MOUNTAINS THAT MOVED

Southland Times, Issue 19658, 7 October 1922, Page 7

MOUNTAINS THAT MOVED

CHINA’S GREATEST DISASTER. TOWNS AND CITIES DESTROYED. Mountains that moved in the night; landslides that eddied like waterfalls, crevasses that swallowed houses and camel trains, and villages that, were swept away under a rising sea of loose earth, wore a few of the subsidiary occurrences that made the earthquakes in Kansu one of the most appalling catastrophics in history, is the interesting account of Upton Close and Elsie M’Connick, in the National Geographical Magazine for May. Though the tremendous shaking-up occurred in December, 1920, the story is only now beginning to spread beyond the narrow defiles which guard the entrance to Kansu Province. It is, perhaps, the most poorly advertised calamity that has occurred in modern times. Though Kansu is within telegraphic reach of the rest of the world, the details of the disaster have never come over the wires. The native population was too stunned and the few foreign residents were too busy in relief work to give any description of the dancing mountains and vanishing valleys. Mr Joseph W. Hall (Upton Close), who visited the earthquake area under the auspices of the International Famine Relief Commitee, has brought back one of the first accounts of the devastated’ country and the strange things that happen when the earth turns itself into a contortionist. The area of destruction, 100 by 300 miles in extent, contains ten large cities, besides numerous villages. In it is the heart of the so-called loess country, where the soil is a mixture of clay and powdered quartz. A narrower region was comprised in the landslide district, where the loose earth cascaded down the valleys and buried every object in its path. Tales as strange as any that Roman historians have told of Pompeii arc recounted by visitors to the devastated country. As three-fifths of the dead are Mohammedans, -the non-Moslem Chinese claim that the earthquake was a visitation from heaven against the disciples of the Prophet. Somehow the Mohammedans have failed to deny this accusation with their usual vigour nnd have suddenly become surprisingly humble. One of the most dramatic episodes of the disaster was the burial of Ma the Benevolent, a famous Moslem fanatic, and 300 of his followers, just as they had met in conclave to proclaim a holy war. The cave in which they had gathered was scaled by a terrific avalanche, while the group knelt on their prayer mats. By some miracle, the watchman at the entrance to the cave escaped with his life, but the others were buried so deeply that, despite months of digging over an area of a mile, the Moslems have failed to recover the bodies of their leaders. In another village the party found that a whole mountain topped by a temple had slid into a valley. A little beyond they found that a road bordered by poplar trees had ridden the crest of a slide for threequarters of a mile, without apparent damage to the trees or even to the birds’ nests in their branches. One astonished peasant looked out of his window in the morning to find that a high hill had moved on to the homestead, stopping its line of march within a few feet of his hut. In another hut the only people left alive were a couple over seventy years old. They were saved from death only by the fact that their children, displaying a strange lack of filial piety, had sent them to live in a house on the outskirts of the clan village which was buried by an avalanche. The death of their descendants was taken as evidence by survivors in the neighbourhood that heaven had punished the family for its lack of filial respect. In the city Tsingning, the chief magistrate was found living in a canvas tent over his demolished yamen. In the same city two American women missionaries were dwelling in a hovel with earthen floor and a mat-shed roof that would be scorned by well bred live stock. Though they had been offered better quarters, the mission workers had refused to accept them, preferring to share the hardships of their people.

The most appalling sight of all was the Valley of the Dead, where seven great slides crashed into a gap in the hills three miles long, killing every living thing in the area except three men and two dogs. The survivors were carried across the valley on the crest of an avalanche caught in the cross-surrent of two other slides, whirled in a gigantic vortex and catapulted to the slope of another hill. With them went house, orchard, and threshing floor, and the farmer has since placidlybegun to till the new location to which he was so unceremoniously transported. In a small town on the highway two strangers had put up at the inn on the evening of the disaster. In the terror and confusion that followed the earthquake, the landlord completely forgot his two guests. It was not until several days later that he remembered them and when after considerable digging their room was brought to fight, both men were found alive. Stupified by the shock, they knew nothing of what happened, and imagined that they had. Slept through an ordinary night. The landlord, however, in spite of remonstrances, did not neglect to collect room rent for the full period of One of the districts that has suffered most is the tableland to the north, known as the bunch-grass country, which supplies the camel crop for practically all of Asia. The soil is of an unyielding alkali, which cracked appallingly, since there was no loess cushion to mitigate the force of the shock. In one town with a normal population of several hundred the investigators found only twenty or thirty survivors.

HUNDREDS OF TOWNS AND CITIES DESTROYED The loss of nearly two hundred thousand lives and the total destruction of hundreds of towns and cities calls for reconstruction work on a staggering scale. Seven thousand men have been employed by the United international Famine Relief Society in releasing dammed streams and thus preventing disastrous overflows. Fortunately, there is no orphan problem, as children in the devastated districts were so much in demand that they were promptly adopted by the survivors. In Kansu, as in most pioneer countries, men are so much in the majority that women are highly valued. The usual price for a wife ranges from 100 to 300 taels, and, as a result, girl babies are adopted as eagerly as the boys. Kansu, in ancient times the buffer State between the glorious seats of the old Shensi dynasties and the Tartar and Tibetan barbarians, lies to the west of Shensi and north-west of the Szechwan, pinched between the Ordos and southern Outer Mongolia on the north and east, and the Kokonor region of Tibhet and Sinkiang province of Chinese Turkestan on the south and west. Had the quake disaster struck several hundred miles to the north, west or south, the loss of life would have been negligible. As it happened, it selected for destruction, in the agriculturally rich, terraced loess country of the southern half of the affected area, the most populous portion of the province; and to the north, although this part is principally uninhabited grazing land, several of the largest Mohammedan Chinese cities, which were levelled. The survivors say that they heard a tremendous underground roar and felt the shock, which seemed to them to consist of a sickening swing to the north-east and a violent jerk back to the south-west, lasting half a minute. They made all ordinary efforts to save themselves and between successive tremors following the main shock huddled back into the ruins of their houses to await the morning. Not until day dawned and they crawled out to find neighbouring villages obliterated, farm lands carried away or buried, streams blocked and hills of earth towering above their compounds, did they apprehend that the “hills had walked.”