Ma Jian - Red Dust

At Zhongwei town, cold winds swept sheets of newspaper along the wide empty streets. The Yellow River nearby blocked the southern advance of the Tengger Desert. Its waters seemed to have aged on their journey from Qinghai.

In early December, I walked through the Helan range and saw some Neolithic paintings in the caves above. The valley floors were strewn with fallen rocks which local peasants used to build houses and sheep pens. Trees sprouted from the stones. Peasants, children and mountain goats watched me from rocky outcrops. Usually all they saw was the empty road that cuts across the waste. Tombs of the Western Xia Kingdom rose from the earth like huge coal heaps. It is believed the kingdom built its capital nearby in the lee of the mountains, and was destroyed in the thirteenth century by the ferocious cavalry of Genghis Khan.

At Yinchuan I bought a face mask, some shoelaces and a pair of gloves, and met up with two friends of Yao Lu. Their breaths reeked of alcohol.

On 10 December I reached Baotou, the largest city of Inner Mongolia. I had lunch with Chairman Xu of the local literary society. He fed me noodles and dried meat and asked me if I had a destination in mind. I said, ‘My beginning and end are just points on the road. It is the journey itself that matters.’ He said he had longed to travel as a young man, but whenever he ventured beyond a ten-kilometre radius the militia would always drag him back home. In the afternoon he walked me across Yellow River Bridge. I glanced back at the bald head he had forgotten to cover, and wished I had spoken with him longer. He will probably spend the rest of his life inside the walls of that small staff compound.

South of Baotou lay a vast, dry wilderness. Villages scattered the wastes like sheep dung.

I spent the night in Dongsheng with a friend of Chairman Xu, who gave me a pair of padded shoes and a woollen scarf. I hitched a ride the next morning, but a few hours into the journey discovered the truck was going the wrong way, so I jumped off and decided to cut across the Ordos Desert to my goal, Ejin Horo Qi. It looked no further than thirty kilometres on the map, the land seemed reassuringly flat — I could even see some shacks in the distance. So I checked my compass and walked into the wastes.

The grass and sheep dung disappeared and soon there were no more traces of man or beast.

At noon, I was walking through sand dunes. They were as soft as a woman’s breast. Rosy halos hovered at each peak. I sat down to rest and sank my hands into the sand. The cold grains slipped through my fingers like water.

When dusk fell a biting wind blew up and my eyes filled with sand. I was glad that I had the padded shoes to keep my feet warm. I walked all through the night, but by the close of the next day I still had not reached the road. I began to panic. I had walked over fifty kilometres by now. It dawned on me that my compass must have broken. I started racing to every clump of grass, like a madman, screaming and shouting, telling myself I should never have travelled north. When the sun sank again, I ran towards it, yearning for it to take me away.

At night the desert was completely silent. I heard a plane pass overhead and imagined all the people sitting comfortably inside it.

By the third day I was afraid I was losing my mind. I forgot which side of the sun to walk towards. I had to think carefully before each step as I walked the trackless plain. The more freedom you have to chose your path, the harder the journey is. I talked to myself, decided on a course and committed it to paper. But three hours later, I still had no idea where I was. When I grew thirsty, I cupped a plastic bag over the sand and licked the condensation that collected inside. I threw away my water filter and books, then took a photograph of myself so that the person who discovered my bones would know who they had belonged to. My cold body was drying out. I knew it was futile to keep walking because when you are lost, there is nowhere to go. I was on the verge of collapse, but I talked myself forward and begged my legs to keep moving. Images turned through my head. I saw the moon above the desert, a bottle of beer on a friend’s table, the lid to a fountain pen I lost twenty years ago. Sometimes I saw Xi Ping’s chapped lips or a bowl of pork dumplings. But all the time my mind interrupted and said: keep walking, stop and you will die.

In the afternoon I woke by the side of a road. The man who had dragged me there had given me a swig of water before he left.

The restaurant’s metal signpost rattles in the wind. I take a swig of milk tea, press my hand on the map and draw a large red cross through Ordos Desert.

I am tired of the dry plains. The land is so flat up here it can hold onto nothing, not even the wind. After a while you lose track of who you are and long to be squeezed inside the walls of a narrow valley.

Last week I reached Ejin Horo Qi at last and spent two days with the gatekeeper of Genghis Khan’s tomb. The mausoleum was built in the 1950s to house what are believed to be the ashes of the dead Khan. A group of Mongolian pilgrims arrived and performed a ceremony in honour of their departed chief. The Chinese Mongolians wore blue army coats, their brothers from Outer Mongolia wore red robes and leather boots. The pilgrims roasted a sheep and shared the meat out. Everyone got some except me, so in the end the gatekeeper took pity on me and gave me some of his. Four white steeds were tethered outside the tomb in memory of the Khan’s favourite horses. Old Sun’s talisman must have protected me in the desert. When he placed it around my neck he said, ‘Your fortune is good. Do not travel north. If you meet with trouble a gentleman will save you.’ I wish I knew the name of the peasant who rescued me.

The gale outside has blown everything from the road except the houses and the two pool tables. I feel weak and tired, but the wind is north-easterly, so at least it will be behind me as I walk.

I fold up the map, fill my water bottle and pull up my face mask. Then I walk out and head east to the borders of Shaanxi Province.

When I step onto the high plateau of northern Shaanxi I feel I am walking towards my ancestors’ heart. This land covered by fine dust blown from the Gobi Desert is the cradle of Chinese civilisation. The fertile banks of the Yellow River here have been cultivated for over eight thousand years. I have come in search of my roots. The frostbite on my feet burns with each step, so I shuffle rather than tread. My first destination is Hequ village, where I have heard the Yellow River is particularly wide.

I go straight to the banks when I arrive. This is how I imagined the Yellow River to be: a vast landscape of mud charging through a yellow ravine. The water near the bank is frozen solid. Torrents stand motionless and boulders of ice crash silently into each other, caught mid-flow. The huts on the far bank look like fine grains of sand.

I walk south through dry yellow hills. Fierce winds from the desert have scraped the slopes bare. Peasants live huddled in caves that honeycomb the soft cliffs. At a dirty street stall in Shenmu I eat a bowl of noodles and forget to chew a precautionary clove of garlic, and spend the next two days in bed with griping stomach pains. The frostbite on my ear has started to suppurate.

On the way to Yulin town, I see fragments of the Great Wall snake over the terraced hills on the right. The sky looks very blue against the yellow slopes. In the valley, I see stacks of dry hay and dead, seedless sunflowers bending on the marge of a frosty field. Only one side of the road is tarred, the other side is a rocky track. A truck approaches from behind. In the back stands a group of peasants with large red drums tied to their waists. The truck shakes so much as it passes that the faces are a blur.