Hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made.
— Lu Xun

Approached by rail, the landscape of Shidu reveals itself bit by bit in brief spaces between tunnels. The train emerges from the depths into a sudden blast of light, and the traveler — like a swimmer gasping for air — presses his face against the glass to glimpse a peak, a gorge, a terraced slope before plunging back into the hillside. Only on arrival do the fragments take shape in an uninterrupted canvas: karst spires standing tall over the village and the snaking Juma River below.

It is a resort town, but in the chill of early spring a stillness hangs over the valley. The streets are lined with large and empty restaurants. Horses, who spend their summers running about with excited city-dwellers on their backs, stand listless by the roadside. The red cabins of a gondola lift hang in a motionless arc over the river. Bungee-jumping platforms look desolate and bizarre, jutting out from the cliff face in dusty tangles of blue and yellow steel. And above all that, a white afternoon sun throws the hillsides into relief against a clear blue sky. Visitors here encounter a curious mixture of natural beauty and cheap thrills.

From a vantage point high above, however — from a perch in one of the small wooden pavilions that dot the surrounding slopes like misty sentinels — the picture is different, and perhaps closer to reality. The trappings of a vacationer’s paradise fade into the background, and what remains is the gray brick sprawl of a lonely outpost, folded into a majestic and expansive landscape.

Shidu translates as “ten ferries.” In a time before modern engineering, traveling the length of the gorge between Zhangfang and Shidu meant confronting the Juma at ten places. Ten times the ancients making their way through this valley found their passage barred by the waters; ten times they mustered their ingenuity in the name of moving from one place to another.

Today it is no great feat to cross a river, but only the persistence of that basic desire for movement across the long march of human history has brought us to this point. Through the centuries we have foraged for food and followed the herds, fled persecution or war or obligation, sought adventure, fortune and scientific discovery. We have left home and returned to it. Each journey was made possible by those who came before and — finding the way blocked — built a bridge, blasted a tunnel, cleared a path.