Finally it became dark. The sun ceased tormenting scorched heads, but the plain remained just as hot. The guards drove their herd through a narrow doorway into a stone enclosure. The blindfolds were removed, and we could see the stars above us. On the top of the wall stood the food bowls, too high to reach, and after an hour a hand passed them down to us, moving quickly — which meant that the man doing it was walking upright. So the prison was a half-sunken pit; on the outside one could walk at ground level, and escape, but where to?
Everyone remained lying down and slept heavily, sometimes groaning. Many could not stand the following day, and they were left where they lay. The day was less hot, the ground softer and undulating. Some could smell that a great expanse of water was approaching. We approached it at about midday, and waded in it to cool down, but as for quenching our thirst it was a disappointment: the water was brackish, almost salt. In the evening we stopped in the middle of the plain. A prison was unnecessary now, since all of us stayed lying where we had been allowed to slump down.
The same applied the following morning when we struck camp. Those who could still walk were blindfolded again. The ground remained flat, but many of us stumbled over our own feet. By midday people were no longer prodded till they stood up. They were allowed to get up calmly. It was frightening to be left alone in this way. I managed to wrench off the blindfold. In the middle of the bleakest desert we had been left to our fate. In the far distance was a black strip, moving as slowly as a caterpillar: the Chinese escort returning. Scattered across the plain, people were wandering round in circles, and every so often one would fall and not get up again. I tried to yell and call a few of them together, but my voice could not escape my parched throat.
I went over to the closest one, untied his blindfold and told him we were free. He no longer understood me, sat down and stared vacantly around him. I sat down too, simply to await death. It seemed horrific to me to lie there on the plain and be eaten by vultures. My hands started digging a hole, but did not go very deep.
At night a cool wind crossed the plain, on its way to the sea. It passed over the down-hearted, cooling their bodies, and driving away death, which was sitting ready in the shape of vulture to start the process of decomposition.
Nevertheless I woke, very early, as the sun was just poking its head above the horizon, and a shadow fell across my feet; I saw the stone casting it. It was a hexagonal chunk of basalt. There seemed to be some characters on it. But I knew that the Chinese, as children, have a mania for writing on everything. So why not on this stone? But underneath I saw Latin characters too. So people of my race had once been in this desert. They had had the energy to carve letters on a stone. One doesn’t do that at death’s door — or had it been their own tombstone? It was a language I could not read. The letters had almost worn away.
It was midday, and the stone was a crude sundial, so that I could determine a direction, and I headed south. In order to get back to Hong Kong? I scarcely dared hope, but something compelled me to go south. Perhaps also because in that way when I set off my injured left cheek and neck stayed facing west, in the shade. Towards evening the following day I saw a black dot on the horizon, and approaching it, saw another such stone — so that I was on a path that had been trod before. I felt an impulse to depart from it, since I had no desire to tread in long erased footprints. But a hundred metres farther on there was some water in a hole, brackish, murky water, yet not undrinkable for someone who has endured thirst for three days. I drank and felt sleepy, but did not want to sleep here, and went on till I could go no farther.
My scorched skull was pounding, and my hair was thinning. Among Europeans, only the Portuguese can stand the tropical sun on their bare heads with impunity. My consciousness shrank in my hot head, as if my brains were being boiled and my life was exiting through my cracked skin. But I wanted to be free. Now, here, in the greatest kingdom on earth, far from the hated sea, I was lost; no one at all still thought of me or tried to penetrate the depth of my soul. A man cannot live without reason, without disasters, without desire and antipathy. Perhaps, though, I needed to be here for something, and then at any rate I would stay alive. But first sleep, and somewhere cool. Another mile, then I would find it, or else death.
Another grave; I used to skirt them, afraid that something was lying in wait for me. But now it was different, a spot where there was at least shade and perhaps some coolness. I walked round it. It was not a grave like so many others, though the womb shape was retained. The entrance was lined with green and blue porcelain tiles, which in the arid wasteland had the effect of splendid flowers. The grave was almost intact. Around it stood three crudely carved stone horses up to their bellies in the sand. I sat on the saddle of one of the horses, and jumped off again — perhaps I had already gone mad; sitting on a horse here, amid the white heat, in the harsh red and yellow desert, beneath the clear blue sky, like a child on a roundabout, that was a good way of doing so.
The grave seemed to me a more appropriate resting place. It was so tall and the smooth, dark stones of the entrance were inviting. The world rejected me. I crawled into the grave without revulsion. It was cool inside, and I pushed the dried bones aside. In the darkness I bumped into a funerary urn. Perhaps there was something still in it — indeed there was liquid, but I dared not drink it though my thirst was pressing.
Was this not a safe hiding place from the misadventures that threatened me, such as the great empire itself within its walls and mountain chains, protected against everything, the invasions of barbarians, the present and the disturbances that will dislocate and shatter the whole world in the future, when its forces are unleashed and descend upon the kingdom? The grave was the gateway through which I could leave my own life and enter the past. I raised my head and looked through the opening, my eye lit on a hexagonal stone, the kind I had seen before. I had to leave the grave again, the deep ever-silent past in which I did not yet belong, and I focused on that stone from the recent past in order to escape from my own time.
I took a few determined steps, but the desert was surging like an ocean, and I thought I saw a piece of driftwood floating, or was it a shipwrecked mariner, or was it me? No, I was standing here, but I could see myself walking in the distance, coming towards me, and I tried to run away from myself, but I could not: the two people — which of whom I was I no longer knew — would merge. Then the wind began to roar with swelling volume, the sky let loose a long scream, and I fell and nearby the ghost fell too.
I awoke in a yellow light, not the sun’s: I had never seen the moon so full. I tried to recover the thread of my memories, but everywhere I encountered confusion. Had we not just been by a larger stretch of water than the narrow pond here — had it dried out so much? Surely I could not have slept for more than a few days.