To avoid talking to Mr. Yang for a while, I walked fast up the slope and found a waterfall. Beneath it, in the stream, there was ice—big yellow crusts of it, and solid thick shelves of it frozen to the rocks. Twenty minutes down the road the townsfolk of Urumchi were perspiring and playing pool under the trees, and here it was freezing.
I found a Uighur, Zhu Ma Hun—Hun means mister and the rest was the Chinese version of the Muslim name Juma (Friday—the Muslim sabbath). He seemed to claim that he had been the Chinese ambassador to Syria, but he may have meant that he worked in that embassy. His Chinese was as limited as mine. On the other hand, he spoke Turkish and Arabic as well as his native Uighur.
He said he came from Tacheng, on the border of Soviet Kazakhstan, about 500 miles from Urumchi and about as far west as anyone can live in China and still be regarded as Chinese. That gave me an idea.
"You're not Chinese, are you?"
"Yes! I'm Chinese!"
He was big and friendly, fat faced. He might have been a Turk, a Smyrna merchant, or a pasha with a big paunch. He said he had been to Mecca on the hajj.
We were strolling along the mountain road. We passed a public toilet—the Chinese tend to erect them in the middle of all beauty spots—and though we were forty feet away, the thing gave off an overpowering stink. Every public toilet I saw in China was so vile it was unusable. Every foreigner mentioned them; the Chinese never did spontaneously—not because they were fastidious but because they were ashamed and phlegmatic, and preferred to suffer in silence.
"I think you don't have many of those in the States," Zhu Ma Hun said.
"Right," I said, thinking he meant the brick shit house, but I saw that he was pointing to a yurt, where an old nomad—possibly a Tadzhik—was lugging a bucket of water.
"But do you have any tents?" he asked.
"Not as many as you," I said.
The Chinese idea of a picnic lunch is an assortment of dry sponge cake and stale cookies. Mr. Yang had given me a box in the car, and I had not realized what was in it until I was some distance up the mountain. I fed the whole thing to some cows.
That afternoon, still hungry, I looked for something to eat in the market at Urumchi. My favorite street food was a kind of stuffed pancake called jiaozi or else fried dumplings. But the treat here was lamb kebabs and flat loaves of bread they called nang, probably from the same root word as the Urdu nan, familiar to anyone who has eaten in an Indian restaurant.
There are so few Western travelers in Urumchi that Uighurs become animated when they see them. They stare, they gabble, they proffer dried fruit and bunches of fresh grapes. One man tried to interest me in his medicines: dried and splayed lizards (for high blood pressure), deer antlers (for potency), snakes, frogs, and birds' beaks, and a hideous little bundle of twiggy things that he said were the umbilical cords of donkeys.
"They are very good for you," he said vaguely, when I asked what they were for.
The traders in the market, selling the carpets which are woven in Urumchi and the clothes that arrive by train, were either bearded men in skullcaps or fat women in brown dresses. They held up their merchandise, they beckoned me over, but whenever I got close they breathed on me and snatched my wrist and spoke the Uighur greeting.
"Shansh marnie?"
There were more dead animals elsewhere in Urumchi. It is a measure of how deep in the hinterland the town is that there are still many wild animals in the surrounding countryside. At one shop I saw the usual snakes and dried lizards and umbilical cords, but also wolf pelts, fox furs, a half a dozen bearskins and the carcass of an eagle—a white-shouldered Imperial Eagle (so my bird book said), with a wingspan of about six feet. This beautiful bird was a great deal bigger than the Uighur woman selling it.
"Do you want to buy it?" she said.
"What would I do with it?"
"You take the feathers and rub them on your skin. It's good medicine."
"What about this?" I said, pointing to the skull of a gazelle, to which two lovely horns were attached.
"Medicine. Grind it into powder. It makes you strong."
There were any number of Western scientists who claimed that traditional Chinese medicine could be efficacious; but what this woman was saying—and the man in the market with his donkeys' umbilical cords—was surely complete nonsense?
I was prepared to believe that the Chinese had the herbal solutions to high blood pressure, and that acupuncture had its practical uses; but when they scrunched up a dead owl and said, Yum, yum—good for your eyes, I wanted to say Bullshit. If I didn't, it was only because I didn't yet know the Chinese word for it.
There are a handful of tigers in China, some in Hunan, some in the far northeast. Needless to say, they are an endangered species. There is so little food for them that when they're very hungry these tigers will eat insects and frogs. In a copy of a Chinese magazine (China Today) I read the following: 'The [Chinese] tiger is a kind of treasure. The hide of the tiger can be made into an expensive coat. The bones, the kidneys, the stomach and the penis are very valuable medicine. The medicine made from the ribs of the tiger is a very good and effective medicine for curing rheumatoid arthritis."
It was bad enough that they were killing the few animals they had left, but they were doing it for the stupidest reasons. But it was probably true that the most accurate epitaph for creatures that have become extinct is: It Tasted Good.
I tried to get Mr. Fang to teach me how to say, "That is merely a superstitious belief with no scientific basis to support it," but we got nowhere. He asked me why I wanted to be able to say this, and I mentioned the Chinese habit of making the lovely little Asian Barred Owlet into soup. He said there were two good reasons for that: They tasted good and they were good for your eyesight.
He was bewildered that anyone with sense should care for the life of a bird or an animal. I did not argue with him. The Chinese themselves often lived in such cramped and uncomfortable conditions that they could hardly be expected to sympathize with animals that lived the same way. Indeed, the way the Chinese lived and died bore a remarkable resemblance to their animals.
Mr. Fang surprised me further by saying, "Mr. Jiao wants to see you."
"Who is Mr. Jiao?"
"General Manager of the Urumchi Branch of China Railways."
"How does he know I'm here?"
"I told him," Mr. Fang said, and looked sad in his sea-lion way. "He wants you to eat with him."
Mr. Jiao Xi Ku was a dark, tough-looking man from the far-eastern province of Shandong. He had a short neck and a broad face, and as the evening advanced and he drank more and more Xinjiang white wine, his dark face was suffused with a kind of alcoholic blush and his eyes became smaller and very red, like two boiled berries.
We were joined by his assistant, Mr. Jie, who—because he was an underling—did not say very much. After the formalities ("We are honored to have you") I realized that this would be a large meal. The cold dishes were set out and ignored; that meant there were about a dozen more courses to come.
I asked Mr. Jiao about the railway. What were the problems in building and maintaining it? He said the worst problem was the sandstorms, the wind that often grew to force 9 or 10. A cold wind met a hot wind in the gobi and caused great turbulence. And then there were the tunnels through the Tian Shan—they had taken years to cut.
"You see, we did all this by ourselves. We had no help."
"I thought the Soviets helped," I said.
"They planned the line to Urumchi. They did the survey—but it was an aerial survey. They didn't foresee all the difficulties. And of course our friendship with them was broken in 1960."