I woke hungry and decided to "register" for breakfast. For about twenty cents I bought a breakfast coupon. I was told to report at seven-thirty. I did as I was told. On the dot of seven-thirty the dining car filled with people, who sat rather impatiently. A girl in a nightcap and apron went through the car with a tray, plonking bowls down. There was a sudden hush; a silence; and then a tremendous slurping. The chopsticks clicked like knitting needles for a minute or so, and then the people stood and shoved their chairs back and went away. That was breakfast.
Towards midmorning, the Yellow River widened in the cheesey gorge, and we arrived at Lanzhou. I had been here before; I had no desire to stop. I bought some peanuts to eat and walked along the platform while the locomotive's boilers were filled with fresh water. I noticed that most of the people got out at Lanzhou, and very few boarded. It had rained slightly. Chinese rain often made a city look filthier and sometimes much dustier. It had had that effect on Lanzhou, which looked very dismal and rather parched after the sprinkle. The steam engine was reconnected, and we set off again, slowly, with many stops on the way.
After about fifty miles we entered the province of Qinghai. "There is nothing in Qinghai," the Chinese had told me, which gave me an appetite for the place. We were soon among big smooth mountains of mud—great heaps and stacks of hard-packed dirt. It had the look of an endless dump. It was the most infertile place I had seen in China—less fertile than Inner Mongolia, more arid even than the Turfan depression and the ravines of Gansu. The river, which seemed to have the name "the Yellow Water," looked poisonous, so the water was not a source of life; it was another way of ridding the landscape of vegetation.
But people had figured a way of living here. They had made bamboo frames and stretched plastic sheeting over them. Inside these crude greenhouses they grew vegetables. The only produce in Qinghai is grown in these things. At night the people cover them with straw mats because it is below freezing. The daytime sun warms the plants through the plastic. In ditches I could see ice, even though it was noon.
The people were so poor here they could not afford to feed donkeys or buffalos. They plowed, using two people to pull the plow and one to guide it. There they were, in the middle of the whirling dust, dragging the thing. It was the first time in my life I had seen human beings pulling a plow. They also pulled carts and wagons in Qinghai, and had totally replaced animal labor with their own. I had the impression that after the field was plowed a system of plastic greenhouses was erected over the furrows.
The mountains and heaps of mud reddened, grew brown and then gray, and became clawed with eroded gullies; and then they became rocky, and stonier. But they never looked less barren. It was odd, then, to see people preparing the ground for crops—digging, plowing, raking; and to see lives being lived—schoolkids frolicking in the playground under the red flag; other kids carrying water in buckets and picking coal out of the rubble. And in the middle of nowhere I saw a man strolling along and smiling, with a monkey skittering on a leash.
The settlements were clusters of square, squat houses with mud-walled courtyards. Walls were the rule here. And there was some irrigation, some vegetable gardens exposed to the wind and weather. But the clearest impression I had, early on in Qinghai, was of every village looking like a prison farm. Indeed, that is how many of them started out, with the villagers sent to Qinghai as punishment. They were to be reformed through labor, as the saying went, and turned from prisoners into pioneers.
The station signs were written in three scripts—Chinese, Mongolian and Tibetan. I had no idea how far we had come. We were traveling very slowly still. The province was bigger than the whole of Europe, but it was empty. The trees were stark and dead, like symbols of trees, the six lines that a child might draw with a crayon. The ground was bare, the houses and mountains brown, the river gray and the ice at its edges was filthy. The valley was twenty miles wide. Having seen Xinjiang, I suspected that these fields might be green in the summer and that it might not be the dreary place it seemed. But it was odd to be in this brown and lifeless world, where there is nothing visible that can be eaten. It looked like a dead planet. This is the sort of landscape that frightens visitors to China—frightens the Chinese, too. To the Chinese this was not part of the world: it was the edge of it, so it was nothing.
By talking to the other passengers I established that the mountains to the north were the Dabanshan. Gansu was on the other side. Cave dwellers inhabited some of those mountainsides, and in some cases the caves were elaborate, with windows and doors and crude plumbing. I could see on some of them a sort of superstructure protruding, a balcony which made a facade.
The train was creaking along, gaining altitude. We were now at about 7000 feet—it was chilly, the air was thin, the wind was strong. In the cliffs above the track there were caves, an opening on every cliff face, with its own shelf and precarious stairs cut into the rock. Some cave dwellers were sitting in the sunshine, others hanging laundry, hacking at troughlike gardens that seemed magnetized to the mountainside. They were cooking, too. Why think of this as a mountain when you could just as easily think of it as a tenement? That wasn't a cliff—it was the west wing, and that summit was a penthouse. There was a whole world of troglodytes here in Qinghai.
Only its altitude made Xining breathtaking. In other respects it looked like what it was, a frontier town: square brown buildings on straight streets, surrounded by big brown hills. All the water on the creeks and streams had turned to ice. It was an ugly, friendly place, and its bantering people had chafed red cheeks, like bruised peaches. Its terrible weather gave it drama. Its rain was black and very cold. But it did not rain long. Most of the time it was notoriously dry—too arid for growing vegetables outside the plastic greenhouses. Snow also fell, in big, wet plopping flakes. And the wind had torn off all the topsoil. Inside of a week I experienced all those conditions—rain, dust storms, blinding sunlight and snow. If I climbed stairs too quickly, I had to stop and get my breath. I developed a plodding way of walking that enabled me to keep going. There were Muslims all over town, wearing a sort of chef's cap and side-whiskers, and there were also spitting Hans, and Tibetans who favored cowboy hats and frock coats.
"What's that music?" I asked the driver, as we traveled to the hotel from the station.
The driver said nothing, but his pal said, "Beethoven."
"Beethoven," the driver said. "I like Beethoven."
The driver's name was Mr. Fu. He said he could drive me to Tibet. It would be about five days to Lhasa, through the Qinghai desert and then into the mountains. Sleep in army camps on the way. How about it?
I said I was very interested.
Mr. Li, his pal, said, "I think it's Symphony Number Two."
"Isn't it Six—the Pastorale?"
Mr. Li laughed. He had yellow teeth. His laugh simply meant Wrong! It was a barklike noise. He said, "The Pastorale goes dum-dum-dee-dee-dum. No, this isn't Number Two. I know Two, Five, Six, Seven and Nine. This isn't a symphony. It is an overture."
Mr. Fu went fossicking in his glove compartment. He brought out the cassette holder and showed us. It was the Coriolan Overture. Mr. Fu said it was a Beethoven work he particularly liked.
"This is the best hotel in Xining," Mr. Fu said.
Mr. Li laughed in a stern correcting way. "This is the only hotel in Xining."
This hotel reminded me of something I could not quite place—a building I had known in the distant past. It had been built by the Russians, and it retained its fiftyish look. It was very musty, it was mildewed. Why did all Chinese carpets stink with decay? I hated the hotel hours. Dinner at six, no hot water until eight at night. The room girl kept the keys. The toilet didn't flush until you emptied two buckets of water into it—and that bucket was the wastebasket.