2011-03-01 09:12 We spent another day sitting in the sun, and my leg wound is nearly healed. I learned from one of the young soldiers how to disassemble a Type 81 automatic rifle, and with my clumsy hands I ended up smeared all over with gun oil. Charging my gear with the solar panel brought trouble. At first a few people came over with laptops and flashlights to top up their batteries. Later someone tried to carry off my solar panel with a bucket of water in hand, and when I stopped him he said, “Didn’t I give you water?” I later found out he was the driver of Vice Mayor Xu.
2011-03-01 22:45 Two nurses, while searching the hotel storeroom, went down into the basement of the north building of the Xining Hotel and accidentally found a civil-defense blast door half a meter thick. In other words, this place probably connects directly to the vast underground civil-defense network beneath East and West Street, and to those “people” drowned in vines. Everyone broke out in a cold sweat. Captain Jin had his men barricade the door tight, splash it with disinfectant, seal off the basement level, and add an internal guard post.
2011-03-01 23:04 There’s a well in the hotel courtyard. We used to draw water from it with a pump, but now we use a hand crank. This afternoon, while Old Ma was drawing water, Zhou, the driver of Vice Mayor Xu’s daughter, again set his eyes on the simple water filter we had picked up in Xunhua and pestered us relentlessly until he nearly snatched it away. Old Ma’s injuries still aren’t healed, but even so he pulled a gun and fired a shot into the ground before getting it back. Zhou is probably used to getting his way. He was about to draw his own gun when the vice mayor’s daughter called him back.
2011-03-02 18:10 This morning I saw Zhou with his arm in a sling. Who knows whom he offended last night. Around noon a column of black smoke rose in the distance, and I couldn’t tell what building had caught fire. It made me think again of smoke-swamped Chengdu and wonder whether the city’s lawless fires had ever burned out. Captain Jin, however, was on high alert. He immediately ordered everyone to dig firebreak trenches all around the hotel. The main buildings of the Xining Hotel are old-style structures, with wooden floors and wooden corridors throughout.
2011-03-02 18:15 It turned out Captain Jin was not being paranoid. By four in the afternoon the dense black smoke had already swallowed half of Xining. This long narrow city is only five kilometers wide at its narrowest point from north to south. Standing in the hotel courtyard, we could already see huge red tongues of flame licking building after building as they advanced northward. The air was filled with the smells of charcoal, steel, and polyethylene. Everyone was desperately clearing flammable debris from around the hotel.
2011-03-02 21:48 Before night had even fully fallen, the city fire had already reached the end of North Street and was staring at us across Qiyi Road. The air was so thick with ash that no one dared breathe deeply, and we all put on masks. The black smoke made the night itself even darker, firelight flickering sharply, each person’s shadow twisting and dancing on the ground. Many people in the hotel had no masks. Twelve was running around with only a towel over his face, so I gave him a 3M respirator.
2011-03-02 22:37 The wall of fire spread across the footbridge at the end of North Street and reached our side. On both sides of the Xining Hotel were low two-story shopfronts, and their signs went up the instant they caught flame. In the evening wind, embers were already landing inside the hotel courtyard. Everyone rushed about with buckets of sand like worker bees, smothering one spot only to run to the next. Perhaps I was hungry, but in the middle of the fire I thought I could smell roasting meat. Twelve came running over to warn us to strike all the tents. A single spark would be enough to destroy them.
2011-03-03 22:39 The city fire is still going. After more than twenty hours of ravaging the place, it has left behind only charred walls and blackened ruins. Gray flecks drift down through the air, and the Xining Hotel feels like a baked flatbread tossed into a scorching black desert. The open flames may already have spread into the western district. The eastern district, by contrast, had long since been put out. From the hotel building we could see many Dongguan people running about in the distance.
