Leaving the Plains

It was barely six weeks before the terrible earth¬ quake, when, little realising what was about to happen, we set out from the capital of Shensi in North China to visit the very region to be most devastated by that calamity. It was a beautiful November. The air was fresh and bracing — specially at three o’clock in the morning when our active young carter would have us get up — and the sun ran its course through a cloudless sky. Many a day we had watched it rise and set since leaving the railway, lumbering along the dusty track, climbing the mountains and crossing the plain which had brought us to the city of Sian, above mentioned. Once before we had been there, but that was long ago, on our wedding journey. We could no more have recognised the great city from our remembrance of it than it could have recognised us, only with this difference, that while we had been growing older, Sian, strange to say, had grown young, or so it seemed for a mile or two inside the East Gate — very young indeed!

It almost took our breath away to pass under that massive portal and find, instead of the old ruts and mud-holes, the irregular buildings and crowded stalls, a magnificent highway running straight ahead as far as eye could see, broad as a Paris boulevard, smooth as a garden path, and lined on either side with two-storied buildings as alike as peas in a pod. Bicycles sped over this highway, telegraph wires, telephones, electric lights, modern shops, soldiers in foreign uniforms, and people in rickshaws hurrying about their business made us feel antiquated in our Chinese dress and old-time cart.

And then the changes in the mission-circle into which we were warmly welcomed! Loved faces were gone, and those who remained of that first group to obtain permanent residence in the city (Scandinavian Alliance) were veterans of thirty years’ standing. The little handful of converts had grown to number five hundred baptized believers in and around the city, and many hundreds more in the far-reaching stations opened from that centre. Very interesting it was to see the beautiful church filled to the doors on Sunday, the platform packed with fifty students from the Bible School who helped with the singing. Young workers are in training not only there, but in the Swedish- American school, which has grown up to meet the demands of the missionary circle. The passing of one dear lad from Darkness to Light at the time of our visit was a never-to-be-forgotten experience, bringing a breath of revival over the school in which every boy and girl received definite blessing. Several are now preparing to be missionaries, hoping after they have finished their education at home to return to this great needy field.

But much though there was to learn and to rejoice in — both among these dear friends, Associates of the China Inland Mission, and those of the English Baptist Mission — we could stay little longer than was necessary to prepare for our further journey. For the great North-West lay before us, the vast region stretching out from the populous Sian plain to the rugged lonely distances of Kansu, the province that loses itself in Central Asia. Six days’ travelling it would take to reach the border, not counting visits to intermediate stations, and when we entered the province itself (a thousand miles from Shanghai) it would still stretch on a thousand miles beyond, to the frontier of Tibet and the Moslem-peopled heart of the Continent. The loneliness of the mission-stations appealed to us, most of them six to thirteen days’ journey apart, on the verge of civilisation as well as of China proper. One thought of them as out of the world almost, and of the few foreign missionaries as buried in distant isolation. Mountain ranges and desert wastes seemed to separate them from the common life of nations, and their ice-bound streams in winter could scarcely be more sluggish than the currents of thought about them. What was our surprise, therefore, after crossing those mountain ranges, to find instead of mental and social stagnation, the living, throbbing tides of one of the great high¬ ways of the world!