Riding the Iron Rooster

7. The Iron Rooster

Lanzhou is a city in a valley of the Yellow River, and so it is long and narrow and hemmed in by mountains. There were hundreds of brickyards and smoking kilns on its outskirts, and it was brick colored, the same shade as its clayey landscape. It was damp and muddy this afternoon in early summer. Since ancient times it had been one of the gateways of China, the last place to change horses and buy provisions before heading for the outer limits of the empire. The next large settlements were in Turkestan, and beyond them was Europe. Lanzhou still looked like a city on the frontier, with the patched and botched appearance of all Chinese cities — no trees to speak of but plenty of tall factory chimneys and power lines. Most of the oil in Xinjiang was refined here, and it was whispered that in Lanzhou they made atomic bombs. If one accidentally went off in this remote mud-colored place, who would know?

Some of those chimneys were the minarets of mosques. This was the eastern limit of the Muslim world that had its other centers in Turfan and Kashgar and Khotan, at the edges of China. The mountains were bare and stony. The city's bleakness gave it a tidy look. The river was so shallow there was no boat on it larger than a sampan, and the water was like cocoa, the same orangey brown. Some men on the banks flung nets in and dragged out tiddlers, which they pinched in their fingers and saved. Another group of men used the river banks for curing goatskins — dousing them and then jumping up and down on them on the rocks. The rocks and stones were smooth, some were flat, the sort you find on the seashore. This was once part of the inland sea that had flooded towards the Pacific and created the Yangtze Gorges and dumped its sediment to make the whole of east China.

After a few days in Lanzhou I discovered that it had the same labyrinthine lanes in one section that Peking had — small cool courtyards, and tile roofs on which weeds had taken root, and carved doorways; and the squatting children and sweepers who always existed in those old neighborhoods. The temple at Five Spring Mountain was tended by a terrified monk, who stammered at my questions and pleaded with me to go away. At the base of the ancient but derelict pagoda there was a shooting gallery — kids with air pistols whacking away at tattered targets. In that same vandalized hillside, with its painted pavilions, there was a circus — daredevil motorcyclists speeding up the vertical walls of a jangling cage, while the Chinese gaped and refused to applaud.

The rest of Lanzhou looked as though it had been built the day before yesterday, in the 1950s, when the railway west was also built, under Russian guidance. The city did not have a prosperous air, and yet the stores were full of merchandise and the markets piled with vegetables. This was a railway junction to which trains came from every direction in China. Lanzhou had fish from the China Sea and fruit from Guangdong, meat from the north and dried apricots and raisins and prunes and nuts from Xinjiang in the west. It also had televisions and refrigerators, the two most coveted appliances in China.

I read a story in Lanzhou in the magazine Chinese Literature (Autumn 1986). It was by a well-known short-story writer and minister of culture, Wang Meng, and was called 'The Wind on the Plateau." It was clumsy but enlightening, a story about a family in the new consumption-conscious China. Zhao the teacher has changed his life from the austere one he was living in the sixties and seventies. He has bought property and owns a TV and a refrigerator. He believes his life is just about perfect. Yet his son was far from satisfied with things as they were. He wanted video equipment, a musical door-chime, a motorcycle and a rubber dinghy. Why not go out and get an air-conditioner made in Australia?

This seemed to me one of the oddest shopping lists I could imagine, but it was a fairly accurate picture of the current state of craving. But I kept thinking, A rubber dinghy?

Meanwhile, Mr. Fang was still traipsing after me, and when I sauntered, so did he, and when I lollygagged, he just stood nearby looking futile and sorrowful. But one day in Lanzhou he came in very handy. I was passing a public toilet and saw a number of large plastic drums on the sidewalk outside. They stank so badly I asked what was in them. No one seemed to know, but then Mr. Fang materialized behind me and spoke one of the few English words he knew.

"Urine," he said.

There were sixty-three five-gallon drums arranged in rows, waiting to be collected. This hardly noticed feature of Chinese life — urine collection — puzzled me. Mr. Fang was pitifully eager to help me understand its purpose. He knew nothing about it himself, but between us, and using his dictionary, we tried to unravel the mystery.

Inside this public toilet, over the urinal, was a sign: We would like good quality urine, so please do not put anything in — no spitting, no paper, no cigarette butts. And another sign said, This urine is used for medicinal purposes.

Mr. Fang and I accosted a man coming out of the john and asked him what it was all about.

"They are saving this urine for medicine," he said. "I don't take it myself, but it's very good medicine."

What was this medicine intended to cure?

"I don't know," he said.

I asked him whether it was used for fertilizer.

"Oh, yes," he said. 'That too."

As we talked, passersby threaded their way through the 315 gallons of human piss that reeked in sticky drums on the sidewalk.

I thought Mr. Fang would feel useful if I gave him a job to do. He had been looking very demoralized. I asked him to find out what this urine collection was all about. He went away and returned with a ragged scrap of paper on which was written the single word enzyme. He said a doctor had written it down. But I was still dissatisfied.

I subsequently discovered that it was used in endocrinology, and that hormone crystals were sublimated from it. The Chinese had been using human urine in sophisticated medicine for a thousand years and in ancient China used it to treat a number of conditions, including impotence, hypogonadism and dysmenorrhea. These urine hormones also straightened out hermaphrodites. Steroids and pituitary hormones were also isolated from the urine. It was also news to me that present-day fertility drugs are extracted from the urine of menopausal Italian nuns.

The trouble was that my having enlisted Mr. Fang's help made him believe that I had softened towards him, and he was eager for more work on my behalf. Was there anything more I wanted him to do? he wondered. I couldn't think of anything until the day I went to Lanzhou Station to buy tickets for Turfan and Urumchi and saw a squabbling crowd of people, and rather insolent and sneering ticket sellers, and one man told me he had been at the station all day (it was now four in the afternoon) and still didn't have a ticket. So I asked Mr. Fang if he would buy the tickets. He said: Gladly! and gave me his chattering laugh — it called attention to his relief — and he went to work. Later, in his Confidential Memo titled Theroux, Paul, Mr. Fang perhaps scratched with his quill pen: Very interested in urine.

We left Lanzhou at about midnight — the best time of day for catching a long-distance train. You board, hand over your ticket and go to bed; and within a few minutes you're jogging along, sound asleep. When you wake up you've gone 500 miles.

This was the train that the man in Peking had called The Iron Rooster, which was like calling it "the cheapskate express," because the people who ran it were penny-pinchers. But that was just prejudice, a way of maligning a minority, a dig at the Uighurs. In most respects the train was no better or worse than any of the others I had taken in China. And the penny-pinching was not unusual — austerity, and mending and patching had long been among the commonest features of Chinese life. Luxury, even simple comfort, had been condemned as decadent, and so inconvenience, plainness, and roughing it had come to be accepted as virtues. Only recently — within a few years — had anyone confessed to wanting creature comforts and pretty colors. But that did not strike me as immoderate. It was a society that was pledged to austerity that was probably the most prone to going on binges.