2011-03-03 22:51 Quite apart from the fire, the temperature has clearly risen. It’s abnormally warm. Today I even took off my sweater. In other years at this time, many people would still be wearing padded long johns. By noon the blaze had already moved far away from us. During a break I looked toward the North Mountain behind us and was startled to find patches of pale growth on the slopes. Through binoculars they looked almost like little white flowers. We all stayed indoors with the doors and windows shut tight, and the place felt like a steaming oven.
2011-03-06 23:07 The city fire burned for a full two days before finally beginning to die down, and it took another half day before the ash-filled sky gradually cleared enough to see. The sky looked like cloisonne hammered in hell, growing clearer and clearer, while the tufts of cloud scattered across it looked like the strange white flowers that had suddenly appeared in the mountains, beautiful and unsettling. By sheer luck the hotel camp survived the disaster. We walked over roads of scorched gravel to the bank of the Huangshui River to wash the filters of our masks.
2011-03-06 23:15 From the foot of North Mountain, on slightly higher ground, we looked out over the whole city. The center and west of Xining were a sheet of scorched wasteland, with only the occasional district left untouched by the fire, yet even those were smoke-stained yellow and black. The eastern district, by contrast, was almost entirely new, sharply divided from the burned sea by a winding defensive line. The dark green oval domes stood out vividly on the horizon, and the prayers of the believers drifted through the dust-choked air as if an invisible barrier were protecting that territory.
2011-03-07 10:59 At dawn, dew had gathered on the bare rocks but still had not soaked through the charred soil. We had returned late last night from North Mountain, and I had meant to sleep a little longer. Then I was jolted awake by the roar of engines and a burst of noise, with a few muffled gunshots mixed in. I rushed out to call for Blade and instead ran headlong into an armed stranger standing in the corridor, his face wrapped in a camouflage Arab scarf and his arm thickly bandaged.
2011-03-07 11:54 Everyone was bound and driven into the first floor. It seemed the invaders were afraid of being discovered by Dongguan scouts in the distance outside, because even the posts outside had been replaced with their own men. Through the mottled glass I saw a nameless convoy of all kinds of off-road vehicles in the courtyard. What chilled me most was that the Hummer H5, which had haunted me like a ghost since Chengdu, was parked among them. The invaders all wore goggles and kept silent as they watched us like predators.
2011-03-07 12:37 The invaders had dealt with Captain Jin’s men at dawn, then spent another hour crossing the Dongguan defensive trench and seizing the Xining Hotel. Our sentries were hopeless. There were roughly a dozen vehicles in the yard, all hidden beneath camouflage netting. I saw the bald man. He still wore no hat. After all this time not only had no stubble grown back, but ridged veins had begun to rise across his scalp, as if metal had been implanted beneath a punk’s skin.
2011-03-07 21:18 A little after two in the afternoon another coach bus drove into the courtyard and backed directly up to the doorway of the first floor of the north building. All afternoon, seven or eight men wrapped in black bandages moved busily between the coach and the basement, carrying laptops and coils of optical cable. Orange and silver lines covered the ground as if the place were a mobile-base-station construction site. A little while ago there was a stir below, and they opened the civil-defense iron door.
2011-03-07 22:08 The man who looked to be the invaders’ leader began demanding guides familiar with the layout of the underground shopping streets beneath Ximenkou. Only then did I realize they had not come to seize food and supplies. The men in black had been working in an orderly way all afternoon. When no one answered, the leader shot dead the prisoner nearest him, then asked again, then shot another. Several hands went up, trembling.
2011-03-07 22:13 I was one of the people who raised a hand, because the leader was the bald man. Midway through the journey he had warned us once, yet later drove off in a stolen vehicle. He seemed either not to recognize me at all, or to be mocking me. In the end he chose Twelve. They put a gas mask and headlamp on him, gave him a heavy toolbox, and took him down to the basement with the men in black. The rest of us remained under guard. From time to time a phosphorescent green flash swept past outside the window. That was the invaders’ night watch.
