Country Driving [61]
“What’s the punishment?”
“You will be fined,” the male cop said, and both of them suddenly grinned. It was a certain Chinese smile that masks embarrassment, and I found myself grinning, too.
“By law, we can fine you five hundred,” she said. “But since this is your first time, we’ll only fine you one hundred.”
It was the equivalent of twelve dollars. “Thanks,” I said, and put the money on the table. The moment they saw the bill they became nervous, and neither would touch it. “I’m going to have to call our supervisor,” the female cop said, and she left the room. A few minutes later she returned: “We can’t take cash.”
“Why not?”
“Because of corruption. If it’s cash, there’s no proof of the amount. So you’re going to have to mail it.”
Periodically, anticorruption campaigns sweep through the Communist Party; invariably they fail to make much difference. But in this forgotten part of Gansu the cops were taking it seriously. The woman escorted me outside, and we crossed the street to the Agricultural Bank of China. It was Sunday, so she contacted a manager, who opened the place especially for us. I filled out a form with the address of the police station, wrote the woman’s name, and handed over the money. The bank manager said, “It’ll arrive by Tuesday.” He seemed pleased by the efficiency—it would take only two days for the money to reach the woman who stood immediately beside me. She was happy too; on the street she shook my hand and wished me a good journey. I started the City Special, turned around, and drove back to the checkpoint. The road cops were still there, goofing around in their baggy uniforms, and they shouted happily when I cruised past.
FOR FORTY MILES I followed a small road into the Gobi. This was the blankest Sinomap yet: only ten place-names marked the page. One was Yumenguan, the Jade Gate, a military structure that had been built by the Han dynasty, and that was where the pavement ended.
A rough dirt track continued farther into the desert. I was off the map now, in unmarked territory; the City Special bounced over low rocky hills. After ten miles the track terminated at the ruins of Hecangcheng. It’s an ancient fortified granary, built over two thousand years ago to serve the Han soldiers who were stationed here. In this part of the desert, on the western edge of the empire, the Chinese had constructed forts instead of a wall. The land is so flat and barren that I could see the next one in the distance, three miles away. I had reached the end of the line—the stream of continuous walls had given way to scattered forts, like final drops from a spigot that had been shut off.
There was nobody else at Hecangcheng. The government planned to build a paved road to the site, but the modern construction had yet to begin and the place remained isolated. The old granary was massive, more than two hundred feet long, with ten-foot walls that rose stark above the scrubland. There were pillars of tamped earth, and gaping holes that showed the sky; in the mud walls I could see the matted straw that had been used for construction. This part of Gansu is so dry that the straw still looked fresh; in truth it had been here for more than twenty centuries. This granary, like all the forts in the region, was surveyed in the early 1900s by Aurel Stein, the great Hungarian-British explorer and archaeologist. He made two trips here, spending months with camel trains in the desert. On his second journey he literally retraced his steps. At one point he stumbled upon two sets of tracks, the prints of a man accompanied by a dog, and he realized they were his own—seven years earlier he had wandered here with his faithful dog Dash II. He wrote, “Time seems to have lost all power of destruction on this ever-dry ground which knows no drift sand nor erosion.”
I pitched my tent in the shadow of the fort. A small stream ran in the distance, surrounded by marshland, like a thin ribbon of green