Free Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuściński Page A

bag, then that bag is identical to all the rest. What happens when there is a large gathering and everyone must leave their caps and bags in a cloakroom? How do they distinguish their belongings from those of thousands of others? I have no idea—and yet they appear to do so. It is proof that real differences can indeed dwell not only in large things, but in the smallest of details—in the way, for instance, that a button has been sewn on.
    One mounts the Great Wall through one of its abandoned towers. The wall is bristling with massive crenellations and turrets, and wide enough for ten people to walk along it side by side. From our vantage point, the wall serpentines into infinity, each end disappearing somewhere beyond mountains and forests. It is deserted, not a soul around, and the wind tears at us. I take it all in, touch the boulders dragged here centuries ago by people dropping from exhaustion. To what end? What sense does it make? Of what use is it?
    With each passing day I thought of the Great Wall more and more as the Great Metaphor. I was surrounded by people with whom I could not communicate, encircled by a world I could not fathom. I was supposed to write—but about what? The press was exclusively in Chinese, so I understood nothing of it. At first I asked Comrade Li to translate for me, but every article, in his translation, began with the words: “As Chairman Mao teaches us,” or “Following the recommendations of Chairman Mao,” etc., etc. Is that what was actually written? My only link to the outside world was Comrade Li, and he was the most impenetrable barrier of all. To my every request for a meeting, a conversation, a trip, he responded, “I will convey this to the newspaper.” And I would hear nothing more on the matter. Nor could I go out alone, without Comrade Li. But where could I have gone anyway? To see whom? I did not know the city, I knew no one, I had no telephone (only Comrade Li had one).
    Above all, I did not know the language. Yes, I did try studying it, right from the start. I attempted to tear my way through the thickets of hieroglyphs and ideograms only to come up against the dead end of each character’s maddening multiplicity of meanings. I had just read somewhere that there exist more than eightyEnglish translations of the Tao Te Ching (the bible of Taoism), all of them competent and reliable—and all utterly different! My legs buckled beneath me. No, I thought to myself, I cannot cope with this, I cannot manage. The characters flickered before my eyes, shimmered and pulsated, changed shape and position, relations and connections, proportions and patterns; they multiplied and divided, formed rows and columns, exchanged places, the shapes for “ao” appeared who knows how in the character for “ou,” or suddenly I confused the notation for “eng” with the notation for “ong”—which was a truly horrendous error.

CHINESE THOUGHT
    I had a lot of time on my hands and spent much of it reading the books about China which I had purchased in Hong Kong. They were so absorbing that I would momentarily forget about Herodotus and the Greeks.
    I still believed that I would be working here, and therefore wanted to learn as much as possible about this country and its people. I didn’t realize that the majority of correspondents reporting on China were based in Hong Kong, Tokyo, or Seoul, that they were either Chinese or at least fluent in the language, and that there was something impossible and unreal about my situation in Peking.
    I constantly felt the presence of the Great Wall; not the one I had seen several days ago in the mountains to the north, but the much more formidable and insurmountable one for me—the Great Wall of Language. How desperately I yearned for my gaze to alight on some recognizable letter or expression, to hold on to it, breathe a sigh of relief, feel at home. All in vain. Everything was illegible, obscure, inscrutable.
    It was actually not dissimilar to