She sank back gratefully, closed her eyes. At least she was still fully dressed. She opened one eye to see him looking at her.
"You’re all right?"
"Yes." She propped her head on the pillow, aware that she was floating, and he was standing over her. "Dr. Lin," she said. "Do you not think it remarkable that we met like this?"
"You know, Mo Ai-li, what’s remarkable is that we came to this place and Dr. Spencer was right: they do know something about Teilhard. He did come here. It makes me think there is hope, where before I had no hope. It makes me think things can change. I thank you for this. You and Dr. Spencer."
"Don’t thank me." She rolled her eyes. "It’s not like my life is much of an example."
"No, no. You’ve exerted yourself against the fates. You told me about your father. In our world, Mo Ai-li-our Chinese world-we just endure these things."
"So you do," she said, looking at him. Accept my world, she begged in her mind. My world where I am walled in, where Horace may soon be leaving me. Oh, was Horace going to die? Was he desperately ill right now? "But I get so frightened sometimes," she admitted.
"I know. Fear is only fear, though."
"And somehow you live without it."
"No," he corrected her. "You live with it." He smiled down at her. "Good-night, Mo Ai-li."
Alone in the hall outside her room, Dr. Lin paused. Could he do this, with this woman? Could he keep advancing toward her? She was so intelligent. He could talk to her, really talk to her. But she was a Westerner. Later she might grow bored, turn to some other man. Lose interest in him. The idea made him sick, even though he had not yet possessed her. He stared down the dimly lit hall, which ended in a square window framing the desert night.
No, he thought finally. She was not like that. Other Western women might follow convenience, but not Mo Ai-li. He could see her character in her face, her words, her actions. She would be a woman he could trust.
It was more than an hour next morning in the jeep, climbing steadily up into the arid, rubble-pile mountains, before they finally turned up a deep, cutting canyon. The ravine was covered with pebbles, the walls so narrow they scraped the jeep. As they climbed they saw smaller tributary washes twist down to join them. Then the canyon opened out to an enclosed plateau and Alice caught her first sight of the baisi temple complex. It was built in pagoda style, its vermilion-and-gilt colors howling against the brown cliffs. The repeating, supplicating roofs under the endless blue desert sky.
They got out of the car. Alice breathed deeply the good baking smell of hot sun on rocks. Then over the dry silence she heard a long, mournful note, calling like a boat horn.
A young man in plain terra-cotta robes, barefoot, shave headed, walked out into the light from the courtyard wall. He turned and spoke through the doorway behind him. The horn sound ceased. Another monk emerged, carrying a long metal instrument.
Kuyuk spoke to the lamas, who turned and led the way into the inner courts. One by one they all stepped over the bottom beams of a succession of great round gates, until they came to the central cell of the compound, where loess-brick rooms surrounded the bare yard.
The lamas said something to Kuyuk in Mongolian and he turned to the group, disappointment on his face. "I don’t know what we’ll be able to learn. These monks have only been here a few years. Records-there are none. The whole place burned in the Chaos and was rebuilt."
That’s the fresh paint, she thought. "No older monks remain?"
"None left living."
"The petroglyph, then," prompted Spencer. "Ask if they’ve ever seen one in the hills around here."
She took the paper from her pocket and gave it to Kuyuk. He talked to the monks and passed it back to her. "They say they have seen these before. They are carved on rocks here and there in the mountains. Some of these places are well known to the local people. But they have never seen one around here."
A silence. Finally Lin spoke up. "May we have a look around the area, then?"
Kuyuk conferred. "They ask only that we do not disturb the land, for it is sacred. Also he cautions that it is the time of wind."
Wind, yes: she had noticed the wind yesterday, at this same time, and then when the afternoon came to an end it had sunk low and died. Now that afternoon was upon them again the wind was back, a stinging fine-grained roar that whistled and slammed at them outside the high, protective walls.
They filed out of the complex and trudged up a narrow path that switchbacked steadily higher up the dirt flanks toward the sky. This was one of the side canyons, but one that looked like it went all the way up. They all tied on handkerchiefs, scarves, anything against the screaming wall of air that fought at them.
They stopped at a rise. Spencer heaved a look back at the sweep below. "Think like Teilhard!" he said.
"Anzhao Teilhard-de silu xiang!" She breathed heavily, looking downward. How marvelously and lucidly arranged is the geology here, she thought. The pattern of rock and shadow marching, like ripples in silk, down to the sea of dunes, then all the way out to the edge of the sky.
Lin was thinking the same thing. "The priest would have loved it here."
She put this in English, prompting Spencer to quote the man. "’The earth’s crust changes ceaselessly under our feet’- what’s next?"
" ’While the heavens sweep us along in a cyclone of stars,’" she finished. Spencer laughed.
They kept climbing against the onslaught of wind. They scanned the rocks, boulders, cliff faces on all sides, but there were no petroglyphs. Nothing but the sun and the wind and the walls of stone.
"A cave," Dr. Lin said finally.
"What?" Spencer stopped.
"Teilhard would have looked for a cave."
"Goddamn, yes, Dr. Lin, that’s exactly right." Spencer had been gleaming all day with the renewal of hope he’d been given last night at the banquet, grinning, writing in his book like a madman. Now, answering Lin, he seemed to ratchet up one notch more.
"The Helan Shan is full of caves," Kuyuk put in.
At that the wind roared louder, sending small rocks and pebbles dancing across the path. They huddled their heads down and climbed again, but this time studying the walls, each cleft and shadow and overhang, for signs of a cave as well as for the rock art.
They panted around a corner and saw, abruptly, the lamasery far below them, a box-walled labyrinth. They stood in silence a moment. Think like Teilhard.
"Look at that," Kong called, and pointed upward. It was a rock cairn, all the rocks piled on over many years by many pairs of hands, by travelers passing along the crest above where the five of them stood right now, the travelers stopping at the temple perhaps, or saying a solitary prayer, or adding a rock. From the top of the pile prayer flags, cloth long faded but still faint with Mongolian letters, crackled stiff and straight out in the wind.
"We need a cave." Alice sighed. "We need the monkey sun god."
"Let’s climb higher," Kuyuk said, muffled.
And later, after winding much higher and not talking, heads down in the wind, suddenly Kong’s voice was snatched out of him and tossed around: "I see one."
"What!" They all cried and shouted, but then, following Kong’s slim pointed finger, they froze, all seeing the abrupt black cleft in the hillside, the dark opening that was deeper somehow, blacker, than the mere shadow it should have been.
They scrambled to it, rocks and sand raining down away from their shoes.
"Careful," Dr. Kong said from the ledge above her. He extended his fine-boned hand.
"Caves are dangerous," Kuyuk barked. He seemed to have suddenly remembered he was responsible for two academics from Zhengzhou and two Americans, actual foreign guests. "It would be better if we came back with a light. I can prepare-"