To the Ends of the Earth

The great gorges lie below Bai De (“White King City”), the lesser gorges just above Yichang. Bai De was as poisonous-looking as any of the other cities, but as soon as we left it the mountains rose—enormous limestone cliffs on each side of the river. There is no shore: the sheer cliffs plunge straight into the water. They were formed at the dawn of the world, when the vast inland sea in western China began to drain east and wear the mountains away. But limestone is a curious substance. It occurs in blocks, it has cracks and corners; and so the flow zigzagged, controlled by the stone, and made right angles in the river. Looking ahead through the gorges you see no exit, only the end of what looks like a blind canyon.

After seeing the great gorges of the Upper Yangtze, it is easy to believe in gods and demons and giants.

There are graffiti on the gorges. Some are political (“Mankind Unite to Smash Capitalism”), some are poetic (“Bamboos, flowers and rain purify the traveler”), while other scribbled characters give the gorge’s name or its history, or they indicate a notable feature in the gorge. “Wind Box Gorge” is labeled on the limestone, and the wind boxes have painted captions. “Meng-liang’s Ladder,” it says, at the appropriate place. These are the zigzag holes that Captain Williamson mentioned in his notes; and they have a curious history. In the second century A.D. the Shu army was encamped on the heights of the gorge. The Hupeh general, Meng-liang, had set out to conquer this army, but they were faced with this vertical gorge wall, over seven hundred feet high. Meng-liang had his men cut the ladder holes in the stone, all the way to the top of the gorge, and his army ascended this way, and they surprised the enemy camp and overwhelmed them, ending the domination of Shu. (In 1887 Archibald Little wrote, “The days are long past since the now effeminate Chinese were capable of such exertions.…”)

The wind blows fiercely through the gorges, as it does in New York between skyscrapers; and it is a good thing, too, because the junks can sail upstream—there is little room here for trackers. On the day I passed through, the sky was leaden, and the wind was tearing the clouds to pieces, and the river itself was yellow-brown or viscous and black, a kind of eel color. It is not only the height of the gorges but also the narrowness of the river—less than a hundred yards in places—which makes it swift, sixty meters per second in the narrower places. The scale gives it this look of strangeness, and fills it with an atmosphere of ominous splendor—the majestic cliffs, the thousand-foot gorge walls, the dagger-like pinnacles, and the dark foaming river below, and the skinny boatmen on their vessels of splinters and rags.

Archibald Little wrote, “I rejoiced that it had been my good fortune to visit the Yangtze Gorges before the coming stream of European tourists, with the inevitable introduction of Western innovation in their train, should have destroyed all their old world charm.” The cities, certainly, are black and horrific, but the gorges are changeless and completely unlike anything I had ever seen before. In other landscapes I have had a sense of deterioration—the Grand Canyon looks as if it is wearing away and being sluiced, stone by orange stone, down the Colorado River. But the gorges look powerful and permanent, and make every person and artifact look puny. They will be here long after Man has destroyed himself with bombs.

It is said that every rock and cliff has a name. “The Seated Woman and the Pouncing Lion,” “The Fairy Princess,” and—less lyrically—“The Ox-Liver and Horse-Lung Gorge” (the organs are boulder formations, high on the cliff face). The Yangtze is a river of precise nomenclature. Only simple, wild places, like the volcanic hills of southwest Uganda, are full of nameless topography; naming is one of the features of Chinese civilization and settlement. I asked the pilot of our ship if it was so that every rock in the Yangtze had a name. He said yes.

“What is the name of that one?” I asked quickly, pointing out of the window.

“That is Pearl Number Three. Over there is Pearl Number Two. We shall be coming to Pearl Number One in a few minutes.” He had not hesitated. And what was interesting was that these rocks looked rather insignificant to me.

One of the passengers said, “These gorges come up to expectations. Very few things do. The Taj Mahal did. The Pyramids didn’t. But these gorges!”

We passed Wushan. There was a funeral procession making its way through the empty streets, beating drums and gongs, and at the front of the procession three people in white shrouds—white is the Chinese color of mourning—and others carrying round paper wreaths, like archery targets. And now we were in the longest gorge, twenty-five miles of cliffs and peaks, and beneath them rain-spattered junks battling the current.