CHAPTER I

INTO MANCHURIA

THE train came to a pause-as if taking a breath for a fresh start. The Hakuba Tunnel was behind us; so also the grey memory of the old Torin Castle. We had been, for hours on hours, threading the southwestern skirts of the massed heights of Heian Hokudo in North Chosen-as Korea should always be called. The huge engine at the head of the "Seoul-Mukden Through Express" bore the crest of a great American locomotive works. Small Chosen children stood hard by and watched it gravely: the steel dragon literally breathing fire and smoke was no longer a fancy of the old legend.

It heaved a sigh and took a gentle grade ahead. Then suddenly, with the dramatic suddenness of a stage curtain lifting, we were upon the full sweep of the majestic Yalu. This river is quite as lordly as the Hudson at the northern tip of Manhattan Island and much more historic. The tall smokestacks of the Chosen Paper Mill Company (a five-million-yen concern) on the right of the track and those of the First and Second Iron Works and of the lumber mills farther down the stream, and the industrial town of Antung rising over on the Manchurian side, all its buildings of occidental style, recall the Hudson rather impressively.

The similarity does not go much further than that, however. Up and down the grey stretch of the stream bat-wing sails of Chinese junks and white square sails of Japanese boats catching the early light of a May morning, and, more than all else, an endless procession

of timber rafts, place the picture definitely out of America and out of Europe. These strikingly fashioned timber rafts of the Yalu are famous throughout the Orient. Every year when winter strangles the water in its white grip the woodsmen go into the forest on either side of the river and fell the trees. In March when the thaw comes they cut the timber into logs eight feet long. These they tie together in eights to form the units of which the rafts are made. From thirty to a hundred such units make one raft. It is usually 100 feet long and about twenty wide. It comes 300 or 400 miles down the stream before it reaches Antung or Shingishu, and usually it takes two months on the way, which explains the hut one sees built upon it and the small truckgarden that is sometimes discovered. The Chinese raftsmen with their rare and leisurely philosophy of life try to raise vegetables as they loiter down the stream.

The Yalu rises in the snows of the Changpai ranges -the fabled Mountains of Eternal Whiteness-500 miles inland. It is navigable 270 miles up the stream to Maoerhshan by small native junks. It marks the boundary between Chosen and Manchuria. Some natives call it "Ai-kiang" and some "Ichou-kiang." The Yalu widens as it makes its stately way to meet the Yellow Sea. At its mouth it is something like thirty miles wide, so that it is difficult to say where the river ends and the sea begins.

Here at Antung the greatest bridge in all Asia crosses the Yalu, connecting Manchuria with Chosen. It is composed of twelve spans and is 3,098 feet in length. It was built by the Government-General of Chosen for its state railway at the cost of several million yen. And it took two years to complete it. Later, when the South Manchuria Railway took over the management of the government railways of Chosen, the bridge became the connecting link between the trunk line of Manchuria and