【英语生活】英国作家游庐山

We left Nanjing by bus on one of China's new motorways, heading north along the Yangtze valley for what Jung Chang , author of Wild Swans, calls the “magic mountain” of Lushan. Part of a cloud-capped range rising vertically from the plain below, 4,000ft above sea level, the fabled haunt of dragons, Lushan has been visited by poets, painters, generals and rulers from the first Ming emperor to Chairman Mao.

I was following in the footsteps of Nobel Prize-winning American writer Pearl Buck (1892-1973), the child of missionary parents who fled to Lushan every summer to escape cholera, malaria and dysentery raging in the subtropical heat of the steamy, mosquito-ridden Yangtze flatlands. (Buck's two older sisters and a brother had already died of these summer fevers before she was born.)

The family travelled by slow-boat up the river, then for 15 miles across the sweltering plain in chairs carried by local farmers to a resthouse at the foot of the mountain. Before dawn the next day they started the five-mile climb in flimsy bamboo seats, each bound to poles resting on the shoulders of four men. They jolted along narrow stony tracks past plunging streams and waterfalls, threading through gorges and along cliff faces. At one point they ascended a flight of 1,000 steps cut into the mountain.

“Higher and higher the road climbed, twisting so abruptly that sometimes our chairs swung clear over the precipices as the front bearers went on beyond the rear ones, still behind the bend. One mis-step and the chair would have been dashed a thousand feet onto the rocks and swirling water,” Buck wrote of these journeys. “Somewhere near the top of the mountain we turned a certain corner and were met by a strong cold current of mountain air ... The bearers welcomed it with loud hallooing calls... Then came the final ascent to the valley, a swift, short ascent, and there it lay like a bowl held to the sky by the topmost peaks of the mountain range.”

The settlement on the summit of Lushan was laid out by Edward Selby Little, an Englishman who leased the land in 1895. He called it Kuling (now Guling) and it still looks like London's Hampstead Garden Suburb, a network of stone houses with trim lawns in woodland glades linked by brick paths beneath tall forest trees.

Buck's father was one of the first five missionaries to buy building plots from Little and put up stone shacks with tarpaulin roofs. These were eventually succeeded by more than 600 villas, many of them palatial, surrounded in their day by tennis courts, bridge clubs and a concert hall.

Handed back to China by the British in 1935, Guling became the summer capital of the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party, and its leader Chiang Kai-shek. But it was Mao who built the broad, winding road we came by, still one of the best in China, and Mao who ensured that Guling remains to this day a Chinese garden city watered by streams and swathed in greenery, yellow dogwood, pink crêpe myrtle and sweet-scented white osmanthus with red tiger lilies growing wild in the woods.

The sturdy little church where Buck's father preached hellfire sermons was turned into a dance hall for Mao and his comrades in the 1950s. Today it is a prime tourist attraction, staging a mock wedding every 30 minutes with a rack of costumes for hire (evening dress for the men, gauzy dance frocks for their wives), and the wedding march blaring across the valley from loudspeakers on the roof.

None of this was visible the evening I got there. We stepped on to Guling's main street in mist so thick you could barely see your hands. Next day it seemed thicker still. We joined an unbroken line of Chinese tourists shuffling along the dizzying walkways cut into the mountainside. There must have been hundreds, perhaps thousands of people peering into what looked like dense white rice soup filling the chasm at our feet. Whenever the mist parted to show spiny crags above and a giddy drop below, they leaped from rock to rock to pose at the rim of the abyss.

As we headed upwards to the Cave of the Immortals the voices bouncing around the ravine sounded like a boisterous London literary drinks party. People shoved and jostled, photographing and shouting at one another. For all I know they were quoting lines carved into the cliffs by the 1,500 great men said to have visited this mountain. Both Mao and the Ming emperors wrote poems here. When I complained to my Chinese companion about the fog, he recited a verse written by Su Shi almost 1,000 years ago: “Lushan's true face I cannot see,/Because I am inside its mists.”

Watching the rock faces come and go, materialising faintly through the cloud, I thought of another writer, the English novelist Mervyn Peake. He was a mission child like Buck, born on Lushan in 1911, the year of the first Chinese revolution. Peake recreated the mountain as the location for Gormenghast in his three Titus Groan novels, and, as I got my eye in, I began to see the looming bulk of his castle and, beyond it, “the long broken line of Gormenghast's backbone”. Peake started writing when Lushan was still a Nationalist stronghold (the American General Marshall tried to negotiate peace between the Communists and the Kuomintang in 1946 on a ledge outside the Cave of the Immortals).