2011-03-08 10:26 Today is International Women’s Day. On March 8, 1976, a rare meteor shower fell in Jilin Province. I found that note in the offline wiki on my phone. The reason it came to mind at all was that I noticed several of the invaders wore simple 3M masks and all spoke with a slight northeastern accent. Sure enough, a few of the off-roaders in the courtyard carried Ji-C plates. Twelve and the men in black had been underground all night and still had not returned.
2011-03-08 14:23 The hotel guards were not strict. Our hands and feet were not tied; only our guns and knives had been taken. They knew we wouldn’t run, because there was nowhere to run to. At noon the people in charge of cooking made two huge pots of mutton soup, but the invaders did not touch any of it. In fact, in twenty-eight hours I had not seen them rest. As I sat dozing in a corner, my phone suddenly vibrated several times. The mobile network has been down for more than two months.
2011-03-08 14:24 I received two text messages, and when I opened them both were gibberish. Plainly, a nearby mobile base station had been reactivated. At the same time, the invaders working over the laptops let out a low cheer. In the instant the bald man clenched his fist, he shot me a hard look. Seeing the phone in my hand, he gave the faintest shake of his head. I hurriedly put it away. The team that went into the basement last night still hadn’t come back. What connection could there be between the phone signal and them?
2011-03-08 22:13 Twelve didn’t return until five in the afternoon, filthy and looking utterly exhausted. They did not leave him with us, but shut him by himself in a tent, though they treated him well enough, sending in roast mutton and milk tea. When he passed in front of me on his way to wash in the courtyard, he gave me a quick wink and dropped something at my feet. It was a small twig, or something like one.
2011-03-08 22:16 It really was a small twig. I couldn’t tell what kind of wood it was. White skin, green flesh, with a star-shaped pattern, so fresh it seemed you could wring juice from it. That evening I received several more text messages. They were no longer gibberish, but shifted again and again among many languages, including salve mundi and прывітанне свет. One message I recognized. It had only two words: hello world.
2011-03-08 22:21 Captain Jin’s remaining men launched a futile resistance during dinner. Several soldiers tried to overpower the guard standing nearby, but the invaders threw them to the ground with impossible strength. The resisters were stripped of all their gear and driven out of the hotel until they vanished from sight. In this enormous city, silent as a cremation ground, I do not know what waited for them. Over the past few nights the sound of prayers has seemed to grow fainter, and the people of Dongguan too have fallen silent.
2011-03-10 15:29 A fine rain began falling today. The air feels much cleaner, though there has been no real drop in temperature. From a distance North Mountain looks even whiter now. Yesterday, besides Twelve, several more “volunteers” were taken underground, and by this morning only one of them had come back, apart from Twelve. I am certain that the invaders have somehow restored a strange kind of communication with the outside world, by means we cannot understand.
2011-03-11 23:56 At a little past one in the afternoon, a dull boom rose from underground, followed by a shaking that made heaven and earth seem to rock. I don’t know whether it was an earthquake or something else. Everyone panicked and ran into the courtyard, only to be shouted back inside by the invaders. The lines they have been working on these past two days seem to have been repaired. The men in black and the guides have still not come back to the surface, and I haven’t seen them use any radios. It seems they are now able to communicate by way of the network.
2011-03-13 14:39 The captivity has now lasted six days. There are thirty-six invaders, not counting the men in black who went underground and never came back, and thirteen vehicles. No new strangers have appeared. They are obsessed only with optical cables and computers. The prisoners have grown docile as lambs, and the guards seem to have relaxed. In these six days, apart from drinking water, I have never seen them eat. They do, of course, change shifts at regular intervals, disappearing into the coach bus draped in black cloth.
2011-03-13 14:52 Panic and unease gradually ebbed, and agitation began to spread. When the soldiers who had been driven off a few days earlier quietly reappeared among the ruins around the hotel, Captain Jin and his remaining men rebelled once again. They managed to kill two guards, but were immediately wiped out by reinforcements. The invaders moved cleanly and quickly, judging everything with uncanny accuracy, as if they all shared one pair of eyes. Camouflage uniforms were dragged off and buried among the ruins. Captain Jin was taken down to the basement and never came back.
