Word: caving
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...individualism, and yet know perfectly well that, powerless or not, individuals make up the world. Every mass unleashing in this century, for good or ill, may be traced to an individual choice. And even when the choice has overwhelmed the choosers, the solitary mind, like a bat in a cave, gropes about for its own directions. "History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes and kindle with pale gleams the passions of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide...
...house, once shared by Chu Teh (with wife) and Chou En-lai (with wife) One notes: a private house for Mao, for his two closest companions a shared cottage. Here Mao lived until 1938, when the Japanese began to bomb Yanan and he moved three miles north to the cave encampment at Yangjialing...
...next stage of pilgrimage comes another mile or two away the famous Zaoyuan, or Date Garden, to which the leaders moved in 1942. By then, they had broken completely with Chiang. There, on the dominant slope, are the caves of the same three men. Mao's boasted no fewer than five rooms; he slept now in a handsome dark wood sleigh bed, on a hardwood board with only a thin pad on top. Chu Teh had a fine cave suite to his left, Chou En-lai to his right...
Just below the ledge are two cottages, one for Peng Dehuai, who would become Defense Minister, one for Liu Shaoqi, who would become President. The three cave dwellings above and the two cottages below made the ruling group; they met as neighbors, friends, brothers, as they planned the revolution to come. The lesser two were persecuted to death; the reigning three were all to die of natural causes in a nine-month period of 1976, at least two of them knowing their revolution had misfired, and the largest of them all, Mao, insane...
This is fine, lighthearted stuff, the kind of escapade that tastes good later with a few beers. Sailors talk cheerfully about buoys disastrously missed in fog, and climbers about snow-cave bivouacs that lasted for days. Still, the risk takers know that sailors drown and mountaineers fall. There is a casualty list, and the chances of ending up on it increase with the risks. Balloonist Maxie Anderson flew across the Atlantic five years ago in his great silver Double Eagle II; early this summer he and Partner Don Ida crashed and died in Bavaria during a balloon race...