I came to the plateau in the cold season.
This time to the plateau, only a general direction, no precise destination, where to count.
This time, I only have a general direction, no precise destination, wherever I go, and that means I am wandering.
In this season, the plateau is very cold at night, the temperature difference between day and night is very big, because of the dryness, the oxygen in the air seems to be less.
But it's an empty place for thoughts.
I looked back from 4,800 meters above sea level and saw snow-capped mountains.
The snow was piled on top of the snowy mountain, glistening. The cold-toned sun shone on it like silver; the warm-toned sun shone on it like gold. Gold and silver mountains always let the people who see it surprise, a thousand hard to run close to see, it is snow, people go away. The sun goes down from behind the snowy mountains, but actually rises from another place and lights up another snowy mountain, and the people there start cheering again. The snow is so white, but it makes the snowy mountains so mysterious and makes people look so stupid.
Snow has a snowy life. The evaporated water vapor condenses in the frozen clouds, that is snow making a fetus. Clouds run around in the sky with a big belly, looking for a suitable place to give birth. Such pregnant women roam everywhere over the plateau in the cold season. The snowflakes floating in the air are the childhood and adolescence of snow, they fly with the wind, romantic and innocent, part of them fall on the top of the mountain, part of them fall in random places.
Then the snow began its middle age on the ground. It was a period of thick, contemplative philosophy, and it was characterized by coldness. Everything is dead, only the snow lives, and everything that is dead again attempts to come back to life under the weight of the snow. There is a period like this every year, which has been cycling for so many countless years that it has been called a law of nature, and the word law makes it seem as if everything should die at this time, and as if the snow in middle age should live.
Snow and rain are actually the same thing, they are children born of clouds in different seasons and different regions, just like people in the north and the south.
Snow water is the twilight of snow, like the twilight of all things, thinning out. Only the snow on the tops of the snowy mountains stays on all year round, giving the impression that their middle age is particularly long, mythically long. Snow water flow away when the appearance is very spectacular, the plateau can not stay them, like the human cheeks can not stay in the eyes of the tears rolled down.
All the rivers are the tears of the plateau.
The winds of the plateau are dazzling. The wind seemed bright when it blew at me from everywhere, as if it had scraped the sunlight over. I had to close my eyes, and in an instant the wind nailed countless burrs of sun hot and itchy all over me.
The wind is the king of the plateau. Due to the low oxygen content, it is more wild and hard than the wind in other zones. Wind here, in its wide territory to break in and out, roll away what it likes, scrape down what it loathes. The wind can make deep cracks in huge rocky mountains, and a mountain of cracked rock is its work. I know the techniques the wind uses against those rocks, because at the same time, the wind is working against my face. It filed my skin, drained the moisture from my lips, and made them open up and ooze blood; it quickly carved a wrinkle in my forehead. Next, it applied a massive amount of ultraviolet light to my face, making me exactly like those rocks. It took only a short time for the wind to repeat on my face what it had done during its millions of years on the plateau.
As the wind passed me by, I felt it was scaly. Several times it has lifted off my hat, and I don't know whether it did so with its claws or by sweeping it off with its tentacles; the wind doesn't like hats. The wind likes to run wildly toward open fields and valleys, very far away in the blink of an eye. In the hollows, a wind once lifted me so violently that I struggled to keep my footing, and the wind blew away my figure as I stepped on the ground, and my shadow swept over several beams, and saw for me where I was going to reach.
The sound of the wind is mostly a raspy low roar and a mournful whine, but one morning I heard the wind singing beside a frozen sea. At first it was a solo, then many joined the chorus, solemn and thick, echoing over the sea. The ice beneath my feet quivered and exploded with a percussion-like clang. At that moment, the sun rose over my shoulder, illuminating the sea, the winds, and the woods, and I thrilled in the momentary splendor.
There are other times when the wind has brought other sounds with it. For example, it has carried the drumming of a distant monastery to my ears, and it has been able to blow the warp beams on a hillside with a whirring sound. There was even an afternoon when I was walking in no man's land when a gust of wind brought a woman's clear, staccato singing. I don't know where that song started, at least in the back of a few big mountains, or maybe even farther, at the end of the plateau, the depths of time. Wherever it is, only the wind can cross.
The woman, she appeared and disappeared, but the wind carried her voice to eternity.
On top of the wilderness, boulders lie horizontally, like countless heads standing, making me feel shocked.
It was the remains of a mountain that had collapsed. The stones are the present life of the mountain. The collapse of the mountain is just a moment for the plateau, and the moment of the plateau is the generations of people.
I believe that the stone will also walk, it does not have feet, sometimes the wind is its feet, sometimes the water is its feet. How many years later, every stone is not in the original place. Just like every cloud is not in the original place, every person is not in the original place.
Walking stones will also stop, there must be something to make them stop. I saw a sharp stone stopped on the slope, lifting up the tip of its blade, it must be trying to cut through something. For example, when a cloud rolls over it cuts a thunderbolt.
