were few and decayed, and the only vegetation various sorts of cactus, noxious weeds and thorn. How anyone could exist in such a region was a mystery, but some did.

We passed a cemetery in the middle of this wilderness which displayed the grim black cross of Baron Samedi, Lord
of the Dead, as did every cemetery in this land. The white plinth was blackened with burnt offerings. In it they were burying the body of a man wrapped in leaves in a small, newly built mausoleum with slits in the sides to hold offerings, a miniature version of Papa Doc’s more bourgeois residence in the cemetery at Port-au-Prince. This solid little building was a great contrast to the
caille
in which this man passed his life. For the majority of Haitians the only solid roof they ever have over their heads is in the city of the dead.

At half past ten we crossed the main ridge of the Chaîne de Belance which separates L’Artibonite from the Département du Nord. The road was paved with huge stone slabs, numbers of which had sunk far below the level of the rest. There, near the pass, it was very cold and the people were very poor. They came running to the roadside at the sound of the engine to implore us to give them money. They did not ask for dollars, as they had in Port-au-Prince, but for a single gourde, the local currency which had an even exchange rate with the dollar of 20 cents to one gourde.

At the foot of the pass we asked an old woman for half a dozen oranges. She asked for half a gourde, but when we took our half dozen oranges she tried to press the whole basketful on us. Surely half a gourde couldn’t have been the market price?

By the time we reached Plaisance, a place among thick woods, the road surface had disappeared completely. In some places it was like driving over frozen waves, in others it was nothing more than a river bed filled with enormous stones. In this country it took an hour to cover sixteen miles.

At 1.30 p.m. we arrived at the gates of Cap-Haïtien in a state of extreme fatigue, to find it the antithesis of Port-au-Prince. Certainly the poor were just as poor in their warrens on the outskirts, but the city itself was old-fashioned, quiet and cool, a place in which you could actually stop to think. No wonder that the Cap-Haïtien painters regarded themselves as a separate
school, of whom Philomée Obin, father of an enormous family, who worked in a rickety wooden house on the outskirts of the town, was the best known. Long streets of old houses led up from the Atlantic to the foot of a wooded mountain, or else opened up vistas of an eighteenth-century cathedral with silver-painted cupolas, all recorded, one hoped, by some tropical Pissarro.

The ruined palace of Sans Souci, built by the ex-slave Christophe when he proclaimed himself king, as Henri I, in 1811, is at Milot about twelve miles from the city. The road to it runs through the plain of Limonade, a rich countryside in which, until the slaves freed themselves, were the estate houses of French sugar planters. Now scarcely even a ruin remained.

There can be few buildings of European inspiration with such a setting, at the head of a grand staircase and with the green jungle all around as if about to smother it. Even in its greatest splendour, with its European furnishings, it could not have been more memorable than it was when we visited it, an echoing, empty shell.

It housed the despotic black king who had been a waiter in Cap-Haïtien, his gallant queen who never failed him, even in adversity, their son, the Prince Royal, who was even fatter than Bébé Doc, and all the court. A looking-glass world, above the plain of Limonade, with a black king and queen awaiting the arrival of a black Alice.

It took about an hour and a half to climb to Christophe’s Citadel, which stands about 2500 feet up on the Pic de Laferrière, through dense growths of mahogany, pomegranates, palms, lianas and bananas. For most of the way the mist was thick. Through it the sound of Auld Lang Syne, played by small boys on the little bamboo pipes they sold to tourists, was borne on the damp air. It was like being on the way to a tropical Balmoral. The track became steeper and steeper and impossibly slippery; but suddenly we were in sunshine, with
the citadel floating on clouds above an enormous, sharpened prow of stone which the German engineers who designed it hoped would deflect shot from the curtain walls, here 130 feet high and 12 feet thick at the base.

There is nothing like the citadel in the whole realm of military architecture. No one really knows how many emancipated slaves died dragging the enormous stones and hundreds of cannon up from the valley floor. It took thirteen years to build, and when it was nearly finished one of the powder magazines was struck by lightning, and the king’s brother, the Duc de Port-de-Paix, and 159 of the household troops, the only ones trusted to form the garrison, were blown to smithereens.

