Riding the Iron Rooster

In this shallow green valley in the desert, in which all the water came from underground, there were no Chinese high rises, and most of the houses were small and square. There were grape arbors suspended over most of the streets—for the shade and also for the prettiness of them. This valley is the chief source of Chinese grapes—there is even a winery in Turfan—and thirty varieties of melon grow in the area. That intensifies the relief on having come from one of the wildest deserts in the world. Turfan is the opposite of everything that lies around it, with its water and its shade and its fresh fruit.

Mr. Fang still tagged behind me, keeping his distance, sometimes speaking an ominous sentence.

One of the most ominous for the traveler in China is: It is a new hotel. That sometimes struck fear into my heart. It implied peeling wallpaper, plush chairs, exposed wires, lights that didn't work, a hairy carpet, hard beds and a bathroom with no water, loose tiles, sticky glue on the sink, no shower curtain, and a cistern you had to fix yourself by twisting the ballcock. The doors on the fake-wood cabinets were usually stuck, the curtains were thin, the doorknobs loose, the coat hangers misshapen, the telephone didn't work, and neither did the radio. There was always a color television and a bunch of plastic flowers. Such places smelled of fish glue and failure, and they were terribly expensive. In all cases in China I preferred an old hotel. They weren't pretty but they worked.

But Mr. Fang said the old place in Turfan was full, and he put me in the new, as yet unnamed hotel. It was half-finished, and it was empty. Its odor was powerful: fresh cement. In the rubble of the courtyard there was a fountain which contained hot dust and a stiff little mouse. I stood, a little dazed from the heat, and heard a donkey bawl.

Because of Peking time, breakfast was served at nine-thirty, lunch at two, and dinner at nine in the evening. What are civilized hours in a place like Sandwich, Massachusetts, are very inconvenient in Chinese Turkestan. I woke hot and hungry at about six in the morning, and I had no appetite in the evening. But the eating hours were official and inflexible, and the local people woke late and went to bed late. Nothing I could do persuaded anyone to galvanize himself early, in the cool part of the day.

"We will miss breakfast," Mr. Fang said.

"Does that matter?"

"We must have breakfast."

I thought, What good are you? But it was not only that mealtimes were sacred. The food was paid for and therefore had to be eaten. And the Chinese are an oral people—that was another reason. Most of all, the Chinese are at their freest when they are eating. A meal is always a relief and a celebration.

Yet I never wanted breakfast—noodles, thin rice gruel, meat dumplings, maybe mushrooms, and warm milk. As a foreigner I might be offered orange soda or a Pepsi with my breakfast noodles.

In Turfan I bought the local raisins made from white grapes—the best in China—and apricots. And I sat in my room, eating that stuff and drinking my Dragon Well green tea and writing my notes, until Fang and the driver had had their fill of gruel, and then we set off down the dusty roads.

Turfan was often a furnace. But on overcast mornings it was pleasant, with low clouds and temperatures only in the nineties. I liked the town. It was the least Chinese place I had seen so far, and it was one of the smallest and prettiest. There were very few motor vehicles, and it was quiet and completely horizontal.

It was a Uighur town, with a few Chinese. There were also Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Tadzhiks and Tungus around the place, bowlegged and in high boots, in the Mongolian fashion. They were leathery faced, and some looked like Slavs and some like gypsies, and most of them looked like people who had lost their way and were just stopping briefly in this oasis before moving on. Half the women at the Turfan bazaar had the features of fortune-tellers, and the others looked like Mediterranean peasants—dramatically different from anyone else in China. These brown-haired, gray-eyed, gypsy-featured women in velvet dresses—and very buxom, some of them—were quite attractive in a way that was the opposite to the oriental. You would not be surprised to learn that they were Italians or Armenians. You see those same faces in Palermo and Watertown, Massachusetts.

Their gazes lingered, too. And some women came close and reached into the velvet and withdrew rolls of bills from between their breasts and said, "Shansh marnie?"

They put this Chinese money into my hand—the money still warm from having been in their deep bosoms—and they offered me four to one. They had gold teeth, and some looked like foxes, and they hissed at me when I said no.