Читать книгу Soul Mountain - Mabel Lee, Gao Xingjian - Страница 24

On the day I arrive on the shores of Caohai, where the Wu River begins, it is overcast and bitterly cold. Recently, a small building has been constructed on the shores of the lake — it is the new ranger station of the reserve. The rock foundations have been built up high and it stands in isolation in this vast stretch of swampland. The little road to it is nothing more than slushy soft mud. The lake has receded a considerable distance but what was once lake still has a few sparse reeds growing here and there. I go up the stone stairs at the side of the building where there are several rooms with the windows open and plenty of natural light. Specimens of birds, fish and crawling insects are piled up everywhere.

The chief ranger is a large man with a broad face. He plugs in the electric heater, makes tea in a big enamel pot, sits on the heater and invites me to warm myself and have some tea.

He says ten or so years ago, for several hundred kilometres around this high plateau lake, the mountains were covered in forests. Twenty years ago the thick black forests came to the shores of the lake and people often encountered tigers. Now these bald hills have been stripped bare and there is a shortage of firewood for cooking, not to mention heating. Especially during the past ten years, spring and winter have become intensely cold. Frost comes early and in spring there are severe droughts. During the Cultural Revolution, the new county revolutionary committee resolved to implement a new initiative: draining off the water and converting it into fields. They mobilized one hundred thousand civilian workers from the county, blasted scores of drainage channels, and built retaining walls to reclaim this part of the lake for cultivation. But it wasn’t so easy to dry out a lake bed which had been saturated for several million years. That year there was a tornado over the lake and the locals said the Black Dragon of Caohai couldn’t stay and had flown away. The lake is now only one third of what it used to be and the surrounding area is all swampland which defies drying off or being restored to its original state.