Smells of charcoal and grilled mutton waft through the air. A house is being built on the right. Mounds of cement blocks, bricks and sand encroach on the road. Wooden planks laid out for pedestrians lie soaking in a stream of whitewash. Horse-drawn carts, tractors, bicycles and shopping trolleys collide as they jostle past.
At last I reach the committee guesthouse. As I put my bag down half a girl’s face peeps above the counter. ‘We’re full!’ Her eyes linger on me for a while then return to the jumper she is knitting.
‘I’m a journalist. Go and tell your leader to fix me up with a room.’ Then I remember that the introduction letter I forged states that I am travelling to Xinjiang Province. ‘Wait, don’t bother, I’m in a hurry. Tell me, is there another hotel near here?’
‘Yes, there’s the Mighty Fort Hostel on Jianshe Road.’ She is plump with big rosy cheeks. Her yellow padded jacket has a red collar attached.
On my way to the hostel, I take out the introduction letter and replace ‘Xinjiang’ with ‘Gansu’. A cold shiver runs down my spine. If the police find out I have forged Director Zhang’s signature and am travelling under false pretences, they will send me back to Beijing. Last week, when I transferred my registration from my work unit to the local Public Security Bureau, an officer called me in for a talk. He said, ‘The Western District have sent us your personal file. I’ve skimmed through it and in my opinion, you’re not such a bad sort. But we’re not finished with you yet. We could summon you for further interrogation at any time. And don’t think about running away — you wouldn’t last a week.’
The Mighty Fort Hostel has no counter, just a window printed with the words RECEPTION DESK. I knock, twice. A girl emerges from the back room. I don’t believe it. She looks identical to the plump girl I saw just now in the committee guesthouse — only she has a cup of tea in her hand.
‘You look just like the girl in the committee hostel.’
‘Which girl?’
‘I don’t know her name.’
‘Oh, you mean Wang Shuyun.’ A blush rises to her cheeks. I hand her my introduction letter and she buries her head in the registration form. Through the window, I watch her carefully copy out my address and employment registration number. She has forgotten the carbon paper, so she fills the second form by hand. The room has just been swept. Smells of dust and soot drift through the window. The certificates of merit and posters of Chairman Mao stuck on the wall have baked dry in the sun.
‘I expect you don’t get many tourists coming to Jiayuguan.’
‘Tourists come here every day, don’t you know — foreigners too.’ She speaks in a local dialect, it is a little hard to understand.
‘I don’t have time to go to my room, can you look after my bag? I would like to see the fort before dark.’
‘There’s a two yuan deposit,’ she says, putting down a thermos flask and a large ring of keys.
‘Deposit for what?’
‘The room comes with pillow covers, tea cups and a thermos flask.’
‘I’ve never had to pay a deposit before.’
‘We’ve joined the Contract System now. If a guest steals from the rooms, it’s deducted from our salaries.’
‘And what if they don’t steal?’ I smile, but her expression remains wooden.
‘It’s only two yuan, you’ll get it back. You city folk are so tightfisted.’ She looks upset. As I walk out I notice the plaque on the door says, ‘Mighty Fort Hostel, Contractors: Big World Tourist Company, Subdivision of Jiayuguan Transport Department.’
The fort is closed by the time I arrive. It rises from the stony plain, guarding a pass between the Qilian mountains and the Mazong range. In the late sun the pale yellow ramparts look as though they have just sprouted from the ground. I look east and see the dry bricks of the Great Wall snake along a bare valley and disappear over the faint hills at the horizon. From there it will continue five thousand kilometres to Beijing and finally plunge into the Yellow Sea at Shanhaiguan, sealing China from the outside world. When my friend the explorer Liu Yu heard a group of foreigners were planning to follow the Wall from end to end, he resolved to beat them to it. ‘We must not let foreigners be the first to walk the Great Wall. It would bring disgrace to the entire Chinese race,’ he wrote to me in a letter from Xinjiang. Last year, just as the foreigners’ preparatory team landed in Beijing, Liu Yu set off from this fort, determined to march to Shanhaiguan for the greater glory of the Chinese people. Occasionally I see articles in the newspapers reporting on his progress.
My home lies in that direction. I turn round and look the other way.
The fort marks an ancient limit of the Chinese Empire. Everything west of here was called ‘Guanwai’, the land beyond the fort. Silk Road merchants travelling from the imperial court of Xian had to cross this forbidding waste on their journeys to Persia and Rome. Even today, the west is a place of banishment, populated by political prisoners, descendants of Turkic migrants, and the ghosts of buried cities. As I pass through the fort’s western Gate of Hell, the poem of a Tang Dynasty exile comes to mind:
Leaving Jiayuguan fort, tears rolling from my eyes, The stony desert ahead, the Gate of Hell behind.
Unlike the poet, I do not feel sad standing here. In fact, I feel strangely at peace. Perhaps because the fort is dry and weather-beaten, or because it stands on an empty plain, its walls do not seem as oppressive as the ones that surrounded me in Beijing. On the contrary, they look gentle and reassuring.
I climb to the top of a bare mound and see the gravel desert project endlessly into the west. On my right, the Great Wall crumbles to its end in the foothills of the Mazong. On my left, the silver Qilian peaks are still hooked to the blue sky. As the sun shimmers across them, specks of light scatter the waste like notes of a heavenly score. A marsh spreads to the south, its waters and reeds rippling in the wind. I lie flat on my back. A cool wind blows a white cloud away to reveal a thin strip of moon. I dig my fingers into the cold earth and whisper: I’m here, at last, and everything is beautiful.
When the sky turns red, I stand up and glance at my watch. Nine o’clock. The hotel doors close at eleven. An eagle cries out as it cuts through the sunset. Back at the fort I see an old couple painting the sky. They have white hair. The old man’s wispy beard blows in the wind. I take out my camera to photograph the pink clouds. A girl walks over from Swallow Cry Wall. She too has a camera in her hand.
‘Are you a photographer?’ she asks.
‘Yes.’
‘How interesting! My name is Su Jin. The couple over there are painters. They’re from Japan.’ I look at the old man with the white beard and the picture on the easel in front of him: fort on one side, eagles on the other, a blood-red sunset in between.
‘Are you their tour guide?’ I ask.
‘Yes, how can you tell?’
‘You look like one, that’s all.’ I hesitate between continuing the conversation and walking away, then I think of the long walk back to the hotel. ‘You came by car, I suppose?’
‘Yes, it will be here in a minute. We’ll give you a lift if you like.’
We walk back to Swallow Cry Wall. I stretch out my hand and stroke the rough surface. It is as hard and dry as tree bark.
‘Give it a slap. Go on — hit it, hit it!’ she shouts, smacking the stone. ‘Does it sound like a shrieking swallow to you?’
I look up and the wall turns black, as it does in the legend when the father swallow crashes into it on his flight home. The story goes that the mother swallow waiting for him in the nest high above cries out day and night, yearning for his return, until one day her breath gives out and she falls to her death.