The Last Samurai

The group took a train to a town in the south. The buildings had posters of Chairman Mao on their sides. No one in the town had a copy of the Dream of the Red Chamber. There were no books in the town or if there were no one would tell HC. There was no jade, there were no pictures. It was an odd place he said for the children all seemed to be boys. The people there seemed to work very hard, but on a field outside the town the parents and the little boys would gather to fly kites, and these were the most beautiful kites he had ever seen. They were a brilliant red, and each had a picture of Chairman Mao on the body of the kite, or two or three characters representing one of the sayings of the Chairman. A steady wind always seemed to flow across the field, and the fiery dragons shot up into the air as soon as they were released.

He did not think he would find the silent tribe, but if he did not go forward where else was there to go? As long as he felt that he had turned his back on England he was all right, but if he turned his face to it he thought that he would turn to stone.

He pretended to be sick, and when the group went on he stayed behind.

One day he stood watching as the kites flew far overhead, the Chinese characters tossing this way and that in the air. The written language was constructed of ideograms compatible with many spoken realisations of the words & he felt that people spoke here any way they liked, while the written language flew on kites overhead. He felt at last free of philology. He thought Why should I inspect the lost silent tribe are they not just as silent if I am not there? But what was he to do if he had no quest?

He watched the kiteflyers and he saw that there was a child with no kite. The child would run now to this group now to another and be pushed away. Once the child ran by HC. It was snivelling and covered with sores and it looked different from the other children in the village. He said something and the child said something he could not understand, he thought that it must be the dialect. He said something else and the child said something else and suddenly he thought that he understood a word here and there, but if he understood them they were Turkic words made strange by the Chinese intonation. He said something in Turkish and he tried it in Karakalpak and Kyrgyz and Uighur and the child looked at him as though it understood. He asked someone if he could meet its parents and he was told it had no family. He thought that the child might come from some Turkic tribe in Xinjiang or perhaps it came from the lost silent tribe itself, but what difference did it make.

At last one day in despair he walked out of town, and he came to a cliff overlooking a valley. The floor of the valley was absolutely flat, a deep bright green. Through it curved a river, flat as a ribbon, a dull silver twisting back and forth. And from that plain thrust the sheer bare rock cliffs of mountains, each a boulder thousands of feet high breaking through the flat green.

The sky when he came there was grey, and shreds of mist snagged on the rock and floated motionless above the ground. It was the strangest and most beautiful place he had ever seen. England seemed far away, it contracted until dead Fraenkel and the pelican in the quad were tiny, the Bodleian and the lives buried there were no bigger than a postage stamp. Although there was no wind he saw that the rags of mist had moved, they hung now a yard or two from where they had been. He wanted to say something—he felt so far away. The opening of the Odyssey came to his mind. Odysseus could not rescue his companions.

They perished by their own recklessness, the fools. They ate the cattle of the Sun God who took from them their day of return, νóστιμον μαρ he thought, nostimon emar—What must I do so that I need never return? Shall I eat the cattle of the Sun?

He felt it would destroy him if he were to put himself back in the matchbox.

What must I do? he said.

The valley floor could not be seen. It was covered with a mist as thick and white as cloud. Out of the cloud rose the barren rocks. The sky had cleared above, as if a solution of air and fine rain had separated until the heavier of the two had silted the valley in thick white mist leaving the clear pure air above. The backs of the rocks were in black shadow, and at the edge of the black ran a glittering line of gold, as though each was a moon just past the new. On the summit of each was a little cluster of trees, black against the setting sun, and liquid flame welled through.

I can’t go back, he said. What shall I do?