Riding the Iron Rooster

The settlements were clusters of square, squat houses with mud-walled courtyards. Walls were the rule here. And there was some irrigation, some vegetable gardens exposed to the wind and weather. But the clearest impression I had, early on in Qinghai, was of every village looking like a prison farm. Indeed, that is how many of them started out, with the villagers sent to Qinghai as punishment. They were to be reformed through labor, as the saying went, and turned from prisoners into pioneers.

The station signs were written in three scripts—Chinese, Mongolian and Tibetan. I had no idea how far we had come. We were traveling very slowly still. The province was bigger than the whole of Europe, but it was empty. The trees were stark and dead, like symbols of trees, the six lines that a child might draw with a crayon. The ground was bare, the houses and mountains brown, the river gray and the ice at its edges was filthy. The valley was twenty miles wide. Having seen Xinjiang, I suspected that these fields might be green in the summer and that it might not be the dreary place it seemed. But it was odd to be in this brown and lifeless world, where there is nothing visible that can be eaten. It looked like a dead planet. This is the sort of landscape that frightens visitors to China—frightens the Chinese, too. To the Chinese this was not part of the world: it was the edge of it, so it was nothing.

By talking to the other passengers I established that the mountains to the north were the Dabanshan. Gansu was on the other side. Cave dwellers inhabited some of those mountainsides, and in some cases the caves were elaborate, with windows and doors and crude plumbing. I could see on some of them a sort of superstructure protruding, a balcony which made a facade.

The train was creaking along, gaining altitude. We were now at about 7000 feet—it was chilly, the air was thin, the wind was strong. In the cliffs above the track there were caves, an opening on every cliff face, with its own shelf and precarious stairs cut into the rock. Some cave dwellers were sitting in the sunshine, others hanging laundry, hacking at troughlike gardens that seemed magnetized to the mountainside. They were cooking, too. Why think of this as a mountain when you could just as easily think of it as a tenement? That wasn't a cliff—it was the west wing, and that summit was a penthouse. There was a whole world of troglodytes here in Qinghai.

Only its altitude made Xining breathtaking. In other respects it looked like what it was, a frontier town: square brown buildings on straight streets, surrounded by big brown hills. All the water on the creeks and streams had turned to ice. It was an ugly, friendly place, and its bantering people had chafed red cheeks, like bruised peaches. Its terrible weather gave it drama. Its rain was black and very cold. But it did not rain long. Most of the time it was notoriously dry—too arid for growing vegetables outside the plastic greenhouses. Snow also fell, in big, wet plopping flakes. And the wind had torn off all the topsoil. Inside of a week I experienced all those conditions—rain, dust storms, blinding sunlight and snow. If I climbed stairs too quickly, I had to stop and get my breath. I developed a plodding way of walking that enabled me to keep going. There were Muslims all over town, wearing a sort of chef's cap and side-whiskers, and there were also spitting Hans, and Tibetans who favored cowboy hats and frock coats.

"What's that music?" I asked the driver, as we traveled to the hotel from the station.

The driver said nothing, but his pal said, "Beethoven."

"Beethoven," the driver said. "I like Beethoven."

The driver's name was Mr. Fu. He said he could drive me to Tibet. It would be about five days to Lhasa, through the Qinghai desert and then into the mountains. Sleep in army camps on the way. How about it?

I said I was very interested.

Mr. Li, his pal, said, "I think it's Symphony Number Two."

"Isn't it Six—the Pastorale?"

Mr. Li laughed. He had yellow teeth. His laugh simply meant Wrong! It was a barklike noise. He said, "The Pastorale goes dum-dum-dee-dee-dum. No, this isn't Number Two. I know Two, Five, Six, Seven and Nine. This isn't a symphony. It is an overture."

Mr. Fu went fossicking in his glove compartment. He brought out the cassette holder and showed us. It was the Coriolan Overture. Mr. Fu said it was a Beethoven work he particularly liked.

"This is the best hotel in Xining," Mr. Fu said.

Mr. Li laughed in a stern correcting way. "This is the only hotel in Xining."