Riding the Iron Rooster

"But I was a Marine," he said. "We fuck anything."

He had met a young Japanese woman in Canton—had just passed by the open door to her hotel room, started shooting the breeze and ended up in bed with her. Kicker was sixty-seven years old and had the face of a rapist. But his features softened as he recalled the encounter—just yesterday, it was, on the fourth floor.

"It was real nice," he said. 'That gal gave me more loving in those six hours than I had in fifteen years of marriage."

Morthole was looking on. He was very drunk. He was alone. He had not made any friends on his long trip. He asked me what I was planning to do. I told him: Head north—more China.

"More tombs," he said. "More chopsticks. More pagodas. What are you doing?"

"Trying to get the hang of it," I said.

"And you're going by train? It'll take ages!"

"It'll give me a feeling of accomplishment."

Morthole laughed. He did not seem to me very bright, but I had never said much to him. I had merely noted the times when he had gone in search of stones, and I had marveled at the satchelful he had collected. His prize was a chunk of the Great Wall—he wondered whether he would be able to smuggle it through customs at Canton Railway Station.

Each of those tourists had surprised me in one way or another. It made me think that you never really know anyone until you have traveled 10,000 miles in a train with them. I had sized them up in London, but they were all both better and worse then they had seemed then, and now they were beyond criticism because they had proved themselves to be human. Morthole, the recluse and rock collector, had a surprise for me, too. I had taken him for an illiterate, and I had not taken him very seriously—or his bag of rocks.

"Do you know The Excursion?" he said.

I said I didn't know what he was talking about. What was this, some China sight-seeing tour to the high spots?

"William Wordsworth," he said. "I learned it at school."

"Oh, that Excursion."

Morthole raised his glass and said,

An irksome drudgery seems it to plod on,

Through hot and dusty ways, or pelting storm,

A vagrant merchant under a heavy load

Bent as he moves, and needing frequent rest;

Yet do such travellers find their own delight...

Oh, God, I thought, and all this time I've been patronizing this poor bastard.

But speaking of travelers finding their own delight, I decided that day to leave Canton. I went to bed thinking how China exists so distinctly in people's minds that it is hard to shake that fantasy loose and see the real thing. It was not quite the same as looking for igloos in Alaska, or grass skirts in Tahiti, or big blubber-lipped Ubangis in Africa; but it was similar. And it was as wrong to lean on the fake Chinese imagery that comes thirdhand to every Westerner as it was to believe in the wholesome air of poverty.

I had a nightmare. I woke up in a sweat as the nightmare ebbed away: I was on a mobbed street, full of toothy and unfriendly faces, and felt trapped and suffocated in a big city. It was a Chinese city—a Chinese nightmare. I thought: Most of my nightmares are Chinese nightmares. On its most ordinary-seeming street, this unraveling republic had sights to scare the hell out of me. But I was growing fond of its gorgeous insects.

6. Train Number 324 to Hohhot and Lanzhou

It had been a very bad month on China's western railway, where wild yaks on the line accounted for some delays, and sandstorms were frequent. Just before I set off I read in the China Daily that 330 miles of track had been buried by the worst sandstorms for twenty years. The report was precise in its tale of woe: a "force 12 gale" had raged for forty-eight hours, and the "eye-blinding sandstorm" had dumped 100,000 tons of sand on the tracks, stranding forty-seven trains and closing the line for nine days, during which 10,000 rail passengers were evacuated. People died in the storm. People were injured. Vast prefectures of Gansu and Xinjiang were cut off.