"Never thought of it that way."
He rolled his shoulders modestly. "So tell me about our destination-Yinchuan. Have you been there?"
"Actually no. I’ve never been to the Northwest." Most of Alice’s jobs had been in commerce, and most of the commerce buzzed around China’s eastern cities. Guangzhou, initially, after things started to open up in the mid-seventies, and then Beijing and Tianjin and Nanjing and, of course, the jewel in the trading crown, Shanghai. But the Northwest, no. She shivered with anticipation, a touch of fear, because she’d heard it was a different China out there, in the desert. A place where the rules varied. Be alert, she reminded herself.
"Well, I’m excited about seeing the Chinese deserts," he said. "The Gobi, the Taklamakan, the Tengger, the Ordos. Even their names sound like music. They’re interesting archaeologically too-especially the Tengger and the Ordos, where we’re headed."
"Because Peking Man is out there?"
"Not just that. Because they’re said to be full of prehistoric sites, and totally undisturbed. Pristine is the word we use. It’s not like America, where everything’s been looted and picked over. Out where we’re going, ancient people left stuff behind and it’s still sitting there just the way they left it."
"How can that be?"
He beamed. "Chinese grave robbers only went after tombs from historical times-tombs with treasure. They had no interest in Neolithic and Paleolithic sites."
"Lucky for us." She visualized the little drawing from the letter, the sun head with the face of a monkey. It had a primitive, archetypal look.
"It’s odd that nobody’s surveyed out there since Teilhard." Spencer settled back. "Nobody’s even looked for sites. Do you know how far it’s going to be, to Yinchuan?"
"About two days." Though she hadn’t been there she had read about Yinchuan, the closest town to the Shuidonggou site, where they were going to stay. It was an oasis city. It sat near the top of the Yellow River’s horseshoe curve, on the Ningxia- Inner Mongolia border. It was the edge of the genetic Chinese world, the place where the Chinese and the Uighurs, Muslims, and Mongols started mixing. The region of the three great north-central deserts, too, the Ordos and the Tengger and the Gobi. All cut by a majestic mountain range called the Helan Shan.
Outside, she watched the Beijing suburbs thin. City of history, six hundred, seven hundred years. Teilhard had lived there, had left Peking on a day like this for the Northwest, had ridden a train on this very line. What I like most in China is thegeometry of the walls, the curve of the roofs, the multiple-storeyedtowers, the poetry of the old trees teeming with crows, and thedesolate outline of the mountains.
She watched the trees in a blur, and the villages in their momentary clumps-the few buildings, the crossroads-between stretches of fields. She watched this changing terrain for a long time before the hills appeared, green walls sloping steeply up away from the train. Every few minutes a break in the landscape, a cleavage, would reveal the triumphant, snaking form of the Great Wall in the distance, marching along the crest of the hill above them. Shudderingly beautiful. Built on death and heartbreak. Like so much in China.
These hills, and the stone line of the Wall, disintegrated into the advancing dark. Then it was a shrouded nighttime world roaring by, the ghostly hills cradling north China against the hydraulic train-whistle scream.
Eventually she crawled under her thin blanket and slept. By the time she opened her eyes on her hard pallet the next morning the hills had flattened out; all the green land had vanished and they were rattling across the yellow rock-strewn desert. It seemed to stretch to the limit of the earth. Nothing but boulders and steppes forming low, tired plateaus tufted with struggling gray-green grass.
"Teilhard took this train," she said.
"That’s right. In 1923, on his way to find Shuidonggou, his first big site. Shuidonggou’s in the Ordos Desert-that’s where we’re going to start."
"Because you’re thinking, he hid this crate of fossils out there in 1945. How? He shipped it to someone?"
"Or he carried it there himself. There is this one month, April of forty-five, when he’s unaccounted for. He wasn’t in Peking, but there’s no record of where he went."
"How could he have traveled out here during the war?"
Spencer lifted his hands. "I don’t know. Maybe he just found a way. But I know one thing, from his letters. He loved it out here. Shuidonggou was a place that gave him hope."
Her eyes locked in. "You know-I think you’re right. I remember a line I read last night in one of the books. He wrote from somewhere-Ethiopia, I think-that he felt homesick for Mongolia. For Mongolia! I thought it was odd."
"But if you think about what happened to him out here it makes sense. He stumbled on a site of ancient man. The locals dropped everything they were doing and pitched in to help him. It was the proof he was looking for."
"Though it didn’t help-with Rome, I mean."
"No. It didn’t."
They settled back, Spencer making notes, Alice watching the morning bustle that had taken over their crowded railroad car. It was overflowing now with bodies and luggage and had become a noisy, hurtling village-a Mandarin wall of shouting, laughing, and singing. Old men coughed and hacked and spat at the floor, none too accurately. Spencer winced at the sounds, but Alice was used to it. And she knew, when she got up, to step carefully over the splintered sunflower-seed shells, gnawed watermelon rinds, and sodden black tea leaves.
By noon the pebbly sea outside had given way to grass-lands. Baotou was scheduled for twelve-fifteen.
Now on the horizon Alice could make out the huddle of sand-colored buildings.
"Our colleagues." Spencer closed his notebook.
"Yes." She peered ahead, trying to make sense of the far-off skyline. The two men from Zhengzhou would be there, just ahead, in that town, waiting on the platform. Right now. That tall, contained man, Dr. Lin. And Dr. Kong.
They shot into the squat, sun-baked town, clanked into the station, squealed to a stop.
All around the train was a hissing cloud, the surge of people, shouts and cries, and suddenly there they were, Dr. Kong and Dr. Lin. They bumped their big suitcases down the aisle, smiling. "Hello again," they said. "Hello."
"Hello."
"Hi."
Alice and Spencer stood up. Alice spoke. "Was your journey pleasant?"
"You trouble yourself too much to inquire," Dr. Lin said, using the kind of honorific Chinese one didn’t hear so often these days, except on Taiwan. Mainland people were more suibian, follow convenience, casual. Not him.
"It is of your journey that one should speak," he continued. "You are the foreign guests." He ran his hand through his shock of black hair, then turned and settled his suitcase up into the storage net above the window.
Her gaze settled on his back.
He seemed to feel it, glanced behind. "Truly spoken, it’s an amazing thing. You can really talk."
"Your praise is unjustified," she answered. It was a proper answer, but she tempered it with a smile. She knew her Chinese was good. Mainly, of course, it was because she had a good ear. She had always loved music. All her life, even when she was small, she’d been aware that she heard music the way most other people did not-really heard it. And when she got older and studied Chinese, she found that the other students didn’t listen the way that she did. They thought they did, but they didn’t. And because she heard Chinese, the way that she had always heard music, she quickly picked up the small lilts and angles of Mandarin speech. So what was exceptional about her Chinese was her accent, not her vocabulary. It took years of hard work to build a Chinese vocabulary, and hard work was not Alice’s strong point. Smart but ever so slightly lazy, that was Alice. To Dr. Lin now she demurred politely: "There are lots of foreigners around who can speak better than I."