Gormenghast, the second volume of Peake's trilogy about violence, corruption and decay in the closed world of this mountain, was completed in 1949, the year the Communist party came to power in China. A decade later (the year of Peake's final volume) Mao staged a fateful meeting of the party's central committee on Lushan. An attempted revolt against the policies that caused famine during the Great Leap Forward was crushed here in 1959, and 22m people died of hunger the following year. A further grim session of the Politburo followed at Lushan in 1970.

The history of the 20th century has been written and rewritten on this hillside. Some of Guling's older villas have now been redesignated as museums or shrines. One contains life-size wax effigies of a black-frock-coated missionary and his wife in tiara and floor-length gown. Edward Selby Little is featured with his building plans, alongside a Chinese labourer bent double beneath a block of stone, in a tableau representing imperialist greed and colonial exploitation.

Buck herself, seated pen in hand at a writing desk in her family's small house, is a pretty, waxen child with frizzy ginger hair and a stern expression. An altogether more elaborate mock-up features heroic young visionaries, from Sun Yat-sen to Zhou Enlai, training eagle eyes on China's future. But the main attraction is Mao's villa, a massive bullet and bomb-proof concrete blockhouse screened by trees on a hillside alive with pilgrims, mostly young, always in groups, bussed in to pay homage from all over China.

Buck witnessed many changes of regime in China during her long life, and it gave her a horror of ideology. She rejected her father's fundamentalist faith, and she had no illusions about either Nationalist or Communist dogma. But she might have raised a sardonic smile to see the lovely valley that was her second home in China filled with piped church music as a 21st-century tourist draw.

Hilary Spurling's ‘Burying the Bones: Pearl Buck in China' (Profile, ￡15) is published on April 4

我们乘坐大巴车离开南京，上了一条新建的高速公路，沿长江一路向北，直奔张戎的小说《野天鹅》(Wild Swans)中的“神奇之山”——庐山而去。庐山是巍巍群山中拔地而起的一部分，海拔达四千英尺，如巨龙般若隐若现。在历史上，无数的诗人、画家、大将军，以及从明太祖到毛主席的统治者都曾莅临过庐山。

我是追随着赛珍珠的步伐来到庐山的。赛珍珠（1892-1973）是一位荣获过诺贝尔奖的美国作家，传教士之女，每年夏天她都会从长江平原躲到庐山来，以避开那片蚊蝇满天的亚热带潮湿之地，免得染上霍乱、疟疾及痢疾之类（她的两位姐姐和一个哥哥在她出生之前便死于这些暑热症。）

一家人乘一叶扁舟沿江而上，然后坐上由当地居民抬着的竹椅走上十五英里，穿越一片湿热的平原，随后就抵达庐山脚下的客栈。第二天拂晓之前，他们便会坐上竹子做成的轻薄小凳（竹凳的每一边都绑上一根长棍，然后由四个壮汉扛着）就这样开始了他们的五英里登山之旅。他们沿着石板铺就的山间窄道颠簸而上，越过湍流的小溪与瀑布，穿过险峻的峡谷与陡壁。一步一步的登上了陡峭山峦之间的千个台阶。

“山坡越来越陡峭，急转千回之际，我们的座椅有时仿佛悬于陡崖之上，当前面的挑夫几乎位于后面挑夫的上方，后面的挑夫还留在弯道之后。若一脚踏空，我们的躺椅就会摔到上千英尺下的巨石上，让湍急溪流卷走。”赛珍珠如是记载着这些旅程。“在靠近山顶的某些地方，猛一转弯，就会迎面袭来一股强劲冷冽的山风……挑夫们在响亮的号子声中顶风而上……然后是登上峡谷的最后一段陡峭、短小的上坡路，犹如一只巨碗，盛着茫茫苍天，稳立于山脉之顶端。

庐山顶峰的别墅区是由李德立(Edward Selby Little)设计的。李德立是英国人，于1895年租下这片土地。他把这里称为Kuling（现为牯岭），这里看起来仍是一派伦敦汉普斯特德花园郊区的摸样。高耸的林木下，有青石小径将鳞次栉比的石头房子和林间空地上修剪整齐的草坪连在一起。

赛珍珠的父亲是最早从李德立手中购买建筑用地的5位传教士之一，并在石头小屋上安装了防雨顶棚。在此之后，600多套别墅相继建成，其中很多华美如宫殿，在鼎盛时期曾被网球场、桥牌俱乐部和音乐厅所包围。

