Sketches of China 04: Beijing by train

Illustration: Mark Doyle

This is the fourth instalment of Sketches of China, a collaboration between the writer James Kelly and the illustrator Mark Doyle.

Speeding across the countryside under sulphur skies, an arrow shot for the city’s heart, the forlorn moan of the electric locomotive thundering along the tracks, cutting across the land, slowing from time to time, stopping at anonymous skylines of half-built tower blocks and cranes that tell of the rapacious pace of urbanisation, the shape of a woman emerging freshly showered onto a balcony in the evening sun as the carriages pull away once again, surveying the scene from the window, the landscape drenched in wan yellow light, the sinuous figures and sun-beaten skin of peasants who till the land, resting for a moment under a drooping tree, the red and white stripes of a chimney stack behind them, a smelter belching out smoke that hangs low in the air above fields of cadmium rice and split melons, the smog lingering over rivers whose fish have long since departed, hanging in wisps above brittle fields, their groundwater sullied, their aquifers depleted, the earth sucked dry, the train reaching the first buildings that announce the metropolis under darkening skies, the forlorn moan of the engine dying out to the creak of the carriages as it slows, snaking unnoticed through shabby suburbs, the buildings growing taller, entombing the land and climbing to touch the sky, the carriages tugging as finally they come to a halt, stepping out onto the concourse, waking into a nightmare, feeling the frenetic pulse of the city as the sun gradually sinks over the fields left far behind, the land slipping into shadow to await the new day, the televised dawn of progress at all costs.

***

James Kelly is a writer and translator with a strong interest in landscape and time. Read more of his work at www.geosoph.scot/writing/.

Mark Doyle is an artist and illustrator working in painting, sculpture, printmaking and digital media. See more of his work at www.markdoyle.org and on Instagram @markdoyleartist.