Riding the Iron Rooster (28 page)

I slept like a log. The train was not particularly crowded. Mr. Fang was installed in another compartment. I had expected a stifling coach, but it was chilly on the train. I needed the China Railways' horse blanket.

I woke at six, in darkness. All of China is on Peking time. It had been light until nine at night in Lanzhou. I read Mildred Cable on the Gobi Desert and realized that I was just passing a point the Chinese had once called The Gate of Demons because beyond it was the howling wind and wasteland of which they had an acute terror. ("Some told of rushing rivers cutting their way through sand, of an unfathomable lake hidden among the dunes, of sand-hills with a voice like thunder, of water which could be clearly seen and yet was a deception.") I read for an hour. At seven it was still dark, the sun behind the distant mountains. We came to a small station called Shagoutai, where the only living things were a muleteer and his mule—the animal loaded with water bags and waiting behind the grade crossing.

The mountains were dark, treeless, grassless ranges and they were folded like thick quilts. They were black, because they were backlit by the unrisen sun. Near Lanzhou, I thought the mountains were like
shuijiao
(water dumplings). The same smoothness, and folds, and crimp marks. I loved the sight of the wilderness of dumplings. But in this semidesert, with far-off hills, no image came so easily to mind. The nearer hills all had cave entrances in them—the arched doorways of the cave dwellers of Gansu. It was a strange, rocky province, and so long and narrow I knew I would be traveling through it still tomorrow. Like Qinghai, the adjoining province to the south, Gansu was notorious for being a place where political prisoners were sent, the Chinese Siberia. Security was a simple matter because there was no escape through the desert. Only forty years ago travelers on this route—and at just about this spot in Gansu—were met by a large stone tablet with the inscription
Earth's Greatest Barrier.
Meaning the Gobi.

The landscape changed, all at once, into everything, at the town of Wuwei. The Iron Rooster was in a deep, cool valley, and there were wet mountains a few miles away, and beyond them a great ridge of brown mountains, and higher and farther still, on the distant horizon, a long range of snowy mountains. So blue and white were these mountains of ice that the range itself had the look of a sword blade. There were arid patches, too, between the snowy peaks in the distance and the green valley in which we were traveling.

These mountains to the south were the Datong Shan, several of them 20,000 footers, in the province and sometime penal colony of Qinghai, which stretched beyond them to the edge of the Tibetan Plateau.

I had been warned that this train trip west would be barren and boring. It was not. I was beginning to understand that the empty parts of China are the most beautiful, and some of them—like these valleys—very fertile. It was a chain of oases along the northern arm of the Silk Road. Its utter emptiness was so rare in China that it seemed startling to me, and where there were gardens and trees it was almost lush. Large herds of sheep grazed along the stonier stretches, nibbling at hanks of grass; and there were mules and crows and mud-walled towns. In one place I saw six camels, big and small, placidly watching the train go by. The mules were indifferent to the train. They were braying, and biting and mounting each other, honking and showing their teeth as they hauled their hoses into place.

The train was full but not crowded. The dining car was nearly always empty, perhaps because most of the passengers were Uighurs—Muslims—and the Chinese menu was about as porky as it could be. And the other dishes could not possibly have been
halal,
which is the Islamic version of kosher—implying ritual slaughter. Because business was so bad, the chef usually chatted, asking me what I wanted. How about some chicken and prawns? Or shredded pork? Or pork balls? Or diced pork and doufu (bean curd)? Or fish with ginger? Cauliflower with dried shrimp? Sauteed cucumber?

Like many features of Chinese life, the food had glorious names, and each dish had its own identity and pedigree. But in practice they were almost impossible to tell apart, having not only the same taste, but the same color and stringiness.

By midafternoon, the train was moving across a flat green plain between two ranges of low mountains, the Qilian Shan and the Helan Shan. In places I could see the crumbled sections of the Great Wall. Where the land was flat, it was intensively cultivated, and in places there were tall, slender and rather redundant-looking poplars. The Chinese were averse to planting shade trees because it was impossible to plant crops under them. They favored the skinny symbolic tree that doubled as a fence. The idea of The Forest was alien to China. It only existed in northern Heilongjiang province—the Manchurian northeast; and I had heard that even the little that remained was being cut down and made into chopsticks and toothpicks and Ping-Pong paddles.

