She had powerful explosive force — she managed to smear a streak of mud across Diao Zhuo’s face before he caught both her hands. The two glared at each other ferociously, like stags locked in a showdown; if they had actually had antlers, they’d have been clashing already. Da Qin and He Ma neither moved to intervene; after rummaging around in the vehicle for a moment, they produced a pack of tissues with about a third left, and only then did Ba Yunye stand down.
After wiping up haphazardly for quite some time, Ba Yunye calmed down, panting softly. “Let’s go. Keep driving a bit — if we find nothing we turn back.”
As she passed Diao Zhuo, she noticed a few streaks of mud on his face that hadn’t been wiped clean, leaving him grey-speckled. She couldn’t help it — “Ha ha ha” — she burst out laughing.
He suddenly bent down, scooped up a large handful of mud, and made as if to plaster it over her face. She let out an “Ah!” and fled in fright, diving into the car.
“Get out here.” Diao Zhuo stood outside.
“Please don’t…” Ba Yunye rolled down the window. “How about I help wipe your face clean?”
Diao Zhuo pointed at the rearview mirror, telling her to look for herself. She stretched her neck to look at her reflection — she was almost revolted by the great splotchy face staring back, all black and yellow. But glancing around — Diao Zhuo, He Ma, Da Qin — whose face was clean?
Children of the open road care nothing for convention!
“Hey! Diao Zhuo — do I look like the dark Judge Bao from Qin Opera?” she asked with a laugh.
“You’ve actually heard Qin Opera?” He turned to look at her.
“I’ve not only heard it, I can sing it.”
“Let’s hear a line or two.”
“I won’t — I’m afraid it’ll stir up your homesickness.”
“I’m barely in Xi’an a few days a year. Sing away.”
A few seconds later, everyone present was forced to cover their ears — Qin Opera already sounds like a bellow at the best of times, and what’s more, she was singing the classic aria of the old Judge Bao from The Case of the Golden Hairpin…
Words cannot describe how awful it was.
Diao Zhuo swore he would never let her sing Qin Opera again.
Both vehicles started up again and moved forward, swaying and creeping cautiously.
This time, before they had gone more than two or three kilometres, after cresting a small earthen rise, the sharp-eyed Ba Yunye spotted a human-shaped figure ahead. She grabbed her walkie-talkie and shouted excitedly: “Hey! Up ahead!! Something’s here!!”
The walkie-talkie crackled twice, then Diao Zhuo’s voice came through: “I see it.”
Both vehicles stopped. All four people, heedless of the muddy ground beneath their feet, charged toward the object.
“It’s a person!!” Ba Yunye hadn’t even reached it yet before she called out.
A smell of putrid decay.
Diao Zhuo spread both arms wide to block the other three. “Da Qin!”
“On it!” Though it couldn’t be confirmed that the corpse was Zou Kaigui, Da Qin still steeled his nerves and took a good number of photos with his camera, capturing video as well.
The group moved closer slowly. Ba Yunye suddenly covered her mouth and dry-retched several times, turning away. Diao Zhuo glanced at her sideways — he had nearly started thinking of her as one of the guys, but in this moment abruptly remembered that Master Ba was, after all, a young woman.
“Need a wheelchair?” he asked.
Ba Yunye was about to snap back, but felt the ground sway beneath her feet; her head went dizzy, as though she were about to fall over the next second. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed that the others were also struggling to stand steady. A few seconds later the swaying came again, accompanied by a deep rumbling that seemed to rise from beneath the earth. Ba Yunye’s eyes swept around, found where Diao Zhuo was standing, staggered a few steps, and deliberately cried “Ah!” before falling against him.
Earthquake Alert: At 18:46 Beijing time on May 15th, a magnitude 5.2 earthquake struck near Shuanghu County in the Nagqu region of Tibet, at a focal depth of 7 kilometres. As the earthquake occurred in an uninhabited zone, there are currently no reports of casualties or property damage.
Long Ge’s lips were pressed tightly together as he read that message. Ba Yunye would give him a safety report almost every evening, along with a “nothing found yet.” The group had passed the midpoint of their days in the wilderness, and no other news had come through — meaning everyone was still safe, which was some comfort to Long Ge.
A little while later, Zou Kaigui’s younger brother, Zou Tonggui, finished a task and came sauntering back, a cigarette dangling from his lips, hands rubbing fish scales.
When Long Ge had earlier been asking around about Zou Tonggui, people had told him his life was so-so, neither good nor bad — Zou Kaigui would sometimes subsidise him a little, a sum of ten or twenty thousand a year. Their mother, who had been blind in both eyes, had passed away from illness a few years earlier; apparently even on her deathbed she had been calling out for Xiao Wen.
