Twenty-four

ANNA HAD NEVER SEEN rain like the torrential rain that streamed past her now. A vertical drop, like a waterfall. It was dark, and there were no lights but the reflection of the rain in the pools that stretched out in front of her. Tiered pools; those in front of her curved as they followed the edge of a hill. Those beyond in rows.

It was like looking at the seating of an open-air stadium, an auditorium. The curves played back the echoing drumming of the water. The country—a country with no lights, no roads—was rippling away from her; and then she solved the conundrum of the shapes around her. These were some kind of fields. Fields built into slopes, over one another like green shelves. Green shelves filled with the pouring rain. So much rain that the crops were almost flooded, and only the merest tip of the rice shoots showed in the water, so that the shelved ranks of rain-filled pools had a faint green fluorescence.

Behind her, in the darkness, she heard noises.

A group of men—twenty or more—were coming along the track at the edge of the field. They walked with dogged purpose, their heads down, each man carrying a pole across his shoulders from which woven baskets hung. The baskets were drenched, the men were drenched, their feet bare in the mud and rain except for the slip of leather sole fastened around the ankle, with a narrow strip passing between the toes. They wore caps of dark cloth pulled tight across the forehead.

In the center of the group was, incongruous in this storm, an empty sedan chair, with a curved roof. Inside it was some sort of luggage, a banded box, and a gun case. The men who carried the poles of the chair slithered in the rain, and the chair rocked from side to side.

“Anna,” said a voice. “Can you see…”

She turned her head, trying to find who had spoken to her. Threads of vanishing sound, the merest breath. Echo within echo.

She looked back to the fields.

The men might have been starving, their bodies were so narrow, their wrists and hands so thin. Long tunics stuck to the flesh like second skins, revealing small shoulders, and the ridges of vertebrae. They did not speak; they walked with a concentrated rhythm, without comment, without raising their eyes.

At the back of the group came a taller man. He wore what might have been European clothes, although it was hard to tell in the shadows and the rain. A broad-brimmed hat was pulled down over his face. He had a long dark coat, and breeches, and boots. Anna stared at the boots as he walked within ten feet of her, and realized that she had nothing at all on her own feet. She was naked, except for a cotton gown that reached to her knees.

But she was not cold, and the rain had not touched her.

“Anna,” the voice repeated. “Listen to me. Follow this road.”

And this time it was inside her body, reverberating in her hand, the very tips of her fingers, as if the syllables were solid, as if she could touch them. She frowned. There was no road; only the rain.

And then, out of the darkness came the shape of a village.

Its small street, a tunnel under the overhanging and almost touching eaves of the houses, was a river of flowing mud. To the left-hand side was a limestone wall, and, below it, the roughest kind of footpath, raised up from the street with uncut and unfinished slabs crossing piles of stones. One by one, the men climbed onto the lower wall, and negotiated the slabs. Only then did Anna notice the two dogs, two large liver-and-white spaniels, saturated and silent, threading their way between the feet of the men.

Somewhere in this greater gloom of touching roofs, a door was opened. The men stopped on the slab walkway; as Anna reached them she put her hand to her mouth. Mixed with the mud of the street was human sewage. The Chinese porters were leaning against the wall, philosophical about the stench, or immune to it. In any case, the rain was fast and acting as a sluice; she saw one man rest his head on the limestone and look upward, so that the rain streamed down his face and neck.

Voices were raised along the street. She edged past the men and looked down into the house. It was full of smoke from a fire in the center of the floor, and it was also crammed with people. Children crowded to the front. The European had taken off his coat and hat and flung them over the arms of the Chinese boy who had come in the house with him, and who was speaking to the owner. Calmly, the taller man looked around him. His bearded face was broad, his eyes small and deep-set, and his skin was sallow, with almost a jaundiced tinge.

An argument began to break out. The porters came through the door, bowed under their burdens, pushing and shoving to gain entry. A wail of protest went up; another set of doors, in the rear of the room, was opened, and those who had already been in the house were forced backward, into the animal quarters. His expression unperturbed, the white man sat down closest to the fire.

