Riding the Iron Rooster (64 page)

I was in a compartment with a young man and an old man. The young one smoked, the old one spat. But they were otherwise very courteous. They were also going to Golmud. As we went along in the trembling train it struck me that we were a great distance from what most people would regard as fruitful and bounteous China. We were over the edge, way past the old Chinese frontier, four days at least from civilization and its vast, stinking cities.

The scenery was lovely. The train had risen and snaked through the mountain passes west of Xining and then had traveled down to the cold valleys. The frozen river was a startling chalky white, and it showed up clearly even in twilight, like a road covered with snow, winding through the brown valleys.

"Going to Xizang?" the old man asked, meaning Tibet.

He assumed that no one would go to Golmud to stay, and of course he was right. That was why this was the train to Tibet.

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.

But I was pleased to be here, in such a wilderness. I sat in the safety of the train and looked upon the desolation of the land with a sense of mounting excitement. In the Lop Nor Desert of Xinjiang, and in Hami and Turfan they say, "Marco Polo came through here," or "This was the Silk Road." But here in Qinghai no claim at all could be made. There was never anyone here. It was death to attempt a crossing. No one passed through. And it was always like this—just as empty.

Mr. Zhao was traveling with his father, who visited him from another part of the train. This old man sat and stared at me. I tried to speak with him, but he was deaf. He had a deaf man's bright smile. Whenever I wrote in my notebook the old man put his teacup down and pressed his nose against my notebook page, marveling at my handwriting.

At last, the mountains and hills utterly vanished and in their place there was a light brown desert. I looked closer and saw that it was all low snowdrifts covered with fine sand. Later in the day it was stony. Still later, it was dark and rubbly—but still a desert—and the brown twisted symmetry of the rubble made it seem like an immensity of dog turds.

There were stations every twenty miles, but a station here was three small square buildings, the same brown as the turdy desert, standing in the wind, with emptiness on every side, and clouds madly blowing over them.

"It is not good," Mr. Zhao said. Obviously he missed the traffic and drizzle of urban Liaoning.

"I like this place," I said.

He erupted in the short spitting laugh that in China means
You must be out of your mind.

"I just wish we had some water," I said.

I asked the Head of the Train, who seemed very young, why there was no water.

"Because this is the desert."

He spoke English with a slight American accent.

"But you have boilers," I said.

"The water in the boilers is for the engine."

"Are people complaining about the lack of water?"

"You are complaining," he said, in a friendly way, "and other people are complaining, too. But I tell everyone it is a problem, and they understand."

"I don't understand."

"Because you are a foreign friend," he said, which was a polite Chinese way of saying that I was a Martian.

He said he was twenty-two. I asked him his name.

"My name is Gold Country," he said in English.

"
Jinguo?
" I asked.

"Yes. My father named me that because he wanted China to be prosperous."

He seemed rather ineffectual to hold such an important job—he was in complete charge of the train. But he was pleasant. He said he had not had much formal education and in fact had learned his English on the Voice of America.

Towards the end of the afternoon the rubbly desert gave way to rockier ground, and mountains appeared to the southwest. Two mountains were distinct and beautiful, and the snow was a luminous bluish color, covering the entirety of these slopes because they faced north and received no sun. They were the mountains (I could see from my map) Yagradagze and Har Sai, each of them just under 20,000 feet. They rose out of great flat snowfields, while in the foreground was rough desert and the chugging train.

"It has recently snowed," Jinguo said. "That is not unusual. It often snows heavily in March here. And in the passes it snows all year. Foreign friends like snow!"

As if in welcome a flock of eight gray cranes gathered themselves together and made off, just ahead of the train, rising and still folding as they flew, like large mechanical bumbershoots blown sideways by the stiff wind.

Golmud was hardly a town. It was a dozen widely scattered low buildings, some radio antennas, a water tower. One of the few cars in town was Mr. Fu's ridiculous Galant. There were some buses, but they were the most punished-looking vehicles I had seen in China—and no wonder, for they toiled up and down the Tibetan Plateau.