“Zou brother, hello…” Long Ge offered a cigarette — a Snow Domain Yunyan, a joint product of Yunnan Tobacco and the Tibet Tobacco Factory, which was something of a rare treat here. Zou Tonggui started to decline, but when he saw the box, he accepted it after all, tucking it behind his ear.
“Not a soul has come looking for him in ages — how did you track this place down?” Zou Tonggui’s smile didn’t reach his eyes; one could tell he was no pushover. A man barely in his forties, yet more than half his hair had already gone white; his face was crisscrossed with deep lines, ravaged by sea wind and harsh sun, looking over ten years older than Long Ge, who was the same age.
Long Ge repeated the cover story he had fabricated, and Zou Tonggui put on a look of disdain, as though a few tens of thousands wasn’t worth making this trip for. “Him… we’re in touch occasionally, but most of the time he’s off running around the country, and he has no regard for a small place like ours. I’ve heard he’s gone missing — I hope he comes back safe; we’re brothers after all… Alas! The truth is, it’s all fate: if he can come back, that’s fate; if he can’t, that’s fate too.”
Long Ge kept nodding. “You’re right — from what I’ve seen, Old Zou is a straight-up, honest sort, which is why I lent him money. In the end, life matters more than money. I can forget the money — I just want him to be alright.”
“He’s an honest man…” Zou Tonggui smiled with an air of hidden meaning.
“By the way, brother — I’ll say something unlucky, and please don’t hold it against me.” Long Ge said. “If he never comes back… his daughter Zou Xiaowen… as her uncle, wouldn’t you need to keep looking for her?”
“Me?” Zou Tonggui carefully took the Snow Domain Yunyan from behind his ear, lit it, and took several long, satisfied drags.
Long Ge gave a smiling nod, adopting an air of eager expectation. “I’ll be straight with you — I also run a tourism business. If you could do like Kaigui and travel the whole country searching for Zou Xiaowen, I’d not only pay you a wage, I’d sponsor your travel costs — you’d just need to put in a good word for me along the way.”
Zou Tonggui seemed not to have anticipated this suggestion and was greatly taken aback.
Long Ge pressed his advantage. “I went to find Xiao Wen’s birth mother, but she… tsk, she’s remarried and had a chubby baby boy…”
The now-comprehending Zou Tonggui hurriedly waved both hands, shaking his head vigorously like a rattle drum, and let out a heavy sigh. “No use! I won’t do that! Aah!!” He stood up in agitation — the motion was so abrupt the bamboo stool let out a sharp creak. He seemed to want to say something but stopped himself; he was clearly bursting with something unsaid, his chest rising and falling.
“Brother, I’ve heard that it was when Old Zou went out fishing with you that Xiao Wen was taken. The child is pitiable — after all, blood is thicker than water. And besides, it’s what Old Zou has been painstakingly trying to do all these years…”
Zou Tonggui let out another “tsk” — whether out of frustration, or whether there was something he could not bring himself to say. In the end he shook his head. “You’d better just wait for Kaigui to come back. Only he can do this — others, especially me, are of no help.”
“Really no way?”
“Aah!” Zou Tonggui fell silent, drawing long drags on his cigarette.
Long Ge pressed no further, and felt more strongly than ever that there was something deeply suspicious about Zou Xiaowen being taken by traffickers.
“That must have been an earthquake…” He Ma murmured.
Tibet sits on the Mediterranean–Himalayan seismic belt, where tectonic activity is frequent; but because of the low population density and the prevalence of uninhabited zones, even with relatively frequent earthquakes, casualties are not common. Several of the group could still feel tremors underfoot; they estimated this earthquake must have been no less than magnitude 5.
Diao Zhuo looked down with a thoroughly deadpan expression at Ba Yunye, who was clinging to his waist putting on the air of a helpless little bird — the same person who had been shouting murder when they ran into the wolf pack, and now a few shakes of the ground had her playing fragile. It was far too deliberate…
He gave a heavy, pointed cough. Ba Yunye felt the vibration in his chest, lifted her head, patted her own chest, still keeping up the act: “Oh dear, that gave me such a fright.”
Da Qin and He Ma exchanged a glance; their expressions clearly said: “You gave us the bigger fright.”
“There should be aftershocks!” Ba Yunye stared at Diao Zhuo’s chest, looking as though she very much wanted to continue resting against it.
“Can’t you at least hope for something good?” Diao Zhuo had by now grown quite accustomed to her nature.
