Riding the Iron Rooster

I woke at six, in darkness. All of China is on Peking time. It had been light until nine at night in Lanzhou. I read Mildred Cable on the Gobi Desert and realized that I was just passing a point the Chinese had once called The Gate of Demons because beyond it was the howling wind and wasteland of which they had an acute terror. ("Some told of rushing rivers cutting their way through sand, of an unfathomable lake hidden among the dunes, of sand-hills with a voice like thunder, of water which could be clearly seen and yet was a deception.") I read for an hour. At seven it was still dark, the sun behind the distant mountains. We came to a small station called Shagoutai, where the only living things were a muleteer and his mule—the animal loaded with water bags and waiting behind the grade crossing.

The mountains were dark, treeless, grassless ranges and they were folded like thick quilts. They were black, because they were backlit by the unrisen sun. Near Lanzhou, I thought the mountains were like shuijiao (water dumplings). The same smoothness, and folds, and crimp marks. I loved the sight of the wilderness of dumplings. But in this semidesert, with far-off hills, no image came so easily to mind. The nearer hills all had cave entrances in them—the arched doorways of the cave dwellers of Gansu. It was a strange, rocky province, and so long and narrow I knew I would be traveling through it still tomorrow. Like Qinghai, the adjoining province to the south, Gansu was notorious for being a place where political prisoners were sent, the Chinese Siberia. Security was a simple matter because there was no escape through the desert. Only forty years ago travelers on this route—and at just about this spot in Gansu—were met by a large stone tablet with the inscription Earth's Greatest Barrier. Meaning the Gobi.

The landscape changed, all at once, into everything, at the town of Wuwei. The Iron Rooster was in a deep, cool valley, and there were wet mountains a few miles away, and beyond them a great ridge of brown mountains, and higher and farther still, on the distant horizon, a long range of snowy mountains. So blue and white were these mountains of ice that the range itself had the look of a sword blade. There were arid patches, too, between the snowy peaks in the distance and the green valley in which we were traveling.

These mountains to the south were the Datong Shan, several of them 20,000 footers, in the province and sometime penal colony of Qinghai, which stretched beyond them to the edge of the Tibetan Plateau.

I had been warned that this train trip west would be barren and boring. It was not. I was beginning to understand that the empty parts of China are the most beautiful, and some of them—like these valleys—very fertile. It was a chain of oases along the northern arm of the Silk Road. Its utter emptiness was so rare in China that it seemed startling to me, and where there were gardens and trees it was almost lush. Large herds of sheep grazed along the stonier stretches, nibbling at hanks of grass; and there were mules and crows and mud-walled towns. In one place I saw six camels, big and small, placidly watching the train go by. The mules were indifferent to the train. They were braying, and biting and mounting each other, honking and showing their teeth as they hauled their hoses into place.

The train was full but not crowded. The dining car was nearly always empty, perhaps because most of the passengers were Uighurs—Muslims—and the Chinese menu was about as porky as it could be. And the other dishes could not possibly have been halal, which is the Islamic version of kosher—implying ritual slaughter. Because business was so bad, the chef usually chatted, asking me what I wanted. How about some chicken and prawns? Or shredded pork? Or pork balls? Or diced pork and doufu (bean curd)? Or fish with ginger? Cauliflower with dried shrimp? Sauteed cucumber?

Like many features of Chinese life, the food had glorious names, and each dish had its own identity and pedigree. But in practice they were almost impossible to tell apart, having not only the same taste, but the same color and stringiness.

By midafternoon, the train was moving across a flat green plain between two ranges of low mountains, the Qilian Shan and the Helan Shan. In places I could see the crumbled sections of the Great Wall. Where the land was flat, it was intensively cultivated, and in places there were tall, slender and rather redundant-looking poplars. The Chinese were averse to planting shade trees because it was impossible to plant crops under them. They favored the skinny symbolic tree that doubled as a fence. The idea of The Forest was alien to China. It only existed in northern Heilongjiang province—the Manchurian northeast; and I had heard that even the little that remained was being cut down and made into chopsticks and toothpicks and Ping-Pong paddles.