CHAPTER III.
Table of Contents SÖUL FROM THE CITY WALL.
Seen from the wall (a most wonderful wall which describes a circuit of 9975 paces), Söul looks like a bed of thriving mushrooms, mushrooms planted between the surrounding high hills, but grown in many places up on to those hills. Yes; they look very much like mushrooms, those low, one-storied houses, with their sloping, Chinese-like roofs, some tiled, some turfed, and all neutral tinted. The houses of Söul are as alike as mushrooms are, and as thickly planted.
The wall defines the city with a strange outline. Now it dips into the tiny valley, now it pulls itself up on to the top of some high hill.
Korea is a most distressingly hilly country. If you elect to go for a decent stroll, it is a matter of climbing a hill, and when you reach the summit of the hill it is a matter of tumbling down the other side, to scramble up another hill, and your path will be just such a succession of ups and downs, even though you go north until you reach the "Ever White Mountain," and, in reaching it, reach the "River of the Duck's Green," which, flowing towards the south, divides Korea from China; reach the Tu Man Kang which, flowing towards the north-east, divides Korea from the territory of the Tsar. Up and down it will be, even though you push east until you reach the purple "Sea of Japan." Still up and down you will find it, although you go as far south, or as far west, as Korea goes, and find yourself on the shores of China's "Yellow Sea." Korea looks like a stage storm-at-sea. Its hills are so many that they lose their grandeur, as individuality is lost in multitude.
But we must get back on to the wall, the wall of Söul.
The wall, which is purely Chinese in character, is punctuated by eight gates. All of them have significant names. Several of them are strictly reserved for very special purposes. The south gate is called "The Gate of Everlasting Ceremony." The west gate is "The Gate of Amiability." The east gate is "The Gate of Elevated Humanity." The south-west gate is "The Gate of the Criminals." The majority of Korean criminals, who are condemned to death, are beheaded. But this may not be within the city walls. The procession of the man about to die passes through the "Criminals' Gate." And that gate is never opened save on the occasions of such gruesome functions. The south-east gate is "The Gate of the Dead." No corpse is interred within the city walls. And no corpse, save only the corpse of a king, may pass through any other gate than the "Gate of the Dead." Any corpse (but the monarch's) would defile the gates through which Söul's humanity is wont to ebb and flow. The "Gate of the Dead" has another name. It is often called "The Gate of Drainage," for by its side the River Hanyang flows out to the Yellow Sea. The northern gate stands high upon the summit of a peculiarly shaped hill, which the French missionaries aptly named "Cock's Comb." This gate is never opened save to facilitate the flight of a Korean king.
The gates differ greatly in size, which adds to the unusual picturesqueness of the wall.
The Cock's Comb, up to whose highest ridge the wall of Söul runs, is at once the most distinct and the most interesting bit of Söul's background. It is, among the mountains of the world, so uniquely shaped that no one who has ever seen it can ever forget it. And it is the altar of the most sacred of Korea's national ceremonies.
Although a large portion of this hill is enclosed within Söul's wall, Söul itself, climbing city though it is, has not climbed far up the hill. The summit of the Cock's Comb is an uninhabited, high suburb of Söul.
When the night has well fallen, when the "white" clad masses in Söul's market-place can no longer see the outlines of the hill, four great lights break out upon that hill's crest. To all in Söul those lights cry out, "All's well. In all Korea, all's well." Each light represents two of the eight provinces into which Korea is divided. If in any Korean province or county there is war, or threatening of war, a supplementary light burns near the light that indicates that province. If the war-light is placed on the left, war or invasion threatens one province, if the war light is placed on the right, war or worse threatens another province.
The bonfire signal service of the Korean War Office is complicated and elaborated. One extra fire means that an enemy has been sighted off some part of the sandy Korean coast. Two lights mean that the enemy have landed; three mean the enemy are moving inland; four mean they are pushing toward the capital; five-! Well, when five such fires flare up, the citizens of Söul can only pray-or run and drown themselves in the rapid rushing river that leaves Söul as the condemned leave it-because those five bonfires mean that the enemy draw near the city's gate.