She inhaled the smoke; it began to choke her.

With every breath, the room receded.

It seemed to her that she slept, although she had no grasp of time. In her sleep, she heard the mechanical pumping of a machine. A heart that was not a heart. An intake of breath without life. There was a liquid in her veins that was not blood. It was too icy. She tried to see herself, and saw only a tissue shell, like the discarded carcass of a larva, or the dead body of a crane fly, caught in a web.

Morning came, and the ice flowed out of her and into the air, turning it raw and cold. The same men set out along a steep track that rose quickly away from the houses, and she followed them, seeing them from extraordinary angles. From above, a dark line among the rooftops; then, so close that she could feel the moisture of their breath on her face. Closer still, so that she saw the straps cutting into the flesh of one man’s shoulders.

The roofs rapidly disappeared with every step, swallowed into the cloud through which they were ascending.

The dense forest of silver fir that had once covered the mountain of Wa Shan mostly lay rotting where it had been felled for charcoal. She counted the paces alongside one tree as they passed it; fifty meters from root to tip. There was no oak, or beech, or hornbeam on these slopes. They trudged on upward, the dew clinging to the still-damp clothes of the men around her.

The track began to be crowded on each side with rhododendrons; then it gave way to bamboo, thick enough to slow their progress. She saw how high they were—eight, nine thousand feet—when they reached a plateau, half a mile wide and full of bamboo scrub. Long tracts of grasses and weeds scratched at her; with amazement she saw her own bare feet placed in the bearers’ footprints. The ground was cool under her rather than cold; and occasionally, as she glanced up, she saw the sky begin to appear above them, an eggshell blue threading between the bands of fog.

They passed a clematis that was still in bloom: the pale pinkish blossom of montana. The soil of the plateau thinned, and then gave way completely to rock. They began to climb in earnest now, hand over hand. She smelled the fragrance of the green tea they had brewed. For a second, she thought she tasted it in her own mouth.

And then the clouds cleared.

“Look,” the voice murmured.

At ten thousand feet, the mountain was covered with rhododendron, mass upon mass of them, everywhere she looked. Too fantastic to be a dream. On some thirty-foot-tall bushes, the flowers were so huge and so profuse that they almost hid the leaves. Their twisted stems, distorted by the extremes of weather, and by gaining purchase on the thin ground, were covered in mosses and lichen. Anna’s gaze trailed over the panorama of color that fell below them: darkest crimson, brightest red, silver pink, yellow, white. An ocean, a borderless steppe of moving color. Rhododendron fargesii, with its massive pink bloom, freckled with a darker pink inside the petals, was here in its hundreds and thousands.

“It flowers here,” the voice murmured. “And below your window, right here. And all across the country, all across the state, all across the city. He brought it home.”

Which city? she wondered, confused. Which state?

It was midday, and very warm. In front of them, the mountain ledge that they were standing on was only ten or twelve feet wide. The leader of the party was looking back along the line of men. He filled a clay pipe with tobacco, and took two or three long pulls, exhaling the smoke. He took his tea, standing while the bearers were crouching or sitting; his dogs came to lie at his feet. When he had finished the pipe, he tapped it out on the sole of his boot; and then, almost casually, he walked to the edge of the rock, and looked down.

She saw it with his eyes suddenly: an abyss three thousand feet deep, and the roar of a river somewhere far below. She realized that the man was merely assessing the further climb, and searching the rocks below and to the side for specimens. He seemed almost bored at the sterility of the sheer walls of the mountain; calling his dogs, he set off again, striding forward without glancing to see how quickly his party followed.

They came almost to the summit.

It was lit in strong sunshine; the top seemed flat and square, approached by a series of rectangular fortress walls that formed precipices. They were completely sheer. It looked as if God had been playing with building blocks, and left them evenly placed one on the other. At some unimaginable point in the past, ladders had been made and secured to these sheer flat faces of rock, and each ladder was forty feet long, and at the end of each ladder was a small ledge on which to stand.