2011-03-13 14:58 Terror returned to the prisoners’ faces. Xu Hu tried to prove his loyalty and join the invaders, but the bald man coldly refused him. Yet my unease came from somewhere else. The invaders are here for the entrances to the underground municipal civil-defense works, not for us. The truly terrifying thing is nature. In only a few days, even the flowerbeds in the hotel courtyard have begun to sprout the same white blossoms as on the mountain. This is the far northwest. By all logic, the first flowering season should not arrive until after May Day.
2011-03-13 23:12 The bald man finally came to speak to me, though he pretended not to know who I was. He asked whether the VSAT on the off-roader in the courtyard was mine. He needed me to connect the satellite router to their cables. Thinking it might let me glimpse what they were doing, I agreed. A guard escorted me back to my own car and opened the laptop. Only then did I realize that their silent coach bus had been supplying electricity outward the whole time. #RainBell
2011-03-14 10:48 I haven’t slept all night and still haven’t slept now. The bald man’s men replaced the feed horn on my VSAT dish, then used my laptop as a relay to download data into their system. My part in it was tediously simple: following instructions, I kept switching the server ports in the download software on and off. I have no idea what kind of network they connected to through the VSAT, but over the course of a single night we downloaded sixteen petabytes of files with the extension .yll.
2011-03-14 22:58 Today I did no more than doze a little. The rest of the time I was on the VSAT. My laptop burned out this morning, and the fiber line was connected directly to the invaders’ computers. About eleven PCs formed a small network. After receiving and processing the data packets, they fed them down through the optical cables into the depths below. On the screens I saw broken fragments of images: silver-painted Hong-8 bombers diving to attack cities covered in gray vegetation.
2011-03-15 10:05 At dawn I finally returned to my wife’s side. The long download was finished. My vehicle, together with the VSAT, had of course been taken over by the invaders. While washing up this morning, I discovered that one of the men in black had died during the night. The invaders cut the corpse into small pieces, almost like a sky burial. A few of the pieces were buried in the flowerbed, and the rest were carried up North Mountain. There was no great amount of blood from the severed flesh, only a little cloudy fluid.
2011-03-21 21:50 It feels as though only the blink of an eye has passed, and yet it has somehow been six days. Ever since the bald man “commandeered” my car, I lost both electricity and my other supplies, so there is a gap in the record and I have had to write in pencil in a notebook. The invaders are like a pack of internet-obsessed programmer shut-ins. Every day they are either hunched over their laptops or going in and out of the basement blast door, and they die off at the rate of one every eight hours.
2011-03-21 22:05 Just like the first invader who died, every corpse was buried in the black scorched soil around the hotel. In only half a day, the ground would sprout a dense white fuzz like fine grass. Within two days, six-petaled white flowers with claw-like shapes would bloom among the pale grass at about the height of a hand. In sunlight the leaves and stems turned translucent, their edges irregular, like magnified phytoliths under a microscope.
2011-03-21 22:37 The bald man slipped away this morning with his last remaining subordinates while we were struggling in a long narrow corridor of the civil-defense works with the cables spreading at our feet. He had run into something even they could not solve, though I cannot describe it all in detail just now. In any case, the invaders drove us into the tunnels and ordered us to swing knives and scissors to cut short all the optical cables, or perhaps vines, that had spread to our feet.
2011-03-21 22:37 The corridor held only the sound of breathing and the harsh scrape of metal. The air reeked of choking plant sap. From deep in the passageway came a rustling, as though something were running underground. Twelve, who had once gone deep into the works before, had turned ashen and refused at all costs to stay there again. When everyone finally scrambled back to the surface in confusion, the invaders had vanished without a trace.
