The Year of Rice and Salt

In the deep southern canyon they found themselves in a different world. Indeed Bai had to reconsider the idea that he was in the bardo at all. If he was, this was certainly a different level of it: hot, wet, lush, the green trees and bushes and grasses exploding out of the black soil and overrunning everything. The granite itself seemed living down here. Perhaps Kuo had lied to him, and he and Iwa and the rest here had been alive all the while, in a real world become deathly with death. What an awful thought! The real world become the bardo, the two the same… Bai hustled through his hectic days feeling appalled. After all that suffering he had only been reborn into his own life, still ongoing, now regained as if there had been no break, only a moment of cruel irony, a few days' derangement, and now moved on into a new karmic existence while trapped in the same miserable biological cycle that for some reason had turned into a One simulacrum of hell itself, as if the karmic wheel had broken and the gears between karmic life and biological life become detached, gone so that one fluctuated without warning, lived sometimes in the physical world, other times in the bardo, sometimes in dream sometimes awake, and very often all at once, without cause or explanation. Already the years in the Gansu Corridor, the whole of his life he would have said before, had become a dream mostly forgotten, and even the mystic high strangeness of the Tibetan plateau was fast becoming an unreal memory, hard to recall though it was etched on his eyeballs and he was still looking right through it.

One evening the wiregraph officer came rushing out and ordered them all to get uphill fast. A glacial lake upstream had had its ice dam bombed by the Muslims, and now a huge bolus of water was headed downstream, filling the canyon to a depth of five hundred feet or more, depending on the narrowness of the gorge.

The scramble began. How they climbed. Here they were, dead men already, dead for years, and yet they climbed like monkeys, frantic to move up the slope of a canyon. They had been camped in a narrow steep defile, the better to avoid bombs from the air, and as they hauled themselves up through brush they heard ever more clearly a distant roar like continuous thunder, possibly a falls in the ordinarily loud Dudh Kosi, but probably not, probably the approaching flood, until finally they came to a layback in the slope, and after an hour they were all a good thousand feet above the Dudh Kosi, looking down at the white thread of it which seemed so harmless from the broad nose of a promontory where the officers had regathered them, looking down into the gorge but also around them at the stupendous icy walls and peaks of the range, hearing a roar come out of the higher ones to the north, a healthy booming roar, like a tiger god roaring. Up here they were in a good position to witness the flood, which arrived just as night was falling: the roar grew to something almost as loud as a bombardment on the front, but all below, almost subterranean, coming through the soles of their feet as much as their ears, and then a dirty white wall of water appeared, carrying trees and rocks on its chaotic tumbling front wall, tearing the walls of the canyon right down to bedrock and causing slides down into it, some of which were large enough to dam the whole stream for a few minutes, before water poured over it and ripped it away, causing a smaller surge in the general flood. After the front of it had passed out of sight down canyon, it left behind torn walls white in the dusk, and a brown foaming river that roared and clunked at just above its usual level.

'We should build the roads higher,' Iwa noted.

Bai could only laugh at Iwa's cool. The opium was making everything pulse. A sudden realization: 'Why, it just occurred to me – I've been drowned in floods before! I've felt the water come over me. Water and snow and ice. You were there too! I wonder if that was meant for us, and we've escaped by accident. I don't really think we're supposed to be here.'

Iwa regarded him, 'In what sense?'

'In the sense that that flood down there was supposed to kill us!'

'Well,' Iwa said slowly, looking concerned, 'I guess we got out of its way.'

Bai could only laugh. Iwa: what a mind. 'Yes. To hell with the flood. That was a different life.'