Free Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian Page A

women who had been standing on stools at doorways to watch the fun grab their children and retreat indoors. The stools they leave behind turn into vicious weapons for both sides. The town does have a policeman but on a festival day like this people would be buying him drinks or else he’d be hanging around mahjong tables watching people play to find pretexts for extracting bribes . . . preserving public order isn’t free of charge after all. Civil disturbances of this nature don’t involve the law. The fight results in one death in the black dragon team and two in the red dragon team, and that’s not counting little Yingzi’s big brother who was watching. Three of his ribs were broken when, for no reason at all, someone knocked him down and stomped on him. Luckily, they managed to save his life by using dogskin plaster, a family prescription from Pockmark Tang’s which is next door to Joy of Spring Hall, the brothel with the red lanterns hanging outside. You’ve made it all up and it’s a story you could go on telling, except that she doesn’t want to listen.

 

     
     
    In the maple and linden forest in the lower part of the camp, the old botanist who came with me onto the mountain discovers a giant metasequoia. It is a living fern fossil more than forty metres high, a solitary remnant of the ice age a million years ago, but if I look right up to the tips of the gleaming branches some tiny new leaves can be seen. There’s a huge cavernous hole in the trunk which could be a panda’s den. He tells me to climb in and have a look, saying that if it did belong to a panda it would only be inside during winter. I do as he says. The walls are covered in moss. The inside and outside of this huge tree has a green fuzz growing on it and the gnarled roots are like dragons and snakes crawling everywhere over a large area of shrubs and bushes.
    “Now here’s primitive ecology for you, young man,” 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