"That’s the Helan Shan petroglyph," Kong said promptly.
"What?" Spencer’s eyes popped. "You know it?"
"Of course. It’s a rock art design found only in the Helan Shan Mountains around Eren Obo-that’s a village over the border in what’s now Inner Mongolia. They’re quite controversial, these petroglyphs. Nobody knows whether they are from a thousand years ago or twenty thousand years ago. And no one knows what they signify. Or what culture created them." Kong’s thin, high-cheeked face was lit with knowledge and pleasure. "Here!" He reached for one of Spencer’s maps, uncapped his ballpoint, and drew a circle around a section of the Helan Shan mountains. "This is where they’re found. No place else."
"Only here?" Spencer’s grin pulled slowly at his mouth. "This is great. We’ve got to check this out. I’ve never seen any design like this in the Americas, a sun with the face of a monkey."
"Isn’t it so. Moreover, monkeys were never native to this part of north China. Never."
That stopped Spencer cold. "Then the image must date from after trade was established."
"Yet the patina on the rocks suggest these petroglyphs are much, much older," Kong countered. "We don’t know. We only know that this motif-we call it the monkey sun god-is unique to the Helan Shan."
"And it was sketched in this letter, written to Father Teilhard in 1945. What does that tell us?"
Dr. Kong touched his fingertips together. "Let me think back and forth. Certainly by 1945 nothing would have been published about this rock art. At that time the monkey sun god would only have been known to local people."
"Suoyi, " Alice said, "whoever wrote this letter lived in or near the Helan Shan Mountains."
Spencer picked up the map Dr. Kong had drawn on. "So worst case-I mean, suppose we don’t find what we’re looking for here? We could go on to"-he squinted-"Eren Obo." He propped open his notebook and wrote swiftly, beaming. "You’re something, Dr. Kong. How’d you know about this petroglyph?"
"How could I not know? Late Paleolithic hunter-gatherers are my specialty."
"Late Paleolithic…" Spencer glanced from Kong to Lin. "I’d assumed both of you were Homo erectus specialists."
"Dr. Lin is an expert on Homo erectus," Dr. Kong clarified, pointing to the other Chinese. "Early-Middle Paleolithic."
Dr. Lin nodded. "And I study nomadic foragers in the Late Paleolithic," he finished. "Also the Neolithic, the transition to agriculture."
"Ah. Like me," Spencer said.
Kong nodded.
"Then why were you selected to come, Dr. Kong?" Alice asked.
"Oh! Because I am the vice director’s cousin."
Aha, Alice thought. Of course.
"The vice director depends on me to take care of you. And, of course, to watch you."
Alice jumped on his candor like a small animal. "Do you know anything about those men who were following us in Beijing?"
He shook his head. "I don’t know who they were. But it was ordered, I know that. They are watching you. Surely you realize they watch foreigners."
"Yes-sometimes-" Alice said.
"It’s because you’re looking for Peking Man. Please understand, this is considered most important."
"Of course it is," Spencer agreed. "And thanks for being honest. I appreciate it. I think you’re all right, Dr. Kong. I like you."
"Bici." Kong smiled. It’s mutual.
An hour later they were bouncing out of Yinchuan in a cheap rented jeep, an old machine that had seen many better years. It had gray splotches of primer everywhere, rudely patched tires, and one door that wouldn’t shut. The driver grinned at Alice crazily when she addressed him in Chinese and asked if he thought the jeep would make it. He had a mouthful of silver teeth and lentil-shaped freckles splashed over his jutting cheekbones. "I have my tools!" he explained, waving a thin, muscled arm at a single screwdriver and a plastic jug filled with water. "It’s no problem!"
"Those are your tools? That’s it? You have a spare tire?"
"Foreign woman, don’t worry. I can drive to the shores of the four seas and back."
"What’s he saying about the jeep?" Spencer asked nervously.
"He says it runs great."
And it did attain surprising speeds as they roared out of the city, out of the oasis with its lush fields and into the desert. The dirt and rocks became a carpet, rolling gently away toward the horizon, where the wall of the Helan Shan could faintly be seen. No one followed them. Alice could see miles of empty road behind. Scotch broom and sagebrush and other scrubby plants Alice could not name grew in patches. The terrain was so like the Mojave that Alice expected to see a green-and-white sign at any moment, announcing Barstow or Needles. But the road was unadorned and the desert was empty under the brilliant azure sky. Alice held on hard to the window frame as they slammed over potholes and rattled in and out of ruts.
"Dr. Kong." Spencer leaned over the seat. "Is it true as I’ve heard-the archaeological sites out here are undisturbed?"
"Oh, yes! Untouched." Kong smiled, though his bony frame was bouncing cruelly against the hard seat. "Man has been here continuously for eons. We just have not had the resources to study the place. Only a few of the major cultures have even been identified!"
"God," Adam groaned next to her. "Alice, there’s nothing like this in the West. It’s a gold mine."
"Want to change your project?" she joked.
"No! Peking Man’s the thing. That’s what we’re after."
"But it’s heaven for Dr. Kong," she said, glancing at the rapt Chinese professor.
Lin was watching her. "Dr. Kong loves the Neolithic," he said.
"And you, Dr. Lin? You love Homo erectus?"
"I do," he said, and excitement touched his mouth and eyes. "I’ve studied Sinanthropus all my life-from pictures, you understand, and from the bits and pieces we have found at other sites around China. It’s not much. A skull fragment here and a tooth there. Of course, we keep digging at Zhoukoudian, but during the fifty years since Peking Man disappeared we have found almost nothing. Nothing like the original cache of fossils."
"Yet you’ve learned a lot about the yuanren."
"Yes-his tools, what he ate, how he hunted, how he used fire. Where he found shelter."
"Did they have language? Imagination?"
He laughed out loud. "Of course, we don’t know this. But, truly spoken, we could learn so much more if we could locate Peking Man. That is why I had to come on this expedition. If there is any chance at all to find it-even so little as one blade in a field of grass-it is worth going to the ends of the world."
Ah, she thought, such longing. "Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we succeeded?"
"Ke bu shi ma, " he said in the soft voice of a man who has learned not to allow himself to hope, Isn’t it so.
Presently the jeep left the road and bounced through a grove of oleaster trees. The trees stopped at a barren, skidding slope of bare dirt. At its bottom, slow and brown with the sun shattered all over it, crawled the Yellow River.
The jeep coughed to a stop in the trees. Red-cheeked children ran shrieking up the bank, and a gaggle of older women appeared with a watermelon, a cleaver, and a piece of bright cloth. In a moment they had rigged up a little table and awning and were selling slices for thirty fen apiece. Other passengers rolled down into the grove to wait with them: a truckful of armed People’s Liberation Army soldiers, a man driving goats, and a stunted little pickup truck overflowing with a family of Mongols. Alice stared at the ancient patriarch, tiny round glasses of hammered gold on his nose and a few wisps of white straggling from his chin.