The Wall

Last weekend we went to the Great Wall at 司马台 which is a relatively calm and quiet section of the wall. I remember last time, when I was 12 or 13, there were people all over and all along the expanse selling postcards, napkins, water-bottles, and all manners of souvenirs. At the base of the hills, there were two housing complexes and two restaurants that offered accommodations to a couple other backpackers.

The plan was to see sunrise on the Wall, so at 3 am we woke up to begin the trek. Expectedly, the pitch-black, luke-warm air was swarming with mosquitoes. There weren’t any streetlamps to guide our way, but luckily two of the girls I was with brought flashlights. Retrospectively, it was probably a good idea that we climbed the beginning stairs in the dark, because I’m sure it would have been much more difficult had we known the actual number and height of the stairs to even the first tower. In this case, ignorance was bliss, because every time we reached the top of a set, we figured we were almost done. Also, because most of the ascent is bare staircase, without side walls, in the dark we couldn’t see how far of a drop it would have been if we happened to slip.

At 3 in the morning, the Wall is unsurprisingly quiet. Other than the slight chirrups of anonymous insects, there is a complete and encompassing silence. It seemed fitting, given the temporal, spatial, and historical distances all embodied in a structure composed of so many stones, of so many years, of so many lives. I heard a rumor that if you died while building the Wall, your body was shoveled among the stones because there was no time or opportunity to bury the corpse.

Although it was too foggy/cloudy/smoggy out to see the actual sun rise, there was a gradual lightening of sky until suddenly we realized it was day. Hot, sweaty, bitten, and tired, the students gathered at the top of the 12th tower to snack and rest before the long journey back down.

On the descent we saw a single-lane wooden bridge spanning a placid body of water, with people fishing along the embankment. The Wall continued far off into the distance.

One of many benefits of climbing the Wall at night is that you miss the large groups of tourists and other travelers, so that when you are afraid you might slip and tumble down thousand-year old stairs to hit your head on thousand-year old stones, you can cling for desperate life onto thousand-year old walls and not have anyone else see how silly you look.

After the sun lightened everything, the clouds eventually rolled out a bit and we were rewarded with a green landscape of mountains beyond mountains covered in blankets of tree growth. A rooster crowed every once in a while.