The Last Samurai (50 page)

HC joined a package tour to avoid suspicion. The tour included a visit to Xinjiang, a province in the far northwest of the country; his plan was to leave the group at Ürümqi and make his way to the Mongolian border. On the second day of the tour it was announced that the Xinjiang leg of the tour had been cancelled to allow more time for celebrated landscapes of art and poetry.

The group took a train to a town in the south. The buildings had posters of Chairman Mao on their sides. No one in the town had a copy of the
Dream of the Red Chamber
. There were no books in the town or if there were no one would tell HC. There was no jade, there were no pictures. It was an odd place he said for the children all seemed to be boys. The people there seemed to work very hard, but on a field outside the town the parents and the little boys would gather to fly kites, and these were the most beautiful kites he had ever seen. They were a brilliant red, and each had a picture of Chairman Mao on the body of the kite, or two or three characters representing one of the sayings of the Chairman. A steady wind always seemed to flow across the field, and the fiery dragons shot up into the air as soon as they were released.

He did not think he would find the silent tribe, but if he did not go forward where else was there to go? As long as he felt that he had turned his back on England he was all right, but if he turned his face to it he thought that he would turn to stone.

He pretended to be sick, and when the group went on he stayed behind.

One day he stood watching as the kites flew far overhead, the Chinese characters tossing this way and that in the air. The written language was constructed of ideograms compatible with many spoken realisations of the words & he felt that people spoke here any way they liked, while the written language flew on kites overhead. He felt at last free of philology. He thought Why should I inspect the lost silent tribe are they not just as silent if I am not there? But what was he to do if he had no quest?

He watched the kiteflyers and he saw that there was a child with no kite. The child would run now to this group now to another and be pushed away. Once the child ran by HC. It was snivelling and covered with sores and it looked different from the other children in the village. He said something and the child said something he could not understand, he thought that it must be the dialect. He said something else and the child said something else and suddenly he thought that he understood a word here and there, but if he understood them they were Turkic words made strange by the Chinese intonation. He said something in Turkish and he tried it in Karakalpak and Kyrgyz and Uighur and the child looked at him as though it understood. He asked someone if he could meet its parents and he was told it had no family. He thought that the child might come from some Turkic tribe in Xinjiang or perhaps it came from the lost silent tribe itself, but what difference did it make.

At last one day in despair he walked out of town, and he came to a cliff overlooking a valley. The floor of the valley was absolutely flat, a deep bright green. Through it curved a river, flat as a ribbon, a dull silver twisting back and forth. And from that plain thrust the sheer bare rock cliffs of mountains, each a boulder thousands of feet high breaking through the flat green.

The sky when he came there was grey, and shreds of mist snagged on the rock and floated motionless above the ground. It was the strangest and most beautiful place he had ever seen. England seemed far away, it contracted until dead Fraenkel and the pelican in the quad were tiny, the Bodleian and the lives buried there were no bigger than a postage stamp. Although there was no wind he saw that the rags of mist had moved, they hung now a yard or two from where they had been. He wanted to say something—he felt so far away. The opening of the
Odyssey
came to his mind. Odysseus could not rescue his companions.

They perished by their own recklessness, the fools. They ate the cattle of the Sun God who took from them their day of return, νóστιμον
μαρ he thought, nostimon emar—What must I do so that I need never return? Shall I eat the cattle of the Sun?

He felt it would destroy him if he were to put himself back in the matchbox.

What must I do? he said.

The valley floor could not be seen. It was covered with a mist as thick and white as cloud. Out of the cloud rose the barren rocks. The sky had cleared above, as if a solution of air and fine rain had separated until the heavier of the two had silted the valley in thick white mist leaving the clear pure air above. The backs of the rocks were in black shadow, and at the edge of the black ran a glittering line of gold, as though each was a moon just past the new. On the summit of each was a little cluster of trees, black against the setting sun, and liquid flame welled through.

I can’t go back, he said. What shall I do?

As he sat there a great wind suddenly blew up, so that high above he could see the branches of the trees streaming in the ferocious air. From behind him in the distance he heard a great noise, as of many people shouting—and when he looked back & then up he saw a huge dragon shooting up into the darkening sky: the best kitemakers in the village had been working on it for weeks, & now it had escaped. The field where they launched the kites was far away, but in the slanting afternoon light all the figures stood out clearly: five or six were staring up at the kite which had escaped, and further back another group was struggling to haul a kite in. One person had caught the body of the kite, and another was reeling in the line.

Suddenly the wind snatched at the kite; the lineman tripped, tearing the kite from the other man’s hands; and as the kite began to lift a child ran forward and flung itself onto the frame. The kite dragged along the ground for a few feet, the tiny figure still clinging—and then the wind snatched it high into the air while the line went flying far out of reach.

Now the kiteflyers looked up in silence, while the brilliant red kite bore the child away. It sailed above HC, and when it reached the cliff a current of air tossed it high above.

