I'll wait for you on the Loess Plateau.

When the train runs on the Shu Road, the mountains, rivers and deep valleys are full of vitality. Trains shuttle between cliffs, like flowing water. As the train slowly passed the Qinling Mountains, the mountains slowly changed color. Emerald mountains left their sight, and brown hills and sparse green dotted the mountains. When I arrived in Shouyang, Shanxi Province, the mountains were more bare and dry, like burning pottery.

This yellow hill lacks vitality, giving people a desolate and sad mood. Looking at the lonely houses and terraces on the yellow land, I often wonder: How can people survive in such barren land?

I came to Shanxi, a place on the Loess Plateau, for more than 40 years, and it has become my second hometown. The profundity and massiness of the Loess Plateau have been deeply implanted in my bone marrow.

The Loess Plateau is the largest loess accumulation area in the world, and it is also the plateau with the largest loess coverage area in the world, also known as Wujin Plateau, which is located in the north of central China.

The Loess Plateau is more than 1000 kilometers from east to west and 750 kilometers from north to south. Including the vast areas west of Taihang Mountain, east of Sun Moon Mountain in Qinghai, north of Qinling Mountain and south of the Great Wall. It spans Shanxi Province, Northern Shaanxi Province, Gansu Province (except Longnan City, most areas of Pingliang City, Ningxian County and Zhengning County of Qingyang City), Qinghai Province, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region and Henan Province, covering an area of about 620,000 square kilometers, with an altitude of 800 ~ 3,000 meters.

I remember that when I was working in Tianqiao Village in Beitian, Jinzhong, Shanxi, the village was located on a promontory, surrounded by deep ravines.

I live on campus, so I go exploring in the ditch with a group of children on weekends.

Those ravines are deep, some can lead to another village, some are unfathomable, and no one has come to an end. The villagers gave different names to these ditches, including peach blossom ditch, Muju, Shenxian Ditch, Taisheng Ditch and so on. There are nine long and narrow gullies in the east-west direction, and few people can really walk through these gullies.

I don't know what the name of each ditch means, nor do I know what is in each ditch.

Once a student took me to a ditch for a picnic. We brought small iron pots, instant noodles and eggs. The students set up a pot with clods, picked up dry wood and made a fire to cook. We were having fun when suddenly a parent on the hill shouted to the children, "How did you come to this place for a picnic?" It's not good here, draw the teacher away! "Turned out to be a student's father. He is a feng shui master in the village. He is leading a group of people to find the grave.

This ditch is a grave ditch. It's scary to hear that this is a place to put graves. Most villagers will not walk into this ditch and watch the dusk in the distance. Let's get out of here.

Children in the village often play in the ditch. They know what wild fruits are in that ditch.

Since spring, they have been picking wild fruits, such as apricots, mulberries, peaches, wild jujubes and apples. Once, a student brought me a fruit like ginseng fruit, which I didn't know. The villagers said: the children in the mountains are too wild to run around. Since spring, they have eaten fruits and sour apricots.

In the Loess Plateau, although the soil erosion land lacks nutrition and the harvest is not good, the rain washes all the nutrient layers on the soil surface into the ditch, so the land in the ditch is fertile and crops and fruit trees grow well.

In summer, the broad green corn leaves sway with the wind, making a rustling sound. Apple trees, pear trees and jujube trees are full of fruits in autumn and are red by the sun. When I am free, I like to help the villagers pick apples. They always like to take the biggest and reddest apples home for me to eat.

The barren and desolate mountains on the loess high slope are in sharp contrast with the fertile and rich mountains below.

The loess plateau looks so desolate and barren, often dusty, just like a thirsty person, waiting for the rain to moisten it. In fact, when you get close to it and understand it, you find it is not that simple.

Once I saw a photographer photographing a village called Zhaidi, which was very shocking. The color and gradation of this oil painting deeply attracted me. He photographed the magnificent scene of the Loess Plateau.

I began to look for this mysterious little village. I didn't go until the first time I got off work in the afternoon. It is far from Zhuangzi, and I have been walking on the winding mountain road. There is a deep ditch under the road, which opens its mouth like a monster at dusk. I have to go home because it is dark.

The second time I went the wrong way, I missed the entrance to the village and couldn't find it.

The third time, I heard from my fellow villagers that it was so short to go in from another town. In the gap of the mountain, there are two forks in the road, which I accidentally missed.

The bottom of the village is in a depression, surrounded by mountains. There are earth walls on the east and west mountains, which used to be the castle of Shanxi merchants.

I climbed up the castle and looked down from the observation deck. This is a typical loess plateau landform.

It looks a little surprising that the mountains are dyed golden in the sunset.

For the first time, I found that this seemingly desolate loess plateau is a very unique place.

Rivers and ditches were eroded by rain, rushed out of deep ditches, carved into yellow veins, like a tough guy exposing a brown backbone.

Those mounds of mud are carved by groups of nature, standing tall one by one, waiting for this unpretentious land.

People have lived in this isolated small village for generations, self-sufficient, avoiding war and fighting against the world.

I went to Xiaozhai Village, Tieshi Town, Jinzhong City. At the head of the village, there are two ancient buttonwood trees. From there, I was attracted by a huge oil painting. I saw:

The vast and boundless ravines form multiple folds, outlining the outline of the unearthed mountain. Like the ribs of a giant dinosaur, they extend downward one by one. There are various shapes, but the top of the mountain is flat, as if it had been leveled by a huge cutting machine.

The mountains in this place are very strange, all red in color, and some are mixed with layers of crimson sandstone, which seems to have been deliberately infected by oil painters.

Walking into this red canyon, the mountains have been weathered into various shapes, some as sharp as bamboo shoots, some as giants, and some as unspeakable monsters.

Because the mountains on the Loess Plateau are all made of loess, they are easily eroded by rain and sunshine and become fragmented. Maybe what you see today will disappear tomorrow.

The villagers have been used to seeing such scenery for generations and feel monotonous and nothing novel. This place is dry and lack of rain, which is not suitable for crop growth. So the villagers planted drought-tolerant plants such as dates, apples and millet.

Villagers also use loess to carve caves that are warm in winter and cool in summer. The outside of the cave looks very rustic, but it is unusual to go in, clean and ventilated. Others are built on the mountain, rising layer by layer and densely covered with caves. It embodies the survival wisdom of ordinary people who drift with the tide.

No matter how wonderful the outside world is, the yellow land is still our home, the birthplace of our Chinese nation and the cradle of our Yellow River civilization.

Whenever I take a plane overlooking the Loess Plateau from a height of 10,000 meters, under the blue sky, the Loess Plateau is magnificent, integrated with heaven and earth, and bold and unconstrained.

Ridges extend in all directions, like the arteries in our Central Plains and the keels in China. I was deeply infected by them.

Friends, why not take a walk on the Loess Plateau? Although it does not have the beauty of Emei Mountain and the charm of Jiangnan, it has its resolute character, and only those who really have feelings for it can appreciate and praise it!

Come on! I am waiting for you in the valley on the loess high slope.