OUT OF EDEN WALK

The cicadas were buzzing. They’d been doing this for millions of years. The air steamed.The small town of Simatai looked nothing like its Google-mapped version. Google left China in 2010 to avoid censorship, and its satellite imagery hasn’t been updated. Meanwhile, in the intervening 14 years, the constructed landscape of China has been radically transformed. Immense new urban districts have mushroomed across open fields, and there now are highways, apartment complexes, reservoirs, malls, and factories where once stood a satellite pastiche of lonely village roads or sorghum farms.I had been walking effortlessly through this gone world of China for two years. My GPS tracks bisect ghostly croplands and vanished older structures alike. There was one landmark at Simatai, however, that hadn’t changed or budged: the Great Wall, built in the sixth century. It abides. That one I still had to climb over.