In most other countries, a landscape feature was a grove of trees, or a meadow, or even a desert; so you immediately associated the maple tree with Canada, the oak with England, the birch with the Soviet Union, and desert and jungle with Africa. But no such thing came to mind in China, where the most common and obvious feature of a landscape was a person—or usually many people. Every time I stared at a landscape there was a person in it staring back at me.

Even here in the middle of nowhere there were people and settlements. The villages were walled in, and most houses had walls around them: mud smeared over bricks. They were the sort of stockades that are frequent in Afghanistan and Iran—at the far end of this Silk Road—and probably a cultural hangover from the memory of marauders and Mongol hordes, the Central Asian nightmare.

The day had turned very hot. It was now in the nineties. I saw eighteen sheep crowded into a little blot of shade under a frail hawthorn tree. Children cooled themselves by kicking water in a ditch. Farmers with lamp shade hats planted crops by pushing one sprout at a time into the ground, in a process that had a greater affinity to needlepoint than to farming, as though they were stitching a design into the furrows. And though there were black peaks and mountain ranges on both sides of the train, the land ahead fell away, and it was as if we were approaching the ocean—the land dipped and had the smooth, stony look of the seashore. It was the hottest part of the day, but even so the land was full of people. Hours later, in an immense and stony desert I saw a man in a faded blue suit, bumping over the stones on his bike.

Then there were sand dunes near the track—big soft slopes and bright piles; but the snowy peaks in the distance still remained. I had not realized that there was anything so strange as this on this planet.

I was eating dinner in the empty dining car at about eight that night when we came to Jiayuguan. What I saw out the window is printed on my mind: in the summer dusk of the Gobi Desert, a Chinese town lay glowing in the sand, and rising above it, ten stories high, was the last gate in the Great Wall—the Jia Yu Watchtower—a fortresslike structure with pagoda roofs; and the train slowed at the Wall's end, a crumbled pile of mud bricks and ruined turrets the wind had simplified and sucked smooth. In the fading light of day, there was this ghostly remainder of the Great Wall, and what looked like the last town in China. The Wall went straggling west, but it was so small and destroyed it looked like little more than an idea or a suggestion—the remnants of a great scheme. But my excitement also came from seeing the red paint on the gate, and the yellow roof, and the thought that this train was passing beyond it into the unknown. The sun slanted on the gray hills and the desert and the blue bushes. Most of what I saw was through the blurring haze of the day's dust, and the intimation at sunset was that I would fall off the edge of the world as soon as it got dark.

On my way back to my compartment I passed the Hard Class compartment, in which Uighurs were praying—kneeling on mats and facing southwest towards Mecca between the berths; and Chinese were brushing their teeth, and glugging tea, and hanging up laundry; and very loud Arabic music blasted from a portable tape player. Some people were sleeping and many were sighing, and a few spitting and hoicking. A card game was in progress, and a furious argument. Nearby a young girl placidly nursed her baby. The floor was thick with spittle, orange peels, peanut shells and tea dregs. More men entered, gargling, from the washroom.

Someone grasped my arm. The light was bad, but I saw he had a big nose and wavy hair and a brown suit with bell-bottoms, a style that had become popular that year in the oases of the Xinjiang desert.

"Shansh marnie?"

It was the Uighur catchphrase:
Change money?

The Uighurs were officially designated a Chinese minority, and Xinjiang was their own autonomous region. They were a Turkic-speaking people, the remote descendants of nomads whose kingdom existed here 1200 years ago, and many of them looked like Italian peasants. It was no wonder that Marco Polo found them a friendly and fun-loving people. They were overwhelmed by the Mongol hordes in the thirteenth century, and were drafted into the army of this khanate. They converted to Islam, they adopted the Arabic script for their language, they were conquered by the Chinese several times, and several times rebelled, most recently a hundred years ago. There are about four million of them in Xinjiang, and they seemed totally out of sympathy with the Chinese and often mocking. Their world was entirely separate: it was Allah, and the Central Asian steppes, a culture of donkey carts and dancing girls. They ate mutton and bread. They were people of the bazaar, who—familiar with outlandish travelers—were travelers themselves. For the first time since the People's Republic was founded they were allowed to travel.