1935年由英国人交还给中国后，牯岭成为国民党(Kuomintang)及其领袖蒋介石的夏都。但我们上山的路则是由毛泽东修的，蜿蜒宽阔，不失为中国最好的山路之一，也是毛泽东确保了牯岭保留至今，成为中国的花园城市。这里溪流纵横，绿树掩映，丛林中，野生植物色彩斑斓，黄的山茱萸、粉的紫薇还有甜香四溢的白桂花和红色的卷丹百合。

赛珍珠的父亲曾经宣讲过地狱之火布道词的坚实的小教堂，在20世纪50年代变成了毛泽东和他的同志们的舞厅。今天，这里是一个重要的旅游景点，每隔30分钟上演一场模拟婚礼，有一排可供租用的服装（男士为晚礼服，妻子则是薄纱连衣舞裙），婚礼进行曲通过屋顶扩音器的喇叭响彻山谷。

我到达的当晚什么也没看到，因为当我踏上牯岭的主干道时，雾气如此浓重，几乎伸手不见五指。第二天雾气似乎更重了。我们加入了连绵不绝的中国游客大军，在山壁上开凿的山道上晕头转向地慢慢移动。这里一定有成百或成千人，摩肩接踵，看上去就像是浓稠的白米粥填满我们脚下的缝隙。一旦云雾散开，露出头顶突兀的峭壁，和脚下让人目眩的落差，他们便从这块岩石跳到那块岩石，在悬崖边上摆起姿势拍照。

当我们朝着上面的仙人洞而去，嘈杂之声在深谷中回荡，听上去犹如喧哗吵闹的伦敦文学酒会。人们推推搡搡，相互拍照，彼此大声招呼。我只知道他们正在诵读1500年多位据说曾到此一游的伟人们刻在石壁上的诗句。毛泽东和明代皇帝都曾在此题诗。当我向同行的中国伙伴抱怨浓雾时，他为我吟诵了1000年前苏轼的诗句：“不识庐山真面目，只缘身在此山中。”

看着一面面岩石从眼前来来去去，在云层里若隐若现，我想起了另一位作家——英国小说家馬溫·皮克(Mervyn Peake)，他与赛珍珠一样同是传教士的子女，1911年生于庐山，这一年中国爆发了的第一次国内革命。皮克的再创作将此山作为他的三部曲《泰忒斯誕生》(Titus Groan)中歌门鬼城(Gormenghast)的所在地，而我通过一番练习，开始看到他的城堡巨大而模糊的主体，以及城堡上“歌门鬼城支柱长长的断裂带”。皮克开始写作时，庐山仍是国民党的要塞——1946年，在仙人洞外的一座山梁上，美国将军马歇尔(Marshal)试图促成共产党与国民党之间的和平谈判。

皮克三部曲的第二部《歌门鬼城》是关于这座山上封闭世界里的暴力、腐化和堕落的，完成于1949年，同年共产党在中国执政。10年后（皮克三部曲的最后一部问世），毛泽东召开了决定共产党中央委员会命运的庐山会议。1959年，反对大跃进期间引发饥荒的政策的企图在这里被粉碎，第二年2200万人死于饥饿。1970年，一场更为严酷的政治局会议于在庐山召开。

20世纪的历史在这座山坡上被反复书写。牯岭的一些老别墅如今被重新设计成博物馆或神殿。其中一处容纳了真人大小的蜡像，外罩黑色僧袍的传教士和他头戴宝冠，身穿及地长袍的妻子。李德立的造型与他建筑图纸摆在一起，旁边是一个中国劳工，屈身于在两块巨石下，形成代表帝国主义贪婪和殖民主义剥削的造型。

赛珍珠本人拿着钢笔坐在她家小屋的书桌旁，这是一个漂亮而肤色略显苍白的小孩，一头卷曲的金发，神情严肃。一组更为精致的实体模型塑造的是一些年轻英武的梦想家，从孙中山到周恩来，目光敏锐的注视着中国的未来。但主要的景点是毛泽东的别墅，一座防弹防轰炸的水泥碉堡，隐藏山坡上的树林中，里面充斥着朝圣者，大多数是年轻人，通常成群结队坐着巴士从全国各地来到这里向伟人致敬。

赛珍珠在她漫长的一生中经历了许多中国政权的更迭，这使她对意识形态产生了恐惧。她拒绝了她父亲的正统派基督教信仰，无论对国民党还是对共产党的教义都不抱幻想。但她或许会对美丽山谷中回荡着的教堂管风琴音乐报以嘲讽的微笑，在她的第二故乡中国，他们以此招徕21世纪的游客。

希拉里·斯伯林的《 埋骨：赛珍珠在中国》》(Burying the Bones: Pearl Buck in China)（小传，15英镑）于4月4日出版。

译者/诸彦青