The villagers stopped at the edge of the cliff. The kite began to descend. The wind snatched it this way and that, and at last hurled it at the top of one of the mountains HC had been looking at just before. The wind was blowing away from them, but in a sudden sharp twist it tossed at them a snatch of sound, the howling of a child, before wheeling away again.

The villagers looked at the mountain & HC, feeling they might now be more communicative, asked sympathetically: What is to be done?

But though he found the dialect very difficult what they seemed to be saying was that nothing could be done.

HC was sure he had not understood, but later someone explained that though of course they could request assistance it would not come and the request would count against them.

HC said: But couldn’t someone climb up and get it?

And everyone said at once that this was impossible because no one had ever climbed the mountain and anyone who tried it would die.

That settled it.

HC said at once:

I will rescue the child.

He looked up at the flaming trees and laughed, and he said:

I will eat the cattle of the Sun.

Night had fallen. The moon was the colour of a pumpkin, low on the horizon, sullen brother of the Sun. Under its baleful light the white mist glimmered, and the black of the mountains was more solid than rock.

He went back to town and he said that he needed a lot of silk. He was told that this could not be had but he kept insisting. He explained what he wanted to do and now the local people took an interest. In all the terrible times they had been through they had kept their interest in kites, and almost everyone in the town took an interest in aerodynamics and in what could be done with the silk. He gave hard currency to the right people and he was given 100 or so square metres of brilliant yellow silk, and a woman sat up all night sewing it for him on an old black Singer with a foot pedal.

In the morning the mist had cleared. The green fields ran straight to the base of each rock, unbroken by any path, and so he walked straight across a field to the wall of rock. The air was still & the occasional cries of the child could be heard.

HC had done some climbing as a boy. The fact that he had climbed before meant that he had some idea of what he was taking on; sometimes he thought he could do it, and sometimes he knew that he knew the form his death would take.

He found a handhold and a foothold, and he began to climb.

After an hour his hands were scraped and there was a shooting pain in his shoulder. His face was scraped on one side where it was against the rock, and a trickle of blood and sweat ran by the corner of one eye and could not be wiped away.

Perhaps no one would back down who’d started such a thing. HC would never back down. He was a linguist, and therefore he had pushed the bounds of obstinacy well beyond anything that is conceivable to other men. He had been through the
Iliad
and
Odyssey
and each time he had come to a word he did not know he had looked it up in Liddell & Scott and written it down, and if there were five words in a line he had looked up five words and written them down before going on to a line in which there were four words he did not know, and at the age of 14 he had worked through Tacitus in this way and at the age of 20 he had read the
Muqaddimah
of Ibn Khaldun and at 22 the
Dream of the Red Chamber
. Now he moved one finger a centimetre and then another, and then he moved the toe of his boot a centimetre and the toe of his other boot a centimetre.

For ten hours he moved up the face of the rock centimetre by centimetre. He looked neither up nor down. But in the tenth hour he put a boot up a centimetre and as his head rose a centimetre the green leaf of a vine dangled by his nose. He looked up and the fringe of the top was a few feet above him. Still obstinately, though his hands were bloody and his face was bloody he climbed centimetre by centimetre.

When he got to the top he could hardly get over the edge. His arms had been stretched up for ten hours and the muscles had set. When he bent one wrist over the edge a terrible cramp seized the whole arm, so that for a second he hung by one hand and the tips of two boots; blackness covered his eyes and he might have fallen back through thousands of feet of empty air. Something saved him. He saw a root by his left hand and grasped it, and though he groaned with pain he pulled himself up over the edge, and he lay on the grass and looked at the sky.

After a while he heard a little sound & still looking up he found he was looking into the face of the child. It was the child he had spoken to the day before. Previously he had thought that the child had been carried away by accident. Now he thought: But perhaps he meant to do it. He saw the dragon shooting up into the air; perhaps the child had imagined being carried into the air away from its tormentors. Now its face was scratched and there was a cut on one arm. HC said something in Uzbek and then in Chinese, but the child did not seem to understand.

After a while he sat up, & the child flinched away. HC was in excruciating pain, but he said to himself Well it’s not for long, and he looked out over the edge.

The valley floor was now concealed again by the thick white mist which must have gathered while he climbed. Above the cloud the mountains rose like islands, and on the nearer ones he could see the different things that grew there. On one there was only bamboo—there is nothing like bamboo for spreading—and the grove was bent almost parallel to the ground from the strong steady wind. The fronds of it were ruffled like feathers, they streamed out in the wind. On another were tortured trees, their hard trunks must have fought harder against the wind before they bent, they consisted of the bare tormented trunks and a few leaves. The light was clear and golden—everything had the clarity and beauty of things seen underwater, so that he could see the individual leaves of the bamboo, the tiny birds, the diaphanous wings of an insect. On the far horizon was a big golden cloud, and a series of smaller clouds were being carried even as he watched steadily out of sight.