2011-03-21 22:55 The invaders never once explained why they had come or why they had left, and they took none of our supplies except for the VSAT they stole from me. The captives sorted through their belongings, and some actually came to blows over whose things were whose, fighting more desperately than they had ever resisted the invaders. Before noon the camp had already scattered like birds and beasts. We had planned to stay and study the data packets downloaded from the network, but the reappearance of Dongguan scouts forced us to abandon that idea.
2011-03-21 23:17 Because the temperature had risen abnormally, the upstream snow had melted early and the Huangshui River had swollen, its muddy water blocking our route out of the city. We could do nothing but search the ruined city for some place to hide. Everywhere there were either burned-out houses or ground overrun with white flowers. We decided to head for the eastern suburbs and see whether any survivors remained at the Army Fourth Hospital. In truth there were survivors everywhere. The people of Dongguan were exchanging gunfire in the streets with people of unknown origin.
2011-03-21 23:26 The farther east we went, the denser the gunfire became. It was fighting over supplies. The mutton we had left was already spoiled. Besides time, temperature too is an invisible blade. The great fire had reduced the city’s remaining resources to ash. Even the well-prepared people of Dongguan had begun turning their knives on one another. We had to be even more careful. We could not afford to be captured again. We settled in an auto-parts shop near Xining Railway Station, in a district filled with similar stores.
2011-03-22 10:01 In the morning we were woken by gunfire just two walls away, loud enough to make our ears ring. We held our breath and waited until it died down before daring to lift the shop’s rolling shutter. One unexpected gain was that the shop contained a whole box of squeeze-powered flashlights printed with some company’s logo, probably leftover promotional gifts that had never been given out.
2011-03-22 12:33 After entering the heart of Dongguan again, I found that the place had changed enormously from a month ago. The eastern district had not been damaged by the fire, but streets that had once stood empty had now become chaotic and filthy. Abandoned luggage, shell casings, severed limbs. It looked like some Middle Eastern city beneath a giant Boston photo spread. Since December, this was the first time I had actually seen travelers shot down in the street and their luggage seized.
2011-03-22 16:59 The newly built Xining Railway Station, only a few years old, was the only structure in the eastern district that had burned, obviously destroyed in some earlier catastrophe. Several enormous cold-storage warehouses lined the rail corridor, and we wanted to see whether any supplies could still be found there.
2011-03-22 18:20 Zhongzhuang is a large area where railway employees gathered, mostly six- or seven-story apartment buildings from the early 1990s. The cold stores of the eastern freight yard were all empty. Judging from the marks on the ground, their contents had been moved in bulk by mechanized work. We crept into the freight yard east of Xining Railway Station. The tracks were bare. I thought of that last train from Kumbum Monastery. We kept going toward Tuanjie Bridge.
2011-03-22 23:19 There were too many cold stores along the freight-yard road to count. More horrifying still, several of them were packed with body bags. Everyone’s appetite had been ruined, and none of us ate much that night. At Tuanjie Bridge there was a bus dispatch station crammed with old buses already blotched with rust. We parked among them and stayed there for the night.
2011-03-23 09:25 We left the bus depot at dawn. The ground was slippery because a thin layer of frost had fallen overnight. The air felt like a lump of soft rubber blocking the throat, deeply uncomfortable. In the distance some people wearing orange scarves spotted us and ran toward us waving something in their hands, though I couldn’t make out what. I hit the accelerator and shook them off. We were not far now from the Army Fourth Hospital.
2011-03-23 11:16 The old site of the Army Fourth Hospital was on Kunlun Road, though by now it had long since relocated to Xiaoxia. We drove east along Bayi Road. Now and then ricochets struck the hood and bounced away. When we reached the hospital, we found it already reduced to ruins, with oil stains and dried blood everywhere. Not far away, on the Lanzhou-Xining Expressway, hung the wreckage of a helicopter.
