22: The Train to Tibet
In the more remote regions of China, where people are not trusted to be orderly, the authorities devise specific drills for boarding the trains. Xining had one of the cruelest I had seen. The Hard Class passengers were lined up in front of the station—perhaps a thousand cold, impatient people in a long, shuffling line. But it was a directionless line. It led nowhere. It was formed in the windy plaza in front of the station, behind an ugly statue depicting a dozen contending minorities. That was appropriate, because the line for the train was composed of the same minorities, contending for seats.
Ten minutes before the train left, a railway guard blew a whistle, and these people snatched up their bales and bundles, and ran. They went flapping two hundred yards across the plaza, panted another hundred around the station, and wheezed down the platform to where the train sat steaming. That race sorted them out, and so there was a gasping free-for-all for the seats, women and children last.
It was a horrible train. But that was not a bad thing. It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places. I had a strong feeling—and I was proved right—that I would be traveling through one of the most beautiful landscapes in China. This train was dirty, scruffy and extremely crowded. Before it set off there was a fight among the passengers, as five heavily laden Tibetans tried to get into the wrong coach. No punches were thrown. It was all push and pull, and some snarling. The Tibetans smilingly resisted. The most explicit sign that it was a bad train was that it ran out of water an hour after it started. No water—for tea more than for washing—is a catastrophe rather than a simple hardship in China. But no one got angry. No one even complained. They inquired in froggy voices, and then took it without further muttering. I was impressed but annoyed. Without hot water this long trip—thirty hours or so—would be unbearable. We were headed for Golmud, in the Qinghai desert, and there the train stopped. I planned to make my own way to Lhasa, with Mr. Fu.
There was no food either. I made noodles in a cup with the last few inches of hot water. People congregated in the dining car, but nothing was served. There was a certain amount of shouting and lots of abuse, but these sounds were drowned by the rattling and clanking steam engine. There were no lights on the train either. I was exasperated, then uncomfortable, and finally bored stiff. I couldn't eat, I couldn't read. I hated the friendly honks of passengers, the yells, the squawking kids. I dug out some of my food and ate it, and wished I had more. The floor was covered with spat-out sunflower seeds.
I was in a compartment with a young man and an old man. The young one smoked, the old one spat. But they were otherwise very courteous. They were also going to Golmud. As we went along in the trembling train it struck me that we were a great distance from what most people would regard as fruitful and bounteous China. We were over the edge, way past the old Chinese frontier, four days at least from civilization and its vast, stinking cities.
The scenery was lovely. The train had risen and snaked through the mountain passes west of Xining and then had traveled down to the cold valleys. The frozen river was a startling chalky white, and it showed up clearly even in twilight, like a road covered with snow, winding through the brown valleys.
"Going to Xizang?" the old man asked, meaning Tibet.
He assumed that no one would go to Golmud to stay, and of course he was right. That was why this was the train to Tibet.
The other passengers were Salars in embroidered jackets, and small brown people wearing stiff little felt bowls on their heads, and Kazakhs in boots and goatskin cloaks, Huis in skullcaps, and enormous Tibetans with ragged rucksacks and shaven heads and greasy robes. They were mostly country folk—shepherds and yak herds and tent dwellers—heading home after their pilgrimage to Taer'si or else their foray at Xining market. There were many soldiers, there were rowdies and spitters and shitters and oddballs in long underwear who loitered in the train's corridors and blew their noses on the curtains.
The mountains nearby had bright, sharp peaks and warm slopes, but beneath them in the shadows, the valleys were frozen and the square mud-walled villages looked like habitations left over from the Neolithic age. They had been built by Mao's pioneers in the 1950s, the Hans who left settled homes and headed west to bring order—as if it needed more order than Buddhism—to Tibet. Night came quickly, a sky of black and blue that was all cloud, and beneath it the brilliant whiteness of the ice on the river.
I lay in bed, cursing the lack of hot tea on this cold train and reading The Hole in the Wall, by Arthur Morrison. It was an old novel about the East End of London in its days of banditry. Leaving Xining, I had asked the young man what those quarries were. He said, "Lime pits." In the novel, lime figures in a hideous way. Blind George, having been assaulted by the bully Dan Ogle, takes his revenge by sneaking into Ogle's room and pressing lime into his eyes to blind him ("the thumbs still drove at the eyes the mess of smoking lime that clung and dripped about Ogle's head ... Blind George gasped, 'Hit me now you's as blind as me!'").
That gave me a nightmare, and its terror arose from my confusing snow and lime—they looked the same—and disfiguring myself as I slipped in it. But it was fitful sleep. The cold in the train increased and it woke me a number of times. In the morning there were mountains in the north, and sandy waste all around. It was the roughest land I had seen in China, wild and stony, and later on, towards noon on this overcast day, there was snow thinly covering the desert—it had an uneven, spilled look—and swatches of snow lay in the ridges of the far-off mountains. The wind blew hard on the ground, and though it was flat, all its boulders were exposed. There was no vegetation at all, no one lived here, and even the railway stations seemed pointlessly positioned, because no one got on or off the train; the stationmaster stood at attention with his green flag—no one else.
There was still no water. It amazed me that no one complained. I spoke to a man in the kitchen who was actually pouring water into a pot. He did not reply. He came over to me, smiled briefly, then slammed the door in my face.
A boy in a smock was selling tickets in the dining car. I asked what the tickets were for. Noodles, he said. So I bought some tickets and lined up at a window leading on to the kitchen. I waited ten minutes, and when nothing happened, I said, "What about the noodles?"
"No more left!" the ticket seller said. He was smiling, but it was an ambiguous smile.
I complained: "I just gave you some money—"
"Come back in an hour."
"I want my noodles or else my money back."
"Later."
It was like prison, or the army, or an old-fashioned nuthouse.
I said, "You are not being very friendly. There is no food, no heat, no water on this train. This is very bad."
The ticket seller was still smiling. I wondered what would happen to me if I hit him. They would probably regard this as a very serious breach of discipline and send me to a far-off place for reeducation; indeed, they would probably send me here, to Qinghai, where they had sent so many other rebels. So I had nothing to fear: I was already in exile.
"Yes. It's bad," the ticket seller said, when he realized I was angry.
"At least get me some water for tea."