The king shot himself in 1820 at Sans Souci while the mob roared for his blood outside. His body was brought to the citadel and hidden under a heap of quicklime to prevent it from being torn to pieces. His epitaph, prepared by himself, was ‘I shall rise from my ashes’.

I
N
1973
I WENT
to China on a flight inaugurating a regular service between Addis Ababa and Shanghai. On board were a number of members of the Ethiopian royal family, various ministers, many of whom are now no more, and the Chinese
chargé d’affaires
to the court of Emperor Haile Selassie.

China was still in a state of profound shock as a result of the massacres which had taken place between 1949 and 1969 during the regime of Mao Tse-tung, when between 32.25 and 61.7 million Chinese were eliminated. The Chairman was still on the throne – three more years were to elapse before he finally passed away and foreign visitors, other than diplomats, were still a rarity.

At four in the morning, Addis Ababa time, on 3 February, I was 40,000 feet or so up in an Ethiopian Airways Boeing 707 over Kunming, in the province of Yunnan in southwest China. During the Long March it had taken the First Front Red Army seven months to reach the longitude of Kunming from its base in Kiangsi. All being well we would be over Kiangsi in two hours. I was glad I was not marching. Since leaving Bombay at 11.30 the previous evening we had flown over Burma, crossed the upper reaches of the Salween and Mekong rivers, and the Wu Liang Shan and the Ai Lao Shan Mountains in China and the Black River without seeing any of them. Fog forced us to put down at Canton, where we found ourselves unseasonably clad for the subtropics, and we eventually arrived at Shanghai some eight hours late on an afternoon of inspissated gloom.

Formed up on the tarmac was a carbon copy of the welcoming party that had been hastily assembled at Canton. Anxious to ingratiate myself with anyone Chinese I decided to get in on the hand-shaking, but by the time I disembarked the committee had dispersed and the Ethiopian royals had been whisked away in a convoy of enormous, priceless (literally, because they were unobtainable through commerce), lace-curtained black limousines, all made in Shanghai. Deprived of our passports with their enormous, priceless (in the same sense) Chinese visas, we journalists and other hangers-on eventually followed them into the city in a convoy of buses, each with a complement of interpreters, some employed by the Chinese International Travel Service, others university lecturers and school teachers, all of whom confessed themselves worried about what their pupils would be up to in their absence.

In the Changning and Chingan districts of the city the afternoon shifts were spilling out of the factories on bicycles and on foot – quiet, orderly, healthy-looking and cheerful, dressed in padded cotton coats and suits obtainable only on coupons. Not a skirt to be seen – nor a dog nor a cat nor the sound of a bird. These countless thousands were held back at the intersections to let us pass, some incurious, others enthusiastic enough to clap. We were told that it was good manners to clap back. Soon it became tiring. There was hardly a car in sight, only lorries filled with goods and people. Finally, we drew up at the side door of the Peace Hotel, formerly the Cathay, the one-time property of Sir Victor Sassoon. Here, the convoy of cars that had conveyed the royal party was being given a sluicing by strangely feudal-looking chauffeurs. Inside, the public rooms were marmoreal caverns lit by 40-watt bulbs, the upstairs corridors lined with brass spittoons. The double bedrooms were clean but sad and behind a curtain in an alcove a couch waited to fulfil some equivocal purpose. The staff smiled endlessly and inscrutably.

By craning out of the window I could see the Whangpoo River, full of junks and sampans and a big ship coming up to a mooring from the Yangtze, twelve miles downstream. The boom of its siren mingled with the hellish screech of motor horns and the tinkle of 10.82 million bicycle bells, not to speak of the Fortnum and Mason-type carillon in the mock Tudor tower of the old customs building.

Just before dusk I managed to give my interpreter the slip and rushed out on to what Europeans used to call the Bund, the waterfront, which was a little like the Thames Embankment outside the Savoy, apart from the rows of men and women, some young, some old and shrivelled like walnuts, all equally zealously performing the slow-motion callisthenics said to be related to the Taoist conception of the unity of opposites known as
tai chi ch’uan.

