I was extremely dispirited. I had been so much looking forward to travelling through the Chinese countryside by steam train and, of course, to seeing the Great Wall itself. But T, ever resourceful, lead us from the station and before long we had paid a ticket tout for a trip on a tourist bus out to the Great wall. The tout was selling dozens of tickets and we waited for ages, in a long queue, for a bus to appear. At last a decrepit wreck of a bus did appear, but it was almost full already and a few people at the head of our queue managed to squeeze aboard but most of us had to remain where we were. A great crowd of disenchanted customers, ourselves included, swarmed around the tout, demanding money back. The tout was unfazed by the hostile crowd and merely proclaimed that another bus would be along shortly. It was already obvious that to wait any longer would be pointless, and in any case, the amount of money we had lost was small, but still it rankled that we had been conned so easily.
T got talking to a small group of travellers from Hong Kong who had also been let down and we all decided that the only way we would get to the Great Wall that day would be to charter our own minibus and this we did. The minibus was a rattling heap of a thing, but it was ours for the day. T said that perhaps, now we had our own transport, we should think about going to a rather more remote section of the Wall, The driver looked at the map with us, and after further discussion and negotiation, we set off. Despite all that had happened, it was still not eight o’clock. T and I sat near the front of the bus and I watched with interest as we passed through the suburbs to the north of Beijing and finally out into the countryside. At first, the roads were straight and wide. There were few motor vehicles, besides taxis and buses, as, apparently, private citizens were not allowed to own motorcars. One of the most frequently seen types of vehicle was a heavily constructed tricycle with a large flat timber platform to the rear. These tricycles could be seen piled high with all sorts of produce destined for market and the roads into and out of Beijing were crowded with them.
We left the main roads behind and began to travel on smaller, less direct roads and all the time we were slowly climbing. The landscape became, at first hilly and then, mountainous. The roads were snow covered and on some slopes, the wheels of the bus started to spin and at times we almost came to a standstill. Somehow we managed to regain momentum each time, the driver crashing his way between first and second gear up the hills. But, the road ahead seemed to get ever narrower and ever steeper and I began to sense that we would be forced to abandon the attempt. There was a constant background of Cantonese banter on the bus between T and our fellow travellers and also much chatting to the driver in Mandarin. I was oblivious to all of this and only later did I find out that each time the driver had shown signs of wishing to turn back, T had told him not to worry because I was very experienced at driving in such conditions and if necessary, I would be able to take over the driving. In this way, she managed to shame the poor man into continuing to wrestle the clapped-out old minibus through hair-raising sequences of twists and turns and up slopes, in which the tyres slithered and spun, threatening to slew us sideways off the side of the mountain. I will be forever grateful that the driver did not choose to take up T’s kind offer and allow me to drive the bus. That is all I have to say on the matter. At last, after an eternity, and against all the odds, we arrived at the Great Wall.
T and I split from the main party and made our way from the car park area and up a steep hill, towards the Wall. The hill was steep and we had to pause for breath a number of times but we finally we reached our objective and climbed up onto it. The Wall could be seen stretching into the distance as far as the eye could see. It was not visible as one continuous thread but rather it rose and it fell steeply as it wended its way across the mountainous landscape and it would disappear from sight behind one mountain, only to reappear at a far greater distance on the side of another mountain and so on almost to infinity.
We walked along the Wall and in terms of physical exertion it was little different from walking the mountains themselves, as it rose and fell so steeply. But I was exploding with energy and I felt that If I only had the time I should want to walk to its very end, two thousand miles or so to the west, in the sandy wastes of the Gobi Desert.
We climbed up stone steps to the top of one of the observation towers and gazed out at the wild and mountainous terrain all about us. Suddenly a snowball exploded next to me, closely followed by a number of further near misses. We looked down and saw that they had been lobbed up at us by a two people standing on the wall just below the observation tower. I quickly flung a couple of snowballs back and managed to send one, in a perfect trajectory, straight down the back of the neck of our foremost attacker. His spirit was immediately vanquished, they departed and the fight was over. I felt a sense of elation and pride at being the latest in a long line of heroic defenders of the wall.