So, philosophically, the name didn't fit. But in every other respect this thing was an Iron Rooster. It squawked and crowed and seemed to flap, as steam shot out of its black boiler and it shook itself along the tracks. It was a big, clattering thing, with bells and whistles, that went its noisy and cocksure way westward, into the desert of what used to be called Turkestan.

I slept like a log. The train was not particularly crowded. Mr. Fang was installed in another compartment. I had expected a stifling coach, but it was chilly on the train. I needed the China Railways' horse blanket.

I woke at six, in darkness. All of China is on Peking time. It had been light until nine at night in Lanzhou. I read Mildred Cable on the Gobi Desert and realized that I was just passing a point the Chinese had once called The Gate of Demons because beyond it was the howling wind and wasteland of which they had an acute terror. ("Some told of rushing rivers cutting their way through sand, of an unfathomable lake hidden among the dunes, of sand-hills with a voice like thunder, of water which could be clearly seen and yet was a deception.") I read for an hour. At seven it was still dark, the sun behind the distant mountains. We came to a small station called Shagoutai, where the only living things were a muleteer and his mule — the animal loaded with water bags and waiting behind the grade crossing.

The mountains were dark, treeless, grassless ranges and they were folded like thick quilts. They were black, because they were backlit by the unrisen sun. Near Lanzhou, I thought the mountains were like shuijiao (water dumplings). The same smoothness, and folds, and crimp marks. I loved the sight of the wilderness of dumplings. But in this semidesert, with far-off hills, no image came so easily to mind. The nearer hills all had cave entrances in them — the arched doorways of the cave dwellers of Gansu. It was a strange, rocky province, and so long and narrow I knew I would be traveling through it still tomorrow. Like Qinghai, the adjoining province to the south, Gansu was notorious for being a place where political prisoners were sent, the Chinese Siberia. Security was a simple matter because there was no escape through the desert. Only forty years ago travelers on this route — and at just about this spot in Gansu — were met by a large stone tablet with the inscription Earth's Greatest Barrier. Meaning the Gobi.

The landscape changed, all at once, into everything, at the town of Wuwei. The Iron Rooster was in a deep, cool valley, and there were wet mountains a few miles away, and beyond them a great ridge of brown mountains, and higher and farther still, on the distant horizon, a long range of snowy mountains. So blue and white were these mountains of ice that the range itself had the look of a sword blade. There were arid patches, too, between the snowy peaks in the distance and the green valley in which we were traveling.

These mountains to the south were the Datong Shan, several of them 20,000 footers, in the province and sometime penal colony of Qinghai, which stretched beyond them to the edge of the Tibetan Plateau.

I had been warned that this train trip west would be barren and boring. It was not. I was beginning to understand that the empty parts of China are the most beautiful, and some of them — like these valleys — very fertile. It was a chain of oases along the northern arm of the Silk Road. Its utter emptiness was so rare in China that it seemed startling to me, and where there were gardens and trees it was almost lush. Large herds of sheep grazed along the stonier stretches, nibbling at hanks of grass; and there were mules and crows and mud-walled towns. In one place I saw six camels, big and small, placidly watching the train go by. The mules were indifferent to the train. They were braying, and biting and mounting each other, honking and showing their teeth as they hauled their hoses into place.

The train was full but not crowded. The dining car was nearly always empty, perhaps because most of the passengers were Uighurs — Muslims — and the Chinese menu was about as porky as it could be. And the other dishes could not possibly have been halal, which is the Islamic version of kosher — implying ritual slaughter. Because business was so bad, the chef usually chatted, asking me what I wanted. How about some chicken and prawns? Or shredded pork? Or pork balls? Or diced pork and doufu (bean curd)? Or fish with ginger? Cauliflower with dried shrimp? Sauteed cucumber?

Like many features of Chinese life, the food had glorious names, and each dish had its own identity and pedigree. But in practice they were almost impossible to tell apart, having not only the same taste, but the same color and stringiness.

By midafternoon, the train was moving across a flat green plain between two ranges of low mountains, the Qilian Shan and the Helan Shan. In places I could see the crumbled sections of the Great Wall. Where the land was flat, it was intensively cultivated, and in places there were tall, slender and rather redundant-looking poplars. The Chinese were averse to planting shade trees because it was impossible to plant crops under them. They favored the skinny symbolic tree that doubled as a fence. The idea of The Forest was alien to China. It only existed in northern Heilongjiang province — the Manchurian northeast; and I had heard that even the little that remained was being cut down and made into chopsticks and toothpicks and Ping-Pong paddles.

In most other countries, a landscape feature was a grove of trees, or a meadow, or even a desert; so you immediately associated the maple tree with Canada, the oak with England, the birch with the Soviet Union, and desert and jungle with Africa. But no such thing came to mind in China, where the most common and obvious feature of a landscape was a person — or usually many people. Every time I stared at a landscape there was a person in it staring back at me.

Even here in the middle of nowhere there were people and settlements. The villages were walled in, and most houses had walls around them: mud smeared over bricks. They were the sort of stockades that are frequent in Afghanistan and Iran — at the far end of this Silk Road — and probably a cultural hangover from the memory of marauders and Mongol hordes, the Central Asian nightmare.

The day had turned very hot. It was now in the nineties. I saw eighteen sheep crowded into a little blot of shade under a frail hawthorn tree. Children cooled themselves by kicking water in a ditch. Farmers with lamp shade hats planted crops by pushing one sprout at a time into the ground, in a process that had a greater affinity to needlepoint than to farming, as though they were stitching a design into the furrows. And though there were black peaks and mountain ranges on both sides of the train, the land ahead fell away, and it was as if we were approaching the ocean — the land dipped and had the smooth, stony look of the seashore. It was the hottest part of the day, but even so the land was full of people. Hours later, in an immense and stony desert I saw a man in a faded blue suit, bumping over the stones on his bike.

Then there were sand dunes near the track — big soft slopes and bright piles; but the snowy peaks in the distance still remained. I had not realized that there was anything so strange as this on this planet.

