OSS CBI Photobook 19, Town and Country

 The encampment outside Hsian/Xian, and the city itself, continue as the subjects of the photos.

Below, we see the carbine in some detail, as well as the rifle strap, here and here, which made it to Marilla and is now in the Trove.

 

Who is the soldier below? Do his descendants have this picture of their own Mom and Dad, or grandparents?

 

 

Visual depth is provided by the figures walking along this receding, curving road. What's that blob in the middle, on the side of the road?

Enlarged on-screen, it looks for all the world like a snopek, a pile of grain sheaves stacked so as to make rain sluice off instead of soaking in.

 

Grain and rain, like those fluffy clouds in the sky, are the same the world over and through time. We have considered snopki before now, on G&C.  Here is a Polish painting from 1893.

 

 

 

The Drum Tower, in Hsian/Xian, shows up once more. Enlarged, we can see that the photographer must be sitting in the back of a Jeep that has the windshield turned down flat.

 

 

That little kid shows up again, tending to his business, but this time we see more figures in the background.  Enlarged, the double doors on the building in the background show pretty clearly.

This grain is barley, I'd say, from the way the seed head, heavy with seed, curves down a little, and also shows, even in the blurry background of the photo below, the suggestion of the famous barley "beard."

Botanical illustration does help.

        

"Barley or millet" were the crops north of the Yangtze, reported MMB. Millet does look quite different:

On the next page, things get serious, with photos relating to the drop in Hsinhsiang described in Chapter 2 of MMB.