Brentwoodian 2019

24 be burned as well: an Emperor of Time as well as Space. Nothing was important before him - I don’t know how true this is. The Wall gathers legends. The Wall is the opposite of a maze: it goes one way only, straight on, up and down, over every obstacle, and it’s this obstinacy that also leaves an impression: the sheer determined, unstoppable will of it all. As I near the limit of where we’ve been told we can go, two of our girls wave from a battlement. They’re too distant to see who they are. I wave back, wondering whether they were waving at me or someone else, or perhaps it wasn’t them at all. We’re all ants here, everyone separated. After the first 500 yards I haven’t seen anyone I know, nor seen the boys who went ahead coming down. Are they still going up? At the highest point we’re allowed I’m level with a kind of pagoda that’s not part of the Wall; it’s more like a small temple. I saw it from the ground, it seemed impossibly high and a long climb, but here we are, sky-gods. A word I’ve been trying to remember all through the climb comes back to me. It reminds me most of Greece’s Mycaenae. The hills have the same vertiginous slope to them; where the rock is exposed it’s the same brutal rock, but where in Greece there were cypresses and pines, here there is abundant deciduous forest, the leaves just turning to red and orange with the change of the season, but whereas Mycaenae thrilled with its association with Agamemnon, its tombs and jewelry, its fireside hearth at the top of the citadel, and all the legends I grew up with and destiny and myth, here the Wall seems anonymous. It’s so big, and we could be anywhere along its length; only the lost unidentified soldiers and their commanders could have been here. I know, or believe I know, because Homer is so good, what the Greeks thought and felt, but I don’t really know what was going on here: who was here, how they lived, what they wanted from their obscure nameless Gods, how they made their sacrifices. The Chinese don’t seem to be bothered either. Compared to European sites there’s so little information given out. The occasional notice is more concerned to tell you not to damage the stones. Is this lack of information because the Chinese all know their history? My guess is that they don’t. After all, most of the English don’t know who the owner of the castle was that they’re climbing about on. And down at the base there aren’t any guidebooks to buy, only opportunities for merchandise. Before beginning our ascent we posed for an official group photo. We’ll collect hard copies when we get down, along with a certificate to proclaim us men now we’ve climbed the Wall, even if we’re women. When I get to the bottom there’s no one I know, and then I spot the two girls who were at the top before me. They haven’t seen anyone either. Over the next half-hour the rest of the group turn up in the square. Everyone’s been to the gift shop. Prices are cheap, and everyone’s got something to take away, as well as their certificate, which, it turns out, we have to sign ourselves. The Chairman was too busy, and we’re only ants. We sleep on the coach back through the unending miles of concrete urban sprawl that is modern China’s architectural legacy, which was new thirty years ago and is degenerating rapidly. The Great Wall. It is Great, and satisfying to have seen and walked it. It’s a Wall, and the greatest of them in a long line that includes Hadrian’s and Offa’s Dyke, and similar efforts around the world. Of course, they all fail in the end; Walls, the expense to construct them eventually pales alongside the expense of maintaining them. President Trump will be gone before his wall between America and Mexico is built. That won’t work either. Only the Wall in Game of Thrones goes on forever, but this Wall, which is its inspiration, runs it close. By Dr Evans