Riding the Iron Rooster

There were rosefinches and hawks, and the most popular bird looked like a plover, with a ringed neck and brownish wings. But when I heard it sing I knew it was not a plover. One of the bird sellers wrote down its name, and I discovered later it was a Mongolian lark. It seemed a hell of a fate for such a musical bird to be snatched from its freedom in the immense grasslands and clapped into a tiny bamboo cage. But there are worse fates. One of the culinary perversions of France is making larks into pâté and spreading them on toast.

Later, when Mr. Fang found me, he introduced me to several officials. They had been sent to Hohhot from Peking. Everyone I had met in Hohhot, except the Muslims, had been sent from Peking. Hohhot was just another unpopular post, but no one complained. I did find it odd that after two and a half days in Mongolia I still had not met an ethnic Mongolian. Everyone I asked had the same explanation—a vague wave of the hand and a mutter, "Over there," meaning somewhere in the yellow emptiness of the grasslands.

When we left Hohhot, and were waiting for the train to arrive, I reminded Mr. Fang of our agreement not to travel together in the same compartment. He said that was fine with him. There was a commotion behind us—fifteen shuffling men escorting a high official across the platform. They were seeing him off. He was a stern, skinny man in a blue cap and baggy blue suit; his shapeless clothes alone marked him out as a hard-liner—the conservatives (always referred to in China as "leftists") still have not abandoned their Maoist look of austerity, and this one had an unusually fearsome look, as if daring anyone to laugh at his flappy pants.

His underlings were effusive in the insincerely solicitous way that arouses either contempt or pity—or indifference, as in the case of this official. All this bootlicking hardly made him blink, and he turned his back on them as they slurpingly said good-bye.

When I found my compartment, this man was in it, already seated and making tea. I had come to see that there was even a "leftist" way of making tea. The real hard-liners carried old chubby jam jars and reused the tea leaves again and again, seldom changing them but letting them pile up until the jar was half full of sodden leaves. I put a pinch of green tea into the teacup that was provided free by China Railways—surely he knew that?—and poured the hot water from the thermos, also provided free of charge.

"Hello," I said. "How are you?"

He nodded, saying nothing.

"Are you going to Yinchuan or Lanzhou?"

He stared at me.

"I'm going to Lanzhou," I said, and in English, "God, you're a friendly guy. But don't mind me—I'm just going to curl up with this book."

It was The Gobi Desert, by Mildred Cable, an account of her Chinese travels in the twenties, when she went up and down the deserts of Turkestan in a horse-drawn cart.

The sun reddened and dissolved into the dust of the Mongolian plain as we set off, jogging westward. In the morning the blue baggy man was gone, and I guessed he had gotten off in the Mongolian city of Baotou.

We followed the course of the Yellow River, its big loop in Mongolia and its straighter progress in the stricken province of Ningxia. No one had a good word for Ningxia, and I could see why. It was a parched and windblown place, with a tiny population, many of them the tenaciously backward-looking Hui people—Muslims. Privately, the Chinese regarded them as filthy and superstitious, but publicly they praised their quaint habits. The Chinese felt rather guilty about the Hui people. Knowing of the Hui horror of pigs and pork, officials in the time of Cultural Revolution put Huis in charge of pigsties and made them swineherds and bacon slicers.

We had left the sparse plains and grassy mountains of Mongolia and were now among big, bulky, Irish-looking mountains, scattered with sheep and goats. All the slopes were worn down and stony, with gullies and ravines and chopped-out sluices and quarries—as if sometime in the remote past water had rushed through this place and taken every live thing away, and the topsoil too. It was spectacular desolation.

The plain returned again and was as flat as a billiard table. The railway tracks were dead straight, and the steam locomotive pulling the train poured soot behind it. I kept the window closed when I realized that the black flakes were accumulating on me and Mildred. I decided that this landscape of straight lines had inspired people to build houses with lots of right angles—flat roofs and straight square walls. There seemed something melancholy in such enormous distances, and yet nearly everything that was plowable had been plowed. But I did not see anyone in those hot fields. The sun moved slowly through the high blue sky, and beneath it everything looked torpid, in tones of light brown. There were very few towns, but each one was a dismal anticlimax: square factories, square houses.