"Snow," Mr. Fu said—his first word.

I had not expected this snow, and it was clear from his gloomy tone that neither had he. The snow lay thinly in the town, but behind the town it was deep and dramatic—blazing in the shadows of the mountain range.

We were still at Golmud Station. Mr. Fu had driven from Xining, and had met me. But he was very subdued in the car.

When I asked him how he was he did not reply directly. He said, "We cannot go to Lhasa tomorrow. Maybe the day after, or the day after that, or—"

I asked him why.

'The snow. It is everywhere—very deep," he said. He did not even glance at me. He was driving fast through the rutted Golmud streets—too fast, but I had seen him drive in Xining and I knew this to be normal. At the best of times he was a rather frantic driver. 'The snow is blocking the road."

"You are sure?"

"Yes."

"Did you see it?"

He laughed:
Ha-ha! You idiot!
"Look at it!"

He pointed out the window. But I was not looking at the snow. I noticed that he was wearing a pair of elegant driving gloves. He never took the wheel without donning them. They seemed as old-fashioned as spats or gaiters.

"Did anyone tell you that the road was blocked with snow?"

He did not reply, so that meant no. We continued this sparring. The snow was bad news—it glittered, looking as though it was there forever. But surely someone had a road report?

"Is there is a bus station in Golmud?"

He nodded. He hated my questions. He wanted to be in charge, and how could he be if I was asking all the questions? And he had so few answers.

"People say the road is bad. Look at the snow!"

"We will ask at the bus station. The bus drivers will know."

"First we go to the hotel," he said, trying to take command.

The hotel was another prisonlike place with cold corridors and squawks and odd hours. I had three cactuses in my room, and a calendar and two armchairs. But there were no curtains on the windows, and there was no hot water. "Later," they said. The lobby was wet and dirty from the mud that had been tracked in. An ornamental pond behind the hotel was filled with green ice, and the snow was a foot deep on the path to the restaurant. I asked about food. "Later," they said. Some of the rooms had six or eight bunk beds. Everyone inside wore a heavy coat and fur hat, against the cold. Why hadn't my cactus plants died? The hotel cost $9 for a double room, and $2 for food.

"Now we go to the bus station," I said.

Mr. Fu said nothing.

"We will ask someone about the snow."

I had been told that buses regularly plied between Golmud and Lhasa, especially now that that there were no flights—the air service to Tibet had been suspended. Surely one of these bus drivers would put us in the picture.

We drove to the bus station. On the way, I could see that Golmud was the ultimate Chinese frontier town, basically a military camp, with a few shops, a market and wide streets. There were very few buildings, but since they were not tall, they seemed less of a disfigurement. It was a place of pioneers—of volunteers who had come out in the 1950s, as they had in Xining. They had been encouraged by Mao to develop the poor and empty parts of China; and of course, Tibet had to be invaded and subdued, and that was impossible without reliable supply lines—settlements, roads, telegraph wires, barracks. First the surveyors and engineers came, then the railway people and the soldiers, and then the teachers and traders.

"What do you think of Golmud, Mr. Fu?"

"Too small," he said, and laughed, meaning the place was insignificant.

At the bus station we were told that the snow wasn't bad on the road. A Tibetan bus had arrived just that morning—it was late, of course, but it was explained that all the buses were late, even when there was no snow.

Mr. Fu was not placated. He pointed south and said, "Snow!"

He was clearly apprehensive, although I was convinced that we should set off.

I said, "We will go tomorrow, but we will leave early. We will drive until noon. If the snow is bad we will turn back and try again another day. If it looks okay we will go on."

There was no way that he could disagree with this, and it had the additional merit of being a face-saving plan.

We had a celebratory dinner that night—wood-ear fungus, noodles, yak slices and the steamed buns called
mantou
that Mr. Fu said he could not live without (he had a supply for the trip to Tibet). There was a young woman at the table, sharing our meal. She said nothing until Mr. Fu introduced her.