Soul Mountain. Gao Xingjian
he says striking his mountaineering pick on the trunk of the metasequoia. He calls everyone in the camp young man. He’s at least sixty, in excellent health, and gets around everywhere on the mountain using his mountaineering pick as a walking stick.
“They’ve cut down every tree that can be sold for timber. If it were not for this tree cave this would have gone too. Strictly speaking, there are no primary forests here. At most these would be secondary growth forests,” he says, quite moved.
He’s here collecting specimens of Cold Arrow Bamboo, the food of the giant panda. I go with him into a clump of dead Cold Arrow Bamboos which are the height of a man, but there isn’t a single live bamboo plant to be found. He says it takes a full sixty years for the Cold Arrow Bamboo to go through the cycle of flowering, seeding, dying and for the seeds to sprout, grow, and flower. According to Buddhist teachings on transmigration this would be exactly one kalpa.
“Man follows earth, earth follows sky, sky follows the way, the way follows nature,” he proclaims loudly. “Don’t commit actions which go against the basic character of nature, don’t commit acts which should not be committed.”
“Then what scientific value is there in saving the giant panda?” I ask.
“It’s symbolic, it’s a sort of reassurance — people need to deceive themselves. We’re preoccupied with saving a species which no longer has the capacity for survival and yet on the other hand we’re charging ahead and destroying the very environment for the survival of the human species itself. Look at the Min River you came along on your way in here, the forests on both sides have been stripped bare. The Min River has turned into a black muddy river but the Yangtze is much worse yet they are going to block off” the river and construct a dam in the Three Gorges! Of course it’s romantic to indulge in wild fantasy but the place lies on a geological fault and has many documented records of landslides throughout its history. Needless to say, blocking off the river and putting up a dam will destroy the entire ecology of the Yangtze River basin but if it leads to earthquakes the population of hundreds of millions living in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze will become fish and turtles! Of course no-one will listen to an old man like me, but when people assault nature like this nature inevitably takes revenge!”
I go with him through the forest, surrounded by waist-high cyrtomiums — their leaves grow out in circles and they look like huge funnels. Of an even deeper green is the edible tulip, which has seven leaves growing out in a circle. There’s an all-pervading dampness everywhere.
I can’t help asking, “Are there snakes in the undergrowth?”
“It’s not the season yet, it’s only in early summer when it gets warmer that they’re quite vicious.”
“What about wild animals?”
“It’s people and not animals that are frightening!” He tells me that as a young man he encountered three tigers on the same day. The mother and her cub walked off right past him and then the male came up to confront him. They looked at one another and when he looked away the tiger walked off. “Tigers generally don’t attack people but people are stalking tigers everywhere. In South China tigers are already extinct. If you come upon a tiger nowadays you can count yourself lucky,” he says sardonically.
“Then what about the tiger-bone liquor on sale everywhere?” I ask.
“It’s fake! Even museums can’t get hold of tiger bones, and over the past ten or so years not a single tiger skin has been purchased in the whole country. A person in some village in Fujian province had a tiger skeleton but it turned out to be something put together from pig and dog bones!” He roars with laughter and has to lean on his mountaineering pick to catch his breath.
“In my lifetime,” he continues, “I’ve barely escaped with my life a few times but not from the claws of wild animals. Once I was captured by bandits who demanded one gold bar as ransom, thinking I was the offspring of some wealthy family. They had no way of knowing I was a poor student in the mountains doing research and that even the watch I was wearing had been borrowed from a friend. The next time was during a Japanese air raid. A bomb fell onto the house I was living in. It smashed the roof and sent tiles flying everywhere but it didn’t explode. Another time was later on when an accusation was brought against me and I was labelled a rightist and sent to a prison farm. Those were difficult times, there was nothing to eat, my body bloated up with beri-beri and I almost died. Young man, nature is not frightening, it’s people who are frightening! You just need to get to know nature and it will become friendly. This creature known as man is of course highly intelligent, he’s capable of manufacturing almost anything from rumours to test-tube babies and yet he destroys two to three species every day. This is the absurdity of man.”
He’s the only person in the camp I can have a conversation with, maybe it’s because we’re both from the world of hustle and bustle. The others are in the mountains all year long, they have grown silent like the trees, and seldom speak. A few days later he went down the mountain to go home. It’s frustrating not being able to engage the others in conversation. I know that they only think of me as an inquisitive tourist. But why have I come to this mountain? Is it to experience life in a scientific research camp such as this? What does this sort of experience mean to me? If it’s just to get away from the problems I was experiencing, there are easier ways. Then maybe it’s to find another sort of life. To leave far behind the unbearably perplexing world of human beings. If I’m trying to be a recluse why do I need to interact with other people? Not knowing what one is looking for is pure agony. Too much analytical thinking, too much logic, too many meanings! Life has no logic, so why does there have to be logic to explain what it means? Also, what is logic? I think I need to break away from analytical thinking, this is the cause of all my anxieties.
I ask Wu (the one who removed the tick for me) if there are other ancient forests in the vicinity.
He says they used to be all around.
I say this is indeed so but I want to know where I’ll now be able to find one.
“Then go to White Rock, we’ve laid a track to it,” he says.
I ask if it’s the track in the lower part of the camp leading into a valley. The upper part of the valley is a bare cliff and from a distance it looks like a white rock sticking out of a green sea of forest.
He nods to say yes.
I’ve been there. The forest looks quite forbidding and the creek is full of huge black trunks which the current didn’t carry down.
“It’s also been logged,” I say.
“That was before the reserve was established,” he explains.
“But does the reserve have ancient forests which haven’t been desecrated by workers?”
“Of course. You’ll have to go to Zheng River.”
“Can I get there?”
“Not you. Even with all our equipment and provisions we can’t get into the central area, it’s a huge gully with very difficult terrain! And there are 5000- to 6000-metre snowclad mountains all around.”
“How can I get to see this genuine ancient forest?”
“The closest spot would be at 11M 12M.” He’s referring to numbers on the aviation maps they use here. “But you wouldn’t be able to get there on your own.”
He says last year two university graduates who’d just been assigned to work here set off with a bag of biscuits and a compass thinking they’d have no problems. They couldn’t get back that night. It wasn’t until the fourth day that one of them finally managed to crawl back onto the highway and was sighted by a truck convoy on its way to Qinghai. They went back down the valley to search for the other who was already unconscious from lack of food. He warns that I absolutely must not go off too far on my own and that if I really want to go and have a look at the forest I’ll have to wait until someone goes to 11M 12M to collect the signals on giant panda activity.