Riding the Iron Rooster

China has five holy mountains. It is the Chinese Buddhist's wish—and the wish of many foreign hikers—to climb them all. The trouble is that, being holy and being Chinese, they have been trampled for thousands of years. They have steps cut to the summit, and noodle stalls along the way, and kiosks selling postcards, monks selling strings of beads, hawkers, fruiterers and professional photographers who charge one yuan per pose. And along with the tough grannies toiling towards the top, there are the Americans in their Chinese T-shirts, Chinese in their American T-shirts, the Germans wearing rucksacks, and the French clutching the guidebook that says Chine. None of this makes the mountain less holy, but it makes the climb less fun.

For some reason, Emei was full of monkeys—frowning rhesus monkeys. They pestered pilgrims and snatched food and rode on the necks of their owners in a lazy and confident way, sitting on a man's neck, with their legs dangling over his chest. They picked their teeth as they rode along. On a back road near Emei I saw a man giving his monkey a piggyback ride, as he cycled—just like a father and child.

I stayed at what was described to me as the Railway University at Emei—it was Mr. Fang's doing. Actually it was the Institute of Communications, and it had 30,000 students. I was in the guest house, which, being new and "modern," had the bizarre touches that the Chinese reserve for their most expensive structures. And when these structures venture out of the realm of Chinese architecture altogether, they acquire things like concrete umbrellas on the terrace, padded velvet walls, fuse boxes in the dining room, murals of pandas, cactuses in the bathroom as a sort of suggestion that there is no water, very scary-looking bare wires protruding from the walls, water stains on the ceiling which take on the appearance of caricatures, and in the smallest rooms the most enormous sofas. The reflecting pool is another feature of such places. These pools were very entertaining—you never knew what you might find in them: dead fish, shoes, a bicycle wheel, rusty cans, chopsticks; but never anything as dull as algae. The one at Emei was full of water, and in the water a very large mirror that had plopped off the wall and shivered to pieces in the pool.

"What do you think of the guest house?" Mr. Fang asked me.

"Excellent," I said. "I want to stay longer."

But the cook sized me up and did one of the cruelest things any cook can do in rural China: he made me Western food—what he conceived to be Western food. Undercooked potatoes, pink chicken, boiled cabbage, and something so odd I had to ask its name.

"Bean—"

His English was like his cooking: strange mimicry. But I eventually found out what he was trying to tell me: wiener schnitzel.

Yet I enjoyed the place. I had felt the same in Inner Mongolia, at Jaiyuguan, Turfan and Urumchi—the wilder and emptier parts of China. I had had enough of Chinese cities. But this was pleasant, and it was possible to take long walks through the countryside, watching people hoeing or pigs wallowing, and in the far-off villages, the little kids doing homework in copybooks in front of the thatch-roofed huts.

***

The railway halt at Emei was at the end of a long, muddy road, and a market nearby sold fruit and peanuts to the pilgrims, who waited patiently, leaning on their walking sticks, for the train. And then, above the sound of sparrows and the whispers of bamboos, a train whistle blew. I liked these country stations, and it seemed perfect to sit there among the rice fields in the hills of Sichuan until, right on schedule, the big, wheezing train arrived to take me away, south into Yunnan. It was twenty-four hours to Kunming, and the train was uncharacteristically empty: I had a compartment to myself, and this one—because of the intense and humid heat—had straw mats instead of cushions.

"There are two hundred tunnels between here and Kunming," the conductor said when he clipped my ticket. No sooner had he gotten the words out of his mouth than we were standing in darkness: the first tunnel.

We were among tall conical hills that were so steep they were terraced and cultivated only halfway up. That was unusual in China, where land economy was almost an obsession. And the day was so overcast that waterfalls spilled out of the low cloud, and paths zigzagged upwards and disappeared in the mist.