The moment I reached the river wall I was hemmed in by hundreds of people. As more and more arrived they began to sway from side to side and surge backwards and forwards in a sort of crazy, rhythmic dance; as they did so, although I smiled at them and tried to appear friendly, they gazed into my eyes without any expression – not a trace of friendliness, malice or even curiosity. Behind them the lights were coming on in the tall buildings that had once housed the Chartered Bank, Jardine Matheson and so on, but were now effectively the tombs of capitalism.

All this left only ten minutes to get ready for a reception and banquet in the Hall of Friendship. Excellent Shanghai food, followed by Chinese speeches and Ethiopian replies on the theme we heard everywhere we went: the Chinese praised the Imperial Government of Ethiopia and its people, under the leadership of His Imperial Majesty, for their glorious tradition of fighting against imperialism. By 10.30 p.m. the city resembled a dimly-lit cemetery.

The government sent an Ilyushin 62 to take us to Peking, as it was then still called. Apart from short-haul prestige flights
such as ours, the whole fleet had been grounded long ago because of doubts about its airworthiness and because the Russians had been reluctant to supply spare parts; indeed the vibration in the lavatory was so great that it was impossible to sit on the seat.

The stewardesses were charming – they fed us mandarin oranges (I wondered what they called them now, in Maoist China) – but no promise of anything but their determination to defend their country and help their comrades could be discerned in their almost unnaturally shining eyes and sing-song voices. Over the next few days I would be equally unable to discern any other sentiments in the shining eyes of Little Red Guards in Hanchow dancing ‘Little Lin has Put on the Red Scarf’ or singing ‘I Watch the Geese for the People’s Commune’; or of four-year-olds doing down the imperialists with toy rifles and bayonets at the Fong Cheng residential area back in Shanghai.

In the Peking Hotel the service was excellent – boiling water for do-it-yourself tea arrived in a bright blue vacuum flask emblazoned with a picture of a white stallion with streaming mane jumping over a power station. One day two of us borrowed bikes from the Australian ambassador, immured with his staff in a suite of rooms alive with bugging devices, and spent a happy day cycling through Peking. The lights were still burning in the corridors of the hotel when at 6.30 a.m. we crept out to see what was to be seen. The temperature (it was February) was around 20°F and a parched, bitter wind was droning in from Siberia by way of Mongolia, bringing a dry dust which produced Peking throat. We decided to begin with the railway station because we both liked steam engines, so we pedalled off along the eastern part of Long Peace Street, the seemingly endless avenue that appears to divide Peking into two roughly equal parts.

This avenue, which was about as wide as the Champs-Élysées, was a cyclist’s heaven but a motorist’s nightmare, as
was most of the rest of the city. Cars and lorries and the Chinese version of the Land Rover were confined to the lane nearest the centre, while the other lanes were flooded with two ever-rolling streams of cyclists, each composed of up to twenty people riding abreast, most of whom at this hour seemed to be men. City workers such as these earned at that time between 60 and 70
yuan
a month (one
yuan
being then worth about 20p). All of them were more or less identically dressed in hats with ear flaps (the more luxurious were of fur and cost about 17
yuan
) and long, brightish blue, padded cotton overcoats. Most wore white gauze masks, presumably to guard against Peking throat.

They pedalled swiftly and purposefully out of the now waning night, thousands of them; it could have been hundreds of thousands: there were estimated to be five million bicycles in Peking, each of which cost, if new, between 120 and 180
yuan.
As in all communist countries the mystery of how anyone could afford to spend almost three times their monthly income on such an artefact was never satisfactorily resolved. These cyclists rarely spoke to one another. Occasionally they rang their bells. The only other sound, apart from the noise of the trolleybuses, was that of the whirring of the bicycle tyres on the surface of the road.

The station was built in ten months during the Great Leap Forward and was designed by students. We left our machines in a bike park. Other people were given bamboo tokens in exchange for theirs, but ours were British – a Raleigh and a BSA – and this was deemed sufficient identification.

Soon, we were borne aloft into the heart of the station on an escalator, surrounded by a minority group from some distant province dressed in overpowering sheepskins and heavily laden with luggage and infants. Ticketless, we were unable to get on to the platforms at which giant diesel and steam loco-motives were limbering up for their journeys: to Moscow via Ulan Bator in about six days, to Canton in 36 hours or Shanghai
in about 25. So we left the station and set off at breakneck speed through some
hutung
, small back streets, to find a place from which we could see the trains rumbling past, their steam engines whistling mournfully.

