“Dragging her tired legs up the steps, [Mulan] thought of life and death, of the life of passion and the life of the rocks without passion. She realized that this was but a passing moment in the eternity of time, but to her it was a memorable moment—a complete philosophy in itself, or rather a complete vision of the past and the present and the future, of the self and the non-self. That vision, too, was wordless.” - Lin Yutang, A Moment in Peking
Lactic acid pulsed through my thighs and calves and into my belly with a dull ache. My face and forearms were grimy with dust from the thick spiderwebs that in some places I had to hack through with my makeshift walking stick. My lungs heave and sweat and grime dribble into my eyes making them sting and run. These were penitent steps, I thought, like the steps of an endless staircase winding to the monastery of a kung-fu master. If you could complete the staircase, you would be allowed to train. By now, despite seeing no-one on my journey so far and having no indication of where I was going, I had given up any idea of turning back. Stairs would lead to somewhere.
When I had set off for a walk through the national park this morning, with no map, compass or sense of where I was, I promised myself I would turn back at midday and retrace my steps in order to find my way home. Despite there being busier more popular paths in the park, I had decided not to follow the crowd. For most people, visiting Zhangjiajie National Forest Park was a once in a lifetime experience, even for Chinese tourists, and they therefore want to go straight for the famous ‘Avatar Mountain’ that the path opposite the park entrance will take you to. Whilst of course I was also excited to take that path, and many others in the park, I was in no rush: I had been gifted an unlimited entry passport by the major of Zhangjiajie after a dinner at his home, a dinner of endless courses, including a jelly made from fern, slices of pure pork fat and even one of roast beef and gravy that the chef was particularly anxious to know what we thought of. The gravy was dense, coagulating and harshly peppery. I said that it was excellent.
I was determined to take full advantage of the unlimited access I had - entry to this park demanded a considerable fee, so this was a valuable opportunity. Steering away from the crowds, I soon found myself wandering through thick forest on stone paths that were overgrown and clearly unused: the flagstones were cracked and uneven, and weeds were forcing their way through the joins. As midday, and my promise to turn back approached, I was disappointed. I was not ready to return and retrace. I was enjoying the alien forest that I found myself in: the swaying, clicking bamboo; the darting green snakes that you would spot, somehow, from the corner of your eyes among the leaf-litter; the tantalising skuttle of birds and other unseen animals in the bushes; and the vast, erupting, vertical pillars of karst that from a distance are white, but up close are orange, in some places dark and rich like a sunset, and covered with intricate brushstrokes and lines that make the rock look flowing and alive like the seabed it once was. These pillars were what the park was famous for, and what allegedly inspired Pandora in James Cameron’s Avatar. They were striking and otherworldly, unlike anything I had seen before, formed from millions of years of erosion of softer rock that left seams of hard sandstone exposed. It was at the foot of one of these pillars that I found myself at midday, the sun hot in the sky and the forest alive with life, facing a steep staircase winding up and into the cliff. The staircase looked unused, draped in vines, and the shaded steps were cushioned with moss, but staircases didn’t go nowhere. I decided to abandon my idea of turning back, and stepped onto the stairs.
Despite the epic and thrusting abovelands, this was primarily a topography of tunnels and holes, of caves and hidden places. Like an iceberg, most of this landscape was below. The pillar up which I was walking had once been deep under the ground, exposed now to the elements and to the consumption of the forest. What was above was mere ostentation, a flourish of feathers, compared to the complex, chthonic worlds beneath the park. Turquoise-tinged rivers ran wide through glittering chasms enjawed with stalactites and stalagmites; pillars where these two had met, centuries of slow accumulation joining back the rock that had been rift and eroded apart by the slow process of solution by a slightly acidic water that I had learned about for my exams at school, were an architecture of epochal time. Weeks later I would take a boat through these rivers, the cool, dripping, echoing caves a perfect foil to the tropical, teeming abovelands. Dark and still the caves may have been, but there was life down there too, like the world above in negative: ghostly white lizards with eyeless sockets that had ceased to see millennia ago and clicking bats that hung like bunches of grapes from the cave roofs, cocoons of dark leather.
Although the sheer sided cliff into which the staircase was cut meant that I could not see where I was going, I could see where I had been. The enormous sandstone obtrusions that thrust upwards from the thickly forested valley floor and straight up into the sky were each topped with vegetation that looked like it had been carried there with the force of the pillar erupting from the ground, and not, as was the case, the slow propagation of these miniature gardens by the ingested seeds and ejected bowels of the birds that paused there, by the flight paths of insects that alighted there, and by the invisible trajectories of winds that patiently carried particles of soil and pollen until the exposed rock became fertile. Each tip was a fractal repetition of the whole park: miniature worlds. In their isolation, I wondered what undiscovered flora and fauna may call those places home. I had heard about delicate butterflies tied by evolution to a single flower that existed only on specific pillars, and plants with medicinal properties that would cure illnesses and induce hallucinogenic visions.
Perhaps it was better for those plants and animals to stay up there, safe in their sky-gardens: the pangolins, giant salamanders and golden pheasants were not faring well down below, despite their protected statuses. Whilst I never got to see a pangolin, I had encountered both the weird, ghostly salamanders lurking in the shaded river near the entrance of the park, and the so-called golden pheasants that inhabited the forest canopy. I loved seeing the absurdly flamboyant pheasants burst chaotically from the treetops, their wings zwirring madly as they achieved escape velocity from the tangled branches, their ornamental tail feathers trailing behind them. The birds were named with restraint: they were far more than golden, decorated as they were with the whole spectrum of colour. Yes, there was gold, but also feathers dappled green and black, iridescent blues, orange, and crimson. I was offered to eat both of these animals during my time in China: the already dead pheasant I accepted, the living salamander I declined.
