They smoked, they muttered a little, they rattled magazines. I wrote: 10:16 P.M. No activity from the honeymooners. Contented breathing. Could be snores. One might be asleep. Anticlimax.
The cigarette smoke bothered me, and on this banged-up train of the Shanghai Railway Board, nothing worked. The fan was dead, the lock had been torn off the door, the arms had been twisted off the seats, the luggage rack was broken, and the window could not be raised. This last matter was the most serious: the compartment was now very hot and smoky. It was a good thing that the honeymooners were either asleep or else ignoring me, because I took out my Swiss Army knife and unscrewed the window locks, removed the window frame, levered the window up six inches, then put the hardware back on, so that no one would suspect I had tampered with it. Dire punishments were threatened for anyone who messed with the train, and if you so much as chipped your Chinese Railways teacup you were charged for it.
There was silence all night in the upper berths. Nothing to report except that I seemed to have more proof that the Chinese were very phlegmatic.
I woke to find myself in the rocky province of Guizhou, all pyramidal limestone hills and granite cliffs. The landscape was green and stony, like Ireland, and the people lived in rugged Irish-looking stone cottages, and houses with rough-hewn beams. They were the strongest houses I saw in China, and around them, marking the limits of their land, were beautifully built dry-stone walls, symmetrical and square.
Among these great slanting slablike hills, there was very little arable land and not many flat places for farming. The gardens were made by balancing walls and building terraces, and by all the other useful things that could be made from the chunks of stone — bridges, aqueducts, roads, dikes and dams. The villages were thick with villas and two-story houses (it was rare in the country to find more than one floor), all of them stone-built, with slate roofs. And their grave mounds were just as solid and built with the same granite confidence: the cemeteries were miniature versions of the villages.
While the honeymooners nipped down to the dining car for the breakfast of rice gruel and noodles, I ate some bananas I had bought in Kunming and drank my green tea. We passed Anshun ("once the center of the opium trade") and we stopped a while at Guiyang, where I met Mr. Shuang.
Mr. Shuang was in his late sixties, plum faced and whiskery, with a shapeless cap and a red armband that showed he was a railway worker. But he was a retired man who, out of boredom, had gone back to be a platform supervisor.
"I was sick of staying at home," he said. "I've been doing this job for half a year. I like it. But I don't need the money."
He said he earned 130 yuan a month.
"What do you spend it on?"
"I don't have children or a family, so I buy music." He smiled and said, "I love music. I play the harmonica."
"Do you buy Chinese or Western music?"
"Both. But I like Western very much."
"What kind?"
He said in a neatly enunciating way, "Light orchestral music."
That was the kind that was played in the train and in the railway stations when they weren't playing Chinese songs. They played "The Skaters Waltz" and "Flower of Malaya" and selections from Carmen.
"Do you get many travelers in Guiyang?"
"Unfortunately, very few people come here. This province was closed to foreigners until 1982. Some people pass through but they don't stop. And yet we have many places to see — some very nice temples, and the Huangguoshu Falls and the hot springs. Please come back to Guiyang and I'll show you around."
It seemed that the more remote and countrified the place in China, the more hospitable the people were.
For the onward journey the honeymooners had changed their clothes: he wore a jacket and sunglasses, she wore a tweed skirt. They smoked and slumbered. Maybe this fatigue meant it was the end of their honeymoon?
By midafternoon we were in the southeast of Guizhou, among greener hills showing the scars and broken terraces of having once been farmed. The route to Guilin was roundabout because of all the mountains. They were an obstruction, but they were very pretty — velvety and shaggy with grass and trees. It was much hotter now, and most of the train passengers were asleep, barely stirring at Duyun; that place looked like Mexico, with a big yellow-stucco station and palm trees under a clear blue sky.
Farther south the landscape changed dramatically: the gray hills here were shaped like camel humps and chimney stacks, and stupas with sheer sides. They were the oddest hills in the world, and the most Chinese, because these are the hills that are depicted in every Chinese scroll. It is almost a sacred landscape — it is certainly an emblematic one. It had happened all at once: the hills looked squarish and ancient, like a petrified city. We had entered a new province, Guangxi, and from here to the city of Guilin, two hundred miles or more, it was all the landscape of the Chinese classical paintings.
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.