So again, I believe that stones also think, and the way they gaze looks as if they are thinking deep and long. At night they are with the sky full of stars, which are other stones floating in the universe, so close to them that they literally rise up from their midst. And they talk, too, in a language of the wise, only one cannot hear them, and if one does hear them, one does not understand them.
One day I suddenly felt that the stones also had life, another form of life. If I stood by a stone for a long time, I might stand as a stone, and the present me was originally the stone me. At that time I was on the hillside of a village when I saw a young boy sitting on a rock, looking like he had become one with the rock, and like he was hatching the rock. Maybe he had to sit there for a while every day, at first in thought, then in realization, and one day when the stone was hatched, he stood up and walked away, a man. He will graze, drink, like a stone to stand and stare, or go with the wind, trekking through the plateau, with many years to strand themselves in a place far away, let the woman miss.
The afterlife of stone is sand, and the afterlife of sand is earth, the earth on the plateau. Even though it is so small that it is invisible to the naked eye, the stone considers itself a stone.
What is the afterlife of the plateau?
How do you know that what hatched out of a rock is not a mountain?
I can't explain any of this without being shocked by the stone.
I saw groups of trees rising up towards the plateau, they attempted to climb to the top of the highest mountain, but it was impossible, there was the border of snow. They stood down where each could not climb, and plunged their feet into the earth and the crevices of the rocks, and became rooted, forming tribe after tribe.
The white and red birches climbed halfway up the mountain, and there became forests, and lived a worldly life. Fir trees are a little higher, resting on very steep high slopes; poplars go to the plateau flat, with people. I don't know why there are some slopes all kinds of trees do not want to go, occupied by grass, grass in the cold day all yellow, is the kind of beautiful and lonely yellow, lonely and irresistible.
In the tundra, even grass is not born, only rough ridges exposed in the blue sky, sad and primitive. All life has its own height.
The trees have their own personalities. Groups of tribes are always lively, they are always clamoring and swaying. Birch is one of the most fascinating trees of my youth, noble and elegant posture; red birch looks like birch drink red face, drunkenness, it likes to turn up the bark in the sun, blood-colored transparent bark is full of compulsion. There are also individual trees with a strange character, love to live alone, standing alone on another slope, or leaning between the cliffs, like a lonely high priest and hermit. The trees in the nearby woods know them well, know which one is their own climb up, which one is defecated by the bird up.
The trees flaunt their vitality everywhere, displaying the grace of being alive.
But what struck me straight away on the plateau was the death of the forest. It was a field of cedar trees killed by fire from the sky that covered the valley. The charred trees fell, forming a huge black pattern; and in the middle of the pattern, more trees, branches and leaves burned out, carcass mottled, but still standing straight up, spikes pointing to the sky. Those were the skeletons of dead trees, maintaining the posture of the living.
In a twilight, I saw the cemetery of the tree, saw the tree with its own bones for their own tombstone.
Drolma was on the plateau like a cloud in the sky. Zhuo Ma is walking on the plateau, like clouds in the sky. Only on the plateau is there Drolma, because the plateau is closer to the sky.
Drolma is the Tibetan word for fairy, just as cloud is the word for cloud.
I manage to call all Tibetan women Drolma. Droma walks out of the village, Droma walks down the mountain, Droma carries water by the glacier, Droma washes clothes by the spring. I look for someone to ask for directions, call out Drolma, one Drolma looks back, four Drolmas look back, all the Drolmas look back. Their eyes were spotless. In fact, they each have their own names, some are called Yangzong, some are called Wangmu, but at heart they are all Drolma.
Zhuo Ma on the plateau to give birth to children. When she gave birth to a daughter, she was still Zhuo Ma, and when she gave birth to a son, she was called Duo Jie, which means King Kong.
Zhuo Ma old to go to the monastery, devoutly in the high threshold. I met the elderly Drolma at the monastery and she told me that her hair was gray. I looked up and there was a cloud floating on the flying eaves of the monastery, and the cloud was the reincarnated Drolma.
The sky of the plateau is the sky of clouds, gathering the most beautiful clouds in the world. Clouds like the soul of the plateau, they are light and colorful, floating around, cover the sun and spread out, in the morning and twilight into a colorful haze.
Clouds fall on the mountain is snow, fall on the mountainside is fog, fall on the meadow is a deep bright sea.
Clouds are everywhere.
Author Biography Li Gang, ancestor of Shaanxi Hancheng, born in Shandong Jinan, Chongqing Writers' Association Honorary Vice Chairman. He entered the Chinese poetry world in the late 1970s, represented by the large-scale series of poems "Blue Water Soldiers". In the 1980s, he was selected as one of the "Top Ten Contemporary Young Poets" and "Top Ten Most Favorite Contemporary Young and Middle-aged Poets". He has published many books of poetry, prose and cartoons, and his works have been translated into many languages. He was awarded the Second National Outstanding New Poetry (Poetry Collection) Award and dozens of other literary awards. In addition, some of his works have been filmed by CCTV and turned into several TV poems and prose, and he has won four consecutive National TV Starlight Awards. Recently published poetry collection "Blue Water Soldier" (Southwest Normal University Press), prose collection "Time Rising" (Chongqing Publishing House).