They were the people who lurked outside the Friendship Stores in Peking and Shanghai, and stood discreetly outside the tourist hotels, looking like exchange students from a Mediterranean country. They usually wore dark suits and ties and platform shoes. They wore watches and sunglasses. Their Chinese was seldom fluent—but that was excusable: it was rare to find any Chinese person who spoke Uighur. But their history as a people had taught them to count in fifty languages. Numbers, after all, are the language of the bazaar. And they had two words of English.

"Shansh marnie?"

"How much?"

"One dollar, four yuan." The official rate was three.

"Say six." I was bargaining for the sake of it, and because it was such a novelty to encounter a black market in this upright, no tipping, no favors, anticorruption economy. What this Uighur and I were doing was sinning; and it felt delightful.

"No six."

"Five."

"No five. Four." He also had bushy eyebrows and a big chin.

He asked me how many dollars I wanted to change. He took out a pocket calculator and said that over a certain amount he could give me a better rate. The train rumbled on towards Ansi (Anxi). 1 lost interest in haggling and had no interest at all in changing money at the black-market rate. What fascinated me was his tenacity in sticking to this one-to-four rate. For him it was like a magic equation. But this Uighur was no fool. Two months later the Chinese government devalued the yuan to exactly this rate.

That night the train crossed the Ravine of Baboons (Xingxing Xia), which had always been regarded as the frontier of Chinese Turkestan.

'The desert which lies between Ansi and Hami is a howling wilderness, and the first thing which strikes the wayfarer is the dismalness of its uniform, black, pebble-strewn surface." That was Mildred speaking. And reading her book reminded me that I was missing one of the glories of this region by not visiting the caves at Dunhuang—Buddhas, frescoes, holy grottoes; the sacred city in the sands. But I intended to go one better, by visiting the lost city of Gaocheng (Karakhoja) whenever this train got to Turfan.

I had gone to bed in a strange late twilight amid a rugged landscape; and I woke, slowly jogging in the train, to a fiat region of sand and stones. Farther off were large humpy sand dunes, which had the appearance of having softly flowed and blown there, because there was nothing like them nearby. The dunes were like simple gigantic animals that went blobbing along through the desert, smothering whatever they encountered.

Soon a patch of green appeared—an oasis. Once there was merely a road linking the oases—but "once" meant only thirty years ago. Before then it was a rough road, what remained of the Silk Route. But these oases were not metaphors for a few trees and a stagnant pool. They were large towns, well watered from underground irrigation canals, and grapes and melons were grown in great profusion. Later in the day the train stopped at Hami. The Hami melon is famous all over China for its sweet taste and its fragrance; and Hami had been no insignificant place, although now it was what remained of the fruit-growing communes of the fifties and sixties. It had known great days, and had had a khan until this century. It had been overrun by Mongols, by Uighurs, by Tibetans and Dzungars. It had been repeatedly reoccupied by the Chinese since the year a.d. 73, during the Later Han Dynasty, and had been a Chinese city from 1698 onward. Nothing of this remained. What had not been damaged in the Muslim Rebellion of 1863–1873 had been flattened in the Cultural Revolution. The Chinese had a facility for literally defacing a city—taking all its characteristic features away, robbing it of its uniqueness, cutting its nose off. Now all Hami was known for was its pig iron.

The peaks beyond Hami and farther up the line had patches of snow on their ridges that lay like saddle blankets, squarish and flat. But down here in the train and on the desert it was very hot—over one hundred degrees in the train and hotter outside. The sun burned down on the sand and stones. There were a few gullies, and in the oldest and deepest ones, which were sheltered, perhaps a dead wu-tong tree, and here and there clumps of camel thorn, the only identifiable weed, apart from the spikes of gray lichens. We were heading towards a dusty range of hills that was surmounted by a blue range of mountains, and rising up beyond were more mountains, which were bright with snow patches and ice slides—long streaks that might have been glaciers.