2011-03-23 13:40 There were still some medicine crates left in the hospital pharmacy, and everyone rummaged through them to see what might be useful. In the ruins of the inpatient building there were a few places covered with striped tarpaulins. It was only when we came close that we realized there were still people there. Most were women, already emaciated beyond recognition. At their feet were piles of Styrofoam and shredded plastic bags. Their faces were covered with rags, leaving only their eyes exposed. When they saw us, they showed no reaction at all, simply sat there blankly.
2011-03-23 18:15 We spent the whole afternoon scavenging through the ruins and found quite a few “good things.” There were probably still people at the nearby farms. A man came out from a farmhouse and shouted from far off, “Be careful! Stay away from those polluted ones!” I turned back to look at the people under the tarps, and it seemed as though tears were rolling down behind the rags over their eyes.
2011-03-23 21:37 After dark we stayed at a nearby farm. The man who had shouted to us was surnamed Bai. He was warm enough, helping us cover the vehicles with cut-open fertilizer sacks. “Your cars will attract thieves,” he said. “There are a lot of them around here now, all driving jeeps.” Hearing the way he spoke, I guessed he must be Mongolian. Supper was boiled beef, a big steaming pot of it. Though it was bland and short on oil, it still felt almost like hotpot to us.
2011-03-23 21:40 While we were eating, Blade asked why the people in the ruins were called “the polluted.” Old Bai lowered his voice mysteriously and said those were all people who had been saved from death but never quite died, and for some reason they were all women. With the recent warming spell, grass had started growing out of them. Old Bai’s wife cut in from the side and said they didn’t eat food at all anymore. All they did was gnaw on plastic.
2011-03-23 22:06 Old Bai said that at the end of January a batch of newly developed vaccine, some kind of isotope, had supposedly arrived in Xining, and only the army hospitals had it. At the time people were breaking their heads trying to get injected. But without exception, everyone who received it later fell ill. Most died. Those who survived all underwent pathological changes, their appetites fading and their movements slowing. We all thought of the isotopes we had been injected with, yet what he described was different from our own experience.
2011-03-24 11:48 We bandaged our wounds and discussed where to go next. At dawn Blade, who had been only pretending to sleep, was the first to sense something wrong and felled Old Bai with an arrow just as he was creeping into the yard with some villagers. There were more than ten of them. Fortunately they had no guns. We fought them off and in the end, relying on firearms, shot down six and drove the rest away. My neck was cut in the struggle. Old Ma said that what we ate last night probably wasn’t beef. Everyone was retching in the yard.
2011-03-24 12:42 We decided to head west. Since the weather is warming, the plateau may not be as desolate as we imagined. Trees of some strange kind had grown up through the middle of the Lanzhou-Xining Expressway, splitting the asphalt by sheer force. None of us recognized what sort of trees they were. Their trunks twisted and their crowns were stark white.
2011-03-24 13:59 We parted from Old Ma’s family at the toll station on the Lanzhou-Xining Expressway. They headed toward Lanzhou, while we turned toward Haiyan. By then their injuries from the fall had almost completely healed. We had spoken little to one another for many days, and they were resolved to go. Before leaving I gave Old Ma our last can. As I watched their vehicle drive away, there were only five of us left. Twelve was in my car.
2011-03-24 18:19 Passing through Xigang, the stench of corpses forced us to put on masks. Huangzhong too had recently been put to the torch. We left the expressway and took the old mountain road, continuing on toward Haiyan. The Huangshui River was in flood, and in many places we had to drive through water. We might not even reach Huangyuan tonight.
2011-03-24 21:46 We spent the night more than ten kilometers short of Huangyuan, where there stood a magnificent temple to Nüwa halfway up the mountain. The hills here too were covered in white flowers, though they were different from those on North Mountain in Xining. After dark, little motes of phosphorescence drifted in the wind. I remember countless journeys westward here in childhood, the rolling mountain ridges in the distance like the backs of ancient beasts. Deep in the mountains came the cries of some beast, carrying very far. Farther off still, at an impossible distance to measure, firelight trembled.
2011-03-25 16:13 We passed through Huangyuan this morning. This major town on the old Tang-Tibet Road remains largely intact, but it is already empty. Only a few Han Chinese were there, crouching in the sun in padded jackets, their faces and hands wrapped in rags, looking at us with obvious ill will. The lama temple in the old city of Dangar was empty too.
2011-03-26 08:15 The shores of Qinghai Lake are overgrown with gray thornbushes as high as the waist. It doesn’t look like spring at all, but like the desolation of autumn. Not far from us on the lakeshore stands a broken sign reading “Torpedo Testing Base.” We did reach Haiyan yesterday, but our instruments showed radiation levels there were seriously over the limit, so we kept well clear of it.
2011-03-27 22:26 We are now at Hainaihai, south of Qinghai Lake. There are many bird eggs on the lake shore, enough to feed us for a while. The herders who once grazed animals here have all gone west along the Tang-Tibet Road. Judging by the traces left on the mani cairns by the roadside, they departed together with refugee convoys bound for the holy city. Here the radiation index has dropped back to normal. We are preparing to circle Qinghai Lake clockwise toward Haixi. But since food is plentiful here, we may as well stay a couple more days.
2011-03-28 21:25 Vast fields of white mushrooms grow along the western shore of Qinghai Lake. I know they are one of the region’s famed delicacies and extraordinarily delicious, but when I saw the claw-boned white flowers growing among them, I swallowed hard and looked for something else to eat. The farther north we went, the more ruined tents and traces of camps we saw on the grassland. Over the shallows of the lake a layer of downy petals drifted, and naked carp were greedily swallowing them.
2011-03-29 09:28 Qinghai Lake may be immense, but it is a salt lake. These past few days we have been collecting dew at night by spreading out sheets of plastic. Only by continuing north will we reach streams of fresh water flowing into the lake. This morning, when we went to gather water, we discovered that the little mounds we had seen last night were actually several fresh graves. Broken entrenching shovels had been stuck into the tops, and beneath stones lay shoulder insignia, standard-issue Second Artillery tabs, one of them even for a lieutenant colonel.
2011-03-29 12:48 Like herders, we followed West Ring-Lake Road north. In the distance we saw that every pane of glass in the Bird Island Hotel had shattered, and purple curtains streamed out of the rooms and waved in the wind. The Buha River flowed beneath our feet, splitting like leaf veins into countless branches before finally emptying into Qinghai Lake. Only when we got closer did we discover that the northeastern outer walls of every building in the Bird Island tourist center were covered with fine cracks. They had been caused by the shock wave of a huge explosion.
2011-03-30 22:35 Plenty of food always breeds inertia. We lingered along the rich shores of Qinghai Lake, and it was hard to imagine how much resolve the herders who had lived here for generations must have summoned to abandon it. When the Qinghai-Tibet Railway finally appeared before us, the track bed, untended for two months, had already begun to sag and warp. We hesitated again: should we continue west along the Qinghai-Tibet line, or turn north here and enter the Hexi Corridor?
2011-03-30 22:40 At that very moment, however, my car chose to break down. Wrangler parts are not exactly found lying around everywhere. After weighing our options, we turned east toward Gangca, the nearest county town. I still hadn’t abandoned my vehicle entirely. We hitched it behind Blade’s car with a tow rope and crawled forward at a miserable pace. Before we even reached Yikewulan Township, we discovered that Gangca county seat, more than ten kilometers away, had long since been destroyed by shock waves.
2011-03-30 22:59 We hurriedly measured the radiation in the air with our simple instrument. It came to about 236 millisieverts, more than twice the safe level. Given that this area had fallen within the old Zone 452 nuclear unit many years before, a somewhat elevated reading was not entirely surprising. I cannot fathom what kind of attack destroyed Gangca. The cracked walls of the Bird Island Hotel must have been caused by the aftershock from here. But what in a small plateau town on the edge of the Gobi could possibly have been worth destroying?