Country Driving [46]
An hour west of Jingbian, I stopped to visit the Great Wall near the village of Ansi. This region had been a major defense point for the Ming, and people told me that there were particularly impressive ruins near Ansi. The name means “Temple of Peace,” and when I pulled over in the village I saw only one adult. He was disabled, with a pair of rough-hewn wooden crutches, and he was minding a flock of children. In rural China, that’s become an archetypal scene: little kids dancing around somebody who can hardly walk.
The old man told me that the Wall wasn’t far away, but his directions weren’t clear. Finally he pointed at the oldest boy. “Just take him,” the man said. “He knows the way.”
In a flash, the child was inside the City Special. Before he could close the door, four others piled in. They successfully slammed the door in the face of a nine-year-old girl, who stood forlornly in the dust, her face a taut little frown between pigtails. I looked at the old man, expecting him to call the children back out, but he didn’t say a word. He wore the slightly dazed expression that you find among people who have lived through war and revolution and famine and now, in their twilight years, have been assigned the task of raising young children.
“OK,” I said. “If all of you are coming, she gets to come, too.”
Sighing, one of the boys opened the door and the girl clambered in. We drove west along a loose dirt track; periodically I had to accelerate in order to plow through a patch of drifted sand. I heard the children whispering, and then I realized that I had told the old man virtually nothing about myself. They didn’t know where I was from, or what I was doing; all I had asked for were directions to the ruins. I pulled over and faced the children.
“I drove here from Beijing,” I said. “That’s where I live. But I’m an American. I’m visiting a lot of areas with the Great Wall, and that’s why I came here.”
The children listened intently. In the front seat there was a boy and a girl, and three more boys sat in the back. The oldest boy was twelve and in his lap he carried a two-year-old girl. All six were extremely serious, especially the baby—a look of worry creased her pudgy face. It occurred to me that this was a situation for chocolate. I divided and distributed three Dove bars, and then we headed off for the Great Wall. I felt like the Pied Piper—for all I knew, these kids represented the entire future of Temple of Peace.
Here in the southern Ordos, the elevation was nearly five thousand feet, and hills of sand had crept to the very edge of town. The Great Wall ran through the dunes, ten feet tall and made of tamped earth. “You could walk along it for a year and still not reach Beijing!” one of the boys announced as he jumped out of the City Special. The children scampered across a dune and I followed, great sheets of sand sliding away beneath our feet. The wall led to a fort—it was square in shape and also made of tamped earth; there were turrets at every corner and a massive signal tower in the center. The tower was shaped like a pyramid, with a tiny hole at the base, like the entrance to some pharaoh’s tomb. One by one the boys vanished inside.
Following them, I crawled on hands and knees. The tunnel turned to the left; pale walls disappeared into darkness. I groped forward, scrambling across the dirt, and then a spot of light appeared. It opened into a shaft—a narrow chimney that rose straight up for fifty feet. In Ming times, soldiers would have used a ladder here, but the boys simply wedged their legs across the shaft and shimmied up. Grit rained down below; I covered my eyes. “Maybe you shouldn’t climb up here!” I shouted. “It’s too dangerous!”
“It’s fine!” one of them sang out. “We’ve done it before!”
I backtracked through the tunnel and rejoined the girl,