The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-01-16
FROM FAR OFF MONGOLIA.
Rapid Railway Building.

| Iou Will Hol Hllu on map the cluStel
 of wooden huts called Mindanken
 where the Manchurian railway on Sat
 urday, october 19, came to a sudder
 stop. But you may easily find the
 Hingan Mountains, breaking northeast
 between Mongolia and Manchuria, and
 # you draw line from Hilar, epelt
 sometimes Chailar, in the land of the
 Mongols, to Sitsikar, spelt sometimes
 Tsitsihar, in the land of the Manchus, you may suppose Mindenken to lie
 within the eastern shadow of the Hin
 gan range.
 l have said that on that Saturday the
 railway stopped suddenly at Minden-
 ken. On the Sunday it would stop fur
 ther west, on the Monday further west
 still; while all the time, on the other
 side of the hills, the line was creeping i south. So by the time, this letter ap- pears in print the two will have joined, 1 and the dream of travellers to make q ! journey from Paris to Peking by rail will be complete.
 | For never since man was able to wield 8 spade has any work been Pu5ISu Ol WlLH SUCH IdpluIly dS lllo Eastern Chinese railway. I took walk several miles up the line to where the building was in progress. Toward great cleft in the mountains track was staked cover the barren plain. , Three thousand Chinese coolies were doing nothing else but shovel the ad-
 joining earth into baskets, swing two
 baskets at the end of a pole across their shoulders, carry it to between the stakes
 and build a bank some two feet above the level. They worked slowly and car ried paltry amounts of earth, and daw-
 dled on their way back for another load.
 Yet what a lot of blue ants they were surging to and fro and gradually, at the shout of the Russian overseer, nov ing further along the plain.
 On the new bank marched men level ling the earth where it bumped. Stacked near by were piles of sleepere. Coolies seized these and flung them across the track, not always straight, and at distances sometimes a foot, sometimes three feet apart.
 Not many yards behind where the rails were being laid came trolley. On this were other rails. A dozen men on one side. q dozen men on the other, caught two rails, ran forward with them thumped them on the sleepers, and then with Russian foreman holding a stick to measure the exact distance they should be kept apart there came the clang of hammers and the driving of clamps. That finished, there was possibly a lowering up of sleeper and the shoveling under of earth to get something approximate to evehness. Then the trolley rumbled forward a few yards, and another two rails were seized and laid. Behind all was long goods train, filled with rail- way building material, crawling in the wake of the workmen and feeding them with aleepers and rails and bolts.
 I walked over the section built on the Friday. Ii was humpy; the two rails were like the first effort of a child to | draw parallel lines; in some places the 1 rail was holding the sleeper end from | the ground, instead of resting on it.
 But here was the great fact-the rail- ' way was being built, trains could run l over it and troops be carried. And the laying of that line was at the extraor- 1lnary rate or three EngnSn flllieS d day! That day, a distance of forty miles tsixty versts) separated the two sections of the line, working toward one l another. This I was to cover in a tar lntass For the convenience of engi- 1eers and officers and British journal sts there was post station, rather like cowhouse, exceedingly dirty. and when I looked at the roof, not more han six inches above my head, I shud- leTed at finding it simply leaving with )ugs. The peasant Russians have a about these creatures. They won't kill them. Indeed when hey build a new house they fill a hat ull of bugs from the old residence and urn them loose in the new one, for a ouse without bugs is an unlucky house 'he things kept falling on the floor, and he table, and on my person. l had a owl of cabbage soup, but while eating it was necessary to hold my hat over he dish like lid to avoid accidents of the London News.