I was eating dinner in the empty dining car at about eight that night when we came to Jiayuguan. What I saw out the window is printed on my mind: in the summer dusk of the Gobi Desert, a Chinese town lay glowing in the sand, and rising above it, ten stories high, was the last gate in the Great Wall — the Jia Yu Watchtower — a fortresslike structure with pagoda roofs; and the train slowed at the Wall's end, a crumbled pile of mud bricks and ruined turrets the wind had simplified and sucked smooth. In the fading light of day, there was this ghostly remainder of the Great Wall, and what looked like the last town in China. The Wall went straggling west, but it was so small and destroyed it looked like little more than an idea or a suggestion — the remnants of a great scheme. But my excitement also came from seeing the red paint on the gate, and the yellow roof, and the thought that this train was passing beyond it into the unknown. The sun slanted on the gray hills and the desert and the blue bushes. Most of what I saw was through the blurring haze of the day's dust, and the intimation at sunset was that I would fall off the edge of the world as soon as it got dark.

On my way back to my compartment I passed the Hard Class compartment, in which Uighurs were praying — kneeling on mats and facing southwest towards Mecca between the berths; and Chinese were brushing their teeth, and glugging tea, and hanging up laundry; and very loud Arabic music blasted from a portable tape player. Some people were sleeping and many were sighing, and a few spitting and hoicking. A card game was in progress, and a furious argument. Nearby a young girl placidly nursed her baby. The floor was thick with spittle, orange peels, peanut shells and tea dregs. More men entered, gargling, from the washroom.

Someone grasped my arm. The light was bad, but I saw he had a big nose and wavy hair and a brown suit with bell-bottoms, a style that had become popular that year in the oases of the Xinjiang desert.

"Shansh marnie?"

It was the Uighur catchphrase: Change money?

The Uighurs were officially designated a Chinese minority, and Xinjiang was their own autonomous region. They were a Turkic-speaking people, the remote descendants of nomads whose kingdom existed here 1200 years ago, and many of them looked like Italian peasants. It was no wonder that Marco Polo found them a friendly and fun-loving people. They were overwhelmed by the Mongol hordes in the thirteenth century, and were drafted into the army of this khanate. They converted to Islam, they adopted the Arabic script for their language, they were conquered by the Chinese several times, and several times rebelled, most recently a hundred years ago. There are about four million of them in Xinjiang, and they seemed totally out of sympathy with the Chinese and often mocking. Their world was entirely separate: it was Allah, and the Central Asian steppes, a culture of donkey carts and dancing girls. They ate mutton and bread. They were people of the bazaar, who — familiar with outlandish travelers — were travelers themselves. For the first time since the People's Republic was founded they were allowed to travel.

They were the people who lurked outside the Friendship Stores in Peking and Shanghai, and stood discreetly outside the tourist hotels, looking like exchange students from a Mediterranean country. They usually wore dark suits and ties and platform shoes. They wore watches and sunglasses. Their Chinese was seldom fluent — but that was excusable: it was rare to find any Chinese person who spoke Uighur. But their history as a people had taught them to count in fifty languages. Numbers, after all, are the language of the bazaar. And they had two words of English.

"Shansh marnie?"

"How much?"

"One dollar, four yuan." The official rate was three.

"Say six." I was bargaining for the sake of it, and because it was such a novelty to encounter a black market in this upright, no tipping, no favors, anticorruption economy. What this Uighur and I were doing was sinning; and it felt delightful.

"No six."

"Five."

"No five. Four." He also had bushy eyebrows and a big chin.

He asked me how many dollars I wanted to change. He took out a pocket calculator and said that over a certain amount he could give me a better rate. The train rumbled on towards Ansi (Anxi). 1 lost interest in haggling and had no interest at all in changing money at the black-market rate. What fascinated me was his tenacity in sticking to this one-to-four rate. For him it was like a magic equation. But this Uighur was no fool. Two months later the Chinese government devalued the yuan to exactly this rate.

That night the train crossed the Ravine of Baboons (Xingxing Xia), which had always been regarded as the frontier of Chinese Turkestan.

'The desert which lies between Ansi and Hami is a howling wilderness, and the first thing which strikes the wayfarer is the dismalness of its uniform, black, pebble-strewn surface." That was Mildred speaking. And reading her book reminded me that I was missing one of the glories of this region by not visiting the caves at Dunhuang — Buddhas, frescoes, holy grottoes; the sacred city in the sands. But I intended to go one better, by visiting the lost city of Gaocheng (Karakhoja) whenever this train got to Turfan.

I had gone to bed in a strange late twilight amid a rugged landscape; and I woke, slowly jogging in the train, to a fiat region of sand and stones. Farther off were large humpy sand dunes, which had the appearance of having softly flowed and blown there, because there was nothing like them nearby. The dunes were like simple gigantic animals that went blobbing along through the desert, smothering whatever they encountered.

Soon a patch of green appeared — an oasis. Once there was merely a road linking the oases — but "once" meant only thirty years ago. Before then it was a rough road, what remained of the Silk Route. But these oases were not metaphors for a few trees and a stagnant pool. They were large towns, well watered from underground irrigation canals, and grapes and melons were grown in great profusion. Later in the day the train stopped at Hami. The Hami melon is famous all over China for its sweet taste and its fragrance; and Hami had been no insignificant place, although now it was what remained of the fruit-growing communes of the fifties and sixties. It had known great days, and had had a khan until this century. It had been overrun by Mongols, by Uighurs, by Tibetans and Dzungars. It had been repeatedly reoccupied by the Chinese since the year a.d. 73, during the Later Han Dynasty, and had been a Chinese city from 1698 onward. Nothing of this remained. What had not been damaged in the Muslim Rebellion of 1863–1873 had been flattened in the Cultural Revolution. The Chinese had a facility for literally defacing a city — taking all its characteristic features away, robbing it of its uniqueness, cutting its nose off. Now all Hami was known for was its pig iron.

The peaks beyond Hami and farther up the line had patches of snow on their ridges that lay like saddle blankets, squarish and flat. But down here in the train and on the desert it was very hot — over one hundred degrees in the train and hotter outside. The sun burned down on the sand and stones. There were a few gullies, and in the oldest and deepest ones, which were sheltered, perhaps a dead wu-tong tree, and here and there clumps of camel thorn, the only identifiable weed, apart from the spikes of gray lichens. We were heading towards a dusty range of hills that was surmounted by a blue range of mountains, and rising up beyond were more mountains, which were bright with snow patches and ice slides — long streaks that might have been glaciers.

They were the first sight I had of the Bogda Shan, The Mountains of God. They were very rugged and very high, but their snow was the only lively feature of this place. Beneath those mountains there was nothing but desert, "the howling wilderness," which this afternoon was too bright to stare at. Rainfall is unknown here, and most of those mountains seemed little more than a vast, poisoned massif — a lifeless pack of rock. This is the dead center of Asia.

