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.
He became very confidential, glancing around and drawing me close to him. "Maybe not lackeys. I have never heard of eating lackeys. But many other things. We eat" — and he drew a meaningful breath—"forbidden things."
That had rather a thrilling sound: We eat forbidden things.
"What sort of forbidden things?"
"I only know their Chinese names — sorry."
"What are we talking about?" I asked. "Snakes?"
"Dried snakes. Snake soup. They are not forbidden. I mean an animal that eats ants with its nose."
"Scaly anteater. Pangolin. I don't want to eat that. Too many people are eating them," I said. "It's an endangered species."
"Would you like to eat forbidden things?"
"I would like to eat interesting things," I said, equivocating. "How about sparrows? Pigeons? Snakes? What about turtles?"
"Those are easy. I can arrange it."
Mr. Jiang was young. He was new to the job. He was a little too breezy. He had the jokey and insincere manner of someone who has been dealing with elderly foreigners who enjoy being joshed as they are being deferred to. I felt his obsequiousness was a deliberate ploy to undermine me.
I had told him I didn't want to go sight-seeing, and yet within an hour of our meeting he took me to the caves outside Guilin, where there were hundreds of shuffling Chinese tourists.
"What are we doing here?" I asked.
"I am so sorry," he said. "We will leave immediately. I thought you might want to see our famous Reed Flute Cave."
What was the point of looking at these humdrum and hackneyed marvels? And having just come through hundreds of miles of Guizhou and Guangxi I had seen enough rock formations to last me a lifetime. I had liked them because I had felt I'd discovered them for myself — I hadn't been led there by someone burbling, "Look!"
"Let's look at them," I said.
Like so much in China on the tourist route — like the terra-cotta warriors and the Ming tombs, the Reed Flute Cave was discovered by a man digging a well. This fellow's shovel opened the way to a vast limestone cave, with chambers and corridors and grottoes. That was in 1959. Lights, signposts, balconies and stairways were installed, and then it became domesticated and acceptable to the Chinese.
It looked grotesque and Disneyish, a piece of natural vulgarity — a tasteless act of God. It could have been made out of polyester or papier-machi. It dripped. It glugged. Chunks of slimy limestone dropped from the ceiling. It was the spelunker's version of Sunset Strip or the Shanghai Bund. People crowded through it, skidding on the greasy floor, listening to a guide explaining its variety of crazy shapes.