He could see that Guo Si was very tired. At times he barely had the strength to lift his spade. But San had made up his mind. Until the white man’s New Year came around again, they would keep each other alive.
At the end of March the first black men arrived in the railway village in the ravine. They pitched their tents on the same side of the stream as the Chinese. Neither of the brothers had ever seen a black man before. They were wearing ragged clothes and were suffering from the cold worse than San had ever seen a person suffer. Many of them died during their first few days in the ravine and on the railway. They were so weak that they would fall down in the darkness and not be discovered until much later, when the snow had started to melt in the spring. The black men were treated even worse than the Chinese, and ‘niggers’ was pronounced with an intonation that was even worse than that used for ‘Chinks’. Even Xu, who always preached that one should be restrained when talking about other people working on the railway, made no secret of his contempt for the blacks.
‘The whites call them fallen angels,’ said Xu. ‘Niggers are animals with no soul, and nobody misses them when they die. Instead of brains they have lumps of rotting flesh.’
The unusually severe cold lay over the ravine and the building site like a blanket of iron. One evening, when they were sitting with their evening meal around a small, ineffectual fire, Xu announced that the following day they would be moving to a new camp and a new workplace next to the mountain they would now start digging and blasting their way through.
They set off early. San couldn’t remember ever having experienced anything as cold at it was that day. He told Guo Si to go in front of him, as he wanted to make sure his brother didn’t fall down and get left behind. They followed the railway track until they came to the point where the rails ended and then, a few hundred yards further on, the roadbed itself. But Xu urged them to keep going. The flickering light from the lanterns ate into the darkness. San knew they were now very close to the mountains the whites called the Sierra Nevada. That was where they would have to start making cuttings and tunnels so that the railway could continue.
Xu stopped when they came to the lowest ridge. There were tents pitched and fires burning. The men who had walked all the way from the ravine flopped down beside the warm flames. San knelt down and held out his frozen hands, which were wrapped up in rags. At that very moment he heard a voice behind him. He turned round and saw a white man standing there, with shoulder-length hair and a scarf wrapped around his face, making him look like a masked bandit. He was holding a rifle. He was wearing a fur coat and had a fox’s tail hanging from his hat, which was fur-lined. His eyes reminded San of those Zi had focused on them that time in the past.
The white man suddenly raised his rifle and fired a shot into the darkness. The men warming themselves in front of the fire curled into the faetal position.
‘Stand up!’ yelled Xu. ‘Take off whatever you have on your heads!’
San stared at him in surprise. Were they expected to take off the hats they’d stuffed full of dry grass and bits of cloth?
‘Off with ’em,’ yelled Xu, who seemed scared of the man with the rifle. ‘No head wear.’
San took off his hat and gestured to Guo Si to do the same. The man with the rifle pulled down the scarf to reveal his face. He had a bristling moustache. Although he was standing several yards away, San could smell strong drink. He was on his guard immediately. White men smelling of spirits were always more unpredictable than sober ones.
The man started speaking in a shrill voice. San thought he sounded like an angry woman. Xu made a big effort to translate what the man said.
‘You had to take off your hats so that you could hear better,’ he said.
His voice was almost as shrill as the voice of the man with the rifle.
‘Your ears are so full of shit that you wouldn’t be able to hear me if you didn’t,’ was Xu’s version of what the man said. ‘I’m known as JA, but you must simply call me Boss. When I speak to you, you take off your hats. You answer my questions, but you never ask any of your own. Understood?’
San mumbled along with the others. It was obvious that the man in front of them didn’t like Chinese.
The man known as JA continued yelling and shouting.
‘You have in front of you a wall of stone. Your job is to cleave this mountain in two, wide enough for the railway to get through. You’ve been chosen because you’ve shown that you can work hard. We don’t want any of those fucking niggers or those drunken Irishmen. This is a mountain fit for Chinamen. That’s why you’re here. And I’m here to make sure you do what you’re supposed to do. Anybody who doesn’t use every last bit of strength he has, who shows me that he’s lazy, will wish he’d never been born. Understood? I want a response from every single one of you. Then you can put your hats on again. You can collect your pickaxes from Brown — he’s mad as a hatter every full moon. He likes to eat Chinamen raw. At other times he’s meek as a lamb.’
They all responded, each of them mumbling.
The sky was beginning to lighten when they found themselves standing with pickaxes in their hands in front of the cliff that loomed almost perpendicular in front of them. Steam was coming from their mouths. JA handed his rifle over to Brown for a moment, grabbed hold of a pickaxe, and hacked two markers into the bottom part of the rock. San could see that the width of the hole they were expected to create was more than eight yards.
There was no sign of any fallen blocks of stone, no piles of gravel. The mountain was going to offer extremely hard resistance. Every fragment of stone they levered loose would need exertions of a kind that couldn’t possibly be compared with anything they had done so far.
Somehow or other they had challenged the gods, who had sent them the tests they were now faced with. They would have to cut their way through the mountain in order to become free men, no longer the despised ‘Chinks’ in the American wilderness.
San was overcome by a feeling of utter despair. The only thing that kept him going was the thought that one day he and Guo Si would run away.
He tried to imagine that the mountain in front of him was in fact a wall separating him from China. Only a couple of yards in, the cold would vanish; plum trees would be in blossom.
That morning they started work on the rock face. Their new foreman kept watch over them like a hawk. Even when he turned his back on them, he seemed to be able to see if anybody lowered their pickaxe just for a moment. He had wrapped strips of leather around his fists that peeled away the skin on the faces of any poor soul who offended. It was not long before everybody hated this man with a rifle. They dreamed of killing him. San wondered about the relationship between JA and Wang. Was it Wang who owned JA, or vice versa?
JA seemed to be in league with the mountain, which was extremely reluctant to let go the tiniest splinter of granite, not even a tear or a strand of hair. It took them almost a month to hack out an opening of the required size. By then, one of them had already died. During the night he had crept silently out of bed and crawled out through the tent door. He had stripped off his clothes and lain down in the snow in order to die. When JA discovered the dead Chinese, he was furious.
‘You have no reason to mourn the suicide,’ he screeched in his shrill voice. ‘What you should regret is that now it’s you who have to hack away the stone that he ought to have shifted.’
When they came back from the mountain, the body had disappeared.
When they started to attack the mountain with nitroglycerine, men began to die, and San realised it was time to run. No matter what would be in store for them in the wilderness, it couldn’t possibly be worse than what they were going through just now. They would run away, and not stop until they were back in China.