It was a rice-growing area, but there wasn't much water available. This was probably the reason I saw such ingenious pumps and irrigation in Guangxi. I saw about ten different kinds of water movers. I saw the chain pump being pedaled by two children. This pump, Professor Needham says, is unchanged in its design since its invention in the first century A.D. All the pumps I saw were mechanical—no motors, no hoses even. The largest and weirdest was a gigantic spoon, about ten feet long and made of wood, which a woman used to move water from a lower field to a higher one. She didn't simply lift and dump the water; she scooped and splashed very quickly, and it was like a laborious form of playing.
Amid these limestone stacks and buttes there was a limestone village with the same look of eruption. But there was no railway station to serve these stone houses—not even a platform, nor a grade crossing. The village was in a low place, and its muddy streets were in shadow. What was remarkable was the number of horses in the place. People were buying and selling them, riding them, tethering them to trees, hitching them to carts. It was market day, late afternoon, and the traders were winding things up. For the next little while, along the railway tracks, I saw pony carts making their way home. It was unusual to see Chinese horsemen, but I inquired and discovered that these were people of the Miao minority, who are fairly numerous in Guangxi—there are five million of them altogether. The Chinese are respectful of such people, but are more mystified by their customs and habits than they are by those of Westerners. They stared, fascinated, but still they didn't understand. They never seemed to understand the strengths of these little nations in their autonomous prefectures (Guangxi had two minority states within its borders), and so they never seemed to take the minorities seriously. They treated them like exotic pets.
An eerie sight in Guangxi were the caves in those gray limestone hills. The hills had come to look like fat columns and towers, and the caves made them seem hollow. Later I learned that Guangxi is full of caves. Some are underground dripping caverns, but these above-ground things—many of them at any rate—had been converted into homes. The strangest ones looked like gaping mouths, with white stalactites showing like teeth.
In a shallow pool among those towerlike hills there was a gray and white crane, the sort the Chinese regard as an auspicious bird, representing long life. The train startled the bird, and off it went, soaring and circling, as we rumbled on through a painting of mountains that was being endlessly unrolled.
In the kitchen of the dining car, a young woman was scrubbing pots and singing in Chinese.
I know that you love me
I am waiting
But where do you want me to go?
The pot she scrubbed with a stiff brush was nearly as big as she was. And the kitchen was a primitive thing: it was black, with a black coal stove, and a cracked sink. At mealtimes it looked more like a blacksmith's forge than a kitchen. The meals on this train had been terrible. Lunch had been bad dried fish, disgusting fatty ham, rancid prawns and rubbery rice. But I had my bananas, and I still had peanuts I had bought back in Sichuan.
As I loitered, listening to the kitchen girl singing, a young man introduced himself. He was Chen Xiangan, from Shanghai. He worked in the dining car. He spoke no English at all. He asked me, Could I help him with his problem?
"Gladly," I said.
"I want you to give me a name—an English one."
That was not an unusual request. English names were coming back into fashion, now that people were reasonably sure they wouldn't be attacked by Red Guards as bourgeois capitalist-roaders and harbingers of revisionism for calling themselves Ronnie and Nancy.
"It must sound like my Chinese name," he said, and that was when he told me he was called Xiangan.
I pondered this. Xiangan sounded Irish to me—like Sean or Shaun. I suggested that but then told him that Sam was simpler, and Sam Chen seemed like a good Shanghai name to me.
He thanked me, and later I saw him pushing a food trolly. He wore only a T-shirt and blue underpants and an apron. He was saying over and over again, "Sam Chen, Sam Chen, Sam Chen."
In her nasal, twanging voice, the kitchen girl was still singing her love song.
I know that you love me
I am waiting...
We came to Mawei, a station amid the limestone stacks and dark pine trees. There was no town. There were villages scattered nearby. The passengers dashed off the train and rushed outside the station where, at tables, about fifty people were selling fresh plums—yellow and purple ones—and dusty bananas and round watermelons. This was the longest stop I ever made at such a small place, and I was sure it was deliberate—a fruit-buying stop.
The honeymooners bought a watermelon. They crawled into one berth and cut it open with a jackknife and ate it with a spoon, taking turns and slurping. It was like sex. For once the girl had stopped chain-smoking her Gold Medal cigarettes, and once they were together, eating this watermelon on the rumpled bunk, they stayed together.
The kitchen girl was still singing, plonkingly and with feeling.
I know that you love me
I am waiting...
At sundown we entered the heights above a wide valley that was darkened and in shadow because of the setting sun. The valley's rim was all rounded peaks that were slowly blackening, but the other side was distant, perhaps thirty miles away. The sky slumped into this space as the sun passed behind the last hill, and the valley was so deep I couldn't see its floor, only its shadows, which made it look bottomless. We were still climbing, but before we got all the way up, the orange and all the flamboyant Are of the sunset had vanished. Then night fell and we were traveling in darkness.
I lay on my mat in the heat and read Kidnapped, and dropped off to sleep at about eleven. The lights were still on when I woke again and fixed the sliding door with a rubber band. The lights went out. I heard that melon-eating sound again from the berth above, where the honeymooners were lying together. But I knew it wasn't that—they had finished their melon hours ago. And yet this was a rich, satisfying sound, with a deep breath, like the sigh you hear from someone with a hearty appetite. They were devouring each other in the dark.
They were still at it, at four in the morning, when the train arrived at Guilin.
"In China, we have a saying," Mr. Jiang Le Song said. "Chule feiji zhi wai, yangyang dou chi." Looking very pleased with himself, he added, "It rhymes!"
"We call that a half-rhyme," I said. "What does it mean? Something about eating planes?"
"'We eat everything except planes and trains.' In China."
"I get it. You eat everything on four legs except tables and chairs."
"You are a funny man!" Mr. Jiang said. "Yes. We eat trees, grass, leaves, animals, seaweed, flowers. And in Guilin even more things. Birds, snakes, turtles, cranes, frogs and some other things."
"What other things?"
"I don't even know their names."
"Dogs? Cats?" I looked at him closely. I had overheard a tourist objecting to the Chinese appetite for kittens. "You eat kittens?"
"Not dogs and kittens. Everybody eats those."
"Raccoons?" I had read .in a guidebook that raccoons were also popular in Guilin.
"What is that?"
Raccoon was not in his pocket English-Chinese dictionary.