So far in her journey from London, Gladys had stayed in a hotel only once, the dreaded Intourist Hotel in Vladivostok. For the rest of the journey, she had slept either on the train, on the station platform, or with other missionaries. But after they left the train in Yutsu and began the bone-jarring bus trip to Tsechow, Gladys and Mr. Lu had to find a place to sleep each night. It wasn’t difficult to find somewhere to sleep. Chinese people seemed to be on the move all the time, so there were many inns along the way. But these inns were not like any inns Gladys had stayed in before. They weren’t inns with bedrooms, closets, curtains, and beds. Chinese inns were quite different. They were one large square room, bare except for a long, low platform made from bricks in the middle or along one wall of the room. The platform was called a k’ang, and it was heated from underneath by a fire. The k’ang, as Gladys found out on her first night in one of the inns, was a communal bed. Men, women, and children, strangers and traveling companions, officials and peasants, all slept side by side on the platform.
The first night sleeping on a k’ang was very strange for Gladys. For one thing, she slept fully dressed, like everyone else. Mr. Lu said it offered protection against a neighboring sleeper’s lice or fleas. He also pointed out that there was nowhere to take off your clothes and put on pajamas and nowhere to protect clothes from being stolen while a person slept. Once again, Gladys used her sleeveless fur coat as a blanket. Even so, it was hard for someone used to sleeping on a mattress to get used to sleeping on bricks. And then there was the snoring and snuffling. The old woman beside Gladys kept trying to roll over on her, and Mr. Lu made peculiar sucking noises when he lay on his back. Another man, three bodies down, had a cage with five chickens in it that he placed next to his head. The chickens scratched and squawked while their owner slept soundly. As the night slowly passed, Gladys could only imagine what people back in England would think if they could see her at that moment.
Finally dawn came, and the sleepers began to stir. Gladys sat up. Every one of her bones ached as she crawled to the edge of the k’ang and pulled her shoes from her coat pocket. She noticed the old woman beside her staring at her feet. The toe of her stocking had a hole in it, but Gladys didn’t think that was what the woman was looking at. When Gladys looked down at the old woman’s feet, she saw, to her horror, that the feet were deformed, wrapped in bandages and only about half the length of a normal foot but twice as thick. The woman’s feet looked more like horse hooves than feet. Gladys knew why. The missionaries in Tientsin had told her that Chinese people considered tiny feet to be beautiful and that a Chinese woman would never find a husband if she had “huge” feet like Europeans. So in China, it was traditional for the women to have their feet bound when they were babies so that the front of each foot would fold over and grow back under the rest of the foot.
Though she’d heard about the practice, this was the first time Gladys had seen it up close. And what she saw looked grotesque. She wondered how anybody could think it pretty or desirable. She watched the old woman stand up and move across the room and out the door in small, hobbled footsteps.
Each morning, Mr. Lu and Gladys ate the same breakfast of soup made with noodles and vegetables. After breakfast, they climbed onto yet another bus and continued their journey. It was the same pattern day after day—travel by day and sleep in an inn by night. Each day the buses lurched over rocky outcrops, forded swift-flowing streams, and stopped for the endless repairs the drivers had to make on the decrepit buses.
The principal at the Anglo-Chinese school in Tientsin, though, had been wrong. It didn’t take fifteen to twenty days of bus travel to reach Tsechow. It took twenty-five days! And Gladys had enough bruises from the bumpy trip to account for every one of those days.
After Mr. Lu reached his destination, Gladys had to travel on alone for the last two days. But before they parted company, Mr. Lu had taught Gladys a few simple words in Chinese, including the word for “mission.” So when the bus finally screeched to a halt in Tsechow, Gladys climbed out of it and approached the first person she saw. She repeated in Chinese the word mission in the same singsong way Mr. Lu had taught her to say it, and much to her delight, the man seemed to understand. He pointed up a hill while making motions to go to the left. All the while, he rattled on in Chinese. Gladys smiled a thank you at him, picked up her suitcases, and began the final climb to meet Mrs. Lawson.
Gladys was greeted at the door of the mission house by an old woman. She reached out and shook the woman’s hand. “Mrs. Lawson,” she began with tremendous relief, “I’m Gladys Aylward from London.”
The old woman smiled sweetly. At the same time, she shook her head. “You’re mistaken, my dear,” she said. “I’m Mrs. Smith. Mrs. Lawson isn’t here. Come in and have a cup of tea and tell me how you got here.”
Over several cups of strong black tea the details of Gladys’s trip from London to Tsechow came tumbling out. Mrs. Smith’s eyes were wide with amazement at Gladys’s tale. When Gladys came to the part of the story about Vladivostok and the Russian official, Mrs. Smith reached out and held Gladys’s hand. When Gladys had finished recounting her adventures, Mrs. Smith told her about Mrs. Lawson. It was true Mrs. Lawson had been in Tsechow, but that was several months ago. Mrs. Lawson had moved on, and as far as Mrs. Smith knew, she was staying in a little walled town called Yangcheng, high up in the mountains, two days’ journey away.
Again, Gladys could hardly believe what she was hearing. She still had another two days of travel to get to Mrs. Lawson. “May I stay with you tonight?” she asked wearily. “In the morning I will take the bus to Yangcheng.”
