"Dragon’s Gate" by Laurence Yep, Chapters 7–10

At a city on the river, we debarked.

From my father's letters, I assumed that this was the road for the fire wagon.

He spoke in the dialect of the Three Districts.

Smoke billowed from the pipe on top of the fire wagon at the very front.

A westerner with thick sideburns directed some of us into one of the houses, letting us make room where we could among the provisions.

We had no sooner settled down than we heard a loud howl from the fire wagon; and the whole train lurched forward.

Even when the land curved, the tracks tried to run as straight as they could along big holes gouged indiscriminately from the side of the hill.

Even when the land curved, the tracks tried to run as straight as they could along big holes gouged indiscriminately from the side of the hill.

A crew of T’ang men was setting down the wooden slabs. A crew of westerners rested a pair of iron rails on top of them. To finish up, another T’ang crew was tamping gravel down around the wood.

The blocks had been cut to fit one another without mortar. The fit was so exact that you couldn't have inserted a knife blade between the stones.

Beneath us, in the chasm, lay huge boulders, many of them as big as houses.

On the other side of the bridge, the mountains were too smooth and sheer for even brush to find a grip.

They floundered and high-stepped their way through the waist-high snow to our train, slid back the doors and urgently pantomimed for us to unload the supplies onto a long row of sledges pulled by oxen.

He moved one hand slowly in pantomime, with accompanying noises.

“These things have been bedeviling me ever since I saw them. What in God’s creation are they?”

Sean was staring morosely over the side of the sledge. His coat was now flat, so I supposed he had lost his father’s bottle.

In his eagerness, Sean clambered heedlessly over everyone to get the bottle.

We trundled on, but the sledges ahead of us turned off.

So the driver had all of us—Sean included—tumble out of the sledge and help shove it up the trail. When we reached a path with a more gradual incline, we could climb back into the sledge.

“The wind’s shifting back to the southwest. That means more storms will roll in from the sea. I’m glad I’ll be out of it. You’re lucky there was a lull.”

A shaft of gray daylight fell like a column through an airhole that had been dug straight up through the snow to the surface above.

Over our heads, the wind had risen to a high keening sound; and when it blew across the airholes, I felt as if I were walking inside a giant flute.

The deeper we went into the snowy maze, the more I felt like the wind's tune was a funeral dirge.

Brush smiled warily. "What sort of insult is that?”

“I'm his nephew and I'm joining him." I tried to look modest, but in my mind I was thinking: And then I'll help him in the Great Work.

“When you arrived, did you see the bluff above the camp?"

Even Shifty had been dispatched to a crew of Strangers—each to his own kind.

The snow tunnel now extended another seven meters through the snow to the side of the mountain itself, where a hole had been painstakingly chiseled out of the rock.

For once, he forgot about propriety and used his free arm to reach around me and give me a quick hug.

As he turned, he swung his drill off his shoulder, bringing a bushel of snow down from the wall upon the head foreman.

Shadowy men worked in the dim light, breath steaming from their mouths as they used hammers and chisels to smooth the walls.

With each meter the walls grew rougher and the air more and more stifling.

In front of him was a man swathed from head to toe in scarves.

He was arguing vehemently with Shrimp, and with a thin westerner with a long, dark, curly beard that hung down to his chest and a second westerner in a fur cap like a cylinder and a long red suede coat that hung down to his knees with black fur trimming the collar, cuffs and hem.

And the man in the cap is Kilroy, our overseer. He supervises the crews at the heading.

Uncle Foxfire lapsed into the T'ang people's tongue.

"Yes," Uncle Foxfire glowered. "With us giving and them taking. You're supposed to see that they keep our contracts. We've been in the mountain for six hours and we’re only supposed to be in it for four."

Back home, if someone tried to make fun of America, he would browbeat that critic until the man had to apologize.

“We're learning about them from the bottom up,” Father said, trying in vain to add humor to the moment.

“You’re worse than a liar, because a liar actually tricks people. You’re only a humbug who doesn’t have the energy to trick people. Instead, you let them trick themselves.”