I pull out a red pen, open my map and think back on the route I have taken over the last month. From Xian I walked west to Qianling. From a distance, the three mounds of Empress Wu Zetian’s tomb resembled the curves of a reclining woman. At the peak of one mound I had a piss and the wind blew it straight back into my face.
At Baoji I stopped and saw an exhibition of ancient bronze vessels dug up in fields nearby. Outside the museum, a man stood handcuffed to a tree. A woman in an angora sweater struck a match and held it to the cigarette in his mouth.
On the train to Tianshui, the conductor discovered that twenty peasants in our carriage were travelling without tickets. When he went to lunch he asked me to guard the doors. I turned to the most genial-looking man and asked why he could not afford a ticket. He said, ‘I sold five hundred jin of maize to the state this year and made three hundred yuan. But by the time I’d paid the agricultural tax, farmer’s board tax, security tax and the telephone bills, I was seventy yuan in the red.’
‘Why have a telephone if you’re so hard up?’
‘I’ve never touched a telephone in my life. But the village head wanted one in his home so we all had to cough up twenty yuan.’
I calculated his annual earnings would scarcely buy three puffs of opium so I opened the door and let him go.
From Tianshui I hitched a ride to the Maijishan Grottoes. The entrance ticket had a one-yuan supplementary charge for the road construction tax.
On 20 November I reached Lanzhou and stayed with Yao Lu’s friend at the university. The next morning he gave me a thick jumper and I took a bus through the Liupan mountains to Guyuan in Ningxia Province. When Mao Zedong led the communists through those mountains in 1935, on the Long March to escape Guomindang persecution, he wrote: ‘Heaven is high, the clouds are thin/ We watch the wild geese vanish to the south/ If we cannot reach the Great Wall we are not true men/ On my fingers I count the twenty thousand li we have travelled so far. .’ A nice poem, but what purpose did his crusade serve? This region has suffered from famines every year since the 1960s. Families own one pair of trousers between them, and the men who share them nag their wives to get pregnant so they can sell the babies for money.
It snowed all the way to the Xumishan Caves. A small copse of pine trees rose from the bare summit. I bowed to the twenty-metre-high seated buddha, ate some dumplings in the temple restaurant, then hitched a ride north. The road was lined with Hui traders, all wearing their distinctive white caps. Whether they were busy weighing peanuts or arguing with their customers, they would always look up when a truck passed, so I saw a continual stream of faces.
At Zhongwei town, cold winds swept sheets of newspaper along the wide empty streets. The Yellow River nearby blocked the southern advance of the Tengger Desert. Its waters seemed to have aged on their journey from Qinghai.
In early December, I walked through the Helan range and saw some Neolithic paintings in the caves above. The valley floors were strewn with fallen rocks which local peasants used to build houses and sheep pens. Trees sprouted from the stones. Peasants, children and mountain goats watched me from rocky outcrops. Usually all they saw was the empty road that cuts across the waste. Tombs of the Western Xia Kingdom rose from the earth like huge coal heaps. It is believed the kingdom built its capital nearby in the lee of the mountains, and was destroyed in the thirteenth century by the ferocious cavalry of Genghis Khan.
At Yinchuan I bought a face mask, some shoelaces and a pair of gloves, and met up with two friends of Yao Lu. Their breaths reeked of alcohol.
On 10 December I reached Baotou, the largest city of Inner Mongolia. I had lunch with Chairman Xu of the local literary society. He fed me noodles and dried meat and asked me if I had a destination in mind. I said, ‘My beginning and end are just points on the road. It is the journey itself that matters.’ He said he had longed to travel as a young man, but whenever he ventured beyond a ten-kilometre radius the militia would always drag him back home. In the afternoon he walked me across Yellow River Bridge. I glanced back at the bald head he had forgotten to cover, and wished I had spoken with him longer. He will probably spend the rest of his life inside the walls of that small staff compound.
South of Baotou lay a vast, dry wilderness. Villages scattered the wastes like sheep dung.
I spent the night in Dongsheng with a friend of Chairman Xu, who gave me a pair of padded shoes and a woollen scarf. I hitched a ride the next morning, but a few hours into the journey discovered the truck was going the wrong way, so I jumped off and decided to cut across the Ordos Desert to my goal, Ejin Horo Qi. It looked no further than thirty kilometres on the map, the land seemed reassuringly flat — I could even see some shacks in the distance. So I checked my compass and walked into the wastes.
The grass and sheep dung disappeared and soon there were no more traces of man or beast.
At noon, I was walking through sand dunes. They were as soft as a woman’s breast. Rosy halos hovered at each peak. I sat down to rest and sank my hands into the sand. The cold grains slipped through my fingers like water.
When dusk fell a biting wind blew up and my eyes filled with sand. I was glad that I had the padded shoes to keep my feet warm. I walked all through the night, but by the close of the next day I still had not reached the road. I began to panic. I had walked over fifty kilometres by now. It dawned on me that my compass must have broken. I started racing to every clump of grass, like a madman, screaming and shouting, telling myself I should never have travelled north. When the sun sank again, I ran towards it, yearning for it to take me away.
At night the desert was completely silent. I heard a plane pass overhead and imagined all the people sitting comfortably inside it.
By the third day I was afraid I was losing my mind. I forgot which side of the sun to walk towards. I had to think carefully before each step as I walked the trackless plain. The more freedom you have to chose your path, the harder the journey is. I talked to myself, decided on a course and committed it to paper. But three hours later, I still had no idea where I was. When I grew thirsty, I cupped a plastic bag over the sand and licked the condensation that collected inside. I threw away my water filter and books, then took a photograph of myself so that the person who discovered my bones would know who they had belonged to. My cold body was drying out. I knew it was futile to keep walking because when you are lost, there is nowhere to go. I was on the verge of collapse, but I talked myself forward and begged my legs to keep moving. Images turned through my head. I saw the moon above the desert, a bottle of beer on a friend’s table, the lid to a fountain pen I lost twenty years ago. Sometimes I saw Xi Ping’s chapped lips or a bowl of pork dumplings. But all the time my mind interrupted and said: keep walking, stop and you will die.
In the afternoon I woke by the side of a road. The man who had dragged me there had given me a swig of water before he left.
The restaurant’s metal signpost rattles in the wind. I take a swig of milk tea, press my hand on the map and draw a large red cross through Ordos Desert.
I am tired of the dry plains. The land is so flat up here it can hold onto nothing, not even the wind. After a while you lose track of who you are and long to be squeezed inside the walls of a narrow valley.
Last week I reached Ejin Horo Qi at last and spent two days with the gatekeeper of Genghis Khan’s tomb. The mausoleum was built in the 1950s to house what are believed to be the ashes of the dead Khan. A group of Mongolian pilgrims arrived and performed a ceremony in honour of their departed chief. The Chinese Mongolians wore blue army coats, their brothers from Outer Mongolia wore red robes and leather boots. The pilgrims roasted a sheep and shared the meat out. Everyone got some except me, so in the end the gatekeeper took pity on me and gave me some of his. Four white steeds were tethered outside the tomb in memory of the Khan’s favourite horses. Old Sun’s talisman must have protected me in the desert. When he placed it around my neck he said, ‘Your fortune is good. Do not travel north. If you meet with trouble a gentleman will save you.’ I wish I knew the name of the peasant who rescued me.