Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Just beyond the power plant, the plain erupted into walls of bare, craggy rock. A temple
had embedded itself high on a shattered rock face, a ramshackle fortress trailing a staircase
down to earth.
Into the mountains. We climbed past villages. Houses had been carved out of mountain
faces, rock alcoves faced with brick walls that allowed a single door and window. Piles
of coal sat out front. Black smoke trickled from horizontal chimney pipes. Coal trucks
rumbled forward and past, and sat in front of houses, and in repair shops. I thought of the
logging trucks I had seen rumbling along BR-163 near Santarém, and about the giant sand
haulers in Alberta, and of Nelson's little dump truck in Beaumont, Texas, and for a moment
it seemed likely the world was composed mainly of trucks.
We infiltrated by walking in the gate. Liu had sniffed out a coal mine for us. Actually, there
may not have been a gate, just a narrow road leading into a broad loading pit. The load-
ing area was a small landscape draped with a layer of coal powder an inch or two thick.
A short mountain of coal sat by the battered housing of a conveyor-sorter, waiting for the
afternoon's convoy of trucks to carry it away.
The experience of leaving soft footprints in a blanket of coal powder is dizzyingly sim-
ilar to walking through a fresh, dry snowfall. Wavelets of black dust scatter from your feet.
It's just like snow but black,
you think—and somehow this feels profound.
A man coasted down the hill on his motorcycle, heading toward the town we had come
through on our way up. Would he sound the alarm? After our warmish reception in Guiyu,
it seemed that the world owed us some unfriendliness, and Cecily and I were ready to be
screamed at and kicked out. But the man on the motorcycle barely gave us a look. So far so
good.
We walked uphill to a set of buildings and railroad tracks that surrounded the mine's
extraction mouth. The miners themselves entered through another tunnel, farther down the
mountain, but this was where the coal came out, in old-fashioned mining carts similar to
those you may have seen carrying Indiana Jones.
It was here, at last, that I came face to face with Sad Coal Man.
He was taking a nap. Or smoking a cigarette. Two of him were chatting with each other.
There were eight or nine of him altogether. And just like in his photograph, each of him was
wearing clothes darkened with coal, and had a face dusted and smeared with fine, black
grit.