The Iron Rooster moved along at about thirty miles per hour, as it had done for two and a half days; moving slowly as the landscape grew ever stranger. That was a good thing. If the train had been moving any faster it would have been impossible for me to comprehend the changes in the landscape, from the rice fields and little hills to the great bare mountains. A plane ride from Lanzhou to here would have resulted in shock, and from Peking, in total bewilderment. Arriving here by plane from anywhere else would have been like space travel — some interplanetary mind-bender.

I paced up and down in my pajamas, among slumbering Uighurs, and occasionally had a beer. They were half a liter and cost 15 cents. Because we were on Peking time, the hottest part of the day was 4:30 in the afternoon, and it remained light enough to read by until almost midnight.

In this oddly lighted world of snow and sand, the stone mountains reddened and rushed up to the train. In the distance was a green basin, 500 feet below sea level, the lowest place in China, and one of the hottest. Another oasis, the town of Turfan. Round about there was nothing else but a hundred miles of blackish gravel, and Turfan itself was twenty miles from the station. I got off the train here.

Turfan ("one of the hottest places on the face of the earth") was an extremely popular oasis about 400 years ago. Before then it had been a desert town overrun by successive waves of nomads, Chinese, Tibetans, Uighurs and Mongols. The Silk Road established it as a great oasis and bazaar, but after that — from about the sixteenth century — it was all downhill. And after it was finally left alone by the warlords and the Manchus, new marauders appeared in the shape of enterprising archeologists, and the few frescoes and statues that remained after more than 2000 years of continuous civilization were snatched and carried away to places like Tokyo, Berlin, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Such a place seemed to me unmissable. The station was at the edge of the depression. All I could see were telephone poles in the stony desert, and the huge purply-red range called The Flaming Mountains. The town of Turfan did not reveal itself until I was almost on top of it, and even then it seemed less like a Chinese town than a Middle Eastern one — it was straight out of the Bible, with donkeys and grape arbors and mosques, and people who looked Lebanese, with brown faces and gray eyes.

The desert was almost unbelievably horrible looking — bouldery and black, without a single green thing in it. And it seemed as though if you walked on those stones you would cut your feet. In some spots it looked like an immensity of coal ashes, with scatterings of clinkers and scorched stones. In other places it was dust, with rounded mounds piled here and there. The mounds I discovered were part of the irrigation system called the karez, a network of underground canals and boreholes that had been used successfully since the Western Han Dynasty, about 2000 years ago. There were also parts of this desert surrounding Turfan that had an undersea look, as of an ocean floor after the tide went out for good. Everyone called it the gobi\ the waterless place. Rainfall is unknown in Turfan.

In this shallow green valley in the desert, in which all the water came from underground, there were no Chinese high rises, and most of the houses were small and square. There were grape arbors suspended over most of the streets — for the shade and also for the prettiness of them. This valley is the chief source of Chinese grapes — there is even a winery in Turfan — and thirty varieties of melon grow in the area. That intensifies the relief on having come from one of the wildest deserts in the world. Turfan is the opposite of everything that lies around it, with its water and its shade and its fresh fruit.

Mr. Fang still tagged behind me, keeping his distance, sometimes speaking an ominous sentence.

One of the most ominous for the traveler in China is: It is a new hotel. That sometimes struck fear into my heart. It implied peeling wallpaper, plush chairs, exposed wires, lights that didn't work, a hairy carpet, hard beds and a bathroom with no water, loose tiles, sticky glue on the sink, no shower curtain, and a cistern you had to fix yourself by twisting the ballcock. The doors on the fake-wood cabinets were usually stuck, the curtains were thin, the doorknobs loose, the coat hangers misshapen, the telephone didn't work, and neither did the radio. There was always a color television and a bunch of plastic flowers. Such places smelled of fish glue and failure, and they were terribly expensive. In all cases in China I preferred an old hotel. They weren't pretty but they worked.

But Mr. Fang said the old place in Turfan was full, and he put me in the new, as yet unnamed hotel. It was half-finished, and it was empty. Its odor was powerful: fresh cement. In the rubble of the courtyard there was a fountain which contained hot dust and a stiff little mouse. I stood, a little dazed from the heat, and heard a donkey bawl.

Because of Peking time, breakfast was served at nine-thirty, lunch at two, and dinner at nine in the evening. What are civilized hours in a place like Sandwich, Massachusetts, are very inconvenient in Chinese Turkestan. I woke hot and hungry at about six in the morning, and I had no appetite in the evening. But the eating hours were official and inflexible, and the local people woke late and went to bed late. Nothing I could do persuaded anyone to galvanize himself early, in the cool part of the day.

"We will miss breakfast," Mr. Fang said.

"Does that matter?"

"We must have breakfast."

I thought, What good are you? But it was not only that mealtimes were sacred. The food was paid for and therefore had to be eaten. And the Chinese are an oral people — that was another reason. Most of all, the Chinese are at their freest when they are eating. A meal is always a relief and a celebration.

Yet I never wanted breakfast — noodles, thin rice gruel, meat dumplings, maybe mushrooms, and warm milk. As a foreigner I might be offered orange soda or a Pepsi with my breakfast noodles.

In Turfan I bought the local raisins made from white grapes — the best in China — and apricots. And I sat in my room, eating that stuff and drinking my Dragon Well green tea and writing my notes, until Fang and the driver had had their fill of gruel, and then we set off down the dusty roads.

Turfan was often a furnace. But on overcast mornings it was pleasant, with low clouds and temperatures only in the nineties. I liked the town. It was the least Chinese place I had seen so far, and it was one of the smallest and prettiest. There were very few motor vehicles, and it was quiet and completely horizontal.

It was a Uighur town, with a few Chinese. There were also Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Tadzhiks and Tungus around the place, bowlegged and in high boots, in the Mongolian fashion. They were leathery faced, and some looked like Slavs and some like gypsies, and most of them looked like people who had lost their way and were just stopping briefly in this oasis before moving on. Half the women at the Turfan bazaar had the features of fortune-tellers, and the others looked like Mediterranean peasants — dramatically different from anyone else in China. These brown-haired, gray-eyed, gypsy-featured women in velvet dresses — and very buxom, some of them — were quite attractive in a way that was the opposite to the oriental. You would not be surprised to learn that they were Italians or Armenians. You see those same faces in Palermo and Watertown, Massachusetts.

Their gazes lingered, too. And some women came close and reached into the velvet and withdrew rolls of bills from between their breasts and said, "Shansh marnie?"

They put this Chinese money into my hand — the money still warm from having been in their deep bosoms — and they offered me four to one. They had gold teeth, and some looked like foxes, and they hissed at me when I said no.