Anna clung to the granite behind her. She didn’t want to go forward; she didn’t want to put her hand on the ladder, even if this journey were a dream, or she merely a ghost haunting the journey that these men were making. Then, to her amazement, she saw the man pick up the larger of the dogs, hold the spaniel firmly to his side, and begin to climb the first ladder.

There was no balustrade; no handrail. Just the edges of the ladder itself. They were at ten thousand eight hundred feet, and the narrow ledge that the ladder reached was no more than eight feet wide. Anna felt her arms and hands tingle painfully with vertigo; she began to gasp. Her heart was beating strangely, with an almost mechanical, rasping knock in her chest. As the man got to the top of the ladder he saw the remaining path, narrow and steep and inexpressibly dangerous, winding upward with scree slopes falling away on both sides into nothingness. The world swirled far below him. Anna could only vaguely make out the thin wisps of gray that represented the clouds they had come through.

He put his foot on the next ladder.

After only half a dozen rungs, the dog suddenly began to whine. The man’s arm shifted to hold it tighter; but the dog only struggled more. Anna could see its body begin to slither down his side; the bearers below him stopped, looking up. The dog’s back feet were scrabbling, their claws digging in. Soon, the dog had slipped so far that, as the man climbed, his own body swaying from side to side with the dog’s movements, his right hand was gripping the dog by only the scruff of its neck and its collar. On the very last rung, the dog dropped; the bearers below cried out a warning. The man himself lurched to one side, hanging on to it now by its collar alone. A bearer below, suddenly coming to his senses, climbed rapidly and pushed both dog and master, and the trio fell onto the ridge above.

The moments passed in silence, and Anna had a sense of them all, clinging to the side of this vast wilderness of rock, suspended in their brief and insignificant seconds in time.

They were on the summit.

It was a plateau, undulating and grassy, like a meadow. The first thing that Anna saw was another clematis, and a spinney of silver fir, and then, stretching away from her, the most amazing sight—a woodland, just like any North American or English woodland in spring, the ground covered in white anemones and primula. More astonishing still was the temple, built of timber.

The European walked forward through the grass, took off his hat, and went through the doorway, to where the image of Pu’-hsien Pu’ssa was seated on a plaster elephant. He sat down and regarded it wordlessly and expressionlessly, as if to climb ten thousand feet, and cross the abyss, and find a natural parkland, looking like his own home, looking like Kew on a fine morning, and, at the center of the park, a plaster elephant in a wooden temple, were the most natural, and least surprising, thing in the world.

She began to feel the thin air of the mountains.

She wanted to lie down; the ground at her feet rotated slowly.

She heard her name called again, the same indistinguishable voice.

The short, flower-strewn grass of Wa Shan faded; she stood on a bridge, a wooden cantilever bridge.

“This is the Pi-tao Ho,” the voice told her. And she saw how, as the road rose, the river became deeper. She saw, with giddy certainty, how the journeys would all rise and fall, interminably; they passed juniper, black pine, poplar, black birch, yew, larch. The ravine dripped with moisture, woods thick with actinidia and viburnum.

The road became worse; where it failed, and holes were left in the cliff sides, planks had been laid to form a kind of crossing; where the direction took them over a river, the bridges were nothing more than half-rotten logs. Under them, the icy torrent swirled.

They were at Hsiang-yang-ping, at eleven thousand and six hundred feet, and before them the alpine passes soared. The trees lay three thousand feet below, and snow lay in patches on the path. As they descended from the last mountain pass, they saw countless numbers of yellow poppy, the supposedly unattainable and mythical Meconopsis integrifolia, rolling away over the sandstone and the snow.

“Anna,” the voice repeated. “Can you see these paths? Can you see these bridges?”

“Yes,” she murmured.

She looked down at her hands, thinking that something had touched her. The heavily weighted head of the poppy drooped just out of her reach, hanging on its thick stem as cherry blossom hung down, with the same heavy fist of flower.

She wondered if it was this strange, delicate petal that was caressing her skin.

“Anna,” the voice whispered to her. “Follow me.”