Language of this kind had all but disappeared, they supposed, except in odd fragments of vocabulary handed down through their ancestors. Language of this kind lay far beyond their comprehension, was transmitted by spirits, was concealed perhaps in the spells of shamans, in the hysterics of dream-women, in rain and thunder, the sounds of nature.

These people were very thin, their skin very dark, their joints stiff, their eyes and hair yellowed. Having sold off ultimate jurisdiction over their language, sold it off to people they didn't know, they then blindly followed life's path along to its end. The unfortunate fact of the matter is, though, that my attempts at fiction and the most important linguistic memories of my youth were succored first of all by their baihua-Slled evenings and rainy days, as we curled up in groups of threes and fours in preparation for the contented exchange of nonsense and tall stories. Bearing this immovable backdrop in mind, I'm sure they'd laugh at my fiction, sure they'd view it, in terms of moral or emotional value, as page upon page of wasted breath. In some respects, this contempt of theirs is a source of awakening for which I'm grateful. Despite my love for fiction as a genre, fiction is, in the end, fiction-nothing more. Even though humanity has produced countless beautiful novels, the wars in Bosnia and the Middle East were still fought. A Nazi who's read Dostoyevsky will continue to kill people, a cheat who's read Cao Xueqin and Lu Xun will continue to swindle. We shouldn't overstate the influence of fiction.

One could go even further and say that not only fiction, but also all language is just language, and nothing else; no more than a few symbols describing facts, just as a clock is no more than a symbol describing time. Regardless of how clocks shape our sense of time, shape our understanding of time, they can never be time itself. Even if every clock were smashed, even if all instruments for measuring time were smashed, time would still go on as before. And so we really should say that all language, strictly speaking, is "empty talk," and its importance shouldn't be exaggerated.

I've written a fair amount of fiction, as I've idled away my time as a writer over the last ten years. But essentially I've achieved no more than what anybody from Maqiao would have, my volumes of fiction amount exactly to what Fucha was doing just at that moment when he measured how deep we'd dug today, then heaved a sigh of relief. "Let's get the bad air out of us, let's have a bit of empty talk (baihua)!' He dropped his carrying pole, stretched his arms, and grinned broadly.

It was very warm in the cave. There was no need to put any more clothes on, and we lay on our sides on the soft piles of earth, knees propped together, gazing at the lamp's hazy flickering on the cave wall.

"Go on, then."

"You go first."

"You go first. You've read all those books, you must've read a lot of empty talk."

There was something not quite right about this remark, I felt, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

"All right, I'll tell you something funny about Benyi, okay? This happened when we were doing People's Militia training last month, when you'd gone off for a meeting. Up he popped on the grain-drying terrace, telling me my commands weren't loud enough, so he got me to stand by and watch how he shouted. "Left turn," he shouted, "right turn," he shouted, then "back turn," finally "forward-turn." All over the place, the six guys were, didn't know what direction to turn in, but Benyi just glared, drew circles on the ground, and said this is how you turn, around and around and around and around!"

Fucha roared with laughter, his head crashing against the wall of the cave.

"Okay, my turn." By now quite excited, he moistened his throat and started to tell a ghost story. He said there once was a man from around Shuanglong who'd built a house near the mountains, very high up, projeering over the river. He lived on the top floor, and waking up one night he saw a head outside his window looking east, then west. At first he thought it was a burglar, but then realized this made no sense: if he slept on the upper floor and the window was a good twenty feet from the ground, how could a burglar have such long legs? Groping for a flashlight, he quickly turned it on, and what d'you think he saw?"

"What?" My hairs were standing on end.

"This burglar's face had no eyes, nose, or mouth-blank and flat it was, like a pancake…"

We heard the sound of footsteps in the cave. A quick listen told us it was Fangying back from home. She'd said a little earlier that she was going to fetch a bit of baba cake.

Ripping at the still-warm baba cake in his hand, Fucha said with a smile: "We're talking about ghosts, want to listen?"

She made a terrified "uh" noise, her footsteps fleeing into the darkness.

"Hey, aren't you afraid of the ghosts outside?"

The sound of footsteps stopped.

Fucha chuckled with delight.

"Has it snowed outside?"

No answer.

"Is the sun about to come up?"

Still nothing.

"All right, all right, we won't talk about ghosts anymore, come and sit in here for a while, in the warm."

After a moment of quiet, the rustling sound drew a little nearer. But still I couldn't see Fangying; only a metal buckle on her shoes floated up, flashed momentarily out of the darkness. This told me one of her feet wasn't too far from me.

I don't know when, but I started to hear a thumping noise above my forehead, then after a while, another dull thumping started, a quake that made the lamplight quiver; it didn't sound as if it was coming from above my head, but as if it came from in front, or from the left, from the right, from all directions. An anxious expression clouding his face, Fucha asked me what was going on. I didn't know, I said. He said there was a mountain above us and it was nighttime, there shouldn't be any noise. I agreed, there shouldn't be any noise. Could we have dug down into a tomb? he asked. Had we really found ghosts? I said I didn't believe it. He said the old guard in the production team had told him Tianzi Peak used to have a cave which could take you through to Jiangxi, could it be we'd dug through? Could it be Beijing just outside, or America?

You've been to high school, I said, d'you honestly think we've dug more than a few dozen meters? Reckon we haven't even dug as far as Benren's compost shed.

He gave a small, sheepish smile: sometimes, he said, he could think things over and over in his head without finding a solution; when somewhere was far away, why did it always have to be so far? When something was a long time ago, why did it always have to be such a long time? Couldn't there be a way, a way of digging a hole, for example, of digging and digging until you reached another world?

This had been one of my childhood fantasies-I'd burrow my head into the quilt and hope that when this head burrowed its way out again, it would find some dazzling miracle before it.

We waited and waited for new noises, but heard nothing.

Fucha yawned disappointedly: "That'll do, time's just about up, let's stop work."

"Put out the light, will you," I said

"Make sure you bundle up, it's cold outside," he said.

The lamplight was now behind me. The shadow before me suddenly, dramatically expanded and swallowed me up in one gulp.