Ba Yunye said in a coaxing tone: “Alright, I wish for our great nation to be long prosperous and its people full of joy and happiness — now will you let me lean just a little longer?”
Diao Zhuo gave a cold laugh, his expression making clear: “Dare lean any closer and I’ll flatten you.”
After the false alarm, everyone carefully walked forward a few more steps. There, curled face-down on the ground, lay a decomposed corpse. It wore no outer jacket; one could just make out a woollen jumper, trousers, and other inner layers, slightly dishevelled in appearance, their colours grown ashen. From a distance one might not even have noticed it at all.
Diao Zhuo’s eyes landed on the corpse’s shoes, and his eyes widened ever so slightly — the same model as Zou Kaigui’s spare shoes. Circling around to the back of the body, he gently lifted the shoe; the tread wear pattern was broadly consistent with Zou Kaigui’s walking habits.
“Zou Kaigui?!” Ba Yunye pointed at the corpse and asked loudly.
Diao Zhuo nodded.
“You owe me a meal when we get back!” she said, tremendously worked up.
He Ma and Da Qin shared a moment of excitement before both letting out a simultaneous, long sigh. Although they had come with a premonition, actually seeing what was presumably Zou Kaigui’s corpse — after the brief relief of completing the mission — left them with far more than anything else: regret, and pity.
They didn’t know Zou Kaigui well at all. They didn’t even know about the suspicious circumstances of Zou Xiaowen’s disappearance. They were still sighing over this little girl, who had now lost even the one father willing to travel the whole world to search for her.
Da Qin took many photographs and asked: “Do we bring him back?”
“What do you think?” Diao Zhuo looked toward Ba Yunye.
“Of course…” Ba Yunye began to answer, then thought for a moment, raised an eyebrow. “You had the plan settled in your mind already — why still want to hear what the people think?”
“I’m listening to Master Ba’s recommendation.” Diao Zhuo made a show of being all ears.
She pointed her chin at the pickup truck’s rear bed. “Given the state of the ground on the route we just came through, in a few more days the vehicles may not be able to get through. And now that we’ve found the body, even if we mark the location and come back the same way, whether we’d still be able to find it is another question entirely. After all, ‘walking corpses’ in Qiang Tang are not without precedent.”
Da Qin rubbed his arms. “The way you put it makes my skin crawl.”
Ba Yunye said: “Mostly just wild animals dragging things — they don’t walk on their own.”
“Move him.” Diao Zhuo said.
The three men put on several layers of gloves, found a blue body bag and a simple stretcher, and spent a full half-hour working together to lift the body into the rear bed — and then all vomited violently.
Ba Yunye, having vomited too, stood to the side hugging herself, with a feeling of resolution mixed with heaviness. After all, it was a life — to witness it in its ruined state was, one way or another, saddening.
How good it is to be alive. Yet there are always too many people who contemplate the meaning of life by pursuing death — poets do this, and it turns out even some ordinary souls do the same. Is there something worth dying for in pursuit? Love? Ambition?
He Ma turned around, retched a few more times, then suddenly pointed toward the Ga Ma mountains. “Master Ba… that… photograph…”
Not far away, the peaks of the Ga Ma range rose in sharp points, as though carved by an axe in the hands of the Creator. A strong wind blew in steadily from the Ga Ma direction; she stood frozen for a moment, long unable to collect herself, her eyes suddenly stinging. She pulled out her phone and began photographing.
Photograph? Diao Zhuo looked up — he couldn’t understand why the Ga Ma mountains seemed to move them so.
Ba Yunye shot frame after frame in a frenzy; the wind grew stronger and stronger, nearly enough to knock a person off their feet.
The sky went completely dark; everywhere was a grey, murky expanse. The wind howled without stopping, and the engine sounds of the vehicles felt abrupt and lonely. Zou Kaigui was unfortunate — he had become the Nth casualty of a solo crossing of Qiang Tang on foot. At the same time, he was fortunate — in the end he could still return to his homeland, to rest in peace in the earth.
On the return journey the road was even harder than on the way there; the vehicles kept sinking into muddy pits.
Ba Yunye looked back at the Ga Ma mountains growing ever more distant, and at the spot where Zou Kaigui had fallen just a short while before. Light snow began to fall from the sky without warning — not clear whether it was marking something, sending something off, or trying to hold something back. Before long, this stretch of land was blanketed in a veil of white.
The poet Hai Zi once wrote:
Tibet — a solitary stone that fills the entire sky
No night can make me sleep / No dawn can wake me
Whether or not he was describing exactly this feeling, one could not say.