“To get up early,” he groaned in pretended agony, “it is the curse put upon man.”
“I thought you were always earlier than I am,” she said.
He yawned loudly for answer and shook himself like a dog and took a piece of brown sesame bread out of his pocket and gnawed it while he found his place on the top of bales of goods. She took her own place when all her women were in their vehicles, and the young engineer sat waiting, his motor hot, and he very neat and clean and his hair smooth.
He looked at her with the smallest of smiles on his lips. “My name is Li Kuo-fan,” he said. “Called Charlie by the Americans.”
“Charlie?” she repeated. “It suits you better than Li Kuo-fan. Let it be Charlie. And I am Mayli, surnamed Wei.”
He nodded without repeating her name and the truck started.
She could see excitement in his long narrow eyes. “I’ve looked for this day,” he said. “I have wanted to travel the Big Road since it was made. This is my first chance. Maybe this is why I came along.”
The road rose ahead very rapidly, and yet its slope was clever and even. It clung to the sides of the steepening hills like a trail.
“See how it follows the footholds on the hills,” he said. “It was made by men who had walked these hills so long that they knew where foot could cling.”
So it had been. Generations of grass cutters had found the most hidden easy path for the feet, and generations of traders, following their pack mules on their way to the West, where they could sell their goods and find new goods to bring back, had searched out the possible ways, as they climbed the mountain ranges of the western wall.
“They asked foreign engineers how long it would take to make this Big Road,” Charlie said. “They considered their tools and said ‘Years.’ But the Chairman said, ‘It must be months. We will use our own tools.’ So it was months.” His eyes swept up the climbing agile road. “I’m proud of it,” he said, and she, looking at him, saw his eyes fill with tears and she was silent.
They passed in the middle of the morning a great hole in the road where yesterday the enemy had bombed it, and there they saw such men and women as had built the road. They were now mending the hole, and it was nearly ready for their vehicles. Who were these people? When the vehicle stopped she came down to rest herself and to tell her women that they too could come down since it would be awhile before they could go on. She saw the rugged blue-clad crowd busy at their task, and she went over to a woman who sat flat on the earth, pounding rock to pieces with a harder, larger rock. The woman was young, but the rock dust had made her face and hair gray, and it clung to her eyebrows, and it was thick on her shoulders. Near her in an old basket a little child slept, under a torn quilt. When Mayli came the woman looked up shyly not sure whether this was a foreigner or what. But Mayli spoke to her politely. “Have you eaten?” she asked. Now this was the salutation of the north, and the woman answered it as a question.
“I have worked all night,” she said. “And I eat while I work.”
Now that she perceived that Mayli spoke her own language a wide bright smile came over her dusty face and her teeth were very white and even.
“And the child?” Mayli asked, astonished.
“He sleeps here well enough,” the woman said laughing.
“But your family?” Mayli asked.
“There is my man and me and the older two, and we all work here on the Big Road,” the woman said with pride. “We helped to make it.”
“Like this?” Mayli asked.
“I pound rock and my man carries earth,” the woman answered. “The girl pounds rock over there, and the boy carries what we pound.” She nodded to a girl child a few yards away, who had stopped to stare at Mayli.
“Which is your man?” Mayli asked.
The woman pointed with her chin at a man digging with his hoe in another place. He filled his bamboo baskets and lifted the pole on his shoulder and carried them and emptied them where the earth had been blown away.
“We live not far from here,” she said, pointing again with her chin, “and when they call for the road to be mended, we lock the door and all come together. Let the enemy blow their holes — we can mend them.” She laughed and again her white teeth shone out of her gray and dusty face, and she began pounding. Men and women, they worked with the unhasting speed to which they were used and in less than an hour more there was a bridge of earth and rock, narrow but firm.
“These are the people to whom I belong,” Charlie said when they went on again.
“Were your parents really like these?” she asked.
His thin lips grew more thin. “The people are my father and mother,” he said shortly. It was all she was ever to know of his forebears.
This day was one like the many that came after it. If she had been timid or afraid, she would have been often afraid, for that road now soared so high that to travel upon it was more like flying than riding upon rock and earth. More than a few of her women were sick and they leaned over the side of the vehicles where they rode and vomited heartily. But they did not complain and they would allow no delay. Once when the road marched along the top of a high ridge between higher mountains, Mayli chanced to look back, and she saw An-lan, her pale face set in terror. Indeed it was a cause for fear to see how the ridge dropped down on both sides of the narrow rough road. She called back, “An-lan, An-lan, can you go on?”
The girl could not answer. Her lips were stiff and when she put out her tongue to wet them her tongue was dry. She could only nod her head.
“All right?” Charlie asked.
“An-lan is green with fear,” Mayli said. “But this is no place to stop.”
“It is not,” he replied, and could not take his eyes for one instant away from the perilous trail.
It was indeed a dangerous spot. At the foot of the precipices on both sides of the road they saw the wrecks of trucks and cars which had slipped and fallen to one side or the other. But the wrecks were surrounded with men who were taking them to pieces and packing the metal into bundles which they could carry. Metal was precious, and at a certain town on one of the days, she found one place where this metal was very precious. This town had for hundreds of years been famous for the making of scissors, and today, in the midst of the war, the scissors makers went on with their trade.
Now they had all stopped here for their noonday meal, and Mayli and her women were very curious to see these scissors. They were wrought with skill and so delicately chased that each woman was anxious to buy a pair, and they were willing to go without their meal if only they could buy a pair of the scissors.
Mayli bought scissors, too. She found a small sharp shining pair upon which butterflies were chased, and though she had the pair Liu Ma had given her she could not resist these. The edges were sharp as little knives.
“How sharp the edges are,” she said to the old man who sold them to her. He had a little wayside shop, open to the street, and he had nothing but scissors for sale.
“It is the foreign steel,” he said. He put on his brass-rimmed spectacles and took up the scissors to explain them to her.
“But where do you get such steel?” she asked.
“How impatient are women!” he said, and he reproved her with his little solemn eyes. “I am about to tell you. The steel is from the trucks that slide over the side of the Big Road. You must know that these trucks are made in the Mei country. The steel there is mixed with many metals and it is very hard — harder than any iron we can make. I wish I knew the secret of those makers of steel. Now because of this we make the best scissors we have ever made, although for hundreds of years our scissors have been famous in these parts.”