From here it was only a short way to the Observatory, a huge stone platform outside the Old City Wall on which still stood the marvellous bronze instruments and armillary sphere set up by Kublai Khan in the thirteenth century, and entrusted to Jesuit missionaries in the sixteenth. As the sun rose, the light flooding Long Peace Street, filtered by the dust, was first the sepia of an old photograph and then, as it strengthened, a brilliant ochre.

By then the cyclists had come out of their frozen trance-like state and were talking to one another. Some were pulling little trailers loaded with bottles of milk or wood (one trailer supported a wardrobe with an old lady perched on it) and there were big loaded carts drawn by donkeys or horses.

After a Chinese breakfast back at the hotel, we cycled along the foot of the vermilion south wall of the Imperial City to the Gate of Heavenly Peace, a symbol of the Revolution from which Mao proclaimed the birth of the People’s Republic on 1 October 1949; and before which a million people gathered to inaugurate the Cultural Revolution. We also visited the Nationalities Cultural Palace which contained contemporary artefacts from all China, many of them hideous testimonials to human ingenuity. One of the best exhibits was a carved peach stone.

If only we could have spent more time in the Forbidden City among the remains of the Ming and the Ching – 9000 rooms occupying 178 acres, a whole world. Looking at the happy proletarian throng of visitors, it was difficult to believe that in the lifetime of the older people present the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi had dined on meals of 148 courses, used the monies intended for the rebuilding of the destroyed Chinese fleet to construct a marble boat of debatable taste in the lake of
one of the Summer Palaces, and is said to have taken lovers selected in the slums by her eunuchs and conveyed to her in a black, yellow-tasselled carriage, an encounter from which they never returned.

The rest of the day was a blur of people and places: of pedalling through miles of stone-paved
hutung
, in which the one-storey houses had grey walls, grey tiles, and narrow doorways leading into little courtyards, where often a date tree was growing; of visiting the State Store on Wanfuching Street and little shops in which infinitesimal quantities of things were weighed out with incredible slowness, as they were in English village shops before the last war.

People were kind, especially if you didn’t try and photograph them without permission. (One day, two soldiers had insisted that we took their trolleybus seats, which made us feel decrepit.) We drank tea with old, erudite men in the antique shops of Liulichang, in what was called the Chinese City, and had our lunch in a very crowded cookshop surrounded by Red Guards, soldiers and workers, all very curious about us but friendly. The whole meal, consisting of
shao ping
(wheat cakes), noodle soup, sausage and a big jug of beer, cost us 34 cents each (about 7p).

Finally, as the sun was shining, we reached Coal Hill, a man-made eminence beyond the frozen moat to the north of the Forbidden City. The last Ming emperor is said to have hanged himself from a juniper tree at the foot of it in 1644. To the south, the yellow roofs of the Forbidden City stretched away; to the north, beyond the Hall of Imperial Longevity, there was a stupendous view of the Towers of the Bell and Drum, the sounding of which regulated the days of imperial civil servants for centuries.

Reunited with our interpreters, we were given precisely one hour to see the Great Wall, and if they had been fit enough they would have made us run. We were taken to the Nankhou Pass, where the wall shot up the mountainside to the east and
west, covered with snow and black ice, in a wind so bitter that it caused the photographers’ Nikons to malfunction.

From the highest of the towers, of which there are estimated to be 30,000 still standing between its beginning on a gulf of the Yellow Sea and its end in Chinese Turkestan, I wondered how anyone had had the energy and drive to build it. How did they manage it here, thousands of feet up in the Yinshan Range? In this section the wall is 25 feet thick at the base, and between 20 and 30 feet high. Some of the foundation stones are 14 feet long and the facing stones – the interior is rubble – 5 feet long and 1½ feet thick. It stretches a total of 3930 miles. When one of its engineers, Meng Thien, committed suicide by imperial decree in 209 BC, he said: ‘In a distance of 10,000
li
[a unit of length approximately equal to 590 yards] it is impossible that I did not cut through the veins of the earth. That is my crime.’