The air felt as if it was thinning now as the bends in the staircase became tighter and tighter, the steps sometimes narrowing to shoulder width. I stopped to rest and allow the air to enter my lungs, more cooling and less humid than down below. A thousand other pillars like the one I was climbing were spread in front of me, eventually receding into a haze: there seemed to be no end to them. I was small. I whooped loudly into the vastness in front of me. There was a brief echo, and no indication that anyone could have heard. Deluded because of not seeing anyone for the duration of my walk so far, and completely ignoring the labour that must have gone into creating the stairs on which I stood, I allowed myself to feel as if I had unlocked some mystery, discovered something, looked at something as if it had never been looked at before. I was dwarfed, completely, by the landscape, but felt in that moment that it was laid out just for my eyes, like the Elbe sandstone in Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer in a Sea of Mist being imperialistically surveyed by the straight-backed explorer.
After some time of continuing my ascent, I was well above the tops of the trees, and the cacophony of the birds and the monkeys that screamed in the forest canopy was fading. Instead of the world dimming into silence however, it was becoming populated by a low and confusing babble that sometimes sounded human, and sometimes not. The pulse in my head from the exertion of the steps made the sound hard to discern and focus on and would have become just another background hum had it not been increasing in volume and humanness with every bend. Screeches of what sounded like human laughter began to emerge from the noise, as well as the muffled and indecipherable sound of wind distorted megaphone voices. Soon, the noise was clearly the chaotic buzz of a crowd. I was cautiously intrigued: evidently, the staircase was in fact leading somewhere significant. It did not sound like it was going to be an isolated mountaintop, inhabited, if by anyone, only by a solitary monk in his temple, lotus positioned, flanked by burning incense, where I would sit too and contemplate the vast, transformative beauty of nature from a vantage point rarely enjoyed by the rest of humanity. I didn’t know what was at the peak of the mountain, but it sounded like there were a lot of people there.
When I emerged onto the summit, the scene was confusing, kinetic. The noise was intense: everyone seemed to be shouting. A megaphone wielding man with a red flag attached to his back by a bending pole was shouting things at a group of tourists, all wearing identical red caps and talking among themselves, gesturing behind his back at a truly staggering view. From above, the park looked truly like an alien and perfect world; trees foamed and swayed beneath in an ocean of green among the island towers of karst. It was primordial, devoid of anything resembling the human, a view of earth before men: exotic and untamed. The only possible logical response I could think of to a view like that was silence: awed, breath-taken silence. I could not comprehend or even guess what the megaphone man was shouting at his tour group. What could he possibly be shouting that was enhancing anyone’s experience of the arresting beauty that could be seen from the mountaintop. I felt angry at him and his group for not responding correctly to the scene. An old woman, richly dressed, is carried past on a sedan chair borne on the shoulders of two barefoot and toothless men, one with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth and who spits a stream of orange betel nut juice onto the floor by my feet. The stick I had been holding disappears when a crowd of identically dressed tourists swept past where I had briefly leaned it against a wall. It had never been mine. Barely a glance was given to my dirty face, my sweat drenched clothes, my hair filled with webs. I thought I had conquered a mountain, discovered a secret world made just for me to have a personal adventure: the opposite was true. A woman in high heels totters past with a phone attached to a selfie stick protruding obscenely in front of her, talking loudly to the camera as she walks.
I was reading Moment in Peking at the time, the Chinese classic in which the narrative perspective oscillates between a sense of oneness and separateness, where the characters sometimes seem like leaves in the wind or debris caught in the stream of a river: like much Chinese literature, it is about the struggle for, and the impossibility of, personal discovery and the self-determination of one’s life whilst living through moments in history that are all-consuming and unavoidable: revolutions and wars and grand ideologies, famines and mass dispossessions, and being a small part of a billion strong whole. At the end of the novel, the story of the central character, Mulan, is subsumed by the grand narrative of history. This is the fate of so many of the protagonists of Chinese literature that I read. Despite their ambitions, their loves, their desires, their fantasies about what their lives should or could be, they are always uncontrollably swept along by the force of events and the swell of progress, by ideas greater and more powerful than themselves (completely unlike the rugged individualism, the conquerors of history and masters of their own trajectories found in many Western novels). The protagonist is never truly the main character, history is: the inevitable ebb and flow of it like a sucking riptide.
I was a character in a Chinese novel now. I was swept along. The crowd jostles beside me, in front of me. A long, disorganised queue snakes to the cable car ticket office. I am borne by the flow of people past a stall selling cheap plastic miniatures of Avatar aliens, decorated lucky gourds, rubber chickens. I wonder if I need a souvenir gourd. I was Mulan here, lost in the swell. I quickly buy an ice cold can of Coca-Cola from a shouting man squatting beside the path selling them out of a tattered polystyrene box overflowing with ice. He doesn’t stop shouting as he hands me my drink and my change. The Coca-Cola was sweet and cool and refreshing. Someone asks me to take a picture of them, posing. They ask me to get in the picture too.