It was wonderful, that market in Turfan, just what you would expect of a bazaar in Central Asia. They sold embroidered saddlebags, and leather holsters, and homemade jackknives, and baskets and belts. The meat market dealt exclusively in lamb and mutton — no pigs in this Islamic place; and there were stalls selling shish kebab. Much of the produce was the fresh fruit for which Turfan is well known — watermelons and Hami melons and tangerines. And there were about twenty varieties of dried fruit. I bought raisins and apricots, almonds and walnuts: it struck me that dried fruit and nuts were caravan food.

There were tumblers and fire-eaters at the Turfan market, too, and a man doing card tricks on an overturned wheelbarrow. There was something medieval about the market — the dust and the tents, the merchandise and the entertainers, and the people who had gathered there, the men in skullcaps, the women in shawls, the shrieking children with wild hair and dirty feet.

Nothing puts human effort into better perspective than a ruined city. 'This was once a great capital," people say, pointing to fallen walls and broken streets and dust. Then you stand in the silence of the lifeless place and think of Ozymandias, King of Kings, covered by a sand dune and forgotten. It is very thrilling for an American to consider such a place, because we don't yet have anything that qualifies — only ghost towns and fairly insignificant small cities, but nothing like the monumental corpses of once-great cities that are known in the rest of the world. Probably American optimism arises from the fact that we don't have any devastated cities. There is something wearying and demoralizing about a lost city, but it can also give you a healthy disregard for real estate.

Gaocheng was perfect in its ruin and decrepitude. It had been a renowned city for well over a thousand years, and now it was a pile of dust and crumbling mud. So far it had been spared the final insult — tourists — but one day, when the Iron Rooster turned into a streamlined train, they would find even this place, east of Turfan, twenty-five miles into the desert. It had had half a dozen different names — Karakhoja, Khocho, Dakianus (from the Roman Emperor Decius), Apsus (Ephesus), Idikut-Shahri (King Idikut's Town) and Erbu (Second Stop). Gaocheng had come to be its accepted name, but it hardly mattered, because there was not much left of it. Yet enough remained for anyone to see that it really had been an enormous place, a city on a grand scale, which was why it looked so sad. It had the melancholy emptiness of all great ruins.

Its walls and fortifications were mostly gone, but the ones that still stood made it seem a remarkable citadel. It had been an ancient capital of this region, and then a Tang city, and then a Uighur city, and at last the Mongols had captured it. The Uighurs didn't want the place destroyed, so they had surrendered without a struggle and let the Mongols take charge, as they had over the rest of China. It was the period of Mongol rule, the Yuan Empire of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when the first Westerners began traveling widely in China — among them, Marco Polo.

By then Gaocheng was Muslim. It had previously been Buddhist. It had also been a center of heretics — first Manichaean, then Nestorian. It is impossible to consider these heresies without reaching the conclusion that they make a certain amount of sense. The Manichaeans, followers of the Persian prophet Manes, believed that there is good and evil in all humans, and that life is a struggle between these interdependent opposites, the light and the dark, the spirit and the flesh. The Nestorians were Christians who had been declared heretics for their belief that there were two separate persons in the incarnate Christ, denying that Christ was in one person both God and man. They went on to argue that Mary was either the mother of God or the mother of the man Jesus; but she couldn't have it both ways. For this the Nestorians were persecuted and exiled, after the Council of Ephesus (in 431, in present-day Turkey), and they ended up in the seventh century, at the last stage of the Silk Road, deep in China, where the first Nestorian church was founded in 638, in Changan — Xian.

What made this all the more fascinating to me was that there was nothing left — no church, no heretics, no books, no pictures, no city. There was only the sun beating down on the mud bricks and the broken walls, and all the religion, trade, warfare, art, money, government and civilization had turned to dust. But there was something magnificent in the immensity of this dumb ruin. I kept on seeing this desert as a place where an ocean had been, a gigantic foreshore of smooth stones and seaside rubble; and this city of Gaocheng was quite in key with that, looking like a sand castle that the tide had mostly floated away.

The only live things here were goats. The frescoes and statues had been stolen — and sold or else removed to museums. Farmers had dismantled many of the buildings so that they could use the bricks, and when the local people found pots or vases or amphoras (and they were good ones, for there was both Greek and Roman influence at Gaocheng), they used them in their kitchens, so that they wouldn't have to buy new ones.

I went to a nearby village of Uighurs and asked them whether they knew anything about Gaocheng. "It is an old city," they said. The people I asked were brown-faced hawk-nosed men whose village was shady and totally off the map. They had donkeys, they had a mosque and a small market, but they didn't speak Chinese or any language other than Uighur. The place was called Flaming Mountain Commune, but that was merely a euphemism. The village had gone to sleep. The women watched me through the folds in their black shawls, and I saw one who looked exactly like my Italian grandmother.

Mr. Liu, my guide, did not speak Uighur, though he had lived not far away for twenty years. I had the impression that these desert-dwelling Uighurs did not take the Han Chinese very seriously. When we started away there was a thump against the side of the car, and the driver slammed on the brakes and chased after the laughing kids. He made a fuss, but no one came to help — no one even listened. And then, a further insult. He stopped to ask directions to an ancient burying ground, the necropolis at Astana, and when he put his head out of the car window, two children stuck feathery reeds into his ears and tickled him. They ran away, as he got out and raged at them.

'They are very bad boys," Mr. Liu said, and he glowered at me when he saw that I was laughing.

The corpses in the underground tombs at Astana were 600 years old, but perfectly preserved, grinning, lying side by side on a decorated slab.

"You want to take a picture of the dead people?" the caretaker asked me.

"I don't have a camera."

She paid no attention to that. She said, 'Ten yuan. One picture."

Mr. Liu said, "I hate looking at dead bodies," and hurried up the stone stairs, fleeing the burial chamber.

When he was gone, the caretaker said, "Shansh marnie?"

I hated to leave Turfan. It was the first town I had seen in China that didn't look Chinese, and I wondered why this was so. It was the hottest place I had been, the lowest, the strangest, in the middle of nowhere, with sulky old men and rapacious women and stone-throwing kids. I didn't find any of it threatening — in fact I liked seeing people resisting Chinese dullness, and setting their faces against humorless and canting politicians. It was unusual that such a place had managed to keep its pride and its culture intact, even if its culture was little more than melons and tambourines and Islamic prostrations. It was a green island in lifeless wilderness: very exciting to arrive at on a train, and even better that it was on a gasping, drooling steam train.

I took that same train out of Turfan, Mr. Fang by my side, and headed west through the desert towards Urumchi, which everyone called "Woolamoochie." It is only a hundred miles or so from Turfan, but the trip is slow because of the circuitous passage through the Tian Shan — The Heavenly Mountains. The series of intersecting valleys contain some of China's most beautiful scenery — cliffs, mountain streams, boulder-strewn gullies and deep gorges. The train labors through each of the twelve tunnels and then bursts into one of these valleys in the blinding Xinjiang sunshine, and the rushing water of the Baiyang River drowns out the gasps of the locomotive.

