Riding the Iron Rooster

That was the kind that was played in the train and in the railway stations when they weren't playing Chinese songs. They played "The Skaters Waltz" and "Flower of Malaya" and selections from Carmen.

"Do you get many travelers in Guiyang?"

"Unfortunately, very few people come here. This province was closed to foreigners until 1982. Some people pass through but they don't stop. And yet we have many places to see—some very nice temples, and the Huangguoshu Falls and the hot springs. Please come back to Guiyang and I'll show you around."

It seemed that the more remote and countrified the place in China, the more hospitable the people were.

For the onward journey the honeymooners had changed their clothes: he wore a jacket and sunglasses, she wore a tweed skirt. They smoked and slumbered. Maybe this fatigue meant it was the end of their honeymoon?

By midafternoon we were in the southeast of Guizhou, among greener hills showing the scars and broken terraces of having once been farmed. The route to Guilin was roundabout because of all the mountains. They were an obstruction, but they were very pretty—velvety and shaggy with grass and trees. It was much hotter now, and most of the train passengers were asleep, barely stirring at Duyun; that place looked like Mexico, with a big yellow-stucco station and palm trees under a clear blue sky.

Farther south the landscape changed dramatically: the gray hills here were shaped like camel humps and chimney stacks, and stupas with sheer sides. They were the oddest hills in the world, and the most Chinese, because these are the hills that are depicted in every Chinese scroll. It is almost a sacred landscape—it is certainly an emblematic one. It had happened all at once: the hills looked squarish and ancient, like a petrified city. We had entered a new province, Guangxi, and from here to the city of Guilin, two hundred miles or more, it was all the landscape of the Chinese classical paintings.

It was a rice-growing area, but there wasn't much water available. This was probably the reason I saw such ingenious pumps and irrigation in Guangxi. I saw about ten different kinds of water movers. I saw the chain pump being pedaled by two children. This pump, Professor Needham says, is unchanged in its design since its invention in the first century A.D. All the pumps I saw were mechanical—no motors, no hoses even. The largest and weirdest was a gigantic spoon, about ten feet long and made of wood, which a woman used to move water from a lower field to a higher one. She didn't simply lift and dump the water; she scooped and splashed very quickly, and it was like a laborious form of playing.

Amid these limestone stacks and buttes there was a limestone village with the same look of eruption. But there was no railway station to serve these stone houses—not even a platform, nor a grade crossing. The village was in a low place, and its muddy streets were in shadow. What was remarkable was the number of horses in the place. People were buying and selling them, riding them, tethering them to trees, hitching them to carts. It was market day, late afternoon, and the traders were winding things up. For the next little while, along the railway tracks, I saw pony carts making their way home. It was unusual to see Chinese horsemen, but I inquired and discovered that these were people of the Miao minority, who are fairly numerous in Guangxi—there are five million of them altogether. The Chinese are respectful of such people, but are more mystified by their customs and habits than they are by those of Westerners. They stared, fascinated, but still they didn't understand. They never seemed to understand the strengths of these little nations in their autonomous prefectures (Guangxi had two minority states within its borders), and so they never seemed to take the minorities seriously. They treated them like exotic pets.

An eerie sight in Guangxi were the caves in those gray limestone hills. The hills had come to look like fat columns and towers, and the caves made them seem hollow. Later I learned that Guangxi is full of caves. Some are underground dripping caverns, but these above-ground things—many of them at any rate—had been converted into homes. The strangest ones looked like gaping mouths, with white stalactites showing like teeth.

In a shallow pool among those towerlike hills there was a gray and white crane, the sort the Chinese regard as an auspicious bird, representing long life. The train startled the bird, and off it went, soaring and circling, as we rumbled on through a painting of mountains that was being endlessly unrolled.

In the kitchen of the dining car, a young woman was scrubbing pots and singing in Chinese.

I know that you love me

I am waiting

But where do you want me to go?