Chengdu platform, 8:30 am, awaiting departure for 24-hour trip to Kunming, air filled with ferocious popular Chinese music, loudspeaker announcements, accordion-accompanied Hawaiian melodies. Exhausted from two-day touristic ordeal, author takes upper bunk for morning nap.
11:30 am, seated with companion in otherwise patron-less dining car. Atop white tablecloth, in ceramic vase, a potted plant, about whose base a little jar for soy sauce, a ceramic dish for using it, canisters for chocolate drink and rice wine. At compartment’s end, carved out of shell, a mountain landscape seen from over a wall.
The car smells half of train, half of bad restaurant. A portly employee in tan shirt, apron bound about his waist, gestures to several just-arrived patrons, as they open Styrofoam containers and begin to dig with chopsticks at congealed lumps of rice. Lighting up a cigarette, employee strides the length of the car to engage a female attendant in conversation. From beneath a table she is pulling lunch boxes out of a plastic sack.
Author arises, approaches attendant, asks politely for two of the Styrofoam containers. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says. Across the table from her sits a cook with a cigarette; squinting to keep smoke from his eyes, he also declines to help. Quickly both resume their loud conversation. Reaching under the table himself, author retrieves two containers, walks off, as two more kitchen attendants stare at the foreigner. Having finished lunch, companion approaches personnel, asks what should be done with empty containers. ”Throw them out the window,” says the cook.
Returning to bunk for another nap, author awakens at 2:00 pm. It has not stopped drizzling all day long. From the capital’s outskirts we have passed into a fertile flatland, thence into mountainous terrain. High up the cliffs that border a small river we enter a tunnel. No sooner have we exited than we enter a second. Exiting again, we glimpse a fleeting cliff-face, only to enter another tunnel. Exiting once more, we look across a narrow gorge onto a grassy mountainside. Cows on the precipitous slope balance themselves precariously. High overhead, romantically shrouded in cloud, classical peaks arise, their intervals swathed in improbable atmospheric effects.
Today we will travel through the southwestern quadrant of Sichuan to the border of Xikang, the southeastern tip of which we will cross during the night. When we awaken in the morning we will be in Yunnan, China’s southernmost province. A kingdom of indigenous ethnic diversity, it borders on Vietnam, Laos, Burma, Nepal.
We have entered a long tunnel: ten seconds, twenty, thirty and running. A minute goes by; we have still not seen the end of it. Forty per cent of the route from Chengdu to Kunming, says our guidebook, is taken up with tunnels and bridges – 427 tunnels, 653 bridges. We cross the broad surface of a river, its muddy water dappled with unrelenting drizzle. The construction of this route, completed but a generation ago, was a truly heroic feat. A small barge with six passengers, four of them holding open umbrellas, pushes off from shore. Many met their death in the process. From high above, the umbrellas look like black mushrooms. Quickly the gorge narrows.
We have stopped within a tunnel cut through a nearly vertical cliff face. We start up again, our own distant horn wailing. We have slowed for a scheduled stop; as we emerge, the track is faced with a picket fence fronting a red brick station. Behind it a concrete staircase winds up the mountainside to a village of grey, red-roofed houses, their doorways bracketed with whitewashed pilasters. Higher still, amid steadily steeper sandstone slabs, sit little cornfields, leafy vegetable patches.
We have reached a widening of the tracks and are passing a green freight train, at rest on a siding. The open door of a boxcar shows signs of an earlier cargo of rice. The train is a long one: tankers, containers, two yellow bulldozers tied on a flatbed. All are being drizzled on. Water drips from tarpaulins laid over cars already rusted.
Leaving behind the precincts of a larger village, we enter the sooty ambiance of another tunnel. As its sides rush past the open window, The cool, damp air is faintly noxious. Exiting, we look up into a yet More primitive gorge. Streaked in black, its beige moss-overgrown cliff-sides converge from high above on its boulder-strewn stream. We progress through yet higher elevations, at length descending to a broader, muddier river. Smoke rises from houses visible further up a rain-drenched valley. A wind commences, whipping the steady downpour into rivulets on the window pane. Along the banks of a nearly depleted tributary sit blackened logs.
In quick succession we enter several tunnels. Exiting the last, we find ourselves descended again to the river’s level. Through bank-side deciduous trees we glimpse its full surface, as it flows through a mild landscape of gentle slopes. Grey green dapples the darker green of the region. The local mood is pensive, dampened but spacious. Low-lying clouds obscure the hilly contours.
We enter into another long tunnel, emerging to view a small skiff as it streaks the river’s raindrop-patterned surface. Here we turn aside to follow a smaller stream. Abruptly it loses its strength. Within but a few hundred yards it has trickled out altogether. Quickly we diverge from its course to enter another tunnel, our passage through it seemingly endless, nothing to observe but vacancy. At last we emerge in sight of a trestle, over which we are soon to pass. Beneath it float logs at random intervals.
