Lanterns at the Drive

Last Beijing evening. I took the long way into the hotel, up the curved drive under the canopy, where a row of umbrella-shaped lamps glows in file like a procession that decided to stand still. Floodlit pines, dark blue sky, nobody arriving, nobody leaving. I walked it slowly with my jacket over my arm and let the architecture have the final word of the chapter.

Grand hotels are at their most honest at night from their service angles: the drive, the side steps, the door where the staff smoke. That is where the theater shows its rigging. I photographed the colonnade and myself small under it, one guest exiting the overture.

In the morning, the train south: thirty hours to Chengdu, a notebook, and the slow approach to the real reason for this route. The mountain with the factory in it is still eleven hundred kilometers away and I intend to earn it properly, by rail.