I am a labourer on the Chinese Wall, one of thousands. Far from where I was born, I do not think of it. I was brought here with my neighbours, and set to building the wall. Our life is work, rice, sleep. All day from dawn to dusk I take my place in the line of men labouring up and down the mountains, heaving one by one the rough chiselled blocks of stone from the man on my left to the man at my right shoulder. I am indistinguishable from either one, my thoughts could be either of theirs. When one of them dies he is replaced, when I die the line will move up in my place, and the stones go on climbing the mountain, assembling into the wall. Only the wall grows, but we will never see it. Ahead of us, empty country; behind us the wall, perfect, new, cresting the ridges, enclosing the wastes, dividing the farmlands from the desert. We eat, work, work, eat, sleep, moving over the country with our many arms and legs like a long dragon. When at dark we sleep, exhausted, our sleep is the hard sleep of the same heavy stones moving up the mountain, down the other side. And memory. Asleep, still handling the stone blocks, I sometimes glimpse far away, impossible now, red willows by a river, a fish leaping, white lily flowers in the water.