Riding the Iron Rooster полностью

The other passengers were Salars in embroidered jackets, and small brown people wearing stiff little felt bowls on their heads, and Kazakhs in boots and goatskin cloaks, Huis in skullcaps, and enormous Tibetans with ragged rucksacks and shaven heads and greasy robes. They were mostly country folk—shepherds and yak herds and tent dwellers—heading home after their pilgrimage to Taer'si or else their foray at Xining market. There were many soldiers, there were rowdies and spitters and shitters and oddballs in long underwear who loitered in the train's corridors and blew their noses on the curtains.

The mountains nearby had bright, sharp peaks and warm slopes, but beneath them in the shadows, the valleys were frozen and the square mud-walled villages looked like habitations left over from the Neolithic age. They had been built by Mao's pioneers in the 1950s, the Hans who left settled homes and headed west to bring order—as if it needed more order than Buddhism—to Tibet. Night came quickly, a sky of black and blue that was all cloud, and beneath it the brilliant whiteness of the ice on the river.

I lay in bed, cursing the lack of hot tea on this cold train and reading The Hole in the Wall, by Arthur Morrison. It was an old novel about the East End of London in its days of banditry. Leaving Xining, I had asked the young man what those quarries were. He said, "Lime pits." In the novel, lime figures in a hideous way. Blind George, having been assaulted by the bully Dan Ogle, takes his revenge by sneaking into Ogle's room and pressing lime into his eyes to blind him ("the thumbs still drove at the eyes the mess of smoking lime that clung and dripped about Ogle's head ... Blind George gasped, 'Hit me now you's as blind as me!'").

That gave me a nightmare, and its terror arose from my confusing snow and lime—they looked the same—and disfiguring myself as I slipped in it. But it was fitful sleep. The cold in the train increased and it woke me a number of times. In the morning there were mountains in the north, and sandy waste all around. It was the roughest land I had seen in China, wild and stony, and later on, towards noon on this overcast day, there was snow thinly covering the desert—it had an uneven, spilled look—and swatches of snow lay in the ridges of the far-off mountains. The wind blew hard on the ground, and though it was flat, all its boulders were exposed. There was no vegetation at all, no one lived here, and even the railway stations seemed pointlessly positioned, because no one got on or off the train; the stationmaster stood at attention with his green flag—no one else.

There was still no water. It amazed me that no one complained. I spoke to a man in the kitchen who was actually pouring water into a pot. He did not reply. He came over to me, smiled briefly, then slammed the door in my face.

A boy in a smock was selling tickets in the dining car. I asked what the tickets were for. Noodles, he said. So I bought some tickets and lined up at a window leading on to the kitchen. I waited ten minutes, and when nothing happened, I said, "What about the noodles?"

"No more left!" the ticket seller said. He was smiling, but it was an ambiguous smile.

I complained: "I just gave you some money—"

"Come back in an hour."

"I want my noodles or else my money back."

"Later."

It was like prison, or the army, or an old-fashioned nuthouse.

I said, "You are not being very friendly. There is no food, no heat, no water on this train. This is very bad."

The ticket seller was still smiling. I wondered what would happen to me if I hit him. They would probably regard this as a very serious breach of discipline and send me to a far-off place for reeducation; indeed, they would probably send me here, to Qinghai, where they had sent so many other rebels. So I had nothing to fear: I was already in exile.

"Yes. It's bad," the ticket seller said, when he realized I was angry.

"At least get me some water for tea."

"There is no water."

"There is water in the kitchen. I saw it."

You win, he seemed to say, and he brought me a thermos of hot water, much to the delight of the men in my compartment as we shared it.

The landscape became even wilder, though I had not thought that to be possible. It was colder, windier, more rubbly; the mountains blacker. This made bleak Xinjiang seem lush by comparison. A cold wind howled across stony ground. It was hellish and memorable. I thought how the corners of China were so strange and inhospitable and unearthly the Chinese had come to believe that they represented the edges of the flat world they knew as The Middle Kingdom.

The younger man in the upper berth was Mr. Zhao. He came from Liaoning and said he had never seen a place as bad as this. He was a factory supervisor, something to do with magnesium, and was going to be in Golmud for several weeks.

"I'd rather be somewhere else," he said.