At one point a black and white crane, five feet tall, gathered itself up and leaped out of the suds of the fast river, folded its legs and neck and beat itself slowly towards the cliffs. After several hours of these brilliantly lit valleys and bouncing clouds, the tracks straightened and we headed across brown desert to the large smoking city of Urumchi, the last place in China that is reachable by train. The next big town west of this is Alma-Ata, in the Soviet Union Republic of Kazakhstan. Horsemen and nomads don't recognize national frontiers. There are plenty of Kazakhs in Urumchi, along with Tatars, Uzbeks, Tazhiks and Mongols; but more than a third of the city's population is Uighur, and the railway station is in the Uighur style, the station sign in the Uighur script.

It is almost impossible to find any traveler offering a kind word for Urumchi. What began as a Han outpost on the Silk Road, developed into a Tang trading center and then was captured by Huns and finally Mongols. It became the capital of Chinese Turkestan, but with a strong Russian flavor. For most early travelers it was the first stop in China and something of a disappointment ("no one leaves the town with regret"), because it was lacking in any cultural interest. The treasures, the tombs, the lost cities — all the good places to loot — lay farther east. Urumchi was merely political. Here were the offices, the interrogation centers, the jails, the bureaucrats, the spies. That was the case at the turn of the century, and at the time of the Russian Revolution, and it is pretty much the case now.

Still it had a certain ugly charm, this city of a million and a half people, very few of whom were Han Chinese. It was surrounded by big brown mountains, and it had wide streets and shish kebab parlors. Many shops had rare animals strung up outside. It was very hot in the daytime, and one of the popular recreations was playing pool and billiards under the trees — there were pool tables all over Urumchi, in the open air.

Mr. Fang disappeared when we reached the hotel, but his place was taken by Mr. Yang, who — when I asked about Russians — said there was a large Russian community here which dated from the 1930s. I had just missed their Easter celebration — the Chinese government had given them permission to hold it for the first time since Liberation.

There were so many different ethnic groups in Urumchi I wondered what the Cultural Revolution had been like.

"It was very bad here," Mr. Yang said. "But the minorities were not interested. They did not participate in the Cultural Revolution. Very few of them were Red Guards."

"If they didn't participate, then they must have been persecuted," I said.

"Oh, yes," Mr. Yang said, readily agreeing. "They were persecuted! Islamic religion was declared illegal. Praying was illegal. Mosques were considered bad. The Red Guards went in and smashed up the mosques. And people were punished."

"How did they punish the Muslims?"

"They made them raise pigs."

Typical, I thought; and perfect in its way. It was always said that the Chinese under Mao were a forgiving bunch — believers in redemption and reeducation. But it seemed to me uniquely vindictive to make physicists assemble crappy radios, and to force literature teachers to hoe cabbages or shovel chicken shit, and to put Muslims to work in pigsties. That was on the same order as putting hysterical schoolkids in charge of the middle schools; the result was easily predictable, and in the event the little brats persecuted their teachers and passed in blank examination papers to prove they were good Maoist anti-intellectuals.

"I'll bet the minorities didn't like that very much," I said.

Mr. Yang shrieked with laughter. It was the Chinese laugh that means You said it!

He said, 'They wanted to protest, but they didn't dare. They wanted to have a counterrevolution!"

"Do they want to have a counterrevolution now?" It was a delicate question, because there were always rumors of Uighur discontent; and anyone who saw these frowning, disapproving and uncooperative Uighur faces all over Xinjiang could easily reach the conclusion that here were people who were not entirely sold on the aims of the People's Republic.

Mr. Yang laughed again, a slower warning honk that meant: Do not ask that question. But that particular laugh was also a noise I interpreted as a complex yes.

But I was stuck with Mr. Yang. He asked me what I wanted to see in Urumchi.

I said, "Something memorable."

We drove to Nanshan, the South Mountain Pasture. It was only twenty minutes out of Urumchi but it looked like western Uganda, a great green plain with the "Mountains of the Moon" rising out of it, several snowcapped peaks. What distinguishes these mountainsides from others in China are the spruce forests, tall, cool and blackish-green. On some of the meadows there were goatherds and shepherds with their flocks, and Kazakhs living in mud-smeared huts and log cabins. There were yurts, too, and near them men wearing fur hats with earflaps, and boots and riding breeches; and there were women in shawls and dresses and thick socks. They looked like Russian babushkas, and unlike the Chinese, these women were long nosed and potbellied. They tended vegetable gardens near their cabins, and they had donkeys and cranky dogs and snotty-nosed kids who, because of the cold, also had bright red cheeks.

To avoid talking to Mr. Yang for a while, I walked fast up the slope and found a waterfall. Beneath it, in the stream, there was ice — big yellow crusts of it, and solid thick shelves of it frozen to the rocks. Twenty minutes down the road the townsfolk of Urumchi were perspiring and playing pool under the trees, and here it was freezing.

I found a Uighur, Zhu Ma Hun—Hun means mister and the rest was the Chinese version of the Muslim name Juma (Friday — the Muslim sabbath). He seemed to claim that he had been the Chinese ambassador to Syria, but he may have meant that he worked in that embassy. His Chinese was as limited as mine. On the other hand, he spoke Turkish and Arabic as well as his native Uighur.

He said he came from Tacheng, on the border of Soviet Kazakhstan, about 500 miles from Urumchi and about as far west as anyone can live in China and still be regarded as Chinese. That gave me an idea.

"You're not Chinese, are you?"

"Yes! I'm Chinese!"

He was big and friendly, fat faced. He might have been a Turk, a Smyrna merchant, or a pasha with a big paunch. He said he had been to Mecca on the hajj.

We were strolling along the mountain road. We passed a public toilet — the Chinese tend to erect them in the middle of all beauty spots — and though we were forty feet away, the thing gave off an overpowering stink. Every public toilet I saw in China was so vile it was unusable. Every foreigner mentioned them; the Chinese never did spontaneously — not because they were fastidious but because they were ashamed and phlegmatic, and preferred to suffer in silence.

"I think you don't have many of those in the States," Zhu Ma Hun said.

"Right," I said, thinking he meant the brick shit house, but I saw that he was pointing to a yurt, where an old nomad — possibly a Tadzhik — was lugging a bucket of water.

"But do you have any tents?" he asked.

"Not as many as you," I said.

