Dingling & evil spirits.

OUR COMMISSION has been working hard at meetings, briefings, luncheons, dinners for ten days, and this is to be our one break, a day of sight-seeing around Peking. But in no way a day of rest. It is 6:00 A.M., and we find ourselves in a small touring bus at 6:00 A.M. is proof positive that our friend Bob Wallach is one of the great American trial lawyers. He has convinced weary us that to see the Great Wall we should be there early, ahead of the crowds. Lynn and Elizabeth Noah and Leon Slawecki of the embassy have joined us, greatly enhancing the enterprise, since in addition to being bright, witty, brave, true, noble, and strong, they speak Chinese. We travel north, into the rugged hills that form a hundred-mile-wide barrier protecting the great northern plain from Mongolia. As we ascend, the bleak grey-green-brown hills become dotted with wild apricot trees, scattered in flighty disarray up and down the mountainside.

In Peking, it was full spring, the cherry blossoms past their prime--fading dowagers--but here in the mountains spring is newborn, fluffy green and white. Since leaving Peking we have passed no passenger car, only buses and trucks, bicycles, and horse-or donkey-drawn carts. We turn a corner, like many others, and see it, the Wall--as we've seen it in a hundred photographs--moving snakelike along the brow of the hills, as it is said the astronauts see it from space. It doesn't take the easy route along the valley floor like roads and rivers and trains, not the Wall: It seeks the high ground, the crest of the hills. Some say it stretches 4,500 miles, others a mere 1,500 miles.

No matter. It was the Emperor Qui Shi Huangli, the first to unite China, two hundred years before Christ, who built the Wall by uniting the fortifications of the then six kingdoms of China. But the Great Wall we see here at Badaling was reconstructed, raised, and fortified by the Ming emperors (1368-1644). It is in fact a roadway built high above the ground along which five horsemen or ten soldiers could ride or match abreast. At high points there are beacon towers. When sentries sent out smoke signals by burning wolves' dung (I know, I don't believe it either, but that's what China, a Travel Survival Kit says), relaying the message down the line that the nomads were raiding again.

The roadway is wide, but the stone underfoot is worn smooth and slippery. This left segment is steep, very steep, but not steep enough to discourage the inevitable hawker with his cold drinks, Red Army caps, and T-shirts. For a buck and a quarter (four yuan), Bruce Gregory, a very large, amiable, red-bearded fellow, is offered a flaming red T-shirt that proclaims in large white letters: I HAVE CLIMBED TO THE GREAT WALL. Bruce tries to explain to the vendor that he will make more sales if he omits the word "to," and the panting, red-faced tourists who have made it to the top of the first watchtower nod agreement. Some are too far gone to speak. The vendor does not say, "Ah, so," but continues to smile, and makes his sale.

The shadows so early in the day are long, and as we pause (for breath) we see another wall, an elongated wall of shadows with crenellations and watchtowers keeping us company, but undulating from time to time as it mounts a rock or descends into a crevasse. Here in the still morning, the sweet fragrance of the wild apricots is borne our way by the cooling breeze.

WE APPROACH the tombs where 13 of the 16 Ming emperors were buried by the side door, so to speak, rather than by the official entrance, the Sacred Way. We go directly to Dingling, which was built by the Emperor Wan Li (1573-1620), a merry rogue by all accounts. He took six years to build this elaborate tomb, expending all manner of silver coin and resources of the realm, and then, according to one story, threw one wild party in it before closing it up to await his next and final coming. It is the only tomb to have been excavated. Three days later in Hong Kong, Sir Run Run Shaw, the movie producer, will show us a film of the excavation of Dingling in 1956. We will see the workmen take down the bricked-up entrance wall, push open the huge, stone doors with a grudging grinding of rock turning on rock, and see them gently, carefully, remove the debris of centuries to come at last upon the treasures that were buried with Wan Li and his empresses. It is a little like having a grandstand seat at the greatest archaeological event of the early twentieth century, that magic moment when Howard Carter, peering into the tomb of Tutankhamen, whispered in answered to Lord Carnarvon's "What do you see?": "I see wonderful things."

As we approach the pavillion in Dingling Elizabeth Noah points to a string of glazed figures along the outer edges of the roof lines: dragons, phoenixes, lions, and celestial horses all chasing the emperor, who is riding a chicken. If they catch him, she tells me, and he falls off to his death, it is because he deserves it. This same rooftop parade is to be seen on all royal residences. Leon points to an elaborately carved ramp at the entrance to the pavilion and tells us that over this only the emperor may pass. He was carried over it in a palanquin by bearers who walked up the steps.

We, and streams of Chinese, descend into the tomb itself, a vaulted underground palace of five large chambers with giant urns and other artifacts that were discovered there, and find it all very sanitary, very clean, very, if you will, dead. Most of what was found here is now on display in the Forbidden City and at Changling, which we will visit later today.

Leon suggests we picnic at a non-reconstructed, deserted tomb called Qinling, which is near by. Our Great Wall Hotel box lunches are enhanced by the Kirin beer and sodas Hershey Gold bought at Badaling. They are ice cold, as is the jug of California Chablis Lynn has dug out of his cooler. We sit on fallen bits of masonry and statuary chiseled out of rock hundreds of years back, in a grove of tall cedars. It is all very relaxing, very pleasant.

After lunch we explore, discovering the entrance platform and remnants of the portal gate. We walk through the underbrush to the pavilion and beyond it to the tomb itself. Some of us make it to the top of the tomb; some don't try, and some who do find that the only safe way down the slippery stone is by the seat of the pants, which is the way Hershey Gold comes down. (Hershey's is later, on the Sacred Way, to pose for a picture on a crouching lion's back, which back proves just as slick. We call it Hershey's Lion's Fall.)

Changling is magnificent. The entrance gateway opens onto a wide court at the end of which is a very beautiful, large, blue, red, and gold pavilion. Ling'en, the Gate of Eminent Favor. It's a rectangular building in perfect proportion. The emperor and his pursuing beasties engage in their ritual chase along the eaves. (Later that afternoon, in the Forbidden City, Elizabeth will point to a rooftop parade in which the emperor is missing. "He must have been very evil," she says.) We go up a dozen steps or so and enter the pavilion, a cool oasis from the hot, glaring noonday sun. A hostess in a period gown offers to take us around. Leon and Lynn act as interpreters. Our guide shows us elaborately decorated and bejeweled headgear: a blue dragon crown and a phoenix coronet the emperor and his empresses used on ceremonial occasions; the armor Ming officers wore; alabaster wine jars; jewelry, vases, bowls, goblets, plates of gold.

But we must hurry; just three hours hence we face yet another (16-course banquet. So it's back into our bus and back to Peking via the Sacred Way. We drive through the double line of fierce generals and officials and the 12 sets of stone animals--one of each pair standing, the other crouching--past a giant tortoise with a huge stele on its back, to the Triumphal Gate. Somewhere along the four miles we have taken a jog to the right. As I look back, I notice the Red Gate is not on a line with the avenue of animals. Why is that? I ask Leon. Because, he says, "evil spirits fly in a straight line." And smiles at my ignorance of such basic facts in this strange and ancient land. It's been a very good day.