Chapter 23

I have not seen Kinko for two days, and the last was only to exchange a
few words with him to relieve his anxiety.

To-night I will try and visit him. I have taken care to lay in a few
provisions at Sou-Tcheou.

We started at three o'clock. We have got a more powerful engine on.
Across this undulating country the gradients are occasionally rather
steep. Seven hundred kilometres separate us from the important city of
Lan-Tcheou, where we ought to arrive to-morrow morning, running thirty
miles an hour.

I remarked to Pan-Chao that this average was not a high one.

"What would you have?" he replied, crunching the watermelon seeds. "You
will not change, and nothing will change the temperament of the
Celestials. As they are conservatives in all things, so will they be
conservative in this matter of speed, no matter how the engine may be
improved. And, besides, Monsieur Bombarnac, that there are railways at
all in the Middle Kingdom is a wonder to me."

"I agree with you, but where you have a railway you might as well get
all the advantage out of it that you can."

"Bah!" said Pan-Chao carelessly.

"Speed," said I, "is a gain of time--and to gain time--"

"Time does not exist in China, Monsieur Bombarnac, and it cannot exist
for a population of four hundred millions. There would not be enough
for everybody. And so we do not count by days and hours, but always by
moons and watches."

"Which is more poetical than practical," I remark.

"Practical, Mr. Reporter? You Westerners are never without that word in
your mouth. To be practical is to be the slave of time, work, money,
business, the world, everybody else, and one's self included. I confess
that during my stay in Europe--you can ask Doctor Tio-King--I have not
been very practical, and now I return to Asia I shall be less so. I
shall let myself live, that is all, as the cloud floats in the breeze,
the straw on the stream, as the thought is borne away by the
imagination."

"I see," said I, "we must take China as it is."

"And as it will probably always be, Monsieur Bombarnac. Ah! if you knew
how easy the life is--an adorable _dolce far niente_ between folding
screens in the quietude of the yamens. The cares of business trouble us
little; the cares of politics trouble us less. Think! Since Fou Hi, the
first emperor in 2950, a contemporary of Noah, we are in the
twenty-third dynasty. Now it is Manchoo; what it is to be next what
matters? Either we have a government or we have not; and which of its
sons Heaven has chosen for the happiness of four hundred million
subjects we hardly know, and we