Angel
For the last few moments of her life, Catherine gazed up from her bed at the face of the full moon and her faithful companion gazed back down at her, bathing her bone-white face in a soft, flattering light.
‘Dear moon,’ Catherine sighed, ‘what a comfort you are to me, with your timeless presence. As a young girl, I used to gaze up at you in wonder as you sailed through the night sky. Now, here I am, a dying, useless, sack of old bones, with nothing left to me and nobody in the world who cares for me and once again I look to you for comfort.’
A wisp of cloud passed across the face of the moon and a gust of wind flapped the curtains. The old woman’s breath came in ragged gasps and the moon looked down compassionately upon her time-worn face.
‘Where am I going, dear Moon?’ she whispered, ‘where am I going to, now?’
The moon seemed to flicker behind the translucent cloud and never had she felt the reassurance of its timeless presence more strongly.
‘You are going to a very wonderful place,’ breathed the moon into her ear.
‘Are you quite sure?’ she whispered.
The moon swelled in brightness until she could no longer bear to hold it’s gaze. She turned away and looked towards the portrait of her mother, which hung on the wall at the foot of her bed. Her Mother smiled down at her from a time, perhaps sixty years past. ‘Dear Mother,’ She sighed and then turned her head once more and looked back into the dazzling white light which filled her window.
‘Now is the time,’ said the voice of the moon. ‘Somebody is coming to meet you.’
‘Truly, I am now ready.’ She had hardly the strength to whisper this beneath her breath.
As she squinted into the unfathomable brightness, she discerned a figure, brighter even than the surrounding light, floating in through her window. The figure stood tall and still, like a statue and gazed down at her, bathing her in the light of a dozen suns.
Who are you? This was merely thought, not spoken. Her silent question remained unanswered.
Her eyes were open wide, her face waxen. She felt nothing, but a sublime sense of calmness, as she looked up, in rapture, at the immeasurable beauty of the being standing there, in front of her. His perfectly formed face seemed imbued with the suffering of humanity, across countless ages and in his eyes she glimpsed an unendurable sadness, mixed with fathomless depths of compassion.
Broad blades of blazing, golden light, rose up from behind each shoulder as he slowly unfurled his wings, which rose up in majestic sweeping, arcs and breached the confines of her small bedroom as though the walls and ceiling were no longer there.
Catherine groaned, at the sight, but it came out as the softest of sighs; she had no movement left in her.
The beatific being, bent forward to kiss Catherine’s forehead and with soft strokes of his hand, gently closed her eyes. He stood for a handful of moments looking down at her and then he retreated back through the window, in a cascade of light and drifted out into the night.
In a distant town, a young girl, awoken by a nightmare, lay beneath her sheets, clammy with sweat and looked up at the moon. Its reassuring
face calmed her and she whispered to herself, ‘Dear moon, how friendly you look tonight.’ For several minutes she looked up at the bright disk, as the traumatic memories of her nightmare slowly melted away. The last thing she saw, before finally drifting back to sleep, was a shooting star, piercing in its brightness, arcing upwards in the direction of the moon.
Other Fiction By This Author
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You may also like to check out my other writings:
Poems of Passion and Other Verse
(A collection of 33 poems.)
Part One, includes poems around the subject of love found, love lost or other aspects of love or passion.
Part Two, includes poems on a wide variety of topics, often including a strong element of fantasy. Subjects include: The dreams of a cat; The passing of dragons; An extraordinarily beautiful and empathic young girl; An insane genius and my own tribute to Tolkien's Lady Galadriel, from 'The Lord of the Rings', to cite but a few.
Home Sweet Home
(A Novelette)
A young family falls in love with a beautiful house at the edge of a picturesque village.The house is being sold by an adorable elderly couple and the family could not be happier. But, even before the moving-in day arrives, the children discover that the house has a much darker side than they could ever have imagined.
Tread Softly In My Head
(A Novel)
A woman has gone missing and the police have a suspect. They call on the services of Dr Catherine Paradine, a young psychologist, to question him. She has the singular virtue of being a telepath with a native ability to read and project emotion. It seems, therefore, that obtaining the information the police require should be fairly simple. Presumably?
(Due for release, early 2017)
To my adorable wife, Kate
The Jester and Other Stories Page 4