Old Ge

A local guide who had guarded the mountains of Guanzhong for three generations; in the black market he goes by an alias, and no one asks his real surname. His left hand is missing a segment of the ring finger.

This mountain-guarding trade has passed to him over three generations: his father walked the mountains for 50 years and crossed 7 'crossroad stretches'; his grandfather went into a mountain gully, and to this day his body has never been carried back out. The rules of the mountains were bought with lives, and he remembers them well.

He led Shen Zhaoye up the mountain. He didn't talk much; what he gave were rules: at what hours you must not walk, which direction to head when you hear dogs barking, which stretch of path you don't turn back from once you've entered. When Shen Zhaoye asked about that severed finger, he gave no answer.

The man who has guarded the foot of this mountain for 3 generations does not fear the dead in the tombs—he fears the things in those tombs that were never meant to be seen at all.

He takes people into the mountains on a few rules that are not up for discussion: no setting out before first light, no entering a gully past noon, move downwind at the sound of dogs, and at every fork he stops first and the party stops with him.

He does not explain where the rules come from. Ask too often and he will not take you—men who insist on reasons are generally men who intend to judge for themselves, and those he cannot lead.

He walks in front at an unhurried pace and looks back at intervals. Not to check that people are keeping up, but whether the line they are walking has drifted. Drift two or three paces in those mountains and you will not find your way back before dark.

He takes half the money first and settles the rest once they are down. No one has ever asked why it is split that way.

His pack is old canvas, the straps replaced twice, and the contents have barely changed in decades: a cleaver, a coil of hemp rope, a small packet of coarse salt, two torches of his own making, a cloth bag of unhulled rice.

He carries a flashlight and uses it only at the end. Night in the mountains has its own level of light, he says, and eyes that adjust can find the path; switch on a lamp and your eyes are ruined, and when it goes out there is nothing at all.

The rice is not for eating. At certain places he takes a small handful and scatters it at the side of the path, and does not look back. People have asked. He says it came from his father, that his father never said why, and that he never asked.

The missing joint on his left hand went when he was in his forties. He does not say how, and nobody at the foot of the mountain brings it up.