“You can stay here as long as you like, my dear,” said Mrs. Smith kindly. “However, you cannot catch a bus to Yangcheng.”
“Why not?” asked Gladys.
“I’m afraid the road ends here,” replied Mrs. Smith.
Gladys felt the urge to giggle. It was all too much to take in at once. “What do you mean the road ends here?” she asked. “How did Mrs. Lawson get to Yangcheng?”
“From here to Yangcheng there is only a mule track. It’s quite steep, and only the guides and the mules are safe walking it. Everyone else must travel on a mule litter.”
The next morning Gladys found out what a mule litter was. The muleteer, who would lead the mule train into the mountains, chuckled as he helped Gladys climb into the basket that was perched on the back of one of his eight mules. Gladys’s suitcases were slung over another mule. Finally, the muleteer barked a command, and the mule train began to move. Gladys’s entire body shuddered and jerked with every step the mule took. She gripped the low sides of the litter basket with both hands in an attempt to cushion the jolts, but it didn’t seem to help much.
To try to take her mind off the harsh ride, Gladys prayed. She thanked God for getting her safely this far and for Mrs. Smith, who had been so kind to her, even giving her the padded blue trousers and jacket that she was now wearing and that made her look like everyone else in this part of China. Gladys also prayed that Mrs. Lawson would be at Yangcheng when she got there, because she didn’t know what she would do if Mrs. Lawson weren’t there. Mrs. Smith had told her that Yangcheng was a town where there was not another Christian, and most people there had never seen a white person other than Mrs. Lawson. Gladys had also paid the last of her money for the mule ride to Yangcheng. If Mrs. Lawson weren’t there, Gladys would be stranded in a place where no one spoke English and where everyone would think she was a foreign devil. The thought terrified her.
In the distance Gladys could see tall mountains. Mrs. Smith had told her they would travel over gently rolling hills for about nine miles and then start to climb up into the mountains. The mule litter was following a thousand-year-old trail through the mountains. Walled mountain villages were strung like beads along the trail. Mrs. Smith had said that because the villages were a day’s journey apart, the mule trains had to find shelter each evening. They dared not travel at night because of the danger from robbers and wolves that lurked in the area. The muleteers needed the safety of a village with walls and locked gates in which to spend the night.
The sun was beginning to set over the western horizon as they hurried through the gates at Chowtsun. A single path wound up between the houses, and Gladys watched in astonishment as the lead mule walked past many open gates until it came to one that led into a wide courtyard. No one had led it there, but somehow the mule knew exactly where it should go. A Chinese woman hobbled from the house and yelled what Gladys presumed was a greeting. It must have been, because the whole mule train crowded into the courtyard, and the gates were shut behind them.
That night Gladys slept on the k’ang along with the muleteers. She spent a good part of the night thinking about meeting Mrs. Lawson the next day. She hoped Mrs. Lawson would be as kind and motherly as Mrs. Smith had been. After her long and exhausting journey, Gladys was beginning to feel the need for some loving attention.
In the morning, Gladys couldn’t decide whether she was stiffer from the mule litter the day before or from another night sleeping on a k’ang. The head muleteer had snored loudly all night, and Gladys couldn’t wait to be in her own bed in her own room in Mrs. Lawson’s mission house by evening.
It was a seven-hour trip to Yangcheng, and Gladys’s body ached more with every step the mule took. They were high in the mountains now, and the mules were often clomping along over razor-edged rocks that formed the trail. Gladys spent a lot of time looking up enjoying the sky and the occasional eagle that circled above. She tried to avoid looking down at the valley floor hundreds of feet straight below the narrow trail they were making their way along.
As they rounded a sharp corner in the trail, the mule train came to a halt. The head muleteer trotted over to Gladys, who knew he didn’t know a single word of English. As Gladys wondered what he might want, he lifted a callused finger and pointed to the southwest. He said only one word, but it was the one word Gladys wanted to hear at that moment more than any other word: Yangcheng.
Gladys followed the direction of the man’s finger, and sure enough, rising in the distance was a village that looked just like a picture of Cinderella’s castle that Gladys had seen in a fairy tale book. Jutting straight out of the rocks was a high wall, and peeking over the wall were the most fantastically shaped roofs Gladys had ever seen. The roofs had turrets and spheres, cones and towers, and Gladys gasped at their beauty.
As the mule train got closer, Yangcheng became even more beautiful. At last they entered through the east gate of the town. This time the muleteer held the lead mule’s bit firmly. He stopped to talk to a man who was squatting in the late afternoon sun. Gladys supposed he was asking directions to Mrs. Lawson’s house. Sure enough, the muleteer led them down a narrow path to the left. Several hundred yards along the path, they stopped in front of what looked like an abandoned old building. One of the balconies was falling down, and the doors to the building had all been ripped off by their hinges and were nowhere to be seen. In the doorway stood a stark, white-haired old woman, dressed in blue trousers and jacket. The woman picked her way over the bricks and trash that lay around the courtyard and stared at Gladys. “Who are you?” she asked with an abrupt Scottish accent.
“I’m Gladys Aylward,” offered Gladys wearily. “Are you Mrs. Lawson?’
“Yes, of course I am,” she replied, eyeing Gladys with her piercing blue eyes. “You’d better come in, then,” she added matter-of-factly.