The Chinese idea of a picnic lunch is an assortment of dry sponge cake and stale cookies. Mr. Yang had given me a box in the car, and I had not realized what was in it until I was some distance up the mountain. I fed the whole thing to some cows.

That afternoon, still hungry, I looked for something to eat in the market at Urumchi. My favorite street food was a kind of stuffed pancake called jiaozi or else fried dumplings. But the treat here was lamb kebabs and flat loaves of bread they called nang, probably from the same root word as the Urdu nan, familiar to anyone who has eaten in an Indian restaurant.

There are so few Western travelers in Urumchi that Uighurs become animated when they see them. They stare, they gabble, they proffer dried fruit and bunches of fresh grapes. One man tried to interest me in his medicines: dried and splayed lizards (for high blood pressure), deer antlers (for potency), snakes, frogs, and birds' beaks, and a hideous little bundle of twiggy things that he said were the umbilical cords of donkeys.

"They are very good for you," he said vaguely, when I asked what they were for.

The traders in the market, selling the carpets which are woven in Urumchi and the clothes that arrive by train, were either bearded men in skullcaps or fat women in brown dresses. They held up their merchandise, they beckoned me over, but whenever I got close they breathed on me and snatched my wrist and spoke the Uighur greeting.

"Shansh marnie?"

There were more dead animals elsewhere in Urumchi. It is a measure of how deep in the hinterland the town is that there are still many wild animals in the surrounding countryside. At one shop I saw the usual snakes and dried lizards and umbilical cords, but also wolf pelts, fox furs, a half a dozen bearskins and the carcass of an eagle — a white-shouldered Imperial Eagle (so my bird book said), with a wingspan of about six feet. This beautiful bird was a great deal bigger than the Uighur woman selling it.

"Do you want to buy it?" she said.

"What would I do with it?"

"You take the feathers and rub them on your skin. It's good medicine."

"What about this?" I said, pointing to the skull of a gazelle, to which two lovely horns were attached.

"Medicine. Grind it into powder. It makes you strong."

There were any number of Western scientists who claimed that traditional Chinese medicine could be efficacious; but what this woman was saying — and the man in the market with his donkeys' umbilical cords — was surely complete nonsense?

I was prepared to believe that the Chinese had the herbal solutions to high blood pressure, and that acupuncture had its practical uses; but when they scrunched up a dead owl and said, Yum, yum — good for your eyes, I wanted to say Bullshit. If I didn't, it was only because I didn't yet know the Chinese word for it.

There are a handful of tigers in China, some in Hunan, some in the far northeast. Needless to say, they are an endangered species. There is so little food for them that when they're very hungry these tigers will eat insects and frogs. In a copy of a Chinese magazine (China Today) I read the following: 'The [Chinese] tiger is a kind of treasure. The hide of the tiger can be made into an expensive coat. The bones, the kidneys, the stomach and the penis are very valuable medicine. The medicine made from the ribs of the tiger is a very good and effective medicine for curing rheumatoid arthritis."

It was bad enough that they were killing the few animals they had left, but they were doing it for the stupidest reasons. But it was probably true that the most accurate epitaph for creatures that have become extinct is: It Tasted Good.

I tried to get Mr. Fang to teach me how to say, "That is merely a superstitious belief with no scientific basis to support it," but we got nowhere. He asked me why I wanted to be able to say this, and I mentioned the Chinese habit of making the lovely little Asian Barred Owlet into soup. He said there were two good reasons for that: They tasted good and they were good for your eyesight.

He was bewildered that anyone with sense should care for the life of a bird or an animal. I did not argue with him. The Chinese themselves often lived in such cramped and uncomfortable conditions that they could hardly be expected to sympathize with animals that lived the same way. Indeed, the way the Chinese lived and died bore a remarkable resemblance to their animals.

Mr. Fang surprised me further by saying, "Mr. Jiao wants to see you."

"Who is Mr. Jiao?"

"General Manager of the Urumchi Branch of China Railways."

"How does he know I'm here?"

"I told him," Mr. Fang said, and looked sad in his sea-lion way. "He wants you to eat with him."

Mr. Jiao Xi Ku was a dark, tough-looking man from the far-eastern province of Shandong. He had a short neck and a broad face, and as the evening advanced and he drank more and more Xinjiang white wine, his dark face was suffused with a kind of alcoholic blush and his eyes became smaller and very red, like two boiled berries.

We were joined by his assistant, Mr. Jie, who — because he was an underling — did not say very much. After the formalities ("We are honored to have you") I realized that this would be a large meal. The cold dishes were set out and ignored; that meant there were about a dozen more courses to come.

I asked Mr. Jiao about the railway. What were the problems in building and maintaining it? He said the worst problem was the sandstorms, the wind that often grew to force 9 or 10. A cold wind met a hot wind in the gobi and caused great turbulence. And then there were the tunnels through the Tian Shan — they had taken years to cut.

"You see, we did all this by ourselves. We had no help."

"I thought the Soviets helped," I said.

"They planned the line to Urumchi. They did the survey — but it was an aerial survey. They didn't foresee all the difficulties. And of course our friendship with them was broken in 1960."

"So you were on your own then?"

"Yes. And what made it especially hard was that they took all their materials away. The tracks, the equipment, the wood, everything. Just loaded it and took it across the border. And they took their plans, too! Rolled up their plans and went home with them. No one helped us!"

"But you stuck to the original plans?"

"We had no choice. We kept to the same route and finished the line in 1963."

I said, "The line is headed straight for the Soviet border."

"That was the idea," Mr. Jiao said. "And we're still building."

"You're going to connect the line to one in the Soviet Union?"

"Yes. At Alataw Shankou [the Dzungarian Gate]. We have built as far as Usu. There's some dispute about who is supposed to build the connecting line, but we expect it to be done by 1990."

Then Mr. Jie piped up, "There used to be a slogan, This year Urumchi, next year the border!'"

"When was that?"

"Nineteen fifty-eight."

Meanwhile, dishes of food were being put on the table, and sampled, and replaced with others. There was peppery Xinjiang chicken, and lamb, and cucumbers with red peppers, and mushrooms and white fungus, and the best dish I had in China, which was chili duck smoked in jasmine tea, rubbed with rice wine, air dried, sprinkled with scallions, steamed and then deep fried. I made a note of the name: zhang cha yazi.

"You like the duck," Mr. Jie said, noticing my greed and heaping my plate with more.

I said, "If I met someone who could make that dish I would marry her."

The two men stared at me and nodded, which was probably what I deserved for the silly remark.

To change the subject, I said, "Do Hans ever marry Uighurs?"

"Very seldom. You see, the Uighurs are afraid that if they marry outside their people it will reduce their numbers. They try to avoid it. Of course, sometimes a Uighur man marries a Han girl. But a Han man cannot marry a Uighur girl."

