They fled four weeks later. They left the tent silently in the middle of the night, followed the railway track, stole two horses from a rail depot and then headed west. Only when they felt they had travelled far enough away from the Sierra Nevada did they pause and rest by a fire; and then they resumed their flight. They came to a river and rode through the shallows in order to mask their tracks.
They frequently stopped and looked around. But there was nothing to be seen; nobody was following them.
San gradually began to think that they might manage to find their way back home after all. But his hopes were fragile.
13
San dreamed that every sleeper lying on the roadbed under the rails was a human rib, perhaps his own. He could feel his chest deflating and was unable to breathe air into his lungs. He tried to kick himself free from the weight pressing down and squashing his body, but failed.
San opened his eyes. Guo Si had rolled over on top of him in order to keep warm. San pushed him gently to one side and covered his body with the blanket. He sat up, rubbed his stiff joints, then put more wood on the fire burning inside a circle of stones they had gathered.
He held his hands out towards the flames. It was now the third night since they had fled the mountain. San had not forgotten what Wang said would happen to anybody silly enough to run away. They would be condemned to work on the mountain for so long that it would barely be possible to survive.
They still hadn’t spotted anybody chasing them. San suspected the foremen would assume the brothers were too stupid to use horses when they escaped. It sometimes happened that wandering bands of robbers stole horses from the depot, and if they were lucky the search would still be concentrated in the vicinity of the camp.
But then one of the horses died. San’s little Indian pony seemed to be just as strong as the dappled horse Guo Si was clinging to. But suddenly it stumbled and fell over. It was dead by the time it hit the ground. San knew nothing about horses and assumed the horse’s heart had simply stopped beating, the way human hearts sometimes do.
They had left the horse after first cutting a large lump of meat from its back. To confuse any possible pursuers they had changed direction rather more to the south than before. For several hundred yards San had walked behind Guo Si, dragging some branches behind him to cover their trail.
He was woken up by a bang that almost made his head explode. When he opened his eyes, his left ear throbbing with pain, he found himself looking into the face he feared most. It was still dark, even if a faint pink glow could be seen over the distant Sierra Nevada. JA was standing there, with a smoking rifle in his hand. He had fired it next to San’s ear.
JA was not alone. At his side were Brown and several Indians with bloodhounds on leads. JA handed his rifle to Brown and drew his revolver. He pointed it at San’s head. Then he aimed it sideways and fired a shot next to San’s right ear. When San stood up, he could see that JA was yelling something, but he couldn’t hear a word the foreman said. His head was filled with a thunderous roar. JA then pointed his revolver at Guo Si’s head. San could see the terror in his brother’s face, but could do nothing to help. JA fired two shots, one next to each ear. San could see the tears in Guo Si’s eyes caused by the pain.
Their flight was over. Brown tied the brothers’ hands behind their backs and placed nooses around their necks, and they started the trek back east.
When they arrived at the mountain, JA paraded the escapees in front of the rest of the workers, their hands still tied behind their backs and nooses around their necks. San looked for Wang, but couldn’t see him. As neither of the brothers had recovered his hearing, they could only guess what JA had to say, perched on the back of his horse. When he had finished talking, he dismounted, and in front of the assembled workers he punched each of the brothers hard in the face. San fell over. For a brief moment he had the feeling that he would never be able to stand up again.
But in the end he did. Once more.
After the failed escape, what San expected to happen did in fact happen. They were not hanged, but every time nitroglycerine was used to blast open reluctant chunks of the mountain, it was San and Guo Si who were hoisted up in the baskets of death, as the Chinese workers called them. Even after a month, the brothers were still mostly deaf. San began to think that he would have to spend the rest of his life with the roaring noise filling his head.
Summer, which was long and hot, had reached them. At enormous physical cost they penetrated further and further into the mountain, carved their way into the mass of stone that yielded not even a single inch without demanding maximum effort. Every morning San felt that he couldn’t possibly last one more day.
San hated JA. A hatred that grew as time passed. It was not the physical brutality, nor even being hoisted up over and over again in the potentially fatal baskets. It was that when they’d been forced to stand in front of the other railway workers with nooses around their necks, they were put on display like animals.
‘I’m going to kill that man,’ said San to Guo Si. ‘I’m not going to leave this mountain without first having killed him. I shall kill him.’
‘That means we will also die,’ said Guo Si.
San was insistent.
‘I shall kill that man when the time is right. Not before. But then.’
The summer seemed to get hotter and hotter. They were working in broiling sunshine from early morning until distant dusk. Their working hours increased as the days became longer. Several of the workers were stricken by sunstroke; others died of exhaustion. But there always seemed to be more Chinese who could take the places of the dead.
They came in endless processions of wagons. Every time a newcomer arrived at the door of their tent, he was bombarded with questions. Where did he come from, what ship had transported him over the ocean? There was an insatiable hunger for news from China.
During these summer months, as the brothers’ hearing returned, JA was struck down by a fever and didn’t appear. One morning Brown came to say that as long as the foreman was indisposed, the two brothers would not be the ones hoisted up in the baskets of death. He made no attempt to explain why he was excusing them from this dangerous work. Perhaps it was because the foreman often treated Brown just as badly as any of the Chinese. San cautiously attempted to get to know Brown better.
San often wondered about the reddish-brown people with long, black hair, which they sometimes adorned with feathers: their facial features reminded him of his own.
One evening he asked Brown, who knew a little Chinese, about them.
‘The Red Indians hate us,’ said Brown. ‘Just as much as you do. That’s the only similarity I can see.’
‘But even so, they are the ones standing guard over us.’
‘We feed them. We give them rifles. We let them be one step above you. And two steps above the niggers. They think they have power. But in fact they are slaves like everybody else.’
‘Everybody?’
Brown shook his head. San was not going to receive an answer to his last question.
They sat in the darkness. Now and then the glow from their pipes lit up their faces. Brown had given San one of his old pipes and also some tobacco. San was constantly on his guard. He still didn’t know what Brown wanted in return. Perhaps he just wanted company, to break the boundless solitariness of the desert, now that the foreman was ill.