Que Zhi didn’t speak. He looked at his own Western Regions script—carved years ago, the strokes deep, the blade habitually veering left, each vertical line ending in a faint hook.
The characters stood isolated in the midst of that vast field of images, the strokes compact and restrained, carved with force yet held back—as if afraid of taking up too much space.
In the years since he’d left, countless others had added new paintings to this rock wall—deer, horses, oxen, spear-wielding hunters—layering them on one after another, surrounding those two once-lonely characters in a bustling center.
And now, beside his characters, there was a horizontal line.
Very thin, very shallow, crooked—like a shy neighbor next to his deep, solitary carving.
But that person had said: every time I come back, I’ll carve another.
Every time. Come back.
This person probably had no idea what those words meant to someone who had walked the Gobi alone for too many years.
When Que Zhi had carved his characters, he was alone. All these years, traveling between sandstorms and scorching suns, he’d never once imagined that someone would come to this rock wall—not to add a deer, a horse, or a spear-wielding hunter—but to keep him company by adding a horizontal line.
“Let’s go,” Xi Yu said, clearly in high spirits. He tucked the stone fragment into his pocket and dusted off his hands. “Didn’t you say we can see the snow mountains once we cross that ridge? I want to see the snow mountains.”
He turned and walked toward the camels, but after a few steps noticed Que Zhi hadn’t followed. “Why aren’t you coming?”
“Nothing.” Que Zhi withdrew his gaze and fell in behind him.
As they rounded the bend in the riverbed, he glanced back at the rock wall. The ochre-red surface glowed with a dull luster under the afternoon sun, the deer, horses, oxen, and hunters all resting quietly on the rock face, distorted by the heat haze into flowing shapes.
That line of his script was already very old, but the horizontal line freshly carved beside it was so new that it stood out against the entire ancient wall—like a new vein the rock itself had grown.
It was nothing at all—just a thin crooked line. But he thought it was the most beautiful mark on the entire rock face.
That evening, they made camp on a gravel flat. This place was more desolate than the days before—not even hoodoo rocks, only gravel and low, withered shrubs, beaten flat against the ground by wind and sand, like old men hunching their necks.
But Xi Yu didn’t mind.
He spread out his blanket, sat down beside the fire, pulled the dagger from his sleeve, drew it, and looked at his own reflection in the blade by firelight. Still that same face—peach-blossom eyes, the tear-shaped mole, the thin red at the corners of his eyes deepened by the flames. But something was different.
He looked for a long time, then sheathed the dagger and laid it beside his pillow.
“Que Zhi,” he asked, “why did you carve characters?”
Que Zhi was poking at the fire. His hand paused at the question, then continued. “Characters are faster than pictures. Carving a name is faster than carving yourself.”
His voice was flat, as if stating something unrelated.
But Xi Yu noticed that he’d said “carving a name is faster than carving yourself”—not “carving a name is faster than carving a portrait.” Carving yourself.
He treated his name as himself. Carving it into the rock meant leaving himself there.
A person sets out alone, makes camp alone, takes shelter from sandstorms alone, and walks through dry riverbeds alone, stopping to carve his name into the rock wall—as if carving that name made the place feel a little less empty.
“Carving a name is faster than carving yourself.” Xi Yu repeated the phrase, then tilted his head to look at Que Zhi. “So did you carve your name?”
The fire crackled between them. Que Zhi looked up, meeting his gaze across the flames. “Yes. Que Zhi. Both characters.”
“Then you’re not alone anymore.” He looked away, burying his face into the blanket, his voice muffled through the wool. “You carved your name on the rock because you were the only one. Now you have me. From now on, you don’t have to carve it—I’ll carve it for you. Anyway, your handwriting’s ugly.”
Que Zhi didn’t speak.
The fire flickered between him and Xi Yu. He looked down at the old scar on the web of his thumb, his fingertip tracing the rough skin texture around its edge over and over.
His characters had stood on that rock wall for too many years, accustomed to being worn by wind and sand, accustomed to being covered over by later travelers’ deer and horses. No one had ever said “your handwriting’s ugly,” and certainly no one had ever said “from now on, I’ll carve it for you.”
He set his curved blade across his knee, closed his eyes, and leaned back against the gravel.
A long time passed—long enough that the steady, even sound of breathing came from the blanket across the fire—before he finally spoke, his voice so low it was almost inaudible, as if answering or as if bearing witness to himself.
“Alright.”
They saw the snow mountains on the thirteenth day.
That morning, Xi Yu poked his head out from his blanket and found that the Gobi was gone. In its place stretched a continuous snowline, floating along the dark blue ridges, washed pale gold by the rising sun.
The snow mountains were farther than he’d imagined, yet closer too—farther in that the foothills were still who-knew-how-many days’ journey away, closer in that the snowline hung so clearly at the edge of the sky it seemed he could reach out and touch those white peaks.
He’d read the word “snow mountains” in the cold palace, on yellowed old pages, in neat, lifeless strokes. He’d thought snow mountains were just mountains with snow on them—no different from the thin frost that accumulated on the cold palace eaves in winter.
Now, standing on this gravel flat with the morning chill of the Gobi still seeping into his collar, watching the real snow mountains stretch across the horizon, he finally knew that the words in the book were wrong—whoever wrote them had never seen snow mountains, or they wouldn’t have dismissed them with just two characters.
He stared for so long that his neck grew sore before he finally looked down. Then he noticed something moving at his feet.
A lizard lay on a rock beside his blanket—gray-brown back, tail tip slightly curled, watching him with one shiny black eye.
It wasn’t like the lazy sunbathing lizards in the inn yard. This one was smaller, more alert, its limbs braced against the stone in a posture ready to bolt at any moment—yet it seemed hesitant, as if this person before it didn’t quite look like a threat.
Xi Yu crouched down and met the lizard’s gaze. He reached out his finger—but just as it was about to touch the lizard’s back, it darted into a crack in the rocks and vanished.
“It ran away,” he said.
“You moved too fast.” Que Zhi’s voice came from behind him. He sat by the fire, waterskin in hand, pouring water into a bowl. “Lizards don’t trust people. You have to let it watch you first. Once it’s watched enough, it’ll come to you on its own.”
Xi Yu stood up and walked over to sit beside Que Zhi.
He’d long since given up trying to start a fire himself, and stopped pretending he could brew tea. Every morning when he woke, Que Zhi had already lit the fire, boiled the water, and broken the dried rations into small pieces to toast on the stones.
All Xi Yu had to do was sit down, take the bowl Que Zhi handed him, blow on it twice, and say “Too hot”—then Que Zhi would take it back and hold it out to cool for a while.
Today was no different.
The only difference was that today, he didn’t say “Too hot.”
Xi Yu took the bowl, sipped it slowly, his eyes still fixed on the snow mountains. After a few sips, he suddenly said, “Lizards don’t trust people. What about you?”
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