"What do you mean 'cannot'?"

"It is against the law. The government forbids it."

I guessed that he meant the Xinjiang Uighur government. This was an autonomous region, with its own peculiar laws and its own parliament in Urumchi.

"Anyway, they're Muslims and we're not," Mr. Jiao said.

He said that he had been in Urumchi for twenty-eight years — had come as a sort of pioneer in a voluntary Maoist scheme. I asked him whether he spoke Uighur.

"Very little," he said.

"It's a very hard language," Mr. Jie said. He had been in the region for thirty-one years — he was also from the east, Dalian, on the Gulf of Bohai.

Both men shared the Han conceit, like the British in India, which this Chinese rule in Xinjiang strongly resembled: better that these local folks learn to speak Chinese than that we should grapple with their language.

We were still eating. It was local food, they boasted. And I realized as we reached the last of the dishes that they were paying me the highest possible compliment: it was a meal without rice or noodles or bread. Such stodge was usually offered to plump out a poorer meal; but this was all delicacies.

"Will you go back home when you retire?"

"No, I'm staying here," Mr. Jiao said. "My children are here. This is my home now. I will die here."

We talked about the best railway routes through China. They said they liked going to Xian because that route took in the most interesting parts of China and was the most atmospheric.

"You're talking about the Silk Road," I said. "Ancient history."

Mr. Jiao said, "Yes. Recent history is not very interesting."

Remembering what Mr. Yang said about the Cultural Revolution in Urumchi, I asked whether it was true that it had been violent here.

"It was very bad," Mr. Jiao said. His eyes had become very red and tiny. He made a sweeping gesture with his dark hand. "Very bad."

"Did it disrupt the trains?"

"Yes! For twenty-four days at one time. That was in 1968. But there were lots of disruptions and much worse things. You see, the Red Guards were not one group. There were a number of different factions. Two factions were fighting in Urumchi."

"Fighting in what way? You mean arguing?"

"First it was arguing — over the correct interpretation of what Mao had said. One work unit claimed to be better Maoists than the other. They accused the others of being rightists. And then, after the arguments got them nowhere, they fought with guns. Yes, guns. Bang-bang. People died." His eyes went weepy looking, but it was the wine. "It was very bad."

"Do you think it will come back — a second Cultural Revolution?"

"Absolutely not!" he thundered. "Never!"

"Did Mao ever visit Urumchi?"

"No. Too busy, I think," he said, and glanced at Mr. Jie. "But Zhou Enlai came here and traveled all over." He said it in the affectionate way that Chinese always referred to Zhou. "And recently Deng Xiaoping visited here. He had a good time. He was really impressed."

By now we were all drunk enough to talk about war and friendship. I mentioned the Japanese and said I thought they were planning to take over the world by dominating the world economy because they had failed to do so by military means. And how did it feel as a Chinese to be occupied again by a nation that had been driven out in the 1940s?

"We have a saying in China," Mr. Jiao said. "'You can't attack everyone, so you have to be careful of everyone.'"

The last dishes were taken from the table. Mr. Jiao stood up a little unsteadily and we thanked each other. There were no other formalities; no small talk; no lingering. Nothing is more abrupt than the end of a Chinese banquet.

In succeeding days I discovered that this part of Xinjiang was being opened up for oil exploration. Already it was producing an enormous amount of oil — some oil was being exported to the United States. To the southeast, in the Lop Nor Desert, atom bombs were being tested. There had even been a noisy protest in Peking by university students, but the police had put a stop to that, and the atomic testing had continued.

Most of China's minerals came from Xinjiang, and from the numerous radar dishes on the mountains it was easy to conclude that, strategically, it was an important area. I went to factories and became gloomy, seeing women painstakingly making silk carpets with very ordinary designs: one square yard a month, a whole year to make a not-very-pretty carpet. And there were jade carvers in Urumchi who were doing something similar, taking weeks to make fifty-dollar grinning Buddhas in jade, or six months of cutting and polishing to make a jade dish. I had the impression the stuff didn't even sell particularly well.

No one seemed to mind. Urumchi was in a little time warp, everything happening late. Breakfast was at nine-thirty, dinner at nine at night. At about ten-thirty every night the sun broke through the clouds and shone brilliantly until after eleven, and then at midnight the whole place suddenly went cold.

I went into the desert to look at camels, and then northeast to the Bogda Shan, with their peaks like rocky steeples, and then to Tianchi (The Heavenly Pool), a lake about 2000 feet up a mountainside. Above it, the snowy peak of Bogda Feng (18,000 feet) and the other peaks in the range looked like the lower jaw of a wolf, white and black fangs in a long, angular jaw. There were noodle stalls and Young Pioneers and Chinese tourists at the end of the road, but fifty feet beyond that there was no one — nothing but whispering pines and birds singing. I had not seen anything prettier than this, and while such a piney wilderness did not look Chinese, it did not look European either: the settlements on the road and in the woods were Mongolian yurts and cabins and tiny villages, with those same bowlegged horsemen in boots and women wearing shawls and red-cheeked children. I spoke Chinese to a man who might have been a Kazakh and he just laughed.

I met a Chinese man named Mr. Cheng near the lake. He had given himself the English name "Tom" after reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and when he had done so everyone in his office decided to do the same thing — take on an English first name. He worked in The Agricultural Bank in Altay, in the distant north of Xinjiang, in a little corner of China that was pinched by Russia on one side and Outer Mongolia on the other.

In that place (the bank), Tom Cheng said, "We have Mike, Julian, Jan, Wayne and Bob."

Tom said he was thirty-four, which was just the age of the generation that had been involved in the Cultural Revolution — he would have been about sixteen at the height of it. But had the Cultural Revolution penetrated to the remote town of Altay?

"Oh, yes!" Tom said. "We had it there. I was in middle school."

"Did you have Red Guards?"

"Yes. I was a Red Guard! In my own school! I was an organizer!"

Tom Cheng wore a yellow sweater and Chinese blue jeans and white sneakers. He carried a portable radio and a plastic holdall stenciled Shanghai. All this was regarded as stylish. All he lacked was sunglasses.

I said, "Did you criticize your teachers for being rightists?"

"Yes!" he said eagerly.

"Did you have a Little Red Book?"

"Yes. The Thoughts of Chairman Mao."

"Did you sing songs?"

"Oh, yes. 'The East Is Red' and the others — all the songs."

"Did you criticize running dogs and people who took the capitalist road?"

"Yes!" Why was he smiling?

"Did you break things in Altay?"

His face fell. He paused a moment and peered at me, looking sheepish, and took a deep breath. He said, "You were in China then, eh?"