Telegraphy-as Edison knows it-is unknown in Korea. But the Koreans have a weird but vivid telegraphy of their own.
At short intervals upon their rocky, sandy coast huge cranes are built. Each crane is tended by a trusted official of the Korean king. When dusk begins to fall, the attendant of the crane lights in it a great bonfire, if all is well. That bonfire's light is seen by the attendant of a fire some miles more inland-some miles nearer Söul-and so from every pace of Korea's boundary, the faithful servants of Korea's king flash to Korea's capital the message, "All is well." A hundred lines of message-light meet upon that queer hill, the "Cock's Comb" of Söul.
Many a night of late, unless the wires have lied to us, there must have been a great confusion among those signal fires, and vast confusion in poor frightened Söul.
A certain light will mean "China has pounced upon us." Another light will mean "Japan has stabbed us." And a score of other lights will mean a score of dire facts which only the heads of the Korean War Department could translate for us, if they would.
Curfew shall not ring to-night. "Ah! how often," said Helen, when this Chino-Japanese war was first declared, "I have seen those four placid bonfires tell the gentle Koreans that no Lion of England nor of India had roared, that no Eagle of Russia (not to needlessly mention Austria or America) had swooped, no dragon of China or Japan had belched destroying fire! To-night, if those fires burn, they flash a message of dire distress to Söul's shrinking, blue-robed men, and hidden, unseen women, unless happily they are unconscious what an excuse for war their isolated peninsula has become."
Poor Korea! what has she done? Nothing unwomanly. But womanlike she has been unfortunately situated.
China has just suffered a plague.
Japan has just suffered an earthquake. For very many years China and Japan have thought it expedient to soothe national heart-ache (resultant upon national disaster) with the potent mustard plaster of war.
The Chinese hate the Japanese. The Japanese hate the Chinese. The Koreans hate the Japanese and the Chinese, and are hated by both. An Oriental imbroglio is not hard of conception.
The worst of it is that Korea seems doomed. And Korea, with all her faults, is one of the few remaining widows of the dead (but not childless) old world. And she, good purdah-woman that she is, is lying down with considerable wifely dignity upon the funeral pile, which civilization has lit to cremate the false, old notions of the past.
One who has lived in Korea can but think it rather a pity that Korea should cease to be, or be too much remodelled, whoever's in the wrong-Japan or China.
Nature has found Korea so nearly perfect, that it seems almost profane for man (or those combinations of men called nations) to find fault with her. In Korea there are snows that never melt. In Korea there are flowers that never cease to bloom.
The land of the morning calm! Poor little peninsula (only twice and a half the size of Scotland), the soft, rosy Oriental haze is going to be ripped off of you, and in the cold, clear, brilliant light of Westernized day you are going to fade away into nothing! But before you quite fade away let us have a peep at you. You are superior in many ways to our land. For one thing, you begin your year more sensibly. You ring the new year in with the birth of the year's first flowers.
The Korean new year is a month later than ours. The snow is still upon the ground there in February. But even so, the fruitless plum-trees open their myriad buds, and long before the cold snow has melted from their feet, their heads are covered with a warm, tinted, perfumed snow of bloom. A few weeks later, and the cherry trees are white with a magnificence of blossom that nowhere in this world cherry-trees can excel, not even in Japan. Before the cherry blossoms fall the wisteria breaks into ten thousand clusters of purple loveliness. Then the peonies flaunt in every fertile and half fertile spot, and mock, like the impudents they are, the splendour of the sun. But their proud heads fall ere long, and all Korea is lovely with the iris.
Autumn is the most delightful of the Korean seasons. It is matchless. Not even on the banks of the Hudson does summer die so splendid a death as she dies in Korea. The Korean summer, superb and perfumed as she is, is very like that false Cawdor of whom Malcolm said to Duncan:
"Nothing in his life
Became him like the leaving it."
Winter in Korea is unqualifiedly cold. The hills are white with snow, and the rivers are grey with ice. The people huddle into their over-heated houses. And I believe that the...