We have reached the confluence of two substantial streams, the space between riverbank and railway track grown broad enough to permit the construction of buildings. Across the river figures bearing wicker baskets hasten to catch a ferry.
As we enter a tunnel, author glances ahead to glimpse the aperture of another, into which we will enter after exiting the first. Like the first, it too is a long one, no exit yet visible. Midway through, a crevice opens, within which author glimpses a red stream gushing downward. Exiting, we confront a large factory, its yards, workstations and dormitories spread out along the river bank. Though the town is of some consequence, we nonetheless swiftly traverse it. Red rail cars, their compartments brimming with coal, border the tracks at its outskirts. On a bridge suspended across the river we join pedestrians, factory workers trudging homeward.
Hugging a bend of the river, we leave the next town behind, only to see that a portion of it still lies ahead. Before we can reach the outlying district, we enter another tunnel. Into the passenger compartment’s semi-darkness come two girls, one in a pink, the other a yellow, blouse. The two doors between the compartments slam shut. This is another long tunnel. Two more doors open. Will it bypass the town altogether? Two more doors slam shut. Exiting the tunnel, we see that our train has left the town behind, though industrial flames continue to flare on up the gorge. As the train threads its way through the next, narrow S-curve, it plunges into another tunnel. Doors slamming behind them, the two girls reenter. Between them they bear a heavy sack.
Still exhausted, kidney throbbing from a week’s enforced overindulgence, author takes yet another nap, arising at 4:00 o’clock to observe the Emei River, its waters roiling beneath us. As the gorge deepens, we pass quickly from tunnel to tunnel, the dark sockets of author’s eyes reflected on the surface of the darkened coach window. We exit a long tunnel into the light, only to have our way obscured by the furious flow of smoke issuing from two low stacks.
Once past this industrial buildup, we gaze out onto a huge, symmetrical mountain. Rising supremely, its unified contour is unlike any man-made object. At its base five peasants huddle beneath two umbrellas. One mountain mass gives way to another. At the base of the second spreads a village of twenty or thirty grey stone dwellings.
We have entered another tunnel. As we exit, the river has widened. The two girls in pink and yellow, joined by a teen aged boy, enter and exit the corridor. Together we all enter another tunnel. With nothing else to do, author swats an enormous mosquito. The pink girl returns, the compartment door slamming behind her. We have entered a second tunnel. Two minutes go by. The yellow girl returns. Another minute and the teenage boy returns. It has been four minutes since we entered the tunnel. Gradually patches of light appear on its walls. As we decelerate, a slight change in sound signals the engine’s exit. Suddenly we too are out in the light again, facing the tallest gorge we have yet encountered.
Within five seconds we plunge into darkness again. So long is this next obfuscation that author takes a seat to face inward. Beside him, in magenta top, black pants, white arched shoes, sits a sixteen-year-old girl, a Japanese look about her. Intently she works at arranging the paper petals of a yellow flower. A door opens. Her mother appears, addressing the girl in Mandarin.
After a snack of more semi-edible fare, author returns to observe the passing scene. We emerge from a tunnel and cross the river. Beneath us spread out rice fields, terraced in twenty progressively rising planes, their colors varied according to the ripeness of the crop. Exiting from another tunnel, we glimpse the gorge over a field of grasses. Waterfalls flutter down the opposite wall-face. We enter another long tunnel to reemerge at a much greater elevation, from which we gain a spectacular view of the whole gorge, its peaks fringed with white wispy clouds. Almost at once we plunge back into yet another tunnel and on out into a desolate landscape. A single yellow bus bumps along a narrow road, as above it, on a pathway, half a dozen geese, brilliant against a magnificent grey backdrop, inch their way in the opposite direction.
It is late afternoon. As we have followed the river’s course for the past two hours, we have reached an even greater elevation. Under leaden skies the flood has grown more turbulent, the people along its banks more primitive. A single figure clad in blue, summer astrakhan atop his head, looks down from a brick shed onto the passing train.
*
Author, kidney ailment kicking in, is nonetheless up at dawn to record the rather undistinguished landscape of northern Yunnan. Intermittently conquered and returned to autonomy, the region has long been cut off from the rest of China. We have stopped at a large station, where rain has begun to fall in earnest. Puddles form on a concrete sidewalk strewn with pieces of paper, peanut shells, apple cores. In addition to Chinese characters and alphabetic letters, its name is rendered in a tribal script. Within a red-painted door-frame stand two aboriginal girls.
We are underway again. The river, alternately churning and drifting, has turned to a reddish mudflow. For an hour we have been climbing. Slowing to twenty miles an hour, we ascend through a hilly terrain of earth red buildings mired in red earth. Having crested a hill, we begin a descent into a mellower landscape. We pick up speed, plummeting down to a plain, where we follow the course of a man- made irrigation trench. Through an open window the fresh morning air is tinged with the odor of conifers. Along a bicycled road villages begin to increase in size, as we approach the outskirts of Kunming.