At first it looked just like another mountain ridge, its jagged peaks reflected against the early morning sky. But as the car got closer I began to make out square buildings perched high up on top of them, until I was close enough to see the guard towers clearly and the snaking line of the Great Wall of China at Simatai linking them all together.
It was early and the tour buses wouldn’t be there for hours. I had picked up my driver at the bus station where I had been waiting for the local, and he had driven so fast, passing cars from the shoulder and hugging the mountain bends without braking, that we were one of the only cars in the parking lot.
A restaurant built like a worn-out ski chalet at the base of the mountain greeted me at the entrance. Through the window I could see a smattering of people having breakfast, huddled around tables with matching wooden chairs like ones you find in a family dining room. The path wound around the restaurant towards the wall, and I followed it along the small lake and past souvenir vendors still setting up their stations for the tourists.
As I neared the base of the mountain range, the path began to get more crowded with groups of tourists who walked slowly and talked loudly amongst themselves. A group of older Chinese women struck up a conversation with me in broken English, but I smiled and excused myself, pushing forward in my excitement to climb the Wall.
On the mountain pass, in the crevice between two hills that slowly dipped down and met at the roadside, I could climb up onto the wall itself. A cascade of steps, climbing steeply upward, wound vertically up the face of the mountain, ending abruptly at a guard tower and then snaking onwards behind it, until it disappeared into the distance. I took my first step and started to climb.
Each stair was made up of about a dozen gray stones running lengthwise from one to the other, large enough to fit a grown man’s shoe, their speckled faces creating an uneven pattern interrupted with tufts of green grass. I rested my hands on my thighs as a climbed until my muscles began to burn and I had to grasp at the low wall, using the medieval arrow slits for leverage.
As the road I had climbed up from slowly began to disappear behind me into the foliage, the walls on either side of the stairs also began to crumble away, outpacing the speed of the preservation work that was being done to rebuild it. Soon the barrier disappeared entirely, and my feet stepped alongside the edge of the wall that plummeted down hundreds of feet into dense shrubbery and naked cliff faces.
Exhausted and soaked in sweat, I sat down in the cool shade of the guard tower and looked back down the stairs and the pathway that I had climbed. Not a single person had followed me up. I sat quietly, alone, looking down across the vast expanse of the Great Wall. The parking lot, the restaurant, the souvenirs and all of the people of the 21st century were hidden far down below, beneath the trees.
Behind me the wall crumbled away even further. I picked my way carefully across the broken stones that now revealed the packed dirt underneath, and followed it as it curved sharply away to the left toward a small earthen embankment. The clear sound of scraping and shuffling echoed out over the ridge, and when I peered up over it, I found a small group of Chinese workers laying stones on the path.
The two closest to me lay prostrate on their sides, using small trowels to lay down fresh mortar, while the others had climbed further up the path and were moving stones and brushing away debris. The worker laying stones motioned for me to stop, so I smiled and gestured that I understood and wouldn’t go any further. He turned back to his work, but just as he was about to lift his trowel he lifted his head towards me again and waved his hand for me to approach.
“Are you sure?” I asked him, trying to express concern. He replied in Mandarin and waved me forward again, this time extending his other hand and revealing something in his palm. I stepped onto his newly-paved path and took the little fragment that he offered me into my hand. It was a small piece of white porcelain, chipped off from a larger piece of pottery, still stained with traces of an ancient blue design.
I turned it carefully in my fingers, watching it glint in the sunlight, and then gently handed it back to the worker. As I passed it back to him our fingers accidentally touched, so that for the briefest moment I was standing at the top of the Great Wall experiencing China’